Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: Bullshit

Pernicious nonsense and other irritants

  • All the things she said

    I’ve seen my name in print quite a lot recently, but it hasn’t all been book-related. I’ve been dragged into the culture war because of a BBC Radio Scotland item I contributed to, and as a result I ended up in publications ranging from PinkNews to The Independent and the LA Times. As a journalist, you rarely want to be the story. But as a journalist it’s interesting to see how the sausage is made from the other end of the process.

    The short version: the BBC publicly apologised to JK Rowling about a piece I contributed to.

    The long version: I didn’t say what PinkNews and The Independent claim I said.

    I suspect The Independent has just cribbed from Pink News, because the misrepresentation is the same.

    PinkNews in February:

    During the BBC broadcast, trans writer Carrie Marshall said she boycotted the game because she believed it to be funding “the anti-trans movement”.

    The Independent today:

    A week later, the BBC apologised again after a transgender woman appearing on BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland show said that the new PlayStation game Hogwarts Legacy was funding “the anti-trans movement”.

    Both of these reports are misrepresenting what I said, and I’ve asked both publications to correct them [Update, 9 Mar: The Independent has said “oops, sorry” and corrected their article] [13 Mar: PinkNews has also corrected its piece, and a second piece based on the first]. I didn’t say I was boycotting the game, and I definitely didn’t say it was funding the anti-trans movement.

    If you’re quick you can catch the whole item on BBC Sounds for a few more days; it expires this weekend. And if you do, you’ll hear me say that “This is money that people believe very strongly is going to fund the anti-trans movement”. I didn’t share my own views on that, or say whether or not the belief is correct. Asked to come on air as a trusted journalist to explain what some people were saying about the game, I came on air and explained what some people were saying about the game.

    Here’s the full extract, which only the LA Times included any of for context; it’s no coincidence that US newspapers are famed for their fact-checkers, a role that’s largely absent in UK media.

    “Quite a lot of LGBT people are concerned about the Harry Potter franchise, because JK Rowling has been very proud of her association with the so-called Gender Critical movement and some of its leading figures, and has also strongly suggested that she considers her income as proof that people share her views. So this has become about much, much more than the video game. To some people, this is about a culture war issue. We’re now seeing quite a lot of people who are now harassing trans gamers saying ‘I’m buying ten copies of this. What are you going to do about it?’ and it’s become really quite horrible online.”

    “This is money that people believe very strongly is going to fund the anti-trans movement, which has over 300 anti-trans laws in front of US legislators and has become a real battleground in Britain as well. This is having a measurable effect on trans people’s lives and perhaps our safety too, so it’s not just an abstract issue about the ‘death of the author’. It’s about real people’s lives. And I think that’s why so many trans people are concerned about this game.”

    To add insult to incorrect quoting, PinkNews originally said I was a “trans activist” – it’s now been changed to “trans writer”.

    I’ll let you decide whether the apology was justified, but by comparison I’d like to share the BBC Complaints response when I was one of thousands of people who complained about a 2021 BBC article that defamed trans women as rapists. The article’s sources were a sex offender and an anti-trans hate group; the former’s name was removed from the article a few days later when she posted death threats targeting trans people. Here’s what the complaints department had to say.

    “The article was carefully considered before publication, went through a rigorous editorial review process and fully complies with the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards.”

    The article is still online. The complaints department remains unapologetic.

  • Horse Child and Dinosaur Boy

    Writing in The Spectator, Mary Wakefield has a terrible tale to share.

    “A friend in the education world has told me he knows of several British schools in which children are identifying as animals. There’s a horse child who’s taken out by staff for gallops; a boy dinosaur who is fed on strips of meat.”

    The Onion already beat her to it.

    “We just made Quentin up, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean stories like his aren’t potentially happening everywhere, constantly. Good journalism is about finding those stories, even when they don’t exist. It’s about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like, then offering misleading evidence in service of preordained editorial conclusions.”

  • Profits of doom

    This graph is astonishing, if unsurprising: the UK press is publishing an average of 38 articles about trans people per day, most of them negative.

    Graph showing relentless rise of transphobic articles

    Writing in advertising industry site Outvertising, Marty Davies makes it clear that brands, via advertising, are funding this – and that online advertising incentivises it.

    “We’re finding ourselves funding a forever intensifying, never-ending campaign of hate against the trans community. The World Association of News Publishers assessed that over 50% of news publisher revenue comes from advertising. The ‘gender critical’ journalists are pumping out execution after execution of this hate campaign and are paid generously from our hands. This campaign is setting the news agenda and leading our whole media and politics to become infected by its poison.

    It’s important for us also to consider the role of our social platforms and broadcasters in this ecosystem. They also have questions to answer. TV and Radio broadcasters are platforming ‘gender critical’ voices unchallenged – framing anti-trans narrative as ‘legitimate concerns’. Sensationalist stories act like kindling for conversation across social platforms, allowing hateful views to burn like wildfire and become reinforced in algorithmic bubbles. Hate speech is commonplace and sanctions from platforms on users are slow if forthcoming at all. This commentary then provides content to be platformed and amplified by the media vying for attention to then sell on to us advertisers.”

  • Street of shame

    Private Eye magazine would like you to believe that the magazine is a brave outsider, fearlessly speaking truth to power and exposing media hypocrisy. The reality, of course, is that it’s part of the same incestuous bubble as the media it reports on.

    Here’s an example. Normally, a high profile left-wing writer leaving a high profile job amid multiple credible allegations of sexual harassment (the writer is reportedly known by many as The Octopus because of his behaviour towards more junior women), suggestions of an attempted management cover-up and apparently spurious claims of ill-health is exactly the sort of thing you’d expect the Eye to cover. Creepy men! Sneaky bosses! Lefty hypocrisy!

    But they haven’t covered it.

    In unrelated news, The Octopus writes for Private Eye and has done for years.

  • Number crunching

    “Average use of the word ‘trans’ in UK media stories about Brianna Ghey: 0.5

    Average use of the word ‘trans’ in UK media stories about Isla Bryson: 16,427.1

    The first is a victim of a terrible crime, likely targeted for being trans; the latter a perpetrator of a terrible crime, in which her trans status has no bearing.”

    – Andrew Carter

  • A terrible thing that didn’t happen

    On Saturday, the Daily Mail published a made-up story about something that didn’t happen. I know that is hardly news, but neither was the story. It’s just yet another made-up piece trying to spread fear of trans people, the kind of thing that ends up being quoted by politicians who want to remove our healthcare and human rights.

    The article isn’t so much a red flag as a flag shop that only sells red flags and that just got a big stock delivery from the red flag distributor. According to Tory councillor Ruth Sampson, she was in the ladies toilet of a pub when she had a conversation with a trans woman (who “towered” over her) about the absence of paper towels to dry their hands.

    The key assertion in the story is that in the absence of towels, the woman told the councillor that “I’m going to wipe my hands on my penis.” This, according to the councillor, is definitely a thing that actually happened, and it therefore proves that trans women should be excluded from the ladies and all other facilities they are legally entitled to use. To undermine this, said councillor immediately wrote to anti-trans Tory equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch, rather than speak to the police, because that’s what you do, isn’t it?

    Unfortunately for the councillor, the trans woman concerned read the article too. And her side of the story is somewhat different. She had been attending a vigil in memory of a murdered trans girl, went to a pub afterwards, and in the bathroom conversation in question she said “oh, well I’ll just wipe my hands on my jeans then”, left, and thought nothing more of it.

    Which one do you think is most likely? That a trans woman, sad from a vigil and going about her everyday business, would decide to try and intimidate a random woman for no reason? Or that a young, grasping Tory councillor thought she’d try and raise her profile among her fellow Tories with a bit of the old transphobia that seems so popular among her elders?

    The article is a case study in subtle demonisation and defamation. She won’t face any consequences for adding to the anti-trans panic, and because the trans woman isn’t named the press regulations mean the Daily Mail won’t either. It’s all grist for the mill that wants to grind trans people into dust.

     

     

  • “What they want is not a dialogue.”

    This, by AR Moxon, is superb. It’s an evisceration of people who say terrible things and demand freedom from criticism or consequences.

    “they pre-suppose that some are allowed to speak, and others should not be allowed to respond.

    What they want is not more voices. They want fewer voices.

    What they want is not a dialogue. What they want is a monologue.”

  • “Forbidden knowledge”

    One of the many frustrating things about the current anti-trans moral panic is that supposedly reputable journalists are fuelling it with bad faith “just asking questions”, the answers to which are easy to find.

    This damning piece about the New York Times is just as appropriate to many other publications, including most of the UK press.

    “The ordinary liberal reader may be squeamish about this or that aspect of abortion, but they are fundamentally committed to the idea that abortion patients and their doctors are the ones best equipped to figure out what to do with a pregnancy. It is not the job of some outside party or institution—a controlling parent or spouse, a church, a Republican legislative majority, a major national newspaper—to step in and second-guess what they do with their bodies. 

    For trans care, this liberal theory of autonomy and decision-making is cast aside. The theoretical Times reader is ready to consume 15,000 words about the risks, controversies, and downsides of contemporary gender treatment because, at bottom, they are assumed to be dismayed by it all. An abortion patient is really pregnant, but trans youth—children who “say they’re transgender,” as the Atlantic put it back in 2018—maybe aren’t really trans, or wouldn’t be, if they had more time and better information.”

  • No rush

    Countering the constant flood of anti-trans bullshit is a Sisyphean task that many of us simply haven’t the time or energy to deal with, but a particularly egregious example is doing the rounds right now and it’s important to debunk it.

    The lie: the Scottish gender recognition reform bill was rushed through by the Scottish Government.

    The reality: as Nancy Kelley from Stonewall demonstrates, this is one of the most consulted on bills in Scottish Parliamentary history.

    • 5 years and 2 months of discussion and debate
    • 3 large scale consultations, amassing over 43,000 responses with a large majority in favour of reform
    • 67 hours of parliamentary debate and evidence gathering (during which anti-trans groups did not provide any evidence to substantiate their lurid claims)
    • 25 hours of parliamentary debate on proposed amendments at stage 3
    • A clear parliamentary majority in favour of reform at every stage of the bill

    As Kelley writes:

    This is one of the most consulted on bills in Scottish Government history. This is democracy and devolution in action. This is implementing a fundamental human right for trans people in Scotland. To consider triggering a constitutional crisis to block it is shocking.

  • It was never about sports

    This, by Erin Reed, is a good analysis of the Alliance Defending Freedom’s war on trans people and its use of a gullible/complicit media.

    A ban on gender affirming care is not the endgame here. With attacks on gay people rising through book bans and Don’t Say Gay or Trans bills, all LGBTQ+ rights are in the crosshairs. Terry Schilling of the American Principles Project makes that clear when he claims that the debate over gay marriage was a sham and that “essentially we went from Obergefell and gay marriage to now sex changes for gay minors, hormone treatments, and puberty blockers.”

    The ADF is a key driver of the anti-trans movement in the UK and in Scotland too, with its representatives given columns in the Scottish and national press without any explanation of who they are and what they represent; they typically provide witnesses in anti-trans legal cases too, such as the (now reversed) ban on puberty blockers in the UK.

    The anti-trans movement in the US is a Christian Right assault on LGBT+ people. And so is the UK one, although it tries to convince itself otherwise. Whether it’s Scottish Nationalists standing with the right-wing Christian fundamentalists, bored millionaires publicly supporting avowed anti-feminist Christian theocrats or self-proclaimed left-wing writers throwing themselves into the warm embrace of the Daily Mail, The Times and The Telegraph, anti-trans bigots in the UK are doing the work of the religious right.

    A key part of the Christian Right’s strategy is to frame trans people’s basic human rights as a “debate”, in much the same way creationists pushed the idea of “teaching the debate” as a way to get fundamentalist religious beliefs into classrooms. As Katelyn Burns writes in Xtra, that “debate” is no such thing: it’s a constant barrage of anti-trans propaganda. Whether due to malevolence or incompetence, supposedly liberal journalists are doing the devil’s work.