Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • 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.

  • “Do we have them castrated?”

    Byline Times:

    Just days after Rishi Sunak reportedly dropped plans to introduce a conversion therapy ban, Byline Times can reveal that a project of a charity registered in Northern Ireland held a conference in Poland where delegates heard about conversion therapy techniques, how fundamentalist Christian leaders met with British MPs and lords to convince them to fight against conversion therapy bans, and asked whether castration would get rid of “LGBT freaks”.

    One of the things this article demonstrates is how these hateful bigots pretend to be transparent but censor their own videos before publishing them and sharing them online; they’re very aware that without such self-censorship, reasonable people would be repelled.

  • “Irish dancing has fallen”

    Is there any sport that trans women won’t dominate with their superhuman strength, laser vision and ability to fly without wings? Apparently not: the latest news out of Bigot Central is that, and this is a direct quote, “Irish dancing has fallen”. Which is astonishing language considering the news item the post is sharing: in next year’s Irish Dancing World Championships in Glasgow, one of approximately 5,000 contestants will be a 13-year-old trans girl.

    “Fallen” is being used deliberately: it’s language usually used in war reporting to describe when a place is captured by the enemy, and it’s a favourite of the far- and religious right in their attempts to portray oppression as victimisation.

    This, like the attempts to remove trans women from snooker, darts and chess, is saying the quiet part out loud: the bans on trans people have never been about protecting women or protecting women’s sports from some supposed biological advantage. The motivation is identical to the moves to ban any books by or about trans people from schools and libraries: these people do not want trans people to exist in society in any way, shape or form.

  • Ignorance is strength

    The Tory government have confirmed that they intend to ban conversion therapy but not for trans people: according to equalities minister Kemi Badenoch, providing a safe space for kids to explore their feelings about gender rather than mentally torturing them is the real conversion therapy.

    It’s egregious bullshit, of course, but it’s entirely in keeping with Badenoch’s war on trans people, a war she and Liz Truss have been waging for several years now.

    The idea that gender-affirming care is really conversation therapy is a fiction concocted by the evangelicals and parroted widely by their useful idiots. Once again, our politicians are happily dancing to the evangelical right’s tune.

  • Moles whacked

    Bath Moles, one of the UK’s endangered grassroots music venues, is no more. And Mark Davyd knows why.

    Bath Moles is closing because right now, in 2023, it simply isn’t possible to present original live music in a 220-capacity venue without losing money.

    He’s right, and he’s also right that by ignoring what’s going on at the grassroots level the music industry is letting those roots rot. Without venues like Moles (and similar venues, such as Glasgow’s King Tuts and recently closed 13th Note) the British arena-fillers of recent years would never have become famous. No Moles no Radiohead, no Oasis, no Massive Attack, no Ed Sheeran, no Blur.

    While arena shows and stadium shows break financial record after financial record, smaller venues are dying.

    The Music Venue Trust has been trying to change this for years. As Davyd explains:

    The truth is that the solution to stopping any more iconic venues closing is simple. It’s achievable, it’s easy, it can be done, and it will have to be done… For five years now Music Venue Trust has been trying to get the live music industry itself to act on these challenges. We have proposed a simple £1 charge on every arena and stadium ticket sold should be put into a fund to financially support venues like Moles so they can afford to programme and develop the artists of the future. We’ve laid out exactly how such a fund would work and demonstrated that it can be done. 

    This isn’t wishful thinking. It’s exactly what happens in France.

    Every British promoter operating in France, every British artist performing in France, every British agency booking acts into France, accommodates this levy within their costing of every show.

    The loss of key venues is part of a wider issue we have with the arts in the UK, where participation – as an artist or as an enjoyer of art – is becoming increasingly reserved for the rich and those willing to get into huge debt to see stadium shows with three-figure ticket prices. With successive governments uninterested in changing that – the Tories have previously described large-scale ticket touting as entrepreneurship – it’s up to the music industry to fix what’s left of the roof while the sun shines. The best time to introduce a ticket fund was five years ago. The next best time is now.

  • Selling sadness

    I was thinking some more about yesterday’s idiotic Washington Post editorial that attempted to blame women for men’s loneliness. Posting on Bluesky, writer Ian Boudreau made an excellent point:

    If guys are suddenly very lonely it’s probably worth asking what they expected by following the advice of influencers who tell them to be maximally selfish, and who sneer at thoughtfulness, kindness, generosity, and genuine courtesy as weakness and wokeness.

    He’s right. What these influencers offer – and it’s not just men’s rights activists but also various other anti-woke grifters preying on the unhappy – is isolation, because that’s what their business depends on. The lonelier you are, the sadder you are, the more isolated you become, the more of a hold they can have on you. It’s cult programming for profit, and it’s doing enormous damage to so many people.

  • Ad nausea

    Twitter informs me that it’s 15 years today since I first posted on the service. I don’t post there at all now; I’ve unfollowed everybody and locked my account, and unless there’s a change of ownership and a huge change in culture I don’t anticipate returning.

    It’s sad. For its first decade or so, Twitter was net positive: for all its flaws – and I’ve been reporting on and giving talks about the misinformation and disinformation on the service for many years now – it was an incredible communications platform for everything from breaking news to ridiculous flights of fancy. What Elon Musk has done to it in just one year is as tragic as it was predictable.

    Over the last few days big brands such as Apple, IBM, Sony Pictures, NBC Universal and many more (but not, so far, the BBC) have pulled their advertising from the service in response to Musk endorsing a blatantly antisemitic tweet. It’s a welcome move, but it’s also an overdue one: Musk has been endorsing, amplifying and paying money to the worst bigots on Twitter for a long time now, and these brands were quite happy to have their advertising dollars used to finance that.

    There are two things worth pointing out here. The first is that despite widespread publicity around Twitter’s lurch into bigotry the brands seemed perfectly happy with Twitter as recently as Friday, before a Media Matters investigation highlighted specific examples of the brands’ ads being positioned next to pro-Nazi content and even tweets praising Hitler. And secondly, the brands have not said they’re cancelling their advertising; they’re just pausing it. What we’re seeing here isn’t brands developing a backbone; it’s brands trying to ride out what they hope will be a short-lived PR storm.