Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • A terrible echo

    In 2016, every major political party in Scotland stood on a platform that included gender recognition reform. The Scottish Government then threw the issue open to public consultation in 2017 (and again in 2019), during which social and mainstream media – with significant input from genital-obsessed weirdos – repeatedly lied about the proposed legislation, demonised trans people and defamed them as dangerous to children. Gender recognition reform has still not happened.

    In 2021, every major political party in Scotland stood on a platform that included banning conversion therapy. The Scottish Government then threw the issue open to public consultation in 2024, during which…

    If anything, the vitriol around this consultation is even worse. Although it’s largely coming from the same people as before there’s no pretence of “reasonable concerns” this time. Just constant abuse online and ridiculous evangelical claims of the “ordinary parents will be jailed for seven years” variety.

    Any time the rights of marginalised people are thrown open to the public, those consultations are flooded by bigots and misrepresented by the conservative press: whether the rights of trans and non-binary people in Scotland, women in Ireland or gay couples in Australia or Romania, consultations have repeatedly been used by the religious and far right to demand the that marginalised people receive worse treatment and have fewer human rights than they enjoy.

    If the majority wanted marginalised people to have equality, we wouldn’t need to legislate something so basic as protecting young people from treatment the UN defines as torture. We shouldn’t have to ask permission from the very people who deny us those basic rights.

  • Authors who don’t exist

    Meet Jason N. Martin N. Martin, the author of the exciting and dynamic Amazon bestseller “How to Talk to Anyone: Master Small Talks, Elevate Your Social Skills, Build Genuine Connections (Make Real Friends; Boost Confidence & Charisma)”

    Except you can’t meet him, because he doesn’t exist. He’s an AI-generated character with an AI-generated face credited with writing an AI-generated ebook with an AI-generated cover. Both the cover and the content are likely based on content that’s been plagiarised: most of the large language and content models used for AI generation have been fed with real humans’ work in order for them to emulate it without credit or, of course, payment.

    Once you’ve found Jason, Amazon will recommend another 11 just like him.

    Between the synthetic faces, the use of repetitive and potentially AI-generated text, and art copied from other sources, the 57 books that these authors have published over the last two years may well contain almost no original human-generated content, and Amazon’s algorithms in their current state have the unfortunate effect of worsening the problem by recommending additional inauthentic books or authors once a customer stumbles upon one of them.

    Amazon isn’t the only place this is happening, and books aren’t the only sector it’s happening in: there’s a flood of computer-generated content in everything from music to furniture listings. Just the other day Amazon’s listings were full of products called “I’m sorry but I cannot fulfill this request it goes against OpenAI use policy”. X/Twitter is already full of ChatGPT bots posting, and your search engine results are starting to fill up with AI-generated content too. I’ve been trying to research some products recently and it’s been like swimming through treacle: so much content returned by search engines is completely useless now.

    The odd listings are most likely the result of dropship sellers using ChatGPT to write everything from product descriptions to product names in huge volumes, but they’re a good example of the pernicious creep of AI into almost everything online – partly due to tech platforms’ lack of interest in removing useless content. Sometimes it’s funny – ChatGPT confidently informed me that I died a few years ago – but it’s increasingly replacing actual information in your search results. And then that bad information becomes the source data for the next generation of AI articles.

    That could mean AI is an ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail: the more AI-generated content there is, the more AI will use that content as its source – and that means the very many errors AI systems are currently making will cascade. AI researchers have a name for the potential outcome: model collapse. It means that the language models used by AI are so full of bad data that their results are useless at best and absolute gibberish at worst.

    There’s a famous saying in tech: garbage in, garbage out. Thanks to AI, we’re currently seeing that happen on an epic scale.

  • Overreacting

    From the very beginnings of the war on trans people, we’ve been accused of overreacting whenever we report what anti-trans groups and politicians say they want to do to us – which in many cases is the complete elimination of trans people by any means necessary.

    Most UK anti-trans groups and key anti-trans figures have signed a declaration calling for the “elimination of transgenderism”; many talk openly about removing all our human rights, healthcare and legal protections. Some openly wish to see us dead.

    This is something that campaigners for all women’s rights have long experienced: when they tried to raise the alarm about the US Republicans’ openly stated goal of rescinding Roe vs Wade, they were told not to be so silly. Roe vs Wade, of course, is gone with abortion and contraception now under sustained attack in multiple states – and Obergefell v Hodges, which enabled equal marriage, and Loving v Virginia, which struck down bans on interracial marriage, are next in the firing line. We know this because the religious right told us, as they usually do.

    One of the tactics that’s been openly discussed for a few years now is to classify the very existence of trans people as a sexual act, and to then use that classification to ban trans people from everyday life. And here’s legislators in West Virginia trying to do just that. In two separate bills, Republican lawmakers propose to ban “obscene matter”; in their definition of such, they include “any transvestite and/or transgender exposure, performances or display to any minor.” In other words, the mere presence of a trans person near a child would be a sexual offence.

    It’s easy to dismiss this as the latest whacky nonsense from crazed US fundamentalists. But the exact same arguments are being advanced over here by anti-trans groups, many of which work closely with US evangelical groups such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, one of the key drivers and drafters of US anti-trans legislation. And the arguments are in the 2025 Project manifesto by groups including the Heritage Foundation, which is very close to the current UK government. Many of these documents and strategies make it clear that it’s not just trans people being targeted here but queer people more widely, along with women’s reproductive rights.

    The West Virginian bills aren’t expected to become law. But they are a tiny part of a wave of anti-trans bills in the US, bills that UK anti-trans activists and politicians would like to see in the UK too.

    We’re not overreacting; if anything, we’re underselling the threat to trans people’s lives, to the wider LGBTQ+ community and to reproductive freedom.

  • Who pays

    The newsletter publishing platform Substack has a Nazi problem: specifically, it publishes, promotes and makes money from actual Nazi newsletters as well as the more media-trained faces of far right propaganda. As ever, trans people have been trying raise the alarm about the platform for years: it’s where some of the most vicious, abusive and hateful anti-trans bigotry is published, with Substack taking a hefty cut of all of it. In some cases, bigots’ Substacks are the primary source of their income, generating large sums from which Substack takes a 10% cut.

    As a high profile critic of the platform’s support for the world’s worst people, Jude Doyle’s writing attracted a response from the firm’s CEO – and the offer of a lucrative publishing deal if he were to stop pointing out the genuine harm Substack helps pay for. Doyle said no, telling the CEO:

    If you have money to invest in me, then you have money to create and enforce a content moderation policy, stating that you do not host or fund content that promotes hate speech and/or targets marginalized groups.

    But Substack has no interest in doing that. It’s making too much money from hatred.

    Substack’s response to accurate and measured criticism – effectively, “we don’t like Nazis but we like their money so fuck you” – has led a lot of people to demand creators stop using the service. And while I understand why – I won’t pay for a Substack for the same reasons – I also understand why many creators are loath to leave.

    The problem for many people who publish on Substack is a problem we’ve previously seen on other platforms, including Twitter. It’s enabled people to establish an audience and in some cases a career, and that means leaving could cause financial harm to people who abandon the platform. Even if other platforms were morally pure, and very few of them are, the people demanding moral purity from their newsletter creators are rarely the people who will be financially harmed by it.

    In addition, many of the people being urged to quit are marginalised people – the very people who can least afford the financial hit.

    I’ve experienced this myself. I quit writing for a particular publisher over its support for bigots, a decision that cost me about £1,000 in lost commissions a year. I left another media organisation for similar reasons, passing up something close to £4,000 a year. I’ve turned down work from other outlets because I don’t share their values. And I don’t have an active presence on Twitter any more, which has damaged my networking and no doubt cost me work too. And while I’m okay with those choices, it hasn’t made a damn difference to any of those platforms because I’m completely insignificant to them.

    Writing on her Substack, Cathrynne Valente explains it very well.

    It is exhausting just trying to exist with any level of moral consistency online nowadays. And the people who keep being handed the keys to several kingdoms don’t ever bother to worry about it. They just let us tear ourselves apart trying to do the right thing while they feast. It’s all a game to them. It’s not remotely a game to us. So there’s no equivalence.

    Take social media for example. If you leave Twitter for a smaller social network, abandoning the network you may have spent more than a decade building, where do you go? Threads? Its current moderation is just as bad as Twitter’s, enabling nazis and transphobes to abuse people without consequence. Bluesky? It doesn’t have a Nazi problem purely because it’s too small so far, and it’s very clear that the platform creators aren’t very interested in protecting their users from bad actors. And so on.

    So for many creators, it’s far more complicated than “this place is bad and you should quit”: if almost everything is a bad choice, then by removing your voice from a particular platform you’re letting the bigots win. The bigots thrive, the platform continues. The only person who suffers anything negative is you.

    Valente:

    I don’t want to support the Badness by being here. And yet, if I go, does that not just abandon another space because bad people are also here, handing them control of yet another hugely-recognized platform, control they could never achieve on their own just on numbers and popularity, while the people who have any moral compass whatsoever have to continually start over from scratch?

    Which one helps the goblin horde more, staying or going?

    There’s a famous cartoon in which a man says “we should improve society somewhat” and another man pops up to say “Yet you participate in society! Curious! I am very intelligent.” And that’s a pretty good description of the discourse around some of this stuff.

    There are lots of things that are very wrong with tech platforms. Facebook has been complicit in genocide; Instagram (owned by the same company) in the rise of the anti-vax movement. Twitter, pre-Musk, was instrumental in the rise of the far right and in stirring up racial and anti-LGBTQ+ hatred. And that’s just off the top of my head. It’s not impossible to work only on ethically pure platforms. But it’s close to impossible if you want to be where most people – your friends, your colleagues, your readers, your listeners – are and communicate with those people.

    Like Valente, I don’t know what the answer is on an individual level: in the absence of group action, we’re powerless. For now I’m comfortable with the choices I’ve made, because I’m in the fortunate position of not having to choose between having a conscience and having a roof over my head. But I also realise that that’s a luxury that others don’t necessarily have. Many of us think we should improve social media somewhat, yet have to participate in social media.

    Update, 9 January: Substack now says it will remove some, but not all, Nazi newsletters. Reports on social media suggests the total number of removed newsletters is… five.

  • How we got here

    Jude Doyle is always worth reading, and his latest piece for Xtra Magazine is a good analysis of how a handful of powerful people have effectively destroyed US media’s ability or inclination to battle the far right. It’s written from the perspective of a trans person because, as is so often the case, trans people are the canaries in the coal mine.

    The impact of these platforms has not just been to spread bigotry, but to flood the field with junk, to make social media gossip and un-fact-checked blog posts the main vector for information—to make it harder to know what is real. In an emergency, you need to know where the exits are, but at least half of the signs you’ll read in 2024 are lying to you. 

    It is always in the best interests of the powerful not to have a robust press that can hold them accountable.

  • Guilt

    Two teenagers were found guilty of the murder of teenage girl Brianna Ghey today, after what the Crown Prosecution Service described as “one of the most distressing cases the Crown Prosecution Service has had to deal with. The planning, the violence and the age of the killers is beyond belief.” I had to stop following the case because it was so upsetting, the manner of her death so horrific.

    Brianna was chosen in part because she was trans.

    Brianna didn’t go out much because she’d been the victim of anti-trans bullying (according to fellow pupils; her mother didn’t know about it); her anxiety and loneliness meant her killers saw her as “prey” that would be “easier” for them to kill. One of the murderers, Girl Y, told police that Brianna was “not a normal person”; messages between the two killers showed that the other murderer, Boy X, said that “I want to see if it will scream like a man or a girl.”

    You can read more about the trial in the many newspapers or hear about it from the many broadcasters that, since 2017, have paid many thousands of pounds to transphobes stirring up hatred about girls just like her. Time it right today and you’ll see that the news of her killers’ conviction is just above equalities minister Kemi Badenoch continuing to claim that it’s “harmful” for schools to support trans kids.

    Update, 22 Dec

    Predictably enough, the newspaper coverage of this has been vile. The Daily Mail, which you’ll remember bullied trans teacher Lucy Meadows to her death and which has spent the last several years demonising trans people, did one of its “this beautiful angel has been taken too soon” front pages while prominently plugging its Brianna Ghey podcast; it still hates trans people, but it’ll pretend otherwise when there are papers to sell and podcasts to promote. It’s back on its bullshit today, giving vocally anti-trans columnist Sarah Vine the masthead to claim it was the internet wot dunnit. Vine has written many anti-trans articles for the paper, including ones demanding schools don’t support trans kids.

    Meanwhile The Guardian, many of whose writers are proudly anti-trans, was quick to say on its front page that the police had ruled out transphobia as a motive for the killing. That simply isn’t true, as the transphobic messages produced in evidence by the police demonstrated. The police ruled out transphobia as the *sole* motive, presumably because a straightforward murder charge would be more likely to result in conviction.

  • A hateful echo

    In the same week that we heard closing arguments in the trial of Brianna Ghey’s killers, two teenagers who brutally murdered the young girl in part because she was transgender, the Tory government has finally published its draft guidelines regarding trans and non-binary kids in schools. As expected it’s a bigoted shitshow.

    The Department of Education’s own legal team says it’s unlikely to survive any legal challenge. And the fact that no LGBTQ+ organisations were consulted, but every bunch of passing bigots was, makes it clear what the agenda is here. If it weren’t clear enough, the introduction doesn’t even manage to make it into its third paragraph before using the Christian Right dogwhistle “gender identity ideology.”

    Smarter people than me will publish detailed analysis in the coming days and weeks, but the short version is that the guidance acts as if the Equality Act does not exist and often tells schools to act in ways that are against the law. As equality lawyer Robin Moira White put it, it is “a cruel attack on a vulnerable minority by a nasty government focused on running a culture war”.

    The guidance encourages teachers and other school officials to treat trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming children – who remain a tiny minority of pupils – illegally and unethically, which will make it harder for those children to live their lives. It’s a bullies’ charter, a bigots’ wish list, a hateful echo of Section 28.

  • The quiet part

    One of the not-too-hidden secrets of the anti-trans movement is that their goal is the total elimination of trans people. As with the forced birth movement, activists are very careful to disguise their goals, to self-censor and say only what they know they can get away with when they talk to the media. Hence “pro-life” instead of “forced birth”, “reasonable concerns” instead of saying the quiet bit out loud. But in their own events and their own social media, the masks come off.

    The strategy is gradualism, or a wedge strategy: you start small and use your win as a wedge for your real agenda. The US forced birth movement was a fringe movement for decades, but with cynical and significant help from the US GOP it began decades of gradualism to build the foundations for what we’re seeing now: the revocation of Roe vs Wade and moves towards the ultimate goal, which is to prohibit abortion without exception everywhere in the US (and elsewhere too). But even now they continue to pretend that their goal isn’t really their goal: again and again, forced-birther Republican politicians say the right thing about exceptions for rape, incest and medical emergencies before either removing those exceptions or, as ProPublica reports, making those exceptions almost completely inaccessible. The horrific case of Kate Cox, forced to flee Texas in order not to die after the Supreme Court said her life was worthless, shows how hollow those promises are.

    These extreme anti-women laws were always the goal, but the forced birthers pretend otherwise. And the anti-LGBTQ+ eliminationists are doing the same. Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law was initially pitched as for children from kindergarten to third grade, which means kids up to the age of nine; a year later it was extended to twelfth grade, which is 17 and 18-year-olds. Bans on LGBTQ+ books have pretended to be about pornography and protecting children, but explicitly targeted any books by or that mention LGBTQ+ people. Similarly the push for bans on trans healthcare on both sides of the Atlantic initially claimed only to be about protecting pre-pubescent children; the same activists are now pushing for a complete ban on healthcare for trans adults and the removal of all their legal protections too.

    It’s not that they don’t want us to be in sports. They don’t want us to be anywhere. One of the leading voices of the UK anti-trans movement says that trans people’s numbers should be reduced; our equalities minister, who has communicated and met extensively with anti-trans bigots but not LGBTQ+ organisations, claims that we are an “epidemic” and that “predators” are “choosing to exploit rights given to transgender people”, dogwhistling that “I’m not saying that transgender people are predators, but there are more people who are predators than there are people who are trans.”

    This is elimination by a thousand cuts as set out by the Christian right back in 2017: demonise trans people in every possible way. Go after trans people in sports, go after trans people’s use of public facilities, go after trans people’s healthcare, go after trans people’s protection from discrimination, go after trans people’s ability to live normal lives. Ban trans people who go through the wrong puberty; ban the healthcare that can ensure that they do not.

    You can see this in microcosm with Riley Gaines, the US swimmer who was beaten in a race by four other women and tied with a fifth. Gaines has since embarked on a highly lucrative campaign of revenge – not against the women who came first, second, third or fourth, but the trans woman who came equal fifth with her. It turns out that attacking trans people is much better for your profile and your bank balance than being a not-good-enough-to-win swimmer, a lesson other famous swimmers also appear to have absorbed.

    Remember the official line here: trans women must be banned from women’s sports because going through male puberty gives them a biological advantage. That claim is not necessarily true – while there are some sports where it may be a factor in some circumstances, it’s been used to demand bans on trans participation in snooker, darts, croquet and Irish dancing too – but that’s not the point: it’s the stated reason for anti-trans sporting bans. The post-pubertal body, they claim, is simply too powerful for fair competition.

    Except Gaines and the far right doesn’t want trans women to compete in anything at all, which is why she’s just turned the right-wing media machine against a teenage trans girl. The girl, who is 17, began transitioning before puberty and therefore doesn’t possess any of the claimed biological advantages. But the news that she had apparently been offered one of a dozen volleyball scholarships by the University of Washington was enough to set the anti-trans hate machine in motion. It now appears that the university has withdrawn the offer, depriving the girl not just of a sporting opportunity but an educational one too.

    This particular story appears to be another case of something we’re seeing a lot of in the US at the moment: bad losers (or their parents) invoking the spectre of trans people to harm their rivals. Sometimes it’s levelled at girls who are not trans but who aren’t pretty blonde white girls – something trans people and LGBTQ+ allies more widely have been warning about for years. Those warnings, like many others, were ignored – because the collateral damage is welcome too. Bigotry and intolerance run in packs, and they will not stop running when they’re done with us.

  • When left turns right

    One of the interesting and frightening things we’ve seen in recent years is people who would consider themselves left-wing not only turning right, but turning far right. Some of the most extreme examples do so after public humiliation destroys their credibility – Naomi Wolf is a good example of that – or after online criticism hurts their ego. Some do it after losing faith in specific institutions, or to seek the Murdoch dollar or MAGA votes. And often, they take many people with them.

    This excellent piece by In These Times looks at what happens when the left turns hard right.

    It’s easy to dismiss many of these high-profile defectors as crackpots or spotlight-seekers, as never truly serious in their political principles or as plain grifters. Because of course there is money to be made by saying, “Once I was blind, but now I see.” It permits the Steve Bannons of the world to affirm their political faith not as an argument, but just the truth. But, in some ways, the peculiarities of the celebrity drifters are beside the point.

    The point is who they bring along.

    One of the key points in the piece is that there’s a pipeline between being a controversialist and becoming a fascist, and it’s a pipeline we’ve known about for a very long time. “Strategic irony” is a well-worn tactic of the far right: what begins with “edgy”, taboo-busting humour or saying the supposedly unsayable soon becomes a lot less funny. As one of the people quoted in the piece puts it, you can only be ironic for so long; you can only post so many George Wallace memes before you start thinking that two sets of water fountains aren’t a bad idea.

  • It’s all connected

    Charles P Pierce is one of my favourite writers on politics, particularly US politics, and this piece on the links between US right-wingers and growing intolerance and violence in other countries is typically astute.

    As should be clear by now, this slouch toward authoritarian government is an interconnected, international phenomenon. It is a shadow government driven by conspiracy and empowered paranoia. It has power and reach. There is legitimate money behind it. If there is a central point, it’s probably in Russia, but liberal democracies have proven perfectly capable of ignoring the threat until it reaches full roar.