Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Bullshit

Pernicious nonsense and other irritants

  • Trans people don’t swim

    Today’s Glasgow Herald has an offensively framed, scaremongering article about trans people in council swimming pools causing an invasion of “cross-dressing males”. It’s labelled new and exclusive, but it’s neither. As Duncan Hothersall put it on Twitter:

    Not exclusive. Not new. Simply the result of an active anti-trans campaigner seeking out the most scaremongering situation possible and pitching it to a newspaper desperate for clicks. We need to talk about these issues and resolve them; this sort of coverage doesn’t help.

    I wrote about the reality last year: people like me don’t use public swimming pools because we’re scared of people like you.

    I’m not scared of much any more, but I’m scared [of] public humiliation. Scared that someone will be scared of me. Scared that even in gender-neutral changing facilities where the only time I’m naked is in a locked, private cubicle, someone will loudly object to my being there and claim I’m somehow dangerous.

    Dangerously clumsy, maybe. But dangerous? The only risk from my presence anywhere near a swimming pool is if I fall on you or belly flop nearby.

    Two weeks ago, I swam in a hotel pool. It’s the first time I’ve been swimming in three years, and it was wonderful. Maybe next year I’ll go on holiday and be able to swim again.

  • Intolerance dressed up as concern

    It’s not surprising to see yet another anti-trans op-ed in The Scotsman; once again it portrays all trans people as abusive internet trolls in killer heels, trampling on the anti-trans women who are just lovely people who care about all kinds of stuff.

    But even by those low standards, it’s galling to see the horrific practice of female genital mutilation being used to demonise trans people.

    [one woman’s] life was destroyed by female genital mutilation (FGM), an unspeakably cruel practice that regards female biology as “unclean” and “unworthy”. In far too many cultures, men still decide what is a “real” woman.

    Leaving aside the sheer offensiveness of the argument (and the framing: “men still decide what is a ‘real’ woman” is a dog whistle: it’s meant to characterise trans women as men), it’s perfectly possible to support trans rights and fight against horrors such as FGM.

    It’s also possible to campaign against trans rights and also campaign against FGM. So you’d expect the “protect women” crowd to be doing just that.

    So let’s talk about the anti-trans crowd, the ones who only care about protecting women and girls and definitely aren’t motivated by transphobia when they hold meetings where speakers call us “bastards” and “parasites”.

    Let’s focus on the examples of horrors detailed in the Scotsman article.

    How much time and money do the anti-trans “feminist” organisations, the ones raising money with crowdfunding campaigns and t-shirt sales, spend campaigning against female genital mutilation?

    Zero.

    How much time and money do they spend on fighting domestic violence and other forms of violence against women and girls that leaves 140 women murdered by men in the UK every year?

    Zero.

    How much time and money do they spend on fighting against poverty wages for women, the gender wage gap and the underrepresentation of women in STEM subjects?

    Zero.

    I’ll add a few the writer missed. How much time and money do they spend on campaigning to end the systemic, endemic abuse of women in prison by other inmates and even staff, or the system that sends a disproportionate number of women to prison for minor offences?

    Zero.

    How much time and money do they spend on campaigning for equal marriage and women’s reproductive rights in Northern Ireland?

    Zero.

    Can you see the pattern emerging here?

    It’s almost as if this isn’t about protecting women at all.

  • The problem isn’t us. It’s them

    It’s interesting to compare the media’s treatment of extremely rich far-right ideologues who want to watch the whole world burn – reasonable people with legitimate concerns, as the papers might put it – with environmental protesters trying to raise awareness of the very real and present dangers of climate change. They’re loonies, terrorists, privileged middle-class sandal-wearers who ought to get a real job.

    One of the familiar allegations repeatedly thrown at this week’s Extinction Rebellion protestors is that they’re hypocrites: some plastic water bottles have been spotted and Emma Thomson was in a plane, therefore their entire argument is bunk.

    On Twitter, Rosie Swayne explores that argument.

    [they] are NOT protesting about individual consumer behaviour, so however satisfying it feels to point out they prob drive cars/their superglue is prob not vegan/weed lamps are prob CO2 intense etc etc, it’s not actually relevant to their objective.

    The whole point of the protests is to raise awareness of the way in which the media and successive governments have painted climate change as something only individual actions can fix – so there’s no need to regulate big business until every one of us rides a bike and drinks only from containers made from hemp.

    Whereas the reality is that individual action is utterly meaningless for as long as giant corporations continue to trash the planet without fear of consequence. Just 100 companies are responsible for nearly three-quarters of global carbon emissions. Whether you or I drive cars or ride bikes is irrelevant in that context. It’s better if you cycle, of course, but the problem isn’t us. It’s them.

    As Swayne says, the protests are about “GOVERNMENT inaction on climate change. Carping at personal habits has been the RW [right-wing] tactic against environmentalists for over 30 years.”

    Enviro/ist: global warming will kill us
    RW: ahh! but your Citroën 2CV runs on PETROL so your point is INVALID!

    The newspapers picking on environmental protesters aren’t exposing hypocrisy. They’re defending corporations’ rights to put profits over human lives.

  • Maybe we should wear pink triangles too

    Am I missing something, or is this idea incredibly, dangerously bad?

    Labour’s LGBT+ advisor calls for UK-wide ‘safe spaces’ for transgender people

    Mr Watson wants Ministers to give Local Authorities the powers to outline special zones for transgender people so they can socialise safely with family, friends and the wider LGBT+ community.

    I’m hoping that something has become horrendously garbled between meeting and press release, and that the call is for councils to fund safe meeting places and organisations such as the excellent LGBT Health & Wellbeing. But I doubt it.

    “I’m urging the Government to devolve powers to Mayors and Local Authorities across Britain so they can designate safe spaces for trans people. It could be part of a long-term solution in making them feel comfortable within their communities while promoting social cohesion.”

    There’s a lot to unpick in just that paragraph.

    We have a word for “designated safe spaces” for minorities. It’s “ghetto”.

    Think about it for a moment. He wants councils to create special zones for transgender people where they can “socialise”. What about the bits that aren’t special? Are we to be excluded from them? By implication, if you have some areas that are “safe spaces” for trans people, the areas without that designation are and should remain unsafe.

    Second, “making them feel comfortable in their communities”. What communities? My community is Partick, musicians and alcoholics. How exactly will a designated Be Trans Here And You Probably Won’t Get Beaten Up zone in the Merchant City going to make me “feel comfortable” in the bit of Glasgow where I actually live, work and socialise?

    And as for promoting social cohesion: you don’t promote social cohesion by othering and segregating minorities in much the same way you don’t promote fire safety awareness by burning down everybody’s house.

    This idea is “a bid to protect [us] from the worrying rise in hate crime.” Here’s how you do that. You chuck the bigots out of your own party. You stop fearing the wrath of Murdoch and introduce a system of press regulation that actually works on behalf of the public, not the publications. And more than anything, you enforce the laws on hate speech and hate crimes that we already have.

  • “Stop Pretending the Murdochs Are in the News Business”

    Writing in The Nation, Eric Alterman isn’t pulling any punches.

    one family has been able to use the power of the press to subvert democratic norms, misinform citizens, undermine governments, and fill our national debates with lies, misogyny, racism, and ethnocentrism while calling it news.

    Nothing in the article is particularly new: Murdoch’s power over politicians in his native Australia and in the UK is well-known and well documented. But in the age of Brexit and Trump that power is becoming even more malign – and it is power aided by the actions of a group of people who rarely get named in articles about Murdoch’s malevolence.

    …the greatest shame of this story goes to people who receive no mention at all. It belongs to the journalists who, against all evidence and to the detriment of their profession and their nations’ democracies, continue to participate in the charade that what the Murdochs do is journalism and that, therefore, their dishonesty, provocation, and propaganda deserve to be taken seriously as news.

  • Free speech snowflakes

    There are two pieces in the Guardian about a growing trend: people arguing that criticism is “silencing”. First up, Jack Bernhardt on comedy.

    we witnessed another great moment in comedy this week, when the BBC’s head of comedy asked the question we didn’t realise needed to be asked: is comedy dying because the internet is turning people into Victorians?

    …[such comments perpetuate] a culture war based on ignorance, allowing rightwing newspapers to paint a dystopian caricature of social media, where white men are oppressed with terrifying phrases like “check your privilege” and “identity politics”, and opinionated children burn effigies of John Cleese.

    Elsewhere in the paper, Dawn Foster takes historian Niall Ferguson to task for his persecution complex.

    I would pause, for at least a few seconds, if I found myself arguing that my freedom of speech was in a state of extreme jeopardy in this, my column in a national newspaper.

    Of all the tired tropes trotted out by the quick to whinge and slow to think, the “I’m being silenced” one in national, sometimes global media is one of the most tiresome. To hear handsomely paid, high profile media voices claim to be an oppressed minority would be laughable if it weren’t so serious.

    As ever, the problem isn’t that anybody is being silenced. It’s that powerful people are being criticised.

    You’d think academics such as Ferguson would know the difference between censorship and criticism.

    Foster:

    the Venn diagram of men arguing that freedom of speech is the central, precious tenet of “western civilisation”, and those who scream bloody murder the second they are subject to any criticism, or are forced to bear any responsibility for their speech, is a single perfect circle.

    Free speech does not occur without responsibility: to use the traditional metaphor, if you scream “Fire!” in a crowded theatre, you will be culpable when a stampede ensues. If your arguments are racist, sexist or homophobic, the people you attack will rightly point out your prejudice and query whether your professional position is compromised by holding such prejudices.

    This isn’t difficult. Freedom of speech means the government can’t put you in prison for having an opinion. What freedom of speech does not guarantee is freedom from criticism.

    Time for this cartoon again.

    This isn’t about censorship. It’s about ego and status preservation. People who are used to having their words taken as gospel are suddenly hearing people disagree with them, and they don’t like it.

    For years, privileged men have been able to frame themselves as agents provocateurs – often spouting the kind of opinions a roaring, angry drunk on the night bus might, but with a plummy accent, an Oxford degree, and an overreliance on antiquated vocabulary – in columns in national newspapers. Their fury is not that they have been silenced – they have not – but that their victims have argued back, and they have been forced to bear responsibility for their words.

  • Women, know your place

    The FT asks, “can you be a mother and a senior law firm partner?” It’s not asking whether women are capable of the job, thankfully; it’s a piece about the assumptions made about women that aren’t made about men.

    The generally accepted issue is the choice many women face between partnership — on call 24/7 and under pressure to generate business — or starting a family.

    The linked article quotes Farmida Bi of Norton Rose Fulbright:

    For example, partners looking to build a team to work on a deal may assume a mother will not want a demanding client calling at 2am, or to travel frequently for work. These assumptions are not made about fathers.

    As the article rightly notes, there is another assumption here: the assumption that 2am calls are necessary for that kind of work in the first place. But even if they are, there’s no fundamental reason why a woman would be any less suited to the role: it’s entirely possible that her partner is the one who looks after the kids while she’s fielding those oh-so-important calls.

    The FT piece is about the legal profession but conscious and unconscious bias affects women in all industries. The 1950s characterisation of rainmakers vs homemakers, of men as high achievers and women as marking time until they pop out a bunch of babies is partly why women are under-represented at senior levels in so many organisations, why women are more likely to work part-time and why women are more likely to work in lower paid jobs.

    Writer (and FT contributor) Sarah O’Connor recalls a conversation that perfectly illustrates the problem.

    I once asked the head of a law firm why his firm had zero female partners. He said “Unfortunately being partner just isn’t compatible with having a family”. He had a photo of his kids on his desk.

  • Playing with fire

    This is from BBC Question Time this week: the question was pre-vetted, selected for broadcast and posted on social media to get publicity for the show.

    Is it morally right for the nation’s broadcaster to imply that “LGBT issues” may be immoral?

    If you don’t have your thesaurus handy, here are some synonyms for immoral: Wicked. Evil. Depraved. Vile. Villainous. Degenerate. Perverted.

    Whether by accident or design, this is letting a handful of religious extremists set the terms of discussion (and it really is a handful: while this is being reported in the papers as muslims being intolerant, over in Germany every single muslim MP voted for equal marriage this week; in the UK in the same week, a whole bunch of Christian MPs voted against teaching inclusive sex and relationship education).

    It’s suggesting that there’s something inherently shameful about discussion of LGBT people, that children have to be protected from the very notion. The use of the word “exposed” in much of the so-called debate is telling, because there’s no positive connotation to the word. You’re exposed to unpleasantness, to sickness, to perversion. Nobody talks about people being exposed to family values.

    A reminder: you can’t catch being gay, or trans. If social attitudes could influence sexuality or gender identity there would be no gay or trans people. The only difference social attitudes make is to whether people feel it’s safe to be themselves.

    Another reminder: every school will have LGBT pupils and parents, and probably teachers too.

    This isn’t about an informed debate. It’s about a small bunch of intolerant yahoos trying to drag other people’s children back to the Stone Age. Some people out there think the world is flat, but we don’t have debates on whether we should stop exposing children to the fact that the Earth is a sphere.

    To adopt the position of bigots once would seem careless. To do it again and again… here’s Woman’s Hour.

    This tweet demonstrates another too-common occurrence: the so-called debate is about LGBT people and without LGBT people. That’s like running a piece on racism and only featuring the voices of white people (which happens a lot too). Woman’s Hour has been doing this for a couple of years now with trans people.

    Here’s the Today programme, also on Radio 4.

    We put the hateful Section 28 legislation to bed just under two decades ago, but thanks to right-wing fundamentalists and social media rabble-rousers there’s a concerted attempt to re-open a “debate” that was settled a long time ago: LGBT rights are human rights.

    I’m not the only person who thinks this. The BBC’s own journalists are appalled.

    BBC Breakfast presenter Ben Thompson said he had concerns with the phrasing of the question: “LGBT ‘issues’? Like what? That we exist? One of them, RIGHT HERE, is on your TV every morning … Would you ask if it’s ‘morally right’ to learn about gender/race/religion/disability ‘issues’?”

    BBC News senior foreign producer Tony Brown added: “Replace LGBT with black or Jewish and this question would never have been asked on national TV.”

    One on-screen BBC journalist said there was growing concern among the corporation’s LGBT employees about how the BBC debates such issues: “We are supposed to set things in context – but that doesn’t mean accepting a position that is wrong, or failing to call it out as offensive. We wouldn’t ask ‘Is terrorism morally justified?’

    “I look at the care we take over our other reporting and this leaves me totally confused. We are meant to educate as well as inform.”

    There is something deeply wrong in that part of the BBC: it’s the same thinking that invites neo-Nazi group Generation Identity on to discuss the Christchurch massacre, the same thinking that enables former EDL leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, to portray himself as a free speech martyr instead of a vicious, hateful racist. Not all views are equal. We don’t invite the KKK on to talk about racism. Or at least, we don’t just yet.

    It strikes me that a big part of the problem is that the people making the decisions don’t have to live with the consequences. If, say, Jenni Murray pontificates on whether trans people are human, she isn’t going to suffer from the increase in hate crime that we’ve seen since mainstream media started echoing anti-trans bigots’ talking points. If Newsnight features former EDL people fanning hatred, their producers don’t need to worry about getting their heads kicked in on the way home. This applies to other media, of course, but the BBC is the organisation that sets much of the news agenda and frames much of mainstream political debate.

    Writing in The Guardian today, Owen Jones puts it very well:

    too many of those working in the British press act as hatemongers who play with matches then express horror as the flames reach ever higher

  • God’s money moves in mysterious ways

    OpenDemocracy previously reported the dark money being used by US evangelists to finance “grassroots” pressure groups. But the story is much, much bigger.

    US Christian right ‘fundamentalists’ linked to the Trump administration and Steve Bannon are among a dozen American groups that have poured at least $50 million of ‘dark money’ into Europe over the last decade, openDemocracy can reveal today.

    Between them, these groups have backed ‘armies’ of ultra-conservative lawyers and political activists, as well as ‘family values’ campaigns against LGBT rights, sex education and abortion – and a number appear to have increasing links with Europe’s far right.

    We’re talking in some cases about bona fide hate groups using money to push their agenda globally.

    The SPLC explains that “viewing homosexuality as unbiblical or simply opposing same-sex marriage” is not enough to be categorised as a “hate group”. Groups on this list go further – claiming that homosexuality is dangerous, linked to paedophilia and should be criminalised, disseminating “disparaging ‘facts’ about LGBT people that are simply untrue”

    This is, says SPLC, “no different to how white supremacists and nativist extremists propagate lies about black people and immigrants to make these communities seem like a danger to society”

    OpenDemocracy hasn’t traced the dark money to UK anti-LGBT groups yet, but it’s there: it’s a key reason we’re suddenly debating LGBT rights again.

    Joss Prior connects the dots between US fundamentalists’ dark money and UK anti-trans groups.

    All the anti-trans groups and agitators in the uk, have at some time or another set-up crowdfunders and raised thousands overnight. Quite often filled with significant anonymous donations of 100s or 1000’s.

    Ever wonder why there is a moral panic about trans people using toilets and sex-segregated spaces, even though trans people have had these freedoms since 2010?
    Its because the argument is lifted from a different legal landscape, and people are earning by sharing regardless.

    Back to the OpenDemocracy piece:

    “This is dark money coming into Europe to threaten human rights, and we’re not doing anything about it”, warned Neil Datta, secretary of the European Parliamentary Forum on Population and Development, describing the amounts of money involved as “staggering”.

    “It took the Christian right 30 years to get to where they are now in the White House,” he said. “We knew a similar effort was happening in Europe, but this should be a wake-up call that this is happening even faster and on a grander scale than many experts could have ever imagined.”

  • Stop us if you’ve heard these ones before

    I think what I hate most about bigots is their laziness. The stuff they write about trans people is just the stuff they said about gay people, with “gay” Tipp-Exed out and “trans” scribbled in its place.

    The Implausible Girl on Twitter has some examples. First, the silencing of people by a sinister lobby (2000):

    Evil activists “encouraging confused women” to join them in deviance (1990):

    Press regulators refusing to accept that newspapers are inciting hatred against a minority  while Murdoch-owned newspapers increase their abuse against that minority (also 1990):

    There’s so much more. How dare gay people compare their plight to those of genuine battles for civil rights? How dare gay people use people’s suicides to battle bigots? You get called a bigot if you disagree with science that says gay people are natural! Just because we say we hate gay people doesn’t mean we’re homophobic, it’s free speech! There are only two sexes, and no variation within!

    Last, but not least, here’s the mother of modern feminism admitting that she was wrong to battle against the inclusion of lesbians in the feminist movement for so many years. She had called them “the lavender menace” and claimed they were a danger to women and to feminism.

    That last one makes an important point. Unlike being lesbian, gay, bi or trans, being ignorant and hateful is something you can change.