Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Bullshit

Pernicious nonsense and other irritants

  • Good news, bad news

    The UK government’s plans to roll back trans rights suffered a setback this week when tens of thousands of cisgender women emailed the Prime Minister to say “not in my name”. I don’t believe for a moment that the plans have been dropped – as today’s Guardian notes, Dominic Cummings was focus-grouping trans rights in the Autumn as a topic the conservatives can use to attack Labour – but it was a welcome reminder that anti-trans voices do not speak for most women.

    As was this, in the LA Times: it’s very typical of the US response to JK Rowling’s blog post.

    Poke a prejudice, almost any prejudice, and pretty quickly the conversation goes straight down the toilet. Those opposed to civil rights, LGBTQ rights and the Equal Rights Amendment all have historically boiled their bigotry down to some wild-eyed fear about what equality in any form will mean to the state of our public restrooms. Black people peeing with white people, men with women, straight people with gays people, trans with cis — oh, the horror, the horror.

    As I’ve written before, the difference between the mainstream US media and the mainstream UK media is dramatic. Last night BBC’s Newsnight – which previously gave extensive coverage to an anti-trans piece in the BMJ without revealing that the article it was covering was written by the journalists who were covering it – once again decided to scaremonger about trans teens’ healthcare by getting the same journalists to essentially tell the same story again.

    There was lots of scary music and lurid claims from conveniently anonymous sources, but no time to explain how the system currently works. Coincidentally, knowing how the system actually works is at odds with scary tales of children being railroaded at high speed into irreversible treatment.

    The parent of a trans kid detailed the process in the I Paper last year, when waiting lists were shorter – they were 20 months for a first appointment then; it’s now 27 months and climbing.

    Once you are seen for the first time, there follows a lengthy assessment process, involving a minimum of six appointments with two psychologists who assess and challenge the child over a period of at least six months, often stretching to years in limbo. Each appointment is a lost day of education and work, with long journeys to London, a second Gids centre in Leeds, or a handful of satellite clinics.

    If this long assessment period is ever concluded, “hormone blockers” may be prescribed. These are designed to pause puberty, which allows the young person time to reflect on their gender. The medication is well understood, considered reversible, and has been used safely for nearly 30 years for transgender young people and considerably longer for treating early onset puberty.

    Given the timing, it seems rather suspicious that Newsnight chose this of all weeks to reheat the same innuendo from what looks very much like a mendacious campaign. But it appears to have had the desired effect, with endless commenters on Newsnight’s social media comparing trans healthcare providers to Dr Mengele, claiming that this is a scandal akin to Thalidomide and describing an NHS facility as a “child abuse clinic”.

    You may recall similar rhetoric being used before people started bombing abortion clinics or taking assault rifles to pizza parlours in the belief that Hilary Clinton was skinning babies in the basement.

  • A tale of two cities

    Something happened in Glasgow’s George Square last night.

    Tale #1: two rival groups of protesters clashed. One group was there to “protect statues” from vandalism.

    Tale #2: more than 200 far-right loyalist goons set out to attack a peaceful pro-immigration protest, assaulting protesters, passers-by and the police.

    Both tales are true, but they’re framed very differently and effectively describe two different cities.

    The first one has appeared in multiple media outlets.

    The second description is the real one.

    The far-right thugs shouting racist and sectarian slurs – “Fenian bastards” was a favourite, judging by the videos I’ve seen – and sieg-heiling in our streets, the people who just days ago assaulted non-white people and young women in similar scenes, were not counter-protesters and were not there to protect statues. They were coordinated by the National Defence League, the successor to the SDL, a group of fascist clowns who go out intending to inflict violence. Their social media is plastered with the Red Hand of Ulster and the Union Flag, acronyms such as FTP and all the usual far-right tropes.

    To suggest, as some media outlets have done, that they were in any way equivalent to the gentle, joyful, anti-eviction protesters whose event they deliberately targeted isn’t balance. It’s false equivalence.

    I joked on Twitter last night that the bigots “need to work on their messaging: if they claimed to have ‘reasonable concerns’ about ‘statue erasure’, The Herald would give them a column”. But there’s some truth in it. Whether it’s sectarian hooligans or more genteel bigotry, false equivalence is very dangerous.

    False equivalence doesn’t just mislead people about the story. It prevents progress. How can you take action against vicious, violent bigots if you won’t admit that there are vicious, violent bigots in the first place?

  • Fawlty reporting

    [I’d originally posted about the “don’t mention the war” episode of Fawlty Towers and said John Cleese approved the 2013 edit that removed the racial slurs. Cleese has since given an interview to The Age expressing his anger at UKTV for removing the unedited episode, so it seems he didn’t approve of the edit after all.]

  • JK’s trolling

    The thing about bored celebrities taking pops at trans people isn’t so much what they say: we have heard it all before. It’s that their celebrity means we hear it again and again and again.

    I don’t follow JK Rowling, whose opinions on trans people are well known (and no longer explained away as “middle-aged moments” by panicky PRs). But I’ve seen her latest tweets several hundred times this morning already. Not just on Twitter, but in my news app, my RSS reader app, on Reddit and in my social news app. And they’ve caused a whole bunch of cisgender people to come into places such as trans-friendly subreddits hurling abuse and demanding “debate me, cowards!” And over the next few days we’ll see the second wave in the press and online as various right-wingers and anti-LGBT+ groups hail Rowling as a hero for refusing to be “silenced” by the “wokerati”.

    Celebrity gives people a platform. It’s a shame some people choose to use it as a bully pulpit.

  • Oppression as a marketing opportunity

    You’ve seen pinkwashing, when firms who don’t particularly care about LGBT+ people pretend to care about LGBT+ people so they can sell stuff during Pride month. You’ve seen greenwashing, when firms who don’t particularly care about the environment pretend to care about the environment so they can sell stuff to people who do. And now, there’s whitewashing, where firms who don’t particularly care about Black people pretend to care about Black people because it looks good on social media.

    There is far too much of this kind of thing, expertly parodied by Chris Franklin:

  • Brands in “empty PR bullshit” shocker

    This image is from L’Oreal, one of many brands keen to associate itself with the Black Lives Matter movement. The company posted on Twitter to say that it “stands in solidarity with the Black community, and against injustice of any kind.”

    Three years ago, L’Oreal made it clear to Black model Munroe Bergdorf that speaking out against racism was not worth it: they fired her from an ad campaign because some white people complained about her anti-racist posts on social media.

  • It’s getting harder to be average

    When I was at school, I was excellent. I didn’t find anything particularly difficult, and I breezed through exams without having to study for them. I assumed that when I left school, the world of work would be much the same and I would be hugely rewarded for doing sod-all.

    Spoiler: nope.

    One of the things about growing up – unless you’re lucky enough to benefit from inherited wealth and/or nepotism – is that you soon learn that you are not the genius you thought you were. It turns out that the world is full of people who are not just as clever or as talented as you, but who also work much harder than you do.

    That leaves you with two options. One, find ways to compete. Or two, have an almighty shit-fit about how it’s soooooo unfair that others are allowed into your treehouse. Previously the highly privileged railed against “PC gone maaaaaaad”; now it’s about “wokeness”. But it’s always a toddler tantrum.

    Laura Waddell in the Scotsman, itself no stranger to publishing such tantrums, writes about two kinds of contrarians: the career ones who manufacture controversy cynically to pay their bills, and the people who mistake loss of privilege for conspiracy.

    The second camp is rooted in insecurity about one’s own position in the professional world, and a sense of being left behind as it changes. This can be seen in the desire to suck up to a stale model of power, the white male change-maker who held court when the controversialist’s career was on the up. Mocking others is an ingratiation attempt, showing they’re in the same camp, fighting newcomers who dare think they deserve a place at the table. But it is always easier to trick oneself into believing advancement of others has resulted in one’s personal persecution, than come to terms with being average among the competition.

    White people aren’t necessarily better writers than people of colour. Men are not necessarily better musicians than women. Straight people are not necessarily better CEOs than gay people. But for a very long time, mediocre people have had better opportunities than others purely because of their skin colour. their gender or their sexual orientation because they and people like them promoted the people who were exactly like them – and limited the opportunities for people who were not.

    Waddell:

    The problem is not the existence of others – it’s just not being good enough. The world is just a little less likely to reward them for it.

  • Offensively ignorant

    The LGB Alliance, on the actual anniversary of Section 28:

    “We never demanded society change its laws” isn’t just shockingly ignorant, although of course it is. It’s also a grossly offensive insult to the thousands of gay, bisexual and lesbian people (and of course trans people, but the LGBA doesn’t even pretend to care about them) whose lives were ruined by anti-gay legislation over hundreds of years. Very little of that legislation was changed by LGBT+ people asking nicely.

    It’s also a raised middle finger to the very many brave gay, bi and lesbian activists (and of course trans activists, but the LGBA etc etc etc) who fought so hard and in many cases lost so much to gain the most basic human rights for LGBT+ people.

  • Wedge issues to unite the right

    Laura Bassett, writing for GQ.com, explains how the US Christian Right moved from being largely pro-abortion (in some cases because they were racist and believed abortion would limit the number of black children) to becoming militantly against it.

    The short version: strategists used abortion as a wedge issue to rally the faithful and grow the Republican Party.

    [Republican activist] Weyrich tried to make pornography the wedge issue, he tried prayer in schools, he tried the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution which would have guaranteed equal legal rights to women, and none of those issues really rallied his troops. “I was trying to get people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” he later admitted at a conference in 1990. Then, six years after Roe v. Wade in 1973, Weyrich and Falwell noticed that conservatives were starting to get uncomfortable with the spike in legal abortions after the landmark case and with the sexual, social and economic freedom that reproductive rights had brought to women. So they went all in on making abortion a wedge issue that could marry the Christian right and the GOP.

    Most people are in favour of a woman’s right to choose, but the Christian Right claims to speak for the majority. It funnels money into pressure groups and grass-roots groups, demonises the powerless, misrepresents facts, spreads blatant falsehoods – as the piece notes, that includes claiming that pro-choice people are murdering children after they’ve been born – and incites violence.

    It’s so horrific, and so horrifically familiar.

  • Battling homophobia?

    David Paisley took a look at the Twitter feed for the LGB Alliance on the international day against homophobia, biphobia and transphobia (#IDAHOBIT); you’d expect a group that says it’s standing up for lesbian, gay and bisexual people to have something to say about ignorance and bigotry.

    He made this image. On the left, all the posts the LGB Alliance made about homophobia and biphobia on #IDAHOBIT. On the right, the posts they made on the same day attacking trans people, criticising LGBT+ organisations, attacking inclusive education and attacking LGBT+ people for supporting trans people.

    As Paisley points out, the single post to mark #IDAHOBIT was “just a hashtag and a link to an article two years out of date.”

    Paisley:

    Let’s look at the response of their followers.

    For their #IDAHOBIT tweet:
    Retweets: 1
    Likes: 11

    For their anti trans tweets:
    Retweets: 467
    Likes: 4126

    The organisation went on to attack the Council of Europe for publishing guidance designed to protect LGBT+ people from discrimination and to attack Amnesty International for saying trans rights are human rights.

    Paisley:

    The majority of their posts are about trans exclusion, not “LGB” supportive issues… despite the abusive language of their followers they are careful not to be abusive themselves.

    Sometimes, though, the mask of respectability slips. The other week, the group and its followers went after SNP MP John Nicolson with often blatantly homophobic abuse; when presented with evidence of it, two crowdfunding websites ejected the LGB Alliance from their platforms.

    That was an expensive mistake that they’ll no doubt try not to repeat, but I suspect the mask will slip again soon enough: after all, this is an organisation whose co-founder suggested that gay teachers are predators.