Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Bullshit

Pernicious nonsense and other irritants

  • Straight-up hate

    The UK is rapidly approaching the point where there will be more anti-trans hate groups than there are actual trans people.

    The latest group. which launched this week, calls itself the LGB Alliance, and it’s a single-issue hate group: it wants to split the T from the wider LGBT movement. Despite (mainly straight) supporters saying it’s a pro-LGB group, it has no policies about any issues that affect gay, lesbian and bisexual people, issues of which there are many. It exists solely to target so-called “gender ideology”, a phrase beloved of the far right and the religious right.

    For a supposedly gay, lesbian and bisexual alliance it all looks very straight. Its Twitter account does not appear to follow anybody active in LGB rights, but it does follow every single anti-trans pressure group and bigot you can think of, most of whom are straight. Its membership seems to include an awful lot of straight people, and its online allies tend to be straight people too. Actual LGB people have been quick to distance themselves.

    As I’ve posted before, targeting the T in the LGBT community is straight out of the Christian Right strategy to attack the entire LGBT movement, a strategy discussed publicly  in 2017.

    [there are] three non-negotiables in the fight against the so-called gender identity agenda, a conspiracy theory touted by anti-LGBT groups that disavows sexual orientation and gender identity. The first is to “divide and conquer. For all its recent success, the LGBT alliance is actually fragile and the trans activists need the gay rights movement to help legitimize them.” In other words, separate trans activists from the gay rights movement, and their agenda becomes much easier to oppose. As Kilgannon explained, “Trans and gender identity are a tough sell, so focus on gender identity to divide and conquer.” For many, “gender identity on its own is just a bridge too far. If we separate the T from the alphabet soup we’ll have more success.”

    One of the people who pointed this out yesterday is Patrick Harvie, the Scottish MSP, who is a bisexual man. His posts attracted a great deal of negative comment on social media, much of it from straight people using far-right terms such as “cultural marxists” and “Christianphobia”.

    Isn’t it funny how straight, cisgender men who’ve shown no interest in, or active hostility to, feminism and gay/lesbian rights suddenly proclaim themselves defenders of both when it gives them an opportunity to attack trans people?

    Harvie:

    They’re already campaigning against sex education in this country. In others they’re rolling back abortion rights, domestic violence legislation, workplace equality… there are genuinely disturbing forces out there in the world, that threaten all the rights and freedoms we fought for. If they succeed and split our community against itself, don’t kid yourself that they’ll end with hostility to trans & NB people.

  • No, trans activists aren’t forcing anybody to do anything

    Today’s shock-horror trans story is a case study in how certain newspapers deliberately misrepresent stories to make their readers hate trans people. You’ve almost certainly seen it, or read someone’s hot take on it.

    The story is this.

    In June, two people on the internet posted two tweets that asked whether the logos on the packaging on one brand of sanitary products might upset trans men – that is, people transitioning from female to male – or non-binary people who were assigned female at birth. As they pointed out, many trans men and non-binary people have periods too: one of the posters knows this because they are a trans man.

    The company had a look, said “oh, we hadn’t thought of that” and made a minor change to the packaging.

    That’s it.

    Except, of course, it’s not. Those two tweets became “pressure” that “forced” the company to “ban” its packaging, which somehow is all trans women’s fault because reasons. Cue yet more anti-trans hatred, most of it directed towards trans women, across social media. It’s become so ludicrous that I’ve seen trans women angrily posting about it, saying it’s crazy to suggest that trans women have periods, even though nothing in the story has anything to do with trans women and nobody’s suggesting anything of the sort.

    Both of the posters have of course already been hounded off social media by irate Daily Mail, Sun and Telegraph readers.

    “Two people on the internet got mildly miffed about something that most people didn’t even notice” is not and should not be a news story, let alone part of a campaign to demonise minorities.

  • Everybody lies, especially Mark Zuckerberg

    Of all the evils Facebook has been involved in – it’s been implicated in genocide – spouting bullshit is fairly far down the list. But Mark Zuckerberg’s latest speech is a great example of how you shouldn’t trust the company to tell you what time it is, let alone fight for truth and justice.

    Here’s how Zuckerberg described the origins of Facebook.

    When I was in college, our country had just gone to war in Iraq. The mood on campus was disbelief. It felt like we were acting without hearing a lot of important perspectives. The toll on soldiers, families and our national psyche was severe, and most of us felt powerless to stop it. I remember feeling that if more people had a voice to share their experiences, maybe things would have gone differently. Those early years shaped my belief that giving everyone a voice empowers the powerless and pushes society to be better over time.

    Back then, I was building an early version of Facebook for my community, and I got to see my beliefs play out at smaller scale.

    I’m not taking this out of context: the full speech is on Facebook’s newsroom page. It attempts to put Facebook in a lineage that also includes Martin Luther King Jr and the Black Lives matter movement.

    Isn’t that wonderful? Mark created Facebook because of the Iraq War and his passion for justice.

    Except he didn’t. He created Facebook – then called Facemash – so people could vote on people’s pictures and decide how fuckable they were, with particular emphasis on humiliation. As he blogged at the time:

    I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it’s not even 10 pm and it’s a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland dormitory facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendiedous [sic] facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.

    …Yea, it’s on. I’m not exactly sure how the farm animals are going to fit into this whole thing (you can’t really ever be sure with farm animals …), but I like the idea of comparing two people together.

    In 2004, he told a friend:

    Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

    Just ask

    I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

    People just submitted it.

    I don’t know why.

    I don’t know why.

    Dumb fucks

    Martin Luther King Jr he ain’t.

  • Look who’s talking

    Piers Morgan, who used to write homophobic stories in The Sun before that became socially unacceptable, is currently making hay from the idea that there are more than 100 genders. It’s based on a comment made in a video where someone was rather clunkily trying to express the idea that gender is a spectrum.

    We’re familiar with the gender binary: male or female, boy or girl. But most binaries are shortcuts. There’s a whole world of colours between black and white. We use binaries to simplify that, but sometimes they over-simplify. The trick is to understand them for what they are: quick descriptions that apply a lot or even most of the time, but that aren’t the only possibilities.

    The thing about this 100 genders thing is that when I go to LGBT+ and trans-specific events, nobody’s talking about it: the most obscure identity I’ve ever heard somebody describe themselves as is “non-binary”. Nobody’s getting irate about this stuff because they’ve got more important things to worry about, like basic human rights such as access to healthcare and not being murdered.

    That’s not to say there aren’t people out there coming up with ever-longer lists of possible genders, but those people are generally in the corners of social media and academia. Going too far is what they do.

    It’s important to question who’s telling you a story that makes a particular group look bad. These myriad genders are regularly trotted out by the right-wing press, but I simply don’t encounter LGBT+ people talking about it. It appears to be a classic case of people taking a couple of really extreme and/or niche views and trying to persuade people that they represent the entire group.

    Put it this way. Piers Morgan isn’t talking about the healthcare crisis for trans people or the elevated suicide rates among LGBT+ teenagers, the things that really affect LGBT+ people and that LGBT+ people really do care about. He’s just pointing and laughing at them and trying to get you to point and laugh too.

    Here’s an example of a big story about genders: Facebook’s infamous 50-something genders, which were then increased to 71. This was widely reported as 71 genders. It wasn’t. It was 71 possible responses on a form, most of them duplicates or slightly different ways of saying the same thing. For example:

    Cis, Cisgender, Cis Female, Cis Male, Cis Man, Cis Woman, Cisgender Female, Cisgender Male, Cisgender Man, Cisgender Woman

    …Trans, Trans*, Trans Female, Trans* Female, Trans Male, Trans* Male, Trans Man, Trans* Man, Trans Person, Trans* Person, Trans Woman, Trans* Woman, Transfeminine, Transgender, Transgender Female, Transgender Male, Transgender Man, Transgender Person, Transgender Woman, Transmasculine, Transsexual, Transsexual Female, Transsexual Male, Transsexual Man, Transsexual Person, Transsexual Woman

    The Royal Opera House in London used to do the same (and probably still does; I haven’t checked in lately). When you buy your tickets you can choose from these titles:

    Advocate, Ambassador, Baron, Baroness, Brigadier, Canon, Chaplain, Chancellor, Chief, Col, Comdr, Commodore, Councillor, Count, Countess, Dame, Dr, Duke of, Earl, Earl of, Father, General, Group Captain, H R H The Duchess of, H R H The Duke of, H R H The Princess, HE Mr, HE Senora, HE The French Ambassador M, His Highness, His Hon, His Hon Judge, Hon, Hon Ambassador, Hon Dr, Hon Lady, Hon Mrs, HRH, HRH Sultan Shah, HRH The, HRH The Prince, HRH The Princess, HSH Princess, HSH The Prince, Judge, King, Lady, Lord, Lord and Lady, Lord Justice, Lt Cdr, Lt Col, Madam, Madame, Maj, Maj Gen, Major, Marchesa, Marchese, Marchioness, Marchioness of, Marquess, Marquess of, Marquis, Marquise, Master, Mr and Mrs, Mr and The Hon Mrs, President, Prince, Princess, Princessin, Prof, Prof  Emeritus, Prof Dame, Professor, Queen, Rabbi, Representative, Rev Canon, Rev Dr, Rev Mgr, Rev Preb, Reverend, Reverend Father, Right Rev, Rt Hon, Rt Hon Baroness, Rt Hon Lord, Rt Hon Sir, Rt Hon The Earl, Rt Hon Viscount, Senator, Sir, Sister, Sultan, The Baroness, The Countess, The Countess of, The Dowager Marchioness of, The Duchess, The Duchess of, The Duke of, The Earl of, The Hon, The Hon Mr, The Hon Mrs, The Hon Ms, The Hon Sir, The Lady, The Lord, The Marchioness of, The Princess, The Reverend, The Rt Hon, The Rt Hon Lord, The Rt Hon Sir, The Rt Hon The Lord, The Rt Hon the Viscount, The Rt Hon Viscount, The Venerable, The Very Rev Dr, Very Reverend, Viscondessa, Viscount, Viscount and Viscountess, Viscountess, W Baron, W/Cdr

    Facebook’s 71 options are nothing compared to the 200-odd here. It’s exactly the same thing – titles that matter to the holder and maybe their peers, but hardly anybody else –  but you won’t find oleaginous presenters scoffing at that because they want to get an honorific one day too.

    I’m not suggesting we should shoot the messenger, as appealing as the thought of Piers Morgan in front of a firing squad might be. But it’s important to look at who the messenger is. Not all messengers are honest.

    For example, when I first came out my options about the supposed trans lobby were very different from the ones I have now. And the main difference is that back then, I didn’t know many trans people or organisations. My information came from a handful of journalists and an even smaller handful of idiots on the internet. Some of those journalists turned out to be in cahoots with bigoted pressure groups; some turned out to be listed as formal supporters by US evangelical outreach groups; still others just turned out to be hateful arseholes. They were deliberately framing stories in the worst possible way in order to demonise what I now know to be a very ordinary group of perfectly decent people who often have very difficult lives and who don’t deserve to live in the climate of fear and hatred that’s being created around them.

    I’ve written before about the loony-left reports of the 1980s, many of which were entirely fabricated, and about the anti-trans (and anti-immigrant, and anti-Muslim, and anti-disabled people, and anti-working class people) stories routinely run by certain outlets today. The idea that newspapers and other media outlets don’t lie is a wonderful one, but it just isn’t true.

    The stories we’re told are shaped by the people who tell them. All too often those people have an agenda.

  • Scare quotes

    Update, 16 October:

    This is even worse than it looked. The Newsnight article says this:

    The results of the study are yet to be published, but a number of concerns were raised to BBC Newsnight and the British Medical Journal:

    Let”s spell this one out.

    The original BBC Newsnight item and article were put together by Newsnight’s Deborah Cohen and Hannah Barnes. 

    The allegations investigated by the HRA were made by Newsnight’s Deborah Cohen and Hannah Barnes. 

    The article in the BMJ that Newsnight’s Deborah Cohen and Hannah Barnes use to corroborate their own claims was written by Newsnight’s Deborah Cohen and Hannah Barnes. 

    The follow-up article strongly implying a whitewash was written by Newsnight’s Deborah Cohen and Hannah Barnes. 

    So a couple of BBC journalists filed a complaint, did a big item about how “someone” had made a complaint, and when the complaints were found to be groundless were allowed to cast doubt on the investigation into their own complaints.

    That’s shockingly, sickeningly unethical.

    Original post below… 

    In July, BBC’s Newsnight ran a feature raising significant concerns about the prescribing of puberty blocking drugs in London’s Tavistock Clinic.

    The story was based on claims that a key study that informed those prescription decisions was dodgy. It was alleged that researchers did not obtain proper consent, that they did not provide adequate information and that it was methodologically unsound.

    As Newsnight reported, those claims were being investigated by the NHS Health Research Authority.

    The investigation was ongoing at the time of the item, but a notorious anti-trans activist, a sociologist who was caught operating a pseudonymous Twitter account to post transphobic nonsense online, provided the BBC with documents he claimed demonstrated that children and their parents “were not given the information they needed in order to take this momentous life-changing step”.

    The HRA couldn’t respond in detail because its investigation was ongoing, so the Newsnight item was pretty much a hit piece based on allegations that couldn’t be disproved until the investigation was complete.

    Guess what? The investigation is complete and the claims were disproved.

    An official review by the HRA into the conduct of the study, has cleared the researchers of any wrongdoing.

    It found that researchers worked “in accordance with recognised practice for health research” adding that in some areas they were “ahead of normal practice at the time”.

    Don’t hold your breath for an equally prominent on-air correction. The BBC report about the HRA investigation quotes “experts [who are] only prepared to comment off the record for fear of reprisal”, and runs with the headline:

    Questions remain over puberty-blockers, as review clears study

    I’d interpret that as “study was wrong”, wouldn’t you? That’s certainly how it’s being framed on social media, where people are sharing the headline but not the detail.

    The piece concludes:

    While the evidence continues to emerge, debate will no doubt continue about use of puberty blockers in young people.

    Repeatedly giving trolls a megaphone isn’t a debate. It’s scaremongering, scaremongering that helps fuel the growing anti-trans sentiment in the UK: they’re coming for your children!

    Let’s see how that manifests, shall we? Here’s Danny Shaw, BBC News’ Home Affairs Correspondent, this morning:

    BREAKING: There’s been a ten per cent rise in hate crimes recorded by police in England and Wales [in 2018-2019]… Transgender hate crime went up 37%

  • School bully

    Guess which newspaper is making a false distinction between children with special needs and school pupils, and suggesting that the former are harming the latter? Here’s a clue: it rhymes with “fuelling hate crimes”.

    We’ve been here before: in June, the Times wrote an awful article implying that care experienced kids were going to damage other kids’ education, making a false distinction between care experienced children and “bright children”.

    Here, the people who are forcing presumably “bright” children to “lose out” are other children whose additional support needs are “seen by some parents as a ‘golden ticket’”.

    It’s the worst possible spin on a fairly simple story: the government isn’t backing up reforms with money.

    Councils have a statutory responsibility in England to fund special needs support, and that mandatory support has not been accompanied by adequate funding to pay for it. So councils are using their existing budgets in an attempt to provide care that the government mandates but refuses to pay for.

    In any sane worldview the headline would be damning the government. But no, the enemy here is kids with learning difficulties.

    As the journalist Frances Ryan posted:

    This is such irresponsible framing from The Times. It parrots prejudice that disabled children are a drain, a high cost harming the education of ‘normal’ pupils.

    This is happening far too often to be the result of genuine mistakes: these articles aren’t written in a vacuum and posted without anybody seeing them. There is something very wrong at the heart of the organisation, which repeatedly fails to meet even the most basic journalistic standards and which seems to take particular relish in scaring its readers about minorities. But even by its standards, going after children is a new low.

  • I regret to inform you that the Sunday Times and the Christian Legal Centre are at it again

    Another weekend, another bunch of anti-trans stories in the Sunday Times (following on from four stories in the Saturday edition). Today’s selection includes a 3/4 page tale of a deeply troubled man who transitioned and then de-transitioned, something that’s incredibly rare but that does happen, usually because some trans people face terrible hostility when they come out.

    His story is being used to demonstrate that children are being coerced into surgical transition, even though it doesn’t do anything of the sort.

    Point one: he was middle-aged when he began transition.

    Point two: his transition was DIY and ignored the specialist advice that he should consider social transition before considering any medical treatment.

    In other words, the story demonstrates something rather different: that troubled middle-aged men who decide to ignore medical advice don’t always get the happy ending they hope for.

    It’s a sad story about a sad individual with various personal problems who faced terrible hostility (hostility the Times and its sister titles help to fuel) after a transition they began despite medical advice.

    That’s not how it’s being spun here, though. The Sunday Times is using it as yet more evidence of the fictional transgender cult – and the fact that the Christian Legal Centre is representing him casts even more doubt on the whole thing. The CLC is very good at coaching people to make lurid but conveniently unverifiable claims that fit its culture war narratives, claims that frequently turn out to be untrue. The Times has published many of those stories, but doesn’t return to them when they’re thrown out of court.

    The CLC are a bunch of culture war ambulance chasers, and they tend to represent two kinds of people: howling bigots and deeply troubled individuals. This looks like the latter. I feel sorry for the man in the story, but he’s just the CLC’s latest useful idiot.

     

  • Spreading hate

    What does hate look like?

    In many cases, it looks just like you.

    When we think of hateful bigotry, we tend to imagine stereotypes: the bomber-jacketed skinhead, the spittle-flecked preacher and so on. We don’t imagine nice people: our neighbours, our friends, the mums on the school run.

    But the stereotypes are often wrong. To take just two examples I know a bit about: those skinheads are often proudly anti-racist and their gigs raise money that goes directly to refugees; those school run mums are posting poison on the internet.

    Here’s an example. Yesterday, Flora margarine’s parent company terminated an endorsement deal with Mumsnet. It wasn’t the first and it won’t be the last major advertiser to cut ties with the wholesome-sounding message board over its inability to police a hard core of viciously bigoted users who use part of its feminism forum to post hate speech about trans people.

    Mumsnet posters are claiming a co-ordinated campaign against the site by sinister trans activists, but what really happened is that one woman, the mother of a trans kid, messaged the company and said “are you sure you want to be associated with this?” The company investigated and concluded: hell no.

    It’s important to be clear about this. Talking about trans people is not transphobic. Having worries about legal changes is not transphobic. Discussing even anti-trans articles is not transphobic. But that’s not what a hardcore of users are doing, and it’s not why advertisers leave.

    The new face of hatred is not a screaming skinhead shouting slurs. It’s nice middle-class people who choose their words carefully.

    Writing in Out magazine, Gillian Branstetter talks about the US hate group, the Alliance Defending Freedom, and its relationship to the Westboro Baptist Church. Both organisations are hateful, but the ADF understands that wandering around with placards saying “God hates fags” is counterproductive. The ADF is much smarter, and much more dangerous.

    Alongside branding standards, the ADF instructs its employees to replace words like “transgender” with “sexually confused,” “gay” with “homosexual behavior,” and “intersex” with — I’m not kidding — “sexually mutilated.”

    Perhaps most telling, however, is how Mr. Trent and his colleagues are instructed to describe their own work and the policies they defend. They don’t engage in “bigotry,” according to the style guide. They’re merely “defending biblical, religious principles.” They don’t oppose “sex education programs” in schools; they oppose “sexual indoctrination.” It’s not “gay marriage”; it’s “marriage imitation.”

    The Mumsnet crowd do this too. They use the debunked faux-diagnosis of “autogynephilia” as a way to call trans people fantasists, fetishists and perverts. They use “protecting sex-based rights” to agitate against trans people’s rights. They say  they’re just a place where nice, friendly harmless women come together to debate the issues, campaign against Childline, try to defund trans-supportive charities and force charities to cancel discussions on preventing child abuse.

    … these tricks of language rely on the “naive conception” of bigotry. The ADF, allies of the president, and many others in Washington hope to manipulate the view that racism, ableism, misogyny, homophobia, or transphobia cannot be called for what it is until it’s screaming in your face, carrying a five-foot poster declaring your eternal damnation.

    …The Alliance Defending Freedom — as well as the Family Research Council, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and many others — are fighting for a world without LGBTQ+ people in it, where anyone can feel free to deny trans people our most basic rights because they feel God hates us. That fact should not go unnoticed simply because they aren’t holding signs declaring it.

  • Go and get the flu vaccine

    I was given the flu vaccine the other day. I hadn’t really thought about it but since a lung cancer scare a few years ago there’s a flag on my medical records and I’m considered high risk for pulmonary infections and COPD, so I get invited to this stuff.

    As you’d expect, the vaccine didn’t give me flu, make me grow horns or make me autistic, because vaccines don’t do that. What it did do was make me feel a bit crap for a few hours before protecting me from catching – and more importantly, spreading – a really horrible disease.

    As Frances Ryan writes in The Guardian, the flu jab saves lives.

    Flu is often thought of as nothing more than a week of feeling rotten, but it can be life-threatening, particularly for older people and anyone with an acute illness like cancer or underlying chronic health conditions, like me.

    In 2018 I developed flu complications that left me unable to breathe or move and on a ventilator for months. It’s left me with life-changing fatigue and pain, but in many ways I was lucky. Last year 1,700 people died of the flu – despite the fact that this was a relatively mild strain – and further hospital admissions put even greater pressure on an already overstretched NHS.

    The vaccine is free for at-risk groups and incredibly cheap for everybody else. You should get it, if only to prevent having to take time off work to feel like shit.

    Unfortunately we have a problem persuading people to take vaccines. Ryan:

    The UK, like much of the west, is battling an anti-vaxxing movement in which social media has become a gateway for scare stories and quackery. Diseases such as measles are on the rise in England, with the UK recently losing its measles–free status with the World Health Organization because a growing number of people believe dangerous myths about vaccines.

    Things are so serious that one newspaper is taking a stand. Here’s today’s Daily Mail.

    The crusading, campaigning Mail is going to fight against the forces of idiocy and darkness that have persuaded parents that vaccines are dangerous.

    Forces such as, er, the Daily Mail.

    The Mail scaremongered about vaccines for years, and while other UK papers (including the Guardian for a while) did the same it was by far the most vocal. Its sustained, decade-long campaign against the safety of the MMR vaccine continues to inspire and be cited by the global anti-vaxx movement.

    As late as 2005, the Mail continued to argue that debunking the MMR/autism scare was fake news and accused critics of disgraced doctor Andrew Wakefield as perpetrating a witch hunt.

    The science editor of the Daily Mail argued that ‘the MMR scandal is getting worse. Urgent questions about the vaccine’s safety remain unanswered. The doctor who raised those questions is being subjected to what appears to be a witch-hunt. The parents’ recourse through the courts has been blocked. Now they have to put up with being told yet again that the evidence of their own eyes is fraudulent.’

    The Daily Mail spent a decade scaremongering about vaccines: Google “Daily Mail MMR” and you’ll find tons of uncorrected “the truth about MMR” articles and articles that push the long-debunked claim that vaccination causes autism.

    Its new campaign is laudable, but it won’t undo the damage it’s done to public safety not just here, but globally.

  • Useful idiots are still idiots

    I’ve written many times about useful idiots, members of minority groups who join anti-minority parties. One of the best-known examples is Winston McKenzie, the former Commonwealth spokesman for UKIP, whose presence in the party was used to prove it wasn’t racist. He ended up quitting the party because it was racist.

    Trans and gay people do it too. In the US, the “LGBT for Trump” campaign and the Log Cabin Republicans proved to be a bunch of idiots helping to rainbow-wash one of the most anti-LGBT presidents we’ve ever seen, a president whose campaign against LGBT people may see even basic anti-discrimination protections removed.

    Here in the UK we have ageing transsexuals joining anti-trans bigots to rail against the invented dangers of other trans people, and celebrity trans people pulling the ladder up behind them to leave other trans people behind. We even have transgender candidates standing for the thoroughly anti-trans Brexit Party.

    You’ll be shocked to discover that despite having trans candidates, the Brexit party – hardly the most progressive, inclusive party around – still hates trans people. Here’s PinkNews on its co-founder, Catherine Blaiklock.

    The only people this should come as a surprise to are the idiots who can’t see that they’re being accepted because they’re useful, not because they’re welcome. They are there for one reason and one reason only: to try and persuade the public that the organisation is less hateful than it really is.