Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: Bullshit

Pernicious nonsense and other irritants

  • Attrition

    I should be annoyingly happy right now. I’m doing another book festival this weekend, and the day after I’m off to London for the British Book Awards where I’m shortlisted for Discover Book of the Year – quite exciting given that I wasn’t sure anyone would want to read my book, let alone enjoy it. And there are some other things I can’t tell you about yet that are even more fun.

    All things considered, I should be a Tigger, bouncing around with excitement and driving everybody around me up the wall. But I’m not. Instead, every day feels like a slog and it’s getting harder and harder to stay positive. And that’s because every single day since I came out as trans, I’ve been subject to a war of attrition waged against trans people by bigots and their friends in the press.

    That’s over six years now. Six years of the same old slurs, the same old “just asking questions”, the same long-debunked statistics and long-debunked talking points. And yet it never stops. Just yesterday, The Observer let Sonia Sodha write her weekly column about how anything bad in the news – in this case, the police arresting republican protesters at the Coronation – is all the fault of trans people. It’d be funny if it weren’t a weekly occurrence not just in the Observer but in pretty much every other paper too. The Daily Mail alone is currently running over 100 anti-trans articles a month, up from 6 a month in 2013. The Times, The Herald, The Scotsman, The Telegraph, The Express and others appear to have full-time anti-trans columnists now.

    It’s relentless, and of course it has an effect in the streets: according to the Home Office, anti-trans hate crime has risen from under 500 cases in 2011/12 to nearly 4,500 in 2020/21. I have no doubt the next set of figures will be even worse.

    The constant flood of bad news and of anti-trans talking points across what feels like every single media outlet has a debilitating effect on people, to the point where some of the highest profile trans people I followed when I first came out have abandoned social media: blocking bigots is a constant game of whack-a-mole, a massive time sink and a huge drain on your mental health.

    Which is the point. As the late Toni Morrison famously said about racism, its function is distraction.

    It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing”.

    Reflecting on Morrison’s words, author and former TV reporter Aminatta Forna writes on the Luminato Festival website:

    The very first time I read these words, I knew them to be true. I was in my late twenties, working as a television reporter. I was being pushed and resisting being pushed into reporting the same story, over and over – the story of white people’s, specifically, British white people’s racism. At first I regarded this, at least in part, my duty. It didn’t take long for the hidden fallacy to reveal itself. I was being asked to explain, not to black people who knew plenty, but to white people who I was being asked to pretend were oblivious to the fact of it. 

    At a time where in the US trans people are having their healthcare removed, their right to exist in public removed, the safety of their children threatened, the press is full of “are trans activists too unreasonable?” by writers pretending to be oblivious to what’s happening. And with the architect of that cruelty Ron DeSantis greeted like a god by UK equalities minister Kemi Badenoch, who DeSantis says wants to emulate what he’s doing in Florida, these endless articles and social media posts are deliberate distractions.

    I’ve written many times that the line between anti-trans and anti-semite is often very blurry; some of the highest profile members of the anti-trans movement, and some of the highest profile anti-trans books, claim that “transgenderism” is a Jewish conspiracy. So it’s worth reminding ourselves of Sartre’s comments about anti-semites:

    “They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

     

  • Wars on woke don’t work

    The local election results demonstrate something we’ve seen in other countries, such as Australia: using a “war on woke” as your election strategy is a sure-fire way to be rejected at the polls.

    Byline Times:

    As the nation’s leading pollster Sir John Curtice told the Byline Times in an interview this week, “If you look at the long term trends, anti-woke views are becoming less and less common”.

    “You are chasing a declining zeitgeist, because in the end, one of the reasons why ‘anti-woke’ folk are so upset is because certain things that once upon a time nobody questioned, like the idea that same sex relationships are not a good idea… are no longer commonly held views.

    “On this whole argument about diversity, attitudes have shifted and they have shifted in a ‘woke’ direction.”

    The Sunak Tories are trying to roll back the clock, taking the party back to before the David Cameron “hug a hoodie” era to the nasty party of Michael Howard, and by doing so they’re swimming against a demographic tide: as Dr Natasha Kennedy writes on Twitter, demographics are moving the electorate in a less right-wing direction, something “that will only accelerate as the first postwar baby boom starts dying of old age in larger numbers in the second half of the decade while the 2008 mini-boom joins the electoral register in 2026”. The clock is ticking, and right-wing xenophobia in mainstream politics’ time is nearly up.

    Not that you’d know that from the press. But the press is facing its own demographic time bomb: the typical Daily Express reader is 69, and with its circulation down 19% year on year its future clearly isn’t very bright. The Daily Mail (average age 56) is down too (11% daily, 12% for the Mail on Sunday); other newspapers’ figures are so appalling they no longer publish them. The (Glasgow) Herald last published statistics in 2017, when it had 28,900 readers; in 2020, The Scotsman was down to 14,417. Given the ageing demographic of these papers’ readers, it’s probably tasteless but fair to say that a few hard winters could kill the print versions off entirely.

    Some, like cockroaches, will survive: the Daily Mail has been very successful in appealing to terrible people globally via the internet, and that’ll no doubt continue long after the print edition dies. But the press and the Tories’ war on woke is a short term strategy that can only be effective for a very short period of time: they’re swimming against a tide that will eventually sweep them away.

  • 10,000 smoking guns

    One of the leading organisations fighting against women’s reproductive rights and trans people’s existence is the American College of Pediatricians, a right-wing evangelical lobby group that pretends to represent the medical establishment. The organisation has accidentally leaked over 10,000 documents, many of them damning evidence of its hateful, unscientific bullshit – hateful, unscientific bullshit that’s been at the heart of media coverage of abortion and trans healthcare on both sides of the Atlantic by journalists too incompetent, compromised or malevolent to look beyond the press releases.

    Wired magazine:

    The records show how the College, which the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) describes as a hate group, managed to introduce fringe beliefs into the mainstream simply by being, as the founder of Fox News once put it, “the loudest voice in the room.” 

    It’ll be some time before full details emerge but what we’ve seen so far confirms what was already apparent: the ACP is a hate group pushing pseudoscience such as “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria”, an entirely made-up term from a debunked study of anti-trans activists by an anti-trans activist; its goal, as Wired puts it, is to “lend a veneer of medical science to evangelical beliefs on parenting, sex, procreation, and gender… returning America to a time when the laws and social mores around family squared neatly with evangelical Christian beliefs.”

    As ever, the influence extends across the Atlantic. Don’t hold your breath for an exposé in the UK press, let alone a mea culpa.

  • If you believe nothing, you’ll believe anything

    This, from Vice, is very good: America’s Most Influential Conspiracy Theorists Are Going All-In On Transphobia. It’s about how people with various agendas, from Qanon conspiracists to self-promoters, are finding transphobia the perfect vehicle for making the world demonstrably worse. And this is not a US-only phenomenon.

    The fact that these once-fringe subcultures and the so-called mainstream have merged to such an extent means that when they all focus their attention on something, the effect is especially devastating. And right now, that shared focus is an all-pervading panic and hostility about drag queens, “groomers,” transgender identity as being somehow “contagious,” the supposed sexualization of children by LGBT people, and the false claim that gender-affirming care is a form of abuse or mutilation. 

    …The relationship between the anti-vaccine and anti-trans movements makes logical sense, in that they both farm a specific suspicion of science and mainstream medicine. More subtly, both the anti-vaccine and anti-trans worlds also try to weaponize regret, sowing fear that a medical choice might go irreparably wrong.

    …This sort of explicit instrumentalization of conspiratorial ideas is the direction, it would seem, in which things are heading. Demonizing trans people is proving popular because it has political and social utility for so many different people, from Substack to the hall of Congress, from increasingly popular podcasts and the guests they can’t seem to give enough time to to parents confused, as parents always are, by the way the world has changed since they were young.

  • The E stands for enemy

    The Conservative government has been stuffing the EHRC – the Equalities and Human Rights Commission – with anti-equality bigots for some time, which is why it recently and very publicly u-turned on its guidance regarding trans people and the Equality Act. But even knowing that, the latest minutes from the EHRC’s Scotland Committee are absolutely devastating. The EHRC’s own staff said that its politically motivated attacks on trans people were wrong in law, would remove trans people’s human rights and posed an existential threat to the EHRC’s continuing existence. The EHRC is supposed to protect human rights, but in its current incarnation it is clearly the enemy of marginalised groups.

    Trans Safety Network has more:

    The Committee notes that the proposed amendments would ‘[undermine] the Commission’s long held position on trans rights’, which would pose ‘reputational risk’. The Committee also recommends that ‘the Board should consider the risk to our perceived political independence if we are perceived to be aligning with Government in the absence of robust evidence. This is a potential existential risk that such a perception could risk the Commission’s existence going forward’.

  • All the news that’s shit to print

    There’s been a very significant uptick in the amount of anti-trans bullshit in the newspapers this month, with papers such as The Express doing exactly what Express editor Gary Jones said in 2018 was “offensive… I wouldn’t want to be party to any newspaper that will publish such material”: running endless fabricated stories about a minority group to stir up hatred against them. But the best example of the bad faith and malicious intent of the anti-trans press comes via The Telegraph, which breathlessly reports the story of an evil transgender woman robbing London Marathon runners of their rightful place: her participation was “wrong and unfair”, the paper says.

    The woman placed 6,160th.

    She also raised £37,000 for charity, but that detail might make Telegraph readers think slightly positively about her so of course it wasn’t mentioned in the piece.

    This story, like the US right losing its mind over a free can of beer being given to trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney last week, makes it very clear what the beliefs of the anti-trans mob and their friends in the press are: trans people should not be allowed to participate in anything. To claim that a marathon runner placing 6,160th is depriving anyone of anything is simply malicious, malevolent bullshit.

  • Revelations

    The New York Times has a revelation: the US Christian Right deliberately targeted trans people as part of its strategy to rally its base in the aftermath of its equal marriage defeat.

    Or as I put it in my book, published six months ago and written quite a long time before that:

    …That tipping point occurred just as the Christian Right lost its decades-long battle against marriage equality. The UK was implementing the Marriage (Same Sex Couples Act) and the US Supreme Court heard Obergefell v Hodges, striking down all state bans on same-sex marriage.

    Faced with the absolute rejection of its scaremongering and demonisation of gay and lesbian people, the Christian Right found a new target.

    Me.

    Instead of going after the entire LGBT+ community, the Christian Right decided to focus on trans people. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. Multiple Christian Right groups talked openly of their strategy; several, including The Family Research Council, put it in writing on their websites.

    This is not something that anybody kept secret: the US Christian Right in particular has talked openly about this strategy – separate the T from the LGB in order to weaken the movement and battle equality, and do so by forging alliances with anti-trans “feminist” groups – since at least 2017. Trans journalists such as Katelyn Burns and the Trans Safety Network have written about it multiple times for multiple outlets. The award-winning podcast The Anti-Trans Hate Machine, among many others, covered it in detail in 2021.

    Here’s Rolling Stone in 2018.

    Facing such political headwinds, Christian-right activists desperately needed a fresh strategy. Provoking fear of infringement on religious liberty would likely only gain traction among fellow believers. They soon found an alternative in Shackelford’s home state, whose largest city was, at the time, led by a lesbian Democratic mayor. There, in Houston, a small band of well-connected far-right activists was resurrecting an approach from the oldest anti-LGBTQ playbook: to transform the civic debate about homosexuality into a panic about predators. As national activists fretted at the Ritz-Carlton, Houston players had already sketched out a plan to turn voters against nondiscrimination ordinances by framing the debate as one about safety for women and girls. It proved so potent that it prompted a shift in legislative strategy across the country.

    This is what I mean when I say that media is largely incompetent or malevolent when it comes to reporting on trans people. The US evangelical right, the European Catholic Church and right-wing horrors of various kinds have all deliberately and cynically targeted trans people as part of a wider war on LGBT+ people and women’s reproductive rights, they have done so in plain sight and they have provided endless evidence proving that that’s what they’re doing. And mainstream media has largely ignored all of that, or actively supported it. Not least the New York Times, which has spent much of the last six years amplifying every anti-trans dogwhistle it can.

    There is something very wrong with today’s journalism, and some of the worst people on Earth are exploiting it.

  • Breaking the law

    The Equalities and Human Rights Commission, EHRC for short, is technically the UK’s equalities watchdog. I say technically because in the last few years the Tories have been stuffing it with stooges who are actively and vocally hostile to minority groups. So it’s not a huge surprise to see it rubber-stamping the Tories’ war on trans people, even though its rubber-stamping is legally illiterate. So illiterate, in fact, that three (possibly four; it’s unclear today) of its legal directors have resigned.

    There’s a good explainer here on OpenDemocracy:

    Multiple former employees have alleged that opposing trans rights has become an institutional priority for the EHRC.

    As well as alleged resignations by staffers in response, two former legal directors have publicly decried the organisation’s apparent abandonment of the human rights values it is supposed to uphold.

    …Regardless of whether the letter becomes law, it signals a growing confidence to abandon human rights principles in order to further attack the trans community.

    I’m not going to lie. I’m scared by this. And I’m even more scared after reading this transcript of a meeting between the EHRC and Trans Media Watch’s Helen Belcher. 

    90:01 HB: Can you understand why trans people might be incredibly angry with you at the moment?

    90:04 silence

    90:06 MB: Yes

    silence

    90:09 HB: Do you think that means that you are trusted as the human rights body to defend our rights?

    90:16 silence

    What’s frightening about this is that it shows the EHRC’s utter contempt for trans people. They U-turned on trans rights over a year ago and still haven’t made the tiniest attempt to pretend there’s any justification for it, or to suggest there’s any evidence on which they based their U-turn or this more recent letter. The tories simply said FUCK TRANS PEOPLE and the EHRC jumped to attention, saluted and asked: how hard?

    One of my friends, the writer and trans health and policy expert Dr Ruth Pearce, is not mincing her words.

    I am done with being polite, and reasonable, and rational. These proposals represent a blatant attack not just on our civil rights but also on our rights to exist as human beings in public.

    …None of this is about details. It’s about terrorising trans people, and we are terrified.

    It’s about making our lives impossible. Ideally, we will disappear; our oppressors don’t really care if we suffer or we die. And we know, trans people know, that people around us are suffering and dying because we are actually a part of that community. I’ve spent the past 13 years producing research that formally documents the oppression we face, because when we simply say what we know is true because we are living that truth every day, nobody in power gives a shit.

    In the meantime, people in suits believe there are votes and clicks and money to be won through fighting culture wars, through distracting people from rising poverty and slow-burning climate collapse.

    Ruth is right; this is part of a bigger picture. I think in much the same way that attacks on gender recognition reform were a step on the way to the real goal, which was to change the Equality Act, I think the current EHRC move is part of a wider move towards EA repeal – something the likes of The Spectator and key anti-trans figures have been campaigning for for some time now alongside removing the Human Rights Act (something that’s in progress already) and withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights, to which we’re still a signatory.

    I’ve long since stopped expecting people to care about trans people’s rights. But the EA protects many other groups: pregnant people, people of colour, religious people, gay people, lesbian people, disabled people and so on. Removing that protection, which applies to everything from education and employment to housing, would be a significant step towards a low wage, no-rights economy where only the very rich and those considered ideologically pure are protected by the state.

    This is conservatism reduced to its most brutal. As Wilhoit’s Law puts it, “There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” Trans people are one of the out-groups, but we won’t be the only one.

    Dr Pearce:

    …If you’ve ever wondered “what would I have done in the face of rising fascism?” then wonder no longer.

    Your moment is here. The question is how you act.

  • Friends like these

    It’s trans day of visibility today, which means we get to see the rank hypocrisy of politicians tweeting about their supposed support for trans people while openly supporting the removal of trans people’s rights.

    The latest front in the forever war against trans people is pushing the idea of “parents’ rights”. Based on a report from a right-wing think tank, a report fronted by horrific transphobe and Labour MP Rosie Duffield, multiple newspapers have run stories this week expressing their anger that some schools are not notifying parents of teens changing their pronouns or appearance. Or as it’s better described, following the law and safeguarding kids from potential abuse.

    The report comes from Policy Exchange, which is very clearly rubber-stamping already decided policy. The tories intend to use trans people as political footballs in the next election – something they’ve stated openly – and this latest scaremongering gives them the opportunity to say they are responding to the will of the people. People who are being repeatedly and cynically misled by a primarily right-wing press pushing narratives created by the Christian Right. Parents’ rights is the label currently being used by Republicans all over the US to try and eliminate trans teens by removing their protections and healthcare.

    And Labour? Kier Starmer never met a transphobe he didn’t like, so of course he is entirely with the tories on this one.

    For the benefit of people who aren’t LGBT+ or who don’t work with vulnerable people, the reason we have safeguarding is because parents are often the most dangerous people of all. Many of the horrors LGBT+ people experience are perpetrated by their families and communities. “Corrective rape” and other forms of sexual abuse. Domestic violence. Conversion therapy. LGBT+ people are much more likely to be made homeless by their parents, and to be made homeless at much younger ages; in the UK, almost 1/4 of young homeless people are LGBT+. That’s horrifically disproportionate.

    LGBT+ people know this. Teachers know this. And I suspect the politicians do too, but they simply don’t care. To them, LGBT+ lives simply don’t matter.

    As one teacher posted in response to the news:

    My first year teaching, a girl I taught got caught kissing another girl behind the gymnasium. She begged our admin not to tell them it was a girl – just say she got caught kissing someone. They refused.

    The next day she came in with a swollen jaw.

  • Baa baa bullshit

    When I was young, the press routinely made up stories about the “loony left”. Probably the most famous one is the story that nurseries were getting kids to sing “baa baa green sheep” instead of “baa baa black sheep” because the nursery rhyme was racist.

    It sounds ridiculous, I know, but it was a deliberate campaign against the Labour Party and other progressives. British tabloids ran some 3,000 news stories about such “loony left” ideas between 1981 and 1987; the vast majority were either partially or wholly fabricated and were targeted against the handful of London councils under Labour control.

    Very similar stories were fabricated about the European Union too, most notably by a young journalist called Boris Johnson. 

    This week, the Daily Mail ran a front page story about the charity Oxfam banning the words “mother” and “father”. The Times and other right-wing papers ran with it too, and it was the topic of angry discussion online and on shows such as Good Morning Britain.

    You can guess where this is going.

    Oxfam hasn’t banned anything, and it hasn’t told people that they can’t say mother or father. In a piece of guidance specifically referring to the use of language when you’re talking to trans and non-binary people,  it recommends using gender neutral language if you’re unsure what terms the people you’re talking to prefer.

    If you look at the document it’s very clear that that’s the case, but the version used by the newspapers has been deliberately cropped to remove the context by its source, a high profile anti-trans activist and friend of JK Rowling. In some cases, at the very end of the article in the bit most people don’t read, the newspaper reports admit that the document doesn’t say what the article’s entire premise is based upon. But they got their headline, and that’s what matters when you’re waging a war on human rights.

    “Oxfam tells staff: stop saying mother and father”, The Times thunders.

    It’s baa baa bullshit.