Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • A girl called “it”

    Platformer has obtained what it calls “the dehumanizing new guidelines moderating what people can now say about trans people on Facebook and Instagram.” Examples include “trans people aren’t real. They’re mentally ill”, “a trans woman isn’t a woman, it’s a pathetic confused man” and “a trans person isn’t a he or a she, it’s an it.”

    The report says that Meta’s chief marketing officer Alex Schultz, the firm’s highest-ranking gay employee, has suggested that for FB and Instagram users, “seeing their queer friends and family members abused on Facebook and Instagram could lead to increased support for LGBTQ rights.”

    It’s not just trans people. It’s pretty much anybody who isn’t MAGA. And it’s not really new, because marginalised people have been trying and failing to get Meta to moderate hate speech for a long time. But what’s different is that this is now policy, and the policy explicitly says that hate speech is fine when directed towards specific minorities.

  • Zuck’s death cult

    Today, Mark Zuckerberg announced changes to Facebook, Threads and Meta, initially for the US because EU law won’t allow such changes. The short version: hate speech is back, baby!

    You’ll see the details elsewhere so I won’t repeat them here, but ultimately the goal is to remove safeguards and moderation from Meta’s platforms. That freedom for Facebook in particular is new for the US, but it’s not new for Facebook: we saw it in Myanmar, where Facebook was instrumental in genocide.

    That’s not just my opinion; it’s the opinion of UN investigators and of Amnesty International too. As Amnesty put it: “While the Myanmar military was committing crimes against humanity against the Rohingya, Meta was profiting from the echo chamber of hatred created by its hate-spiralling algorithms.”

    Amnesty:

    Internal studies dating back to 2012 indicated that Meta knew its algorithms could result in serious real-world harms. In 2016, Meta’s own research clearly acknowledged that “our recommendation systems grow the problem” of extremism…

    In one internal document dated August 2019, one Meta employee wrote: “We have evidence from a variety of sources that hate speech, divisive political speech, and misinformation on Facebook… are affecting societies around the world. We also have compelling evidence that our core product mechanics, such as virality, recommendations, and optimizing for engagement, are a significant part of why these types of speech flourish on the platform.”

    Hate speech is the oil of Meta’s business, and Zuckerberg doesn’t care about the human cost.

    As tech journalist and long-time Meta critic Ed Zitron writes on Bluesky:

    Meta will burn down everything in search of growth. They have been doing so in broad daylight for years. They will make people angry and sad and hateful (and have done so before) in search of growth in their dying platform. They will make everything worse to create growth. It’s a death cult

  • A broken system

    Abigail Thorn, actor and writer of Philosophy Tube, posted a video two years ago about her (awful) experiences of the NHS. The short version: she demonstrated how the NHS is institutionally discriminatory towards trans people. So I imagine she was quite surprised when a very senior NHS figure approached her about being the face of a new campaign about changes in NHS trans provision.

    Thorn said no, and has written an article explaining why. Thorn is the first to say that there are some very good people working in the NHS, and in trans care specifically. But the organisation itself is broken, and treats trans people appallingly. And it’s getting worse.

    I’m writing this in my sixth month of having my basic healthcare refused by my GP, healthcare that the GP happily provides to dozens of cisgender people but which is apparently too difficult to provide to me. I’m a few months away from finally getting surgery I first asked to be referred for six years ago, a referral that was never made because the gender clinic doctor simply didn’t bother doing it, a mistake or deliberate omission that I didn’t find out about for two years. My next referral was delayed because the gender clinic made an appointment for the mandatory second opinion, never told me about the appointment, and then concluded that I had changed my mind about wanting referred because I didn’t attend. Another year gone.

    So it’s fair to say I’m sympathetic to Thorn’s argument.

    There are many problems with NHS care for trans people, and they’re about to get worse with a Cass-style stitch-up labelled as a review of adult care. That review isn’t going to recommend that the NHS does something about the infiltration of conversion therapists, or the humiliating assessments we have to go through, or the woeful lack of staff, or the waiting lists that mean many trans people will die before even having a first assessment. And it’s not going to do anything about making trans people’s access to care any easier, because as Thorn points out:

    every single person I have spoken to in the NHS- from local GPs to the National bosses- told me they are powerless. There is nobody at any level of the organisation who takes responsibility for the state the service is in and the suffering it is causing. Every single person blames the person above them, even the man at the top.

    …I agree with others who study this field that consultations and “stakeholder meetings” have become a form of abuse by the NHS and the government: we’re included nonperformatively – given time to speak in order to legitimise the process of ignoring us.

    In years to come, this will rightly be viewed as a scandal. But it’s going to harm many more people before that happens.

  • Don’t talk about the dead

    We know that more than a dozen trans teens have taken their lives since the puberty blocker ban was introduced in the UK, despite the government’s best efforts to cover that up: its small inquiry into trans suicides discounted documented trans suicides. So it’s particularly disgusting to see Hilary Cass, the author of the politically motivated and utterly discredited Cass scandal that’s being used to dismantle trans healthcare, to proclaim that “What is worrying is when people say that if children don’t get these drugs, they will die, because clearly that’s not true.” It is “irresponsible for people to shroud-wave in that way.”

    Not for the first time, Cass is parroting the stories of hateful, genital-obsessed weirdos. Morgan Page writes:

    The spectre of the trans death, particularly through suicide, hangs over all of the attacks on trans life. No one wants to admit that this is the desired end goal — that trans people simply cease to exist, whether that be through detransition or death seems to matter little. As Janice Raymond famously put it, the goal is for trans people to be “morally mandated out of existence.” Indeed, “shroud waving” threatens to stir up some empathy for the plight of this embattled minority, and we can’t be having that. Anti-trans actors have gone so far as to accuse trans people of acting like abusive husbands who threaten to kill themselves if their wives leave.

    It’s a useful strategy, this attack on the idea of trans death, because most cis people will never know a living trans person, let alone a dead one.

    It’s worth pointing out yet again that despite its very best efforts the Cass study found no evidence that puberty blockers harmed kids. It did, however, see plenty of evidence that limiting access to healthcare and support kills some of them.

  • Stacking the deck

    Yesterday, Wes Streeting made the UK ban on puberty blockers for trans kids permanent. The ban does not apply to cisgender children; puberty blockers are apparently magic medicine that are uniquely dangerous to trans and gender non-conforming kids.

    The decision was subject to a consultation, which – at the Government’s invitation – featured significant input from anti-trans, pro-conversion therapy organisations with no expertise in healthcare generally or trans healthcare specifically. And despite blatantly stacking the deck with those anti-trans groups, the consultation could still not produce evidence to justify the ban. It did, however, make it clear that the ban would have terrible effects on trans kids’ mental health. We’ve already seen more than a dozen children take their own lives as a result of the temporary ban.

    Streeting simply ignored the evidence and imposed the ideologically motivated ban on the UK, including Scotland. Pressure from the UK government ensured a similar ban was passed in Northern Ireland with the support of Sinn Fein. There’s bleak humour in seeing UK Labour and Sinn Fein finding common ground in killing children.

    I’ve long since given up on trying to get people to care about trans people. But an evangelical government minister banning medically necessary healthcare by prioritising the thinky thoughts of newspaper columnists and religious and social conservatives over evidence and international medical consensus is a terrifying precedent for everybody.

  • The strategy

    Infamous arsehole Matt Walsh has been saying the quiet bit out loud: speaking outside the US Supreme Court yesterday, the far-right clown vowed that “we are not gonna rest… until transgender ideology is entirely erased from the Earth.” He’s not the first to say that; last year Michael Knowles told the US Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.” There are many such examples from the US right, the Christian right and the UK anti-trans movement too.

    Helen Joyce, one of the key figures in the UK anti-trans movement, has spoken openly of her belief that the number of trans people should be reduced and that any trans person, even if “happily transitioned”, is a problem that society must solve: “the fewer of those people there are, the better”. All the key anti-trans groups and many of the key anti-trans activists in the UK have pledged their support for a campaign that calls for the elimination of “the practice of transgenderism”. The founding document of the anti-trans movement, Janice Raymond’s 1979 book The Transsexual Empire, says that “I contend that the problem of transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence.”

    By “transgender ideology”, Walsh means transgender people. By “transgenderism”, Knowles means transgender people. By “the practice of transgenderism” the campaign means transgender people. By “transsexualism”, Raymond meant transgender people.

    The only way to eliminate “transgender ideology” or “transgenderism” or “transsexualism” is to eliminate transgender people.

    And that’s the strategy.

    “The fewer of those people” there are, the better.

    When you understand that that is the goal, the connections between the different strands of the anti-trans strategy become chillingly clear.

    Removing life-saving healthcare for trans teens increases the suicide rate; the same applies with adults and ensures that there are “fewer of those people”.

    Removing legal protections from trans people unless they medically transition and then ensuring that nobody can access medical transition ensures that there are “fewer of those people”.

    Banning trans women from using women’s spaces or competing in women’s sports, part of the wider goal of pushing trans women out of society, means there are “fewer of those people” in that society.

    If that means that some trans women can be bullied back into the closet, well, that means “fewer of those people”.

    And if some of those bullied people are bullied into taking their own lives either suddenly or more slowly, well. That means “fewer of those people” too.

    The anti-trans movement is usually better at PR messaging than Walsh; he’s an extreme outlier in that his brand is built on saying the supposedly unspeakable. But he and the politer bigots of the UK anti-trans movement may not express it in the same way, but they share the same goal: they won’t rest until transgender people are “entirely erased from the Earth”.

  • Enemies within

    The evangelical movement has spent a very long time practicing institutional capture, where it inserts its people into positions where they can enact its policies. And the same appears to be happening with the anti-trans movement here in the UK, with “gender-critical” people who reject the scientific and medical evidence increasingly inhaibiting positions where they can influence healthcare and health policy.

    The latest example, as reported by Novara Media:

    Six leading gender clinicians associated with a controversial NHS review of transgender healthcare spoke at the conference of a designated anti-trans hate group that shares funding with key pro-Trump outfits

    They weren’t there to defend trans healthcare.

    Two of those people were involved in the ideologically motivated and widely discredited Cass Review, which has been used to stop healthcare for trans teens and which is being widely cited by people who want to stop trans adults’ healthcare too. A third is cited in that review and also sits on the board of the anti-trans pressure group SEGM, known as one of the “key hubs of anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience”.

    SEGM, for example, takes money (via the Edward Charles Foundation) from the Charles Koch Institute, a conservative political network that also funds the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation is the group behind Project 2025, a 900-page “wish list” to centralise presidential power and normalise religious conservatism, including by tightly restricting abortion access and expanding political appointees.

  • Masks off, hoods on

    Maslow’s Hammer says that “it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” And if you’re an anti-trans obsessive, everything can and should be blamed on trans people, including the US election result.

    The narrative already emerging from the anti-trans commentariat on both sides of the Atlantic is that the Kamala Harris campaign failed because of The Transes. And as always with the anti-trans mob, that’s nonsense. The Harris campaign conceded The Trans Issue – how I hate that phrase – completely: it didn’t feature trans people in its campaigning, it didn’t stand up for trans people, and even when given the opportunity to refute the Republicans’ anti-trans scaremongering in direct questioning – by some estimates, as much as 40% of the Republicans’ ad spending was spent on demonising trans women – Kamala Harris flatly refused to do so, calculatedly throwing trans people under the bus in the hope of winning a few bigots’ votes.

    But the problem with offering far right lite is that nobody’s buying it. Time and again, given the choice between full-on evil and slightly less evil, people choose the full-fat version. The supposed good guys concede territory to the bad, and having done that the bad guys demand they concede more.

    What far-right lite does do, however, is alienate some of your own voting base – without bringing any of the other side across. When the Democrats weren’t throwing trans people under the bus, they persuaded 6% of registered Republicans to vote Democrat. In this election, that figure didn’t increase. It dropped, to 5%, with the Republicans’ total vote numbers remaining roughly the same as in the last election. This wasn’t an anti-trans swing to Trump.

    You cannot meet bigots halfway because they lie about where halfway is. You can see that here in the UK: the supposed “reasonable concerns” (which were never reasonable) over trans people were only supposed to be over changes to the Gender Recognition Act; when they destroyed those changes, the bigots then decided they wanted rid of the Gender Recognition Act, the Equality Act and all other protections for trans people. Supposed concerns over healthcare for under-18s – again, never reasonable – have now expanded to demands for an end to all healthcare for trans adults – demands that as I and many other trans women can attest, are already being met by some GPs and health boards.

    The panic is such that organisations are now being attacked for doing things that only the deeply deranged could see through an anti-trans lens; for example this week, Marks & Spencer has been under sustained online and media attack for referring to teenage girls as “bright young things”, a decades-old phrase that the genital-obsessed weirdo brigade have decided is proof of pro-trans pandering.

    What we have now is a full-on, mask-off, hoods-on witch-hunt dedicated to erasing every aspect of trans people’s rights and safety until the goal of eliminating trans people completely is achieved – a witch-hunt in which the press is gleefully, hatefully complicit.

  • When ads attack

    In the US, the Trump campaign has spent nearly one-third of its campaign funds on anti-trans attack ads around major sporting fixtures and other popular events. Vox:

    Given that trans people make up barely half of 1 percent of the US adult population and that trans-related issues are low on the priority list of most voters, many might find it baffling that Trump has focused so much of his attention on singling out trans people. Indeed, two media research groups, the left-leaning Data for Progress and video marketing firm Ground Media, working in partnership with GLAAD, each released studies last week finding that the ads had no real impact on voter decision-making and instead alienated many viewers, even among Republicans, who felt they were “mean-spirited.”

    So why are they doing it? One reason is because by yelling about trans people, the Trump campaign can distract attention from their many failings – a strategy that’s been widely used by right-wing politicians worldwide, even though it doesn’t result in electoral success. But another key reason is because they really fucking hate trans people, and the ads help spread that hate. Vox again:

    these ads help to reinforce the idea of a common enemy. They are continuing — which is to say winning, in a very real sense — the larger ongoing culture war against queer and trans people.

    One of the most chilling explanations I’ve read, and I really hope it’s wrong, is that because the Trump campaign is likely to suffer a major electoral defeat it is preparing the ground for a violent response: its very vocal attacks on trans people and on immigrants in particular are telling the MAGA mobs who to target.

    Vox again:

    It’s vital to recognize the parallels to Hitler’s Germany here (especially given John Kelly’s recent allegations that Trump praised Hitler himself): to understand that trans and queer people aren’t being attacked in isolation, but rather in tandem with immigrants, the disabled and mentally ill, and women.

  • Killer conspiracies

    The BBC reports that members of an “anti-establishment cult” have been jailed for trying to kidnap a coroner. What the BBC hasn’t clearly reported (and neither has The Guardian or The Telegraph, the latter of which devoted three pages to the case) is why they were doing it. They intended to enact a “death sentence” on the coroner for supposed crimes related to “gender reassignment” in children and railed against “the transgender movement” in their radicalisation videos.

    Here’s Trans Safety Network’s Mallory Moore:

    Here’s the fake death warrant the group issued regarding the Essex coroner, directly claiming linking the coroner to supposed child mutilation relating to gender reassignment, authorising a “death sentence” for the targetted victim.

    [image or embed]

    — Mal-eficent (Sin #60) (@mall.bsky.social) October 29, 2024 at 9:23 AM

    As Mallory says, “so much of this rhetoric is impossible to differentiate from common [“gender critical”] rhetoric about trans people.” Which is perhaps why the BBC and The Guardian, both of which generally act as uncritical mouthpieces for anti-trans activists, have been so reticent about drawing attention to it.

    Sometimes the anti-LGBTQ+ links are too hard to ignore, however. Last month, a Scots neo-nazi was found guilty of planning a series of terrorist crimes – specifically including an attack on a Falkirk LGBTQ+ group. “They have been pushing their luck for years, now they will pay in blood,” he wrote. “We should get masked up and go do a few of them at their little gay club.” When the police arrested him, they found weapons including a crossbow with telescopic sights, fourteen knives, machetes, a tomahawk, a Samurai sword, knuckledusters, an extendable baton and a stun gun.

    We like to pretend that we’re not like America. But in an age of global media, bigotry and conspiracism are global too. I’ve long written about the parallels between UK anti-trans activism, neo-Nazism and QAnon; rhetoric that’s laundered in the broadsheets becomes murderous in the streets.