Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Bullshit

Pernicious nonsense and other irritants

  • Misreporting

    Let’s do this again, shall we?

    There have been a spate of important trans-related stories in the press this week, and predictably they have all been misreported.

    First up, after a long inquiry into the trans charity Mermaids, the Charity Commission found no evidence of the wrongdoing alleged by anti-trans activists and their pals in the press. Complaints that the charity did not have effective safeguarding policies or that it had inappropriate ties to gender identity clinics were unfounded. The commission tried very hard to find evidence of those things because it really, really wanted to – during the inquiry one member of its staff, clearly an anti-trans activist, forgot to use their own personal account and was caught retweeting an unfounded allegation against the charity on the Commission’s own social media – but failed.

    That’s not to say Mermaids is perfect. It isn’t, and there were failings identified in its management. But the core allegations that have been in the press for two years now were bullshit.

    It’s also worth noting that yet again, the BBC reporting of this is using anti-trans activists’ dog-whistles: we’ve previously had “gender ideology” used to describe trans people existing, and now we have “trans-identified” to describe trans kids. The use of “trans-identified male” and “trans-identified female” are common in bigot circles; the terms are intended to delegitimise trans people and suggest they’re not trans.

    Next up: another bigot fucked around and found out. In yet another case reported widely as a nice teacher losing their job just for saying “sex is real” or misgendering a student, Camilla Hannan has been barred from teaching. And if you look at what the tribunal found rather than what the press is telling you it found, you’ll see that Hannan outed one of her LGBTQ+ students online – a massive safeguarding breach as well as horrific behaviour for any teacher – and that her remorse appeared to be “self-serving”: the judge suggested that “Miss Hannan’s remorse stemmed from being caught, rather than from reflections on her own behaviour.”

    Over in The Atlantic, Helen Lewis claimed that when Donald Trump said this week that “Your child goes to school, and they take your child. It was a he, comes back as  a she. And they do it, often without parental consent”, “lines like this would not succeed without containing at least a kernel of truth.” It does not contain a kernel of truth.

    Lastly, we have the inquest into the murder of trans teen Brianna Ghey. In a report that went out of its way never to describe Brianna as “she”, a girl or a young woman, The Times focused on the real victim here: her killer. He was “set for Oxbridge” and was “a good child with good morals”. That’s good morals as in spending “weeks plotting Brianna’s murder after drawing up a ‘kill list’” and then stabbing her 28 times. The good-morals bit is from a statement by the boy’s mother, who of course is going to come to her child’s defence. But the tone of the reporting here and elsewhere strongly suggests that the real tragedy as far as the press is concerned is not that a young trans girl is dead, but that two cisgender people are in prison for killing her.

  • Spot the difference

    The UK isn’t the only place where “reasonable concerns” over trans healthcare have sparked official reviews. It’s happened in Queensland too, sparking a review very similar to NHS England’s Cass Review. But despite reviewing very similar evidence, this review resulted in a doubling of funding for trans healthcare. Here in the UK, the Cass Review has been used to stop trans healthcare for teens, and it’s increasingly being used to demand the end of healthcare for trans adults.

    The difference? The Queensland review didn’t prioritise quacks and bigots over healthcare experts. As one doctor explains:

    “If you were reviewing a neurosurgical service, you’d need to have some neurosurgeons on the review panel,” she said.  

    “You don’t put faith healers on it.  

    “You have to have people who understand how it works.” 

    The UK seems to be the only country where expertise in healthcare is simply dismissed in favour of ignorance and ideology.

  • Perverse incentives

    One of the “keyboard warriors” who fuelled the recent English racist riots, Twitter user WayneGb88, appeared in court yesterday and was jailed for three years. During the trial, he told the court that he earns approximately £1,400 per month from posting hate speech on the former Twitter.

    This is why hate speech is everywhere: it pays very well. US “detransitioner” Chloe Cole recently revealed that she earns roughly $200,000 a year flying around as a guest of the Christian Right trying to get trans people’s healthcare banned; other anti-trans grifters are raking it in too.

    Being hateful is no longer a hobby; it’s a career, and a lucrative one.

  • Anatomy of a scandal

    This, by Lydia Polgreen, is superb: The Strange Report Fueling the War on Trans Kids. It’s about the Cass Review.

    As much as Cass’s report insists that all lives — trans lives, cis lives, nonbinary lives — have equal value, taken in full it seems to have a clear, paramount goal: making living life in the sex you are assigned at birth as attractive and likely as possible. Whether Cass wants to acknowledge it or not, that is a value judgment: It is better to learn to live with your assigned sex than try to change it. If this is what Cass personally believes is right, fair enough. It can charitably be called a cultural, political or religious belief. But it is not a medical or scientific judgment.

  • State-sanctioned harm

    Scientific American reports that the Cass Review has led to “a plethora of abuses and humiliations” for young trans people, which for some includes forced detransition.

    We estimate more than 1,000 trans adolescents in the U.K. now find that their treatment is illegal. Families risk an up to two-year prison sentence for supporting a child’s continued access to private medication. These adolescents face a state-mandated medical detransition, forcing them to go through a puberty they have fought hard to avoid. The alternative is to flee the country or take greater risks: continue blockers under threat of prosecution or receive alternative medication with more frequent and severe side effects. Families are telling us that fear is driving trans children to discontinue routine hormone monitoring checks and to disengage with wider health care services.

    Healthcare for trans adults is next in the firing line.

    As with abortions, ideologically-driven healthcare bans won’t stop people transitioning. What they can do, though, is make trans people’s lives much more painful and dangerous. The cruelty appears to be the point.

  • Both-sidesing bigotry

    Stop me if you’ve heard this before: politicians, the BBC and the press are reporting outright bigotry as “concerns” and one side of a “controversy” or “debate”.

    Not genital-obsessed weirdos this time, at least not today, although I’m sure the Venn diagram of those people and today’s bunch has a lot of overlap: this time the “concerned” people are the English far-right rioters who over the weekend assaulted multiple people of colour, looted shops, burned down a library and attempted to burn asylum seekers out of a hotel.

    According to BBC news reporter Phillip Norton far right rioters in Manchester were a “pro-British march”; Home Office minister David Hanson told LBC Radio that some rioters “might be people who’ve got genuine concerns” and The Telegraph front page described people of all faiths and none being attacked by white racists as “far right and muslims clash in fresh riots”.

  • Cass: MMR all over again

    I think in years to come the Cass Review, and the media’s complicity, will be viewed in much the same way as Andrew Wakefield’s infamous MMR scare and its promotion by Private Eye and UK newspapers. Unfortunately like Wakefield, it will continue to harm people until and long after it’s been fully discredited and its author a pariah.

    One of the countries who provided supposedly expert guidance to Cass was Finland, whose Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala was on the Cass advisory board. Dr Kaltialia has testified in favour of banning trans-related care in Florida and a new report by Assigned Media reveals the horrific abuse and medical malpractice carried out by her gender clinics. The Cass Review has multiple other links to anti-trans activism.

    The British Medical Association has now announced it will review the Cass report and has made some mild criticisms of it already, and the bigots are furious – which makes you wonder what it is they’re so scared of. After all, if the Cass Review is so scientific, the BMA review will just confirm that. Right?

    There is already a very long list of Cass Review critiques, which have repeatedly demonstrated that this was an ideological project. Dr Ruth Pearce has been tracking them on her website and it’s already quite the collection. Even if you do as Cass did and ignore the voices of trans healthcare experts as biased, it’s hard to argue that the Endocrine Society or the American Academy of Pediatrics are trans activists. But then, this was never about listening to the experts.

  • A sperm donor, not a dad

    Update, 26/7: Vivian, Musk’s estranged daughter, has given an interview to NBC: “if you’re going to lie about me, like, blatantly to an audience of millions, I’m not just gonna let that slide.” 

    Elon Musk has given an appalling interview to the appalling Jordan Peterson in which he demonises and deadnames his trans daughter, claiming that she is the reason he’s become a far right nutcase. I’m paraphrasing, but only slightly. It’s nonsense, of course: Musk, who grew up the rich son of a racist family in apartheid-era South Africa, and whose factories are famously cesspools of racism, was right wing long before he had children.

    I didn’t catch the name of the author but a post I saw earlier today made me laugh because it was both funny and accurate: a significant part of right-wing ideology can be summarised by two phrases, “my wife left me” and “my kids don’t talk to me.” Musk ticks both boxes: not only is he estranged from his trans daughter, but his long-term partner dumped him for a trans woman.

    I don’t doubt that his daughter’s very public estrangement – she made it clear in her court documents that she did not want to be associated with him in any way whatsoever – and his equally public break-up made him angry towards trans people and trans women in particular; spending billions of dollars on Twitter to turn it into an anti-trans hate machine is not a choice made with a cool head.

    Musk’s ongoing, obsessive campaign of revenge – a campaign that threatens not just the safety of trans people but all marginalised people – is one of the most expensive and destructive temper tantrums in human history, and it is all about rage. It’s the rage of a parent whose child won’t do what they’re told, the fury of a patriarch denied the obedience they demand.

    By choosing to exercise her own independence and her own bodily autonomy, Musk’s daughter did the one thing he can’t abide, let alone forgive.

    She said no.

    No to the path Musk mapped out for her.

    No to the life Musk decided she should live.

    No to the body Musk wanted her to have.

    No to being property instead of a person.

    Like so many weak and furious men before him, Musk’s impotent rage has sent him straight into the arms of the far right. He no longer flirts with fascism; he’s in bed with it.

    Transphobia is often fascism’s nursery slope, its training wheels, the shallow end of its swimming pool. It’s the bigotry you begin with, the intolerance it’s generally okay to express – and when you get even the gentlest pushback for it, which of course you will, that’s when the real radicalisation begins. The far right does what it accuses its enemies of: it grooms you and builds an echo chamber around you and radicalises you ever further.

    The appeal of the far right to weak, angry men like Musk isn’t hard to understand: it tells you that nothing is ever your fault. It’s a fantasy of victimhood, of DARVO – deny, accuse, reverse victim and offender. It enables the most powerful people in the world to claim oppression by the least powerful and turns that power against the powerless, all the while chanting the abuser’s anthem: look what you made me do.

     

     

  • Hypocrisy

    The Daily Mail, as I’m sure you’re aware, has spent many years now demonising “cross-sex hormones” and the people who take them for reasons such as not wanting to die.

    This is from tomorrow’s front page.

  • Ignore the experts

    There’s a good piece about the puberty blocker ban in The Guardian by Aidan Kelly, a doctor, in which he explains how we’ve ended up in the farcical situation where fashion writers, bigoted journalists and arrogant celebrities are considered experts in trans healthcare but clinicians and prestigious medical organisations are not.

    In this area of healthcare, like no other I know of, the professionals with the requisite expertise are positioned by their critics as having been “captured by ideology” and therefore lacking in credibility. Meanwhile, those without the expertise are positioned as “independent”, which critics argue makes them better able to evaluate the evidence – despite having never worked in the field and having no understanding of its complexities.

    This simply wouldn’t happen in any other kind of healthcare, but in the UK the entire discussion has been given over to people who get their information from Twitter. Which perhaps explains why there’s been virtually no reporting on the international condemnation of the Cass Review from health professionals, or of the extensive analyses that demonstrate that the government is prioritising ideology over evidence in its healthcare policies.

    There’s a good overview here, from the US organisation FAIR:

    Though there is much more evidence now to support gender-affirming care than in 2008, there is also a much stronger anti-trans movement seeking to discredit and ban such care.

    British media coverage has given that movement a big boost in recent years, turning the spotlight away from the realities that trans kids and their families are facing, and pumping out stories nitpicking at the strength of the expanding evidence base for gender-affirming care. Its coverage of the Cass Review followed suit.