Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: Health

Scare stories and newspaper nonsense

  • The kids are alright

    Wouldn’t it be great if, instead of the thinky thoughts of anti-trans columnists, we had some actual research into children, gender dysphoria and gender identity?

    Look what The Atlantic found!

    Since 2013, Kristina Olson, a psychologist at the University of Washington, has been running a large, long-term study to track the health and well-being of transgender children—those who identify as a different gender from the one they were assigned at birth. Since the study’s launch, Olson has also heard from the parents of gender-nonconforming kids, who consistently defy gender stereotypes but have not socially transitioned. They might include boys who like wearing dresses or girls who play with trucks, but who have not, for example, changed the pronouns they use.

    I’ve been a fan of the author, Ed Yong, for a long time: he’s a very talented and conscientious science writer. This is typical of his work: he’s taken Olson’s study and looked into it in some detail.

    Unlike newspaper columnists, who offer zero evidence with 100% confidence, Olson offers detailed evidence but is also quick to point out the limitations of the study. Nevertheless, it’s interesting: children’s gender identity appears to be a pretty good predictor of whether they’ll turn out to be trans. From the article:

    Charlotte Tate, a psychologist from San Francisco State University, says that this quantitative research supports what she and other transgender scholars have long noted through qualitative work: There really is something distinctive and different about the kids who eventually go on to transition. From interviews with trans people, “one of the most consistent themes is that at some early point, sometimes as early as age 3 to 5, there’s this feeling that the individual is part of another gender group,” Tate says. When told that they’re part of their assigned gender, “they’ll say, ‘No, that’s not right. That doesn’t fit me.’ They have self-knowledge that’s private and that they’re trying to communicate.”

    This bit is key:

    Olson’s team also showed that those differences in gender identity are the cause of social transitions—and not, as some have suggested, their consequence.

    In other words, children are not coerced into having a particular gender identity: you can put Jimmy in as many dresses as you want but if Jimmy isn’t trans, he won’t suddenly become trans or develop gender dysphoria.

    Older trans people are going “no shit, Sherlock” at this point: if it were possible to persuade people to change their gender identity, there wouldn’t be any trans people. You can’t talk people into or out of being trans any more than you can pray the gay away: some of us tried not to be trans for decades, and will spend decades trying to deal with the damage from that.

    Once again there are very strong parallels between today’s harmful anti-trans bullshit and previously harmful anti-gay bullshit. That’s something the Atlantic article makes explicit, describing the work of American psychologist Evelyn Hooker.

    In the 1950s, when many psychologists saw homosexuality as a mental illness (largely because they had only ever worked with gay people who had records of arrest or mental-health problems), Hooker surveyed a more representative sample and found that gay and straight men don’t differ in their mental health. That was instrumental in getting homosexuality removed from a list of mental-health disorders in 1987. “We’re sitting in a similar moment today with transgenderism,” says Devor. “The mental-health issues that we see are largely the result of living a life that blocks your expression of your gender. My view is that the work coming out of Olson’s group will have an Evelyn Hooker effect.”

    I’m not naive enough to think this will have any effect on the mainstream media coverage of trans people in general and trans kids in particular: the moral panic is too well established. But it’s yet more evidence of the growing gap between the reality-based community and the commentariat. All too often, the you-couldn’t-make-it-up brigade are doing exactly that.

  • “It was my first taste of what it meant to have my freedom taken from me.”

    Helen Taylor is the author of The Backstreets of Purgatory, which is ace. She’s a hell of a writer, a genuinely lovely person and the writer of this heartbreaking piece about being sectioned.

    We were supposed to have one-to-one sessions where I told him what I was feeling. It was meant to help, to give me some kind of release.

    ‘Ronnie, I think you are a prick,’ I told him.

    ‘I don’t give a fuck what you think,’ he told me in reply.

    If you’re not familiar with the term, “sectioned” means being detained under section 25 of the Mental Health Act. Taylor was sectioned after a traumatic experience made her existing depression considerably worse.

    It’s not an easy read, but it’s a powerful piece.

  • Why are LGBT people so sad?

    Stonewall Scotland has published a worrying report: half of LGBT people have experienced depression in the last year, rising to 72% among trans people. More than half of trans people have thought about taking their life in the last 12 months.

    Here’s the thing, though. LGBT people are not more prone to depression or suicidal ideation if they are in a supportive environment. In those environments, rates of depression and suicidal ideation pretty much revert to the same as non-LGBT people.

    The difference is largely environmental. If your everyday environment is abusive and unaccepting, it of course has a direct effect on your mental health.

    It’s not the only factor – trans people are currently treated under the auspices of mental health provision, which means we’re in a desperately unfunded part of a desperately underfunded part of a desperately underfunded NHS, a world where mental health counselling has a waiting list of more than a year – but it’s a significant factor. The newspapers that concentrate on the invented “dangers” of trans people in hospitals while ignoring a very real mental health crisis are part of the problem.

  • Nothing looks as good as money

    Amanda Mull has found the secret to perfect skin: be rich.

    That’s not to say you shouldn’t moisturise, keep hydrated or stay out of the sun. But the celebrity beauty secrets magazines are so keen to share tend not to include the best-kept secret of all:

    You can drink as much water and wear as much sunscreen as you want, but the most effective skin-care trick is being rich.

    Rich people look different to the rest of us, because rich people have access to things the rest of us don’t (and don’t do the jobs many of us mortals do, some of which are hardly skin-friendly).

    Rich people who are also handsome or pretty have usually been lucky in the genetic lottery too. As Mull writes:

    It’s no mystery to beauty editors and writers, as well as the famous women surveyed, that the answer is a combination of youth, genetic luck, and access to expensive products, treatments, and cosmetic dermatology procedures that few people outside their world could ever hope to experience.

    If you get plenty of sleep, eat well, drink plenty of water and use skincare products you probably won’t end up looking like a monkey’s scrotum. But you’re not going to look like your favourite Hollywood star either – and the older you get, the more of a difference money, or lack of it, makes.

  • Why we still need to talk about consent

    There are some truly terrifying numbers in a new survey on behalf of the End Violence Against Women Coalition [PDF document]. The study, of around 4,000 Britons, found that:

    • 33% people think rape isn’t rape if there isn’t physical violence;
    • A third of men think rape isn’t rape if the woman had flirted during a date;
    • 24% don’t think rape is rape if you’re in a long term relationship;
    • 11% believe that the more sexual partners a woman has had, the less harm she suffers if she’s raped
    • 40% don’t think it’s rape to stealthily remove a condom during sex;
    • 6% think it isn’t rape if the victim is asleep or too drunk to consent.

    Attitudes were significantly worse among the over-65s: more than 1/3 thought non-consensual sex wasn’t rape if the person is your wife or partner, compared to 16% of under-24s; 42% think it’s okay to keep going if the woman changes her mind compared to 22% of under-49s.

    That matters. As the Coalition’s report explains:

    This generational difference is concerning because many of the cases being reported to the police are younger women who have a clear view of consent, which may not be shared by many of the people who make up juries.

    The whole document makes for important but thoroughly depressing reading. We need to be better than this.

  • Dying for your art

    This is heartbreaking. Sculptor Gillian Genser has been slowly poisoned by the shells she used in her artworks.

    In 2015, I was diagnosed with heavy-metal poisoning. Doctors found high levels of arsenic and lead in my blood, the result of chronic exposure. The water where the mussels grew was likely contaminated from industrial waste, and the mussel shells I’d been working with for decades were toxic. Metals can be absorbed through consumption, air or skin. I’d been exposed in every way.

    Genser’s work is very beautiful, I think, and she says that her poisoning makes it even more relevant.

    When we talk about environmental damage, we speak of declines in populations. Numbers and species. But I’ve experienced the suffering of so many creatures trapped in their polluted habitats. I now hope their voices can be heard—that my art might create a sense of awe, a sense of connectivity and reverence for the natural world.

  • Advice I have been given by mental health professionals

    It’s world mental health day today, which has the worthy goal of trying to end the stigma around mental illness. But we also need to ensure that the help people ask for is actually there – and while a lot of that is about funding, it also means education. Some of that education is needed within the health service as well as outside of it.

    One of my friends recently took the big step of seeing his GP about his mental health, and was spoken to like a criminal: he was effectively told that if he thought his GP was an easy mark and that he’d walk out of there with a prescription for drugs, he had another think coming.

    I’ve encountered similar cluelessness. Qualified mental health professionals have told me that the solution to my depression was to “get a wee part-time job” and  to remember that “there are brown babies in Africa that have it a lot worse than you do.”

    Such people are rare, I know, but when you consider the effort it can take to stand up in the first place, and in the case of actual counselling the long waits to see anybody, it’s another obstacle that can prevent people getting the help we’re urging them to ask for.

  • Mobile phones still don’t cause cancer

    No it can’t.

    When it comes to conspiracy theories, there are two kinds of theorists: the batshit insane, and the people who genuinely believe they’ve stumbled on a conspiracy.

    There was a good example of what I assume is the latter last week in The Observer, which published an astonishing piece about the link between mobile phones and cancer. It turns out that mobile phones really do cause cancer, and there’s a global conspiracy to cover it up.

    No they don’t, and no there isn’t.

    This is something I know a fair bit about, because I’ve covered the subject a lot over the last two decades. Whether it’s phones or wireless networks, every now and then someone comes along and misunderstands the science to conclude that our brains are being cooked and there’s a conspiracy to cover it up.

    Part of the problem is the word “radiation”. We assume that all radiation is ionising radiation, the kind that gives you skin cancer. But radiation also includes the radio waves that bring you Radio Scotland and the light waves coming from your light bulbs.

    The radiation from phones and wireless routers is very low powered, non-ionising radiation. As far as science is aware, there is no possible way the radiation from these devices can cause cancer.

    The Observer has run a follow-up piece this week, this time by somebody who knows the science. It gives the authors of the previous article a very polite but very thorough kicking.

    That the authors attribute this lack of evidence for their claims to the machinations of a nebulous big telecoms is indicative of a mindset more conspiratorial than sceptical… Scaremongering narratives may be more alluring than the less sensational, scientific findings, but they are not harmless. We need only look at any vaccine panic to see the cost in human life when superstition outpaces science. In an age where misinformation can perpetuate rapidly, it can be difficult to parse fact from fiction, but it’s imperative that we hone our scientific scepticism rather than succumb to baseless panics – our very wellbeing depends on it.

    If you’re a journalist considering writing an “ordinary thing causes cancer!” piece it’s worth applying Occam’s Razor, which suggests that the simplest explanation is the most likely. Which is more likely: a) there’s a global conspiracy that’s willingly sacrificing thousands or even millions of lives and which has operated for decades without leaving any evidence whatsoever, or b) you’ve got it wrong?

    A journalist’s job is to report what the evidence says, not to cherry-pick the evidence to support the story the journalist wants to tell.

  • “Open Your Hands, Here Is Some Light”

    This piece made me cry.

    Every evening when the sun starts to set, my daughter picks me a bouquet of light.

    The front door of our house is glass-paned, so she crouches in front of it, where lines of sun are drifting across the wood floor. She pretends to scoop something up — the motion very much like picking a flower — and then runs to me with empty hands.

    “Here is some light,” she says, matter-of-factly.

  • Promises we can’t keep

    I blogged a few days ago about the problem with mental health services: it’s all very well to urge people to get help, but the help needs to be there for them.

    This excellent piece by Vic Parsons explains how the system is failing many LGBT people.

    People are still being left in limbo, on waiting lists, for more than two years – largely because of the tiny pool of resources.

    I live in Scotland, where the NHS is considerably less beleaguered than it is in the rest of the UK: there are fewer people in the whole of Scotland than there are in London, and as a result our services are under considerably less pressure. But even then things move glacially slowly.

    I had an initial assessment for counselling services yesterday, some 19 months after I first self-referred to the Gender Identity Service (in Scotland you don’t need to go through a GP to access such services). The counsellor felt I’d benefit from six sessions or so, and put me into the system. I can expect my first appointment approximately nine months from now.

    That’s February 2019, from a referral in October 2016.

    I’m not in crisis. I’ve already had private counselling that I found very helpful; counselling I was fortunate enough to be able to afford. And I’m currently being treated via a private GP, again because I’m fortunate enough to be able to pay for it. But a system that effectively forces people to go private or go without treatment is a system that’s broken. It’s particularly bad for trans / NB people, but it’s bad for everybody.

    As Vic Parsons writes:

    I know that I can wait for that appointment. But what if I was a teenager, young and alone and afraid?