Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: Bullshit

Pernicious nonsense and other irritants

  • The endgame

    In the US, the people who want to ban abortion will tell you that they don’t want to ban abortion; they just want to put some protections around some of it. This is a lie.

    Also in the US, the people who want to ban healthcare for all trans people – who, not coincidentally, are usually people who want to ban abortion – will tell you that they don’t want to ban healthcare for all trans healthcare; they just want to protect children. This too is a lie.

    We know these lies are lies because the people telling them admit it. For example in January, US Republican legislators discussed the importance of disguising their “endgame”, which was to ban all healthcare for trans adults. It was important to focus initially only on trans kids, the legislators said, because “what we know legislatively is we have to take small bites.”

    As one of the legislators said:

    we have to be looking at the endgame simultaneously, maybe even using that to move the window to say that this isn’t just wrong 0-18, it’s wrong for everyone and we shouldn’t be allowing that to happen.

    This is how you ban people’s healthcare: slowly, and with small bites.

    Here in the UK, we’re told that nobody wants to ban trans adults’ healthcare. This is a lie.

    In the wake of the Cass review into teen healthcare, a review that prioritised anti-trans junk science and anti-trans activists over actual science and medical expertise, it has now been announced that there will be a review into the provision of trans healthcare for adults. If it too prioritises anti-trans junk science and anti-trans activists, then like the Cass review it will conclude that trans healthcare – which after years of underfunding and now political attacks is barely functioning, with people dying on waiting lists that in some cases are now decades long – needs to be restricted too, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

    This is dangerous not just for trans people, but for everybody. Because the Cass review now has people openly discussing a ban on trans healthcare for anyone under 25 to “protect children”, even though 18 to 25 year olds are adults, on the spurious (and untrue) grounds that brains are not fully developed until then. In effect, the claim is that you cannot consent to healthcare until you’re 25.

    So far, this is only being discussed in relation to trans people. But if we establish the precedent that under-25s do not have bodily autonomy, women’s reproductive rights are next.

    That’s the endgame.

  • No surprises

    You’ll see a lot in the papers about the Cass review of NHS care for gender-questioning kids today, as the report is finally released. What you won’t see are any suggestions that it’s a political project, not a medical one. Its job was to undermine healthcare for trans people, and that’s exactly what it’s delivered.

    The review’s conclusion, that there isn’t enough evidence to support affirming treatment for trans teens, was arrived at by discounting nearly 100% of the available research into affirming care (101 out of 103 studies) for spurious reasons; it centred the views of people and organisations opposed to trans healthcare, some of which believe that trans people don’t exist, while refusing to consider evidence from trans-supportive people or organisations as they would be biased; it applied different standards of evidence to pro- and anti-trans studies; and its core analyst is a supporter of conversion therapy and has previously supported the anti-trans pressure group Genspect. And while the review’s scope does not extend to adult healthcare, it’s nevertheless being used to demand restrictions on healthcare for adults until they’re 25.

    The problems with the Cass review have been apparent for some time, and Trans Safety Network has been particularly good at highlighting them. This piece, from late March, is a good overview. It’s telling that freedom of information requests regarding conflicts of interest have been refused.

    The tories will be out of power soon, and rightly so. But the damage they have done will take years, and perhaps decades, to undo.

  • Complete fiction

    I’ve been away for a bit, and while I was out of the country we had yet another completely invented scandal around trans people. This time it was around the new Scottish hate crime legislation, which does not make it an offence to misgender trans people. Despite it not being an offence to misgender trans people, it has been widely reported that the law would make it an offence to misgender trans people.

    Here’s Assigned Media.

    Presenter Justin Webb began his interview with the member of Scottish Parliament by asking, “Is misgendering a crime under this act?” Brown’s answer? “No. Not misgendering. Not at all.”

    …During their back and forth, Brown explains that if a report of a hate crime is made it would be the police’s job to determine if a crime has taken place.

    The latter doesn’t contradict the former, but that didn’t stop pretty much the entire UK press from reporting that misgendering was now a hate crime despite – as I may have mentioned – misgendering not being a hate crime.

    Bad faith scaremongering about legislation is a favourite tactic of the evangelical right, and in Scotland we previously saw it over the smacking ban – which, child-whacking arseholes told us, would see the prisons full of parents wrongly convicted of assaulting their kids. It’s also been used to attack women’s and LGBTQ+ people’s rights in other countries, such as in Spain.

    As ever, it doesn’t matter if the press amplifies bullshit through malevolence or incompetence, because the result is the same: newspapers and broadcasters are misleading their readers, listeners and viewers and doing real damage in the process.

  • A shameful sham

    The news that NHS England is banning the prescription of puberty blockers to trans teens (but not cis teens) is surprising if you look at the results of the consultation into that very plan: the overwhelming majority of responses were against the ban, pointing out that it flew in the face of all available evidence and was contrary to international best practice. The PDF is here if you fancy a look; it’s pretty damning of the proposals.

    But the point of the consultation, like many other sham consultations, was not to change a decision that had already been made. The ban we’re reading about this week was previously decided on and announced in the summer of 2023, months before the consultation was opened.

    The purpose of the consultation was to enable the NHS, and the government, to say that there has been a consultation – secure in the knowledge that nobody is going to report that the consultation overwhelmingly demonstrated that the decision chose to ignore medical expertise in favour of scaremongering and moral panic.

  • Freedom to choose

    There’s an interesting and provocative piece in New York Magazine by Andrea Long Chu, in which she advocates for trans people’s freedom. It’s a long read and quite dense in places – and I don’t think she makes it clear enough that the only medical intervention available to trans kids is puberty blocking, which is fully reversible – but she’s very good on the role of transphobic liberals in laundering far-right views for a more mainstream audience.

    The most insidious source of the anti-trans movement in this country is, quite simply, liberals.

    Liberals are the ones “just asking questions” in the pages of newspapers, pretending to be objective when they’re just as biased against trans people as the most rabid right-wingers.

    The very simple fact is that many people believe transgender is something no one in their right mind would ever want to be… If the liberal skeptic will not assert in mixed company that there should be fewer trans people, he still expects us to agree on basic humanitarian grounds that at least there should not be more.

     

  • Reds in her head

    If you had any remaining doubts that trans people are the go-to bogeymen for the bigoted, the venal and the incompetent, look no further than disgraced former prime minister Liz Truss. Despite only being in office for 44 days before resigning, Truss managed to spook the markets, send borrowing rates into orbit and tanked the value of the pound: she was unable to stay in power long enough to outlast an iceberg lettuce in a blonde wig, a real thing that was created by the Daily Star to mock her intellect and political nous.

    Earlier this month Truss rolled out the age-old excuse for the damage done and the fact that she couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery: it wasn’t me. Instead, she was the victim of “a very powerful economic establishment, coupled by a lack of political support.” When that didn’t fly, she decided on a new claim: it was the trans what done it. Truss is now telling appreciative audiences of far-right US republicans that she was the victim of a UK deep state and a civil service packed full of “trans activists” and “environmental extremists”.

    It’s easy to mock her, and we should: sharing the story earlier I captioned it “and are those trans activists in the room with us right now?”. But it demonstrates something wider: this is the former equalities minister, whose job was to represent LGBTQ+ people, and she is an anti-trans ideologue and a fantasist for whom trans people are her very own reds under the bed.

    Those are qualities that apply just as much to her former equalities sidekick and current equalities minister Kemi Badenoch, who is currently facing multiple questions over her own competence and in particular her uneasy relationship with telling the truth. The bulk of the scrutiny is over her lies about the Post Office scandal, but Freedom of Information requests have also demonstrated that she lied when she claimed to have consulted extensively with LGBTQ+ groups; the only groups she met were two anti-trans groups. Meeting requests by real LGBTQ+ advocacy groups were refused in letters whose tone was very different to the friendly and cheerful messages her office sent to anti-trans activists.

    When unhinged anti-LGBTQ+ politicians are repeatedly given responsibility for LGBTQ+ people’s legal protections, LGBTQ+ people’s safety and LGBTQ+ people’s human rights, Occam’s Razor surely applies: the simplest, most likely explanation is that this is being done deliberately and it is being done maliciously.

  • Deny and distract

    Grief is a horrendous thing, and it’s something we all process in different ways. And Brianna Ghey’s mum, Esther, is grieving something no parent should have to go through: the death of her child, a death whose brutality and ferocity are beyond most people’s understanding.

    With grief comes guilt, an endless parade of what-ifs and if-onlys that come to torture you in the hours where you can’t sleep. And I think Esther Ghey is feeling that acutely right now, because any parent would: of course you’d spend endless hours wondering what you missed, what you could have done differently, what single thing would have prevented this terrible thing from happening. Trying to make sense of the senseless is what we humans do.

    The latest reports suggest that Ghey thinks that social media may have played a part in the death of her daughter. And the way in which this is being reported is starting to look like victim blaming. If Brianna hadn’t been so active online maybe she wouldn’t have been so isolated in real life, and maybe that would mean she wouldn’t have been picked for her vulnerability, and maybe…

    I don’t agree with her, although I understand why Brianna’s mum is on a mission: for many years I’ve been delivering lectures about the regulation of the internet and social media, and sadly every year there are new calls for regulation from yet another grieving parent of yet another kid who should still be here and who is trying to make some sense of a senseless tragedy and ensure no other child experiences what their child experienced. But with this particular horror the press has a vested interest in the internet-did-it narrative, because it lets the real guilty parties off the hook.

    Newspapers blaming the internet for Brianna’s murder have spent six or seven years demanding the institutionalised bullying of trans kids in schools, have fought tooth and nail against hate crime legislation, have portrayed anti-trans hatred as acceptable “debate” and have continually platformed people and organisations who say that trans people are monsters to be hated and feared and eliminated from society.

    As one of the people I follow on social media put it: if you think social media’s bad, you should see what they put in the papers.

    LGBTQ+ people and advocates have been trying to raise the alarm for years, and again and again their warnings have been ignored or even ridiculed. And now that the very thing they feared and tried to prevent is happening, the press, politicians and public figures are doing their very best to deny or distract.

    I’m writing this the day after it emerged that a non-binary kid in the US died after a savage beating by multiple teenagers in the school toilets, a beating that appears to be because of their gender identity; they lived in Oklahoma, whose schools are run by one of the most viciously anti-trans bigots around. Earlier this month, it emerged that a trans teen was stabbed multiple times in North London, an attempted murder apparently because others took exception to seeing a trans person. And despite the best efforts of the press to play it down, the murder of Brianna was in part because one of her killers was repulsed by the fact she was trans.

    I have enormous sympathy for Brianna’s mum. But I think that in her grief and in her pain, in her attempts to make sense of something so senseless, she’s unaware that others are seeking to exploit her, to turn the focus away from the press, the politicians and the public figures who’ve spent six-plus years trying to make the world more lethal for trans and non-binary people.

    I got a call from the BBC last week asking me to come on air regarding Brianna; not to talk about her murder, or the climate of hatred that makes so many of us genuinely afraid, but whether we should ban kids from having phones. I declined, of course. But the framing is telling. There’s no interest in investigating what’s really contributing to the hatred that led to the murder of a young woman, the attempted murder of another and the attack that appears to have killed a third teen. Because that would mean asking questions whose answers are far too uncomfortable, and far too close to home.

     

  • The job

    It’s been said so often that it’s a cliché, but the job of journalism is to report the truth. Its job is to investigate, to find facts, and to follow those facts to see where they lead. It is a process of discovering, of uncovering, of seeing and telling what’s really going on.

    In order to do that, you need to be objective. We all have biases, assumptions and other weaknesses. But in journalism the job is to put them aside, to accept that if the facts contradict your pre-existing beliefs then those beliefs need to change. Because your job is not to shore up your own biases, but to find the truth.

    With some irony, the publisher of The New York Times has written extensively about that here.

    Independence asks reporters to adopt a posture of searching, rather than knowing. It demands that we reflect the world as it is, not the world as we may wish it to be. It requires journalists to be willing to exonerate someone deemed a villain or interrogate someone regarded as a hero. It insists on sharing what we learn—fully and fairly—regardless of whom it may upset or what the political consequences might be. Independence calls for plainly stating the facts, even if they appear to favor one side of a dispute. And it calls for carefully conveying ambiguity and debate in the more frequent cases where the facts are unclear or their interpretation is under reasonable dispute, letting readers grasp and process the uncertainty for themselves.

    Sulzberger’s words here are absolutely true, but it’s worth considering why he’s writing the piece: it’s in response to growing criticism that the New York Times often breaks those rules. That’s certainly the case in its reporting of trans issues where, often by using the opinion section to avoid fact-checking, journalists act as anti-trans propagandists.

    One of the worst of many such propagandists is Pamela Paul, whose ongoing campaign against trans people continued this week with a really shoddy piece about teen detransition. When some trans journalists identified howling errors in her reporting, she dismissed them as activists; when they wrote to the NYT about the flaws in her piece, the paper refused to publish it because it was a criticism in part of their output. Their letter is here.

    The issue with Paul’s work is simple enough: she apparently adopts a policy of knowing, rather than searching. She appears to reflect the world as she may wish it to be, not the world as it is. She does not plainly state the facts. And she does not carefully convey ambiguity or debate.

    At its very simplest, journalism’s job is all about the Ws: who, what, when, why. For every assertion you make, you need to provide solid evidence. So if you say there is an epidemic of X, you need to demonstrate that there is indeed an epic of X. But Paul doesn’t do that. Quite the opposite.

    Writing in Slate, epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, who is neither trans nor a trans activist, investigates the numbers behind Paul’s claimed epidemic of detransition. And – surprise! – they don’t back up her claims.

    That’s not to say that there aren’t detransitioners, or that there isn’t regret. Of course there are. Of course there is. But the question that journalism should be answering isn’t “does this happen?” but “how significant is it?” For example, there are cis women who regret having breast reduction or breast enhancement surgeries, and as far as I can tell the regret rates there are similar, and possibly slightly higher, than the regret rates for top surgery for trans men. Where are the endless editorials about that?

    What’s clear from this evidence is that the vast majority of people do not experience regret, howsoever defined, after transitioning genders. Regret rates are actually much higher for a lot of medical procedures. 

    The whole premise for these articles is a house built on sand. And competent reporters will know that, which means the people who choose not to let the facts colour their articles are incompetent, malevolent or compromised.

    By any metric, the rate of trans detransitioners is tiny; the rate of trans people who regret transition similarly so. Which invites a key question: why the panic? What motive does Paul have to consistently misrepresent what’s actually happening, to abandon the basic tenets of journalism to scaremonger instead? Why is the potential regret of a handful of cisgender people a crisis when the actual removal of healthcare for thousands of trans people is not?

    That’s a rhetorical question.

    Meyerowitz-Katz:

    Ultimately, the question of what proportion of kids or adults regret their transition is only important to a select group: the people who want to transition, and their clinicians. At worst, the rate of regret is still better than other treatments which don’t require national debates over their use, which really begs the question of why anyone who isn’t directly involved with the treatment of transgender people is even weighing in on the topic at all.

  • Sunak

    Just three days after PM Rishi Sunak cried crocodile tears over the death of trans teen Brianna Ghey, he was back to making jokes about trans girls and women in parliament. While Ghey’s mother was in the gallery, and he knew she was there.

  • A gender traitor

    As I’ve said once or twice, Jude Doyle is one of the most insightful people writing about being trans today. This piece, about writer’s block, erasure and being “a gender traitor”, is particularly good even though much of the subject matter is horrible people doing horrible things.

    One of the reasons I love Jude’s writing so much is that he frequently articulates things I’ve been trying and failing to. There’s a really good example of that in this piece:

    If you don’t speak, someone will speak for you. Trans people may rip ourselves apart or drive ourselves mad trying to communicate our existence in some well-reasoned and responsible way, but cis people have no such compunctions. Cis people never stop talking about trans people, because they never have to; cis people can just make shit up, and someone will pay to publish it, pretty much every time…

    Trans people, historically, have a difficult relationship with first-hand testimony. Until very recently, we could only transition by convincing medical professionals we were “really” trans, and we did this by making sure to tell the only story our doctors wanted to hear… This isn’t every trans person’s story. This isn’t any trans person’s story. This is a cis story, created by cis people, and every trans person I’ve ever met has some detail of their biography that contradicts the narrative. Yet instead of concluding that their story is wrong, gatekeepers conclude that trans people are wrong — unless we fit the absolute most stereotypical idea of our gender, in every way, we’re imagining things.

    This, this, so much this.

    A very good example of this is the “born in the wrong body” trope, which was something handed down to us through cisgender people’s media – and which we’ll sometimes use ourselves to try and help cisgender people understand what it’s like to be trans in the simplest, most easily understood terms. It works in much the way that telling little Johnny that Spot has gone to the farm is designed to help children cope with death.

    There’s a name for this kind of simplification: the lie-to-children. Wikipedia: “Educators who employ lies-to-children do not intend to deceive, but instead seek to ‘meet the child/pupil/student where they are’, in order to facilitate initial comprehension, which they build upon over time as the learner’s intellectual capacity expands.” When we take centuries of experiences and compress them into just five words, that’s exactly what we’re doing.

    There is, of course, a meme about it.

    Two images, one of greek philosophers captioned "talking about gender with trans people" and one of a small child being spoken to by a parent or carer marked "talking to cis people about gender".

    And yet all too often this helpful act, this attempt to meet people where they are, is thrown back in our faces as a gotcha, a “HA! NOBODY can be born in the wrong body!” The lie-to-children is met with childlike resistance because all too often we’re trying to help people who don’t want to be helped, who don’t want to listen, who don’t or won’t understand that the simplification isn’t for our benefit. It’s for theirs.