Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • The wedge

    Today’s Observer reports:

    A rightwing Christian lobby group that wants abortion to be banned has forged ties with an adviser to the prime minister and is drawing up ­policy briefings for politicians.

    The UK branch of the US-based Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has more than doubled its spending since 2020 and been appointed a stakeholder in a parliamentary group on religious freedoms in a role that grants it direct access to MPs.

    The ADF isn’t just one of the prime movers in the global anti-abortion movement; it’s also one of the prime movers in the global anti-gender movement, of which trans people are the initial targets. As The Observer puts it, the organisation “also supports outlawing sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ+ adults and funds US fringe groups attacking gay, trans and abortion rights”. It is also believed to be a funder of fake grassroots groups pushing anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ activism: many LGBTQ+ and women’s rights supporters believe that organisations such as ADF use crowdfunding to disguise their investment in such astroturf groups.

    The ADF is already a regular voice in British and Scottish media, almost always without any context telling viewers, listeners or readers what the organisation does and what its goals are. It’s presented as an organisation that advocates for freedom and freedom of speech, not an organisation that works tirelessly to remove women’s reproductive rights, to remove LGBTQ+ people’s human rights, to censor education and to give religious people – but only Christian religious people – freedom from the laws that bind others.

    What we’re seeing here is the wedge that began with attacks on trans people and has since moved to wider anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-abortion moves. This is not a secret: the ADF is one of the supporters of Project 2025 by the Heritage Foundation (another evangelical group close to the UK government, and which for a short time had its own pet prime minister in the form of Liz Truss), which sets out the Christian Right’s plan for what they hope will be another Trump presidency.

    Here’s Nancy Kelley on the stated goals of Project 2025.

    It is almost unfathomably obsessed with ending access to reproductive healthcare, along with total state control of reproductive knowledge, health and choices. It is deeply hostile to migrants, including the most vulnerable migrants, and violently rejects any analysis of racial disparity, or engagement with the USA’s past, present or future as a multi racial democracy. It is shocking, it is scary, and it is specifically scary when it comes to LGBTQ+ people and our human rights.

    And as Kelley points out, these ideas – and the groups behind them – are already gaining significant traction in the UK.

    The UK anti-trans movement and aligned social conservative movements already use the same arguments as Project 2025 (social contagion, sexualisation of children, parental rights, faith and belief) to argue for the same goals here in the UK, and they are doing so with some success.

    With the anti-trans part of the wedge well established, the door is now open to similar attacks on the wider LGBTQ+ community and to women’s and non-binary people’s reproductive freedom. And very conveniently, the most high profile self-identified feminists and women’s rights defenders in the UK are too busy defaming and demonising trans people to pay attention, let alone fight back; in many cases they’re standing arm in arm with the ADF and its fellow travellers.

    It’s tiring to write yet again that once they’re done with us, they’re coming for you: the religious right has been openly promising that for years now. But we appear to be sleepwalking into a very dark place because of journalistic malpractice, useful idiots and British and Scottish exceptionalism: we’re too enlightened, too clever; it couldn’t happen here. But it can happen here. It’s already begun.

  • Immiseration

    I was talking to an acquaintance earlier who was saying that they’ve never seen Glaswegians look so miserable, that “everyone’s going around with their face tripping them”. This NY Review of Books piece by Gary Younge may help explain why.

    This is one of the bleakest sentences I’ve read for some time.

    After more than a decade of austerity, British five-year-olds are a full centimeter shorter now than they were in 2010, and they are becoming significantly shorter than children in other countries.

  • How news lost its nerve

    There’s an interesting piece in Semafor about the ongoing cowardice crisis in journalism. It’s about the US but many of the problems it identifies are just as  prevalent in the UK.

    Of all the issues – fear of litigation in the form of SLAPP suits designed to silence legitimate criticism; fear of losing your job for not toeing the company line; fear of losing access to the rich and/or famous people whose names drive traffic; the lack of money in modern journalism; rich and powerful people wielding social media as a weapon – probably the biggest is the removal of the all-important line between news and money.

    At a moment of economic fragility in the media industry, there’s also simply less of an appetite for stories that could damage important business relationships. This has been a particularly challenging balance for glossy entertainment and lifestyle magazines, whose audiences long ago moved online and who now rely heavily on the businesses they cover.

    …The new priorities are reflected organizationally. Editors-in-chief at Hearst, Esquire’s parent company, now report up to general managers, whose singular focus is the bottom line. The general manager who oversees Esquire and other fashion publications, for example, came to the company from the marketing side of digital payment company Venmo.

    The reason for the long-standing line between editorial and a publication’s funding was to prevent conflicts of interest. A publication that’s financially dependent on the people it’s writing about, whether directly in the form of a business relationship or indirectly in the form of access for future stories, is a publication that is no longer independent; it becomes an arm of PR.

     

  • 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.

  • The minister for the Heritage Foundation

    Like many incompetent, idiotic arseholes, former PM Liz Truss – who crashed the UK economy and was famously outperformed by a lettuce – has found new friends among the US far right and the right-wing press by parroting their bigotry. And to please them she’s introduced a private member’s bill that attempts to bring the most hateful anti-trans legislation from the US to the UK.

    If it passes, which thankfully it probably won’t, it would undo the Equality Act, force teachers to bully children and criminalise doctors who provide healthcare in line with international standards of best practice.

    It is a vicious, hateful bill proposed and supported by vicious, hateful people – people who have made it abundantly clear that the war they’re waging on trans people’s healthcare and human rights is a war they want to wage more widely against all women and the entire LGBTQ+ community too.

  • Politicians are preaching hate

    From ILGA-Europe, which consists of LGBTQ+ organisations across all of Europe and Central Asia:

    A NEW REPORT SHOWS A STARK RISE IN ANTI-LGBTI, AND IN PARTICULAR, TRANSPHOBIC STATEMENTS FROM POLITICIANS ACROSS EUROPE.

    Published today by ILGA-Europe, the 13th Annual Review of the Human Rights Situation of LGBTI People in Europe and Central Asia alarmingly reports hate speech from politicians in 32 European countries over the course of last year, 19 of them member states of the EU.

    There has been a clear accumulation of hate speech against the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex (LGBTI) community from officials across Europe, much of it targeting trans people, in countries including EU member states Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, and Sweden. 

    The vast majority of anti-trans statements instrumentalise children, using scare tactics to create opposition to trans minors’ access to healthcare and restrictions on education. This is a broader trend we see in the use of children, with politicians across Europe claiming that limiting access to information about LGBTI people prevents harm to minors.

  • 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.