Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • Seven kinds of rubbish

    The UK Prime Minister, as I’m sure you’ve seen, has promised to ban “heavy-handed measures” that don’t exist: “taxes on eating meat”, “sorting your rubbish into seven different bins”, and so on. He has previously spoken against other things that don’t exist, such as children identifying as cats, once again with the full-throated support of the right-wing press.

    It’s easy to mock this stuff, and I’m happy to, but it’s also very frightening: when politicians invent and rail against imaginary enemies, they’re not so much flirting with fascism as sticking their tongue down its throat. What we’ve seen in the war on trans people – the weaponisation of absolute bullshit – is now being used more widely. We’re in a very dark place.

  • Carry on torturing

    In 2019, both the Tories in England and the SNP in Scotland formally pledged to ban conversion therapy. In 2023, both the Tories in England and the SNP in Scotland said that their bans would be introduced this year. This week, both the Tories in England and the SNP in Scotland decided they were no longer going to ban conversion therapy. Officially that’s just for this year, but realistically it’s never.

    The reason, inevitably, is the unholy alliance of anti-trans bigots, religious lobbyists and the right-wing press, a Venn diagram that’s close to a single circle. The claim is that a ban is too complex, that it would criminalise legitimate psychological help, or that it would criminalise the wrong people. But the facts haven’t changed, and the facts are that such bans have been introduced all over the world without any problems. As we’ve discovered in countries such as Canada, Brazil, Spain, Germany, France, Malta and New Zealand, you can avoid being prosecuted for torturing children by simply not torturing children.

    And make no mistake, conversion therapy is torture: the UN described it as such in 2020, calling for a global end to the cruel and hideous practice. Amnesty International agrees. Conversion therapy is a breach of people’s basic human rights – specifically, article 5 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights and Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The only psychologists and psychiatrists that support it are quacks: the practice has been condemned by both the British Psychological Society and the Royal College of Psychiatrists, as well as medical bodies worldwide.

    There’s no debate here; you’re either in favour of torturing children or you aren’t. Seeing politicians cave to the pro-torture camp is as despicable as it is predictable.

  • eXodus

    I’m technically still a Twitter/X user, because I maintain an account there. But if you want to chat with me on social media, that’s no longer the place to do it. I’ve unfollowed absolutely everybody and deleted all my personalisation data so I’m not tempted to use it.

    It’s interesting to see what happens to the algorithmic For You feed when you do that: my feed is now made up largely of English football, Miley Cyrus fan sites, horrific anti-Black racism from known hate groups, plenty of transphobia and the occasional open-crotch porn photo. That, apparently, is what Twitter thinks you’re interested in if you’re an adult in the UK.

    I unfollowed everyone much later than I should have, based on something I just learned the name of today: an exodus shock. An exodus shock is an event that makes people leave a service for rivals, and in my case the latest one was Elon Musk’s blatantly antisemitic attacks on the ADL. Musk’s far-right views have been well known for a long time, but it’s his use of his Twitter account – an account that, unless you block him, will frequently appear in your feed – to actually publish antisemitism, racism and transphobia that was the final straw for me.

    There will be many more such shocks, because Twitter is too big to disappear overnight: there are too many users with too much to lose for it to lose everybody in one go. But with each new exodus shock, more people will move to Bluesky, to Threads, to Mastodon, to Instagram. And while none of those services is likely to become as big and central as Twitter was, that doesn’t mean they can’t be incredibly vital and commercially successful.

    I’m on quite a lot of social media sites now and I’m trying to make sense of them all and work out what to post where; so far I think Bluesky has the most irreverent old-Twitter vibes, Instagram is the best place to talk music and books, Threads still feels a bit half-finished and Mastodon just doesn’t seem to gel for me. So there are different social networks for different groups of people, with no clear winner so far. And that’s okay; I’m used to it. My first online adventures were on places like CompuServe and USENET and bulletin boards; this is the same thing with better typography.

    One thing I have noticed since essentially quitting Twitter is the effect on my mental health. It turns out that tuning in all day and all evening to some of the most toxic content on the internet isn’t great for you. That’s a lesson I should probably try to remember when, inevitably, the new Twitters start to resemble the broken one.

  • All the right friends

    I’d like to introduce you to my friends Laura, Amy and Steven. I don’t understand why Laura loves incredibly derivative and often idiotic punk rock, and she thinks that my beloved REM are one of the worst bands in human history. Other than that, we get on brilliantly. I don’t share Amy’s veganism, and she obviously doesn’t share my love of barbecuing steaks. Other than that, we get on brilliantly. I don’t share Steven’s love of country music, and he believes that my book should be banned and that I am a predatory paedophile who should be tarred, feathered and hung from a lamppost. Other than that…

    Steven isn’t real, of course, although there are many people who believe exactly what I’ve described. But of course, I’m not friends with those people any more than I would be friends with animal torturers, wife beaters or any other horrific humans. And this apparently makes me a bad person.

    One of the most annoying topics in the current awfulness of everything is the trope that the woke censorious left won’t be friends with people who don’t share their political views. That trope is bollocks, and AR Moxon has written an excellent explanation of why.

    It’s a very common lament: that there is no civility left these days, as compared to earlier days, and the main reason appears to be that those on the “left” refuse to be friends with those on the “right,” shunning them simply because of their political views.

    This implies something rather startling: American conservatives want to be friends with the rest of us. Had you realized? You’d never know it to listen to them, but apparently it is so, and the notion that some of us don’t want to be friends with them is one of the most pressing matters to be found in the opinion sections of our nation’s great newspapers and magazines and newsfortainment television programs.

    Moxon argues that the supposed polarity of left/right isn’t accurate, and suggests humanist/supremacist instead. The supremacist political view is that “other types of humans do not matter, and shouldn’t have space to exist and thrive as themselves, and should are abused and punished for any refusal to be dominated.” And yet “they feel strongly that friendship is something they still deserve, though it feels like something they actually want, and more like something they believe they’re owed.”

    I think Moxon makes a very important point about the discourse around this.

    Something I’ve noticed about professional civility mourners is that when they mourn the divisions over political views, they rarely mention what those views are, or what effect they have.

    That’s very true of the reporting around this, which frames “views” as some kind of abstract thing without any actual consequences. So for example the “view” that there are too many trans people and that their numbers should be reduced, which is genocidal, is presented as if it were an opinion about wallpaper or a TV show. All too often, “views” are considered more important than the actual people those views are about and targeted towards.

    There is not a debate if one side believes that all Black people, all Jewish people or all LGBTQ+ people should be killed and the other side is the Black people, the Jewish people or the LGBTQ+ people that the other side want to kill. And yet all too often that’s exactly how these things are presented, and have been for a very long time. The BBC famously used the headline “Should homosexuals face execution?” in a piece about Uganda’s anti-gay persecution just over ten years ago. The “should” turns what should be absolute horror into a nice dinner party chat.

    Of course, not all views are so extreme. But many supremacist ones are, no matter how politely they’re expressed. And there is not an equally hateful and violent other side.

    Moxon:

    nobody is trying to strip supremacists of their vote, or ensure that they will go bankrupt over medical care, or force them to give birth to their rapist’s baby, or murder them at the border, or take away their children, or frame the continuance of their lives as a cost rather than a value, as something that must be earned, as something that is undeserved. In fact, these are things that the humanist spirit is trying to ensure even they will be safe from, which actually seems like the friendliest posture a person can take, toward somebody who has decided to be their enemy.

    And yet we’re expected to be friends with people who want those things for us. Moxon uses the analogy of schoolyard bullies who want us to sit at their lunch table as sycophants: “If you want to be friends, why don’t you ever come sit with us? Why is the demand that we come sit with you instead? Why do you want so badly for only some of us to sit over with you, and why aren’t the rest of our friends ever welcome at your table?”

    If you want friends, why aren’t you willing to be friendly?

    Do you want to be friends? Is friends what is desired here?

    I don’t think so, actually.

    I think what’s being sought is accomplices.

    And I think that’s true. It’s freedom of speech as a demand for freedom of consequences all over again: some of the world’s worst people demanding that the world conforms to what they want, and never the other way around. It’s portrayed as a basic human right when it’s nothing of the sort. Friendship is a contract, and the terms of that contract is that if you turn out to be an arsehole, the deal is off.

    In a previous piece, Moxon talked about the abuse of freedom of speech in more detail.

    It’s almost gotten to be boring, the degree to which people believe that what they refer to as “free speech” should not only allow them to say whatever they want (which it does), but should also prevent other people from understanding them to be the sort of person who says those things.

    Moxon believes, as I do, that it’s perfectly appropriate for awful people to be shunned because of the things they say and do.

    There are worse things than shunning. There are shelves empty of books. There are people dying from deliberately manufactured medical policy. There are actual attacks upon freedom and speech. There is supremacy. There is genocide.

    …At a certain point, it seems to me that we have to conclude that what such people are actually advocating for is not to use sunlight to expose and disinfect our society of bigotry, but simply to have a society in which bigotry is free to dance in the sun.

  • Where’s the rush?

    The London Gender Identity Clinic has just updated its waiting list information: as of July 2023 it was making first appointments for people first referred in July/August 2018, five years ago. With 324 new referrals each month and 55 first appointments offered per month, it’s clear that that five year figure is only going to increase.

    Maths isn’t my strong point. But a service that’s only seeing 20% of new referrals each month is a service that’s adding 80% of new referrals to a waiting list that’s already five years long. So if you’re referred today, your waiting time won’t be measured in months, weeks or even years; it’ll be decades.

    In Scotland, where the population is smaller and we have a different NHS, things are marginally better: the Edinburgh gender service is currently making first appointments for people referred two years ago. However in Glasgow, which covers a much bigger area (and oversees all surgery-related care for Lothian, Tayside and Grampian NHS areas too) and is the largest such clinic in Scotland, the waiting list for adults is around five years, up from four years in late 2022.

    Gender services are not bound by the same Referral To Treatment (RTT) and Treatment Time Guarantees (TTG), which mandate that patients should not have to wait more than 18 weeks between referral and the beginning of treatment. Rather, the care for trans people is best illustrated by a small but telling detail: if you believe that the wait for an appointment is affecting your mental health, NHS Scotland will direct you to a page of mental health resources on the Sandyford website. When you visit the page you’ll see a short, simple message: “The page you requested was removed.”

    One of the reasons that waiting lists are growing (other than the fact that trans healthcare is centralised when most of it could easily be handled by GPs) is because where there are vacancies, as there are in Sandyford, the current viciously anti-trans climate makes vacancies hard to fill: in the case of the Sandyford you don’t just have to brave online abuse but run a gauntlet of bodycam-wearing Christian extremists to get in the front door on some days. And while the wider faults in trans healthcare have been glaringly apparent for many years now, no politician is going to demand the improvements that are so desperately needed when you know exactly how the press and pressure groups would spin it.

    I’d love to live in the fantasy world the bigots describe, where you simply refer yourself to a clinic and have hormones and surgery the same day. It’s much nicer than the reality, in which our healthcare is little more than a link to a web page that doesn’t even exist.

  • An evil plan

    In bad movies, villains like to explain in advance what they’re going to do. And in the bad movie we currently appear to be living in, the Christian Right does that too. Often, the most hateful plans and strategies are discussed openly at their conferences or published in their strategy documents.

    A good example of that was the 2017 Values Voter Summit in Washington DC, where the strategy to attack trans people was set out in full: by using a divide and conquer strategy to try and separate the T from the LGB, the Christian Right believed they could use trans people as a wedge against human rights more widely. They would do that in two ways: first of all, by portraying their attempts to remove trans people’s rights as trans people demanding more rights; and secondly, by pushing the message that those rights would remove the rights of others, such as lesbian women and female athletes. As you know, it’s a strategy that so far has been highly successful both in the US and the UK, partly through the Hands Across The Aisle initiative to team up Christian evangelicals with supposedly left-wing feminists and feminist journalists.

    If you thought that one was bad, you should see what they’re working on now.

    As Brynn Tannehill reports, Project 2025 – a coalition of despicable organisations including our old friends the Heritage Foundation (a key influence on the UK government and the main driver of this project), the Alliance Defending Freedom (a key player in anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and rhetoric on both sides of the Atlantic) and many others – has published a 900-page strategy document that’s truly terrifying and that it hopes will inform the next US presidential term. I’m looking at it here from a trans perspective but it’s also horrifying for Black people, for women, for disabled people and civilisation generally.

    “The Mandate for Leadership” is a 920-page document that details how the next Republican administration will implement radical and sweeping changes to the entirety of government… The business wish list calls for eliminating federal agencies, stripping those that remain of regulatory power, and deregulating industries. The president would directly manage and influence Department of Justice and FBI cases, which would allow him to pursue criminal cases against political enemies. Environmental law would be gutted, and states would be prevented from enforcing their own environmental laws.

    As Tannehill says, it’s effectively a wish-list for the evangelical right. And their wishes regarding LGBTQ+ people are frightening.

    “The Mandate for Leadership” makes eradicating LGBTQ people from public life its top priority.

    It’s important to consider the document in its wider context, because at the moment in the US many states are passing laws to restrict people’s access to pornographic content. But the Right’s definition of pornography probably isn’t your definition, because it includes the simple existence of LGBTQ+ people.

    So when you read this:

    Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.

    You need to understand that “it” includes my book, this blog, The Advocate, Autostraddle, the Trevor Project’s suicide hotline and anything else that provides any information whatsoever about LGBTQ+ people. We know this because they’re already trial-running it in the form of laws such as Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation.

    And that’s just the beginning. Tannehill:

    It could be argued as well that people who are visibly trans in public are pornographic or obscene, because they might be seen by a minor. This understanding of intent is in line with the call to “eradicate transgenderism from public life.”

    That eradication is real.

    The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule 

    The document decries “the toxic normalisation of transgenderism” that it claims is “invading” school libraries and says that its very top priority is to:

    Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.

    That’s not a dog whistle. That’s a five-alarm wake-up call in a document that sets out very clearly how the Christian Right intends to turn the US into a theocracy.

    Tannehill:

    The question remains: Will they be able to get all of this past the Supreme Court? Perhaps not in the short run. But over time, if given the power, they will replace current justices with those they hand-pick to give them the decisions they want, just as they did to end Roe v. Wade. Conservatives at the Claremont Institute have stated that they intend to seize power for generations and remake the U.S. entirely in their image. The “Mandate for Leadership” is an announcement of their goals, and the roadmap to achieving them.

  • The Sun sinks lower

    If you thought The Sun newspaper had changed its spots since the days of demonising AIDS sufferers and pissing on the Hillsborough dead, it would like to show you otherwise. Here’s its Sun Says column:

    Yes, it’s using dead babies as cannon fodder in its war on LGBTQ people. Those babies were not murdered by someone who was LGBTQ, and the lack of action was nothing to do with “wokeness”; quite the opposite, as it appears that racism played a significant part in the difficulty whistleblowers had in getting management to listen to them.

    Even by the Sun’s terribly low standards, to blame a murder committed by a straight, cisgender white woman and covered up by straight, cisgender white people on the LGBTQ community is utterly disgusting – and no different from the internet bigots calling LGBTQ people child abusers to try and incite violence against them. If you buy or work for any Murdoch property, you’re helping to pay for this.

     

  • Years and years

    One of the more irritating barks of the anti-trans sealions is “what rights don’t trans people have, exactly?” It’s irritating because it’s deliberately obtuse: many of the rights we have on paper are rights that are not enforced, which means they might as well not exist. And the sealions know that but pretend not to.

    A good example of that is the right to NHS treatment that most UK nationals take for granted. But Cumbria, Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust has just announced that for the foreseeable future, it will not be accepting any referrals to the Northern Region Gender Dysphoria Service (NRGDS). You cannot get trans-related treatment through the NHS via any other avenue, so the NHS has effectively just scrapped trans healthcare in the region. We know that this healthcare is life-saving for many people, and yet in that part of England it simply isn’t available to anybody who isn’t already on the years-long waiting list.

    This isn’t the first time this has happened. In 2021, it emerged that Northern Ireland’s only gender identity clinic hadn’t accepted a single new patient since 2018. The Sandyford in Glasgow stopped taking new patients for its youth services for a while last year too.

    Even where new patients are being accepted, the backlog isn’t being cleared quickly enough. According to a freedom of information request earlier this month, trans people in Yorkshire can expect to wait thirty-five years for a first appointment at current clearance rates.

    The reason for this awful state of affairs is because there aren’t enough staff or resources to cope with demand for healthcare that remains part of the desperately underfunded and short-staffed mental health division of the desperately underfunded and short-staffed NHS. Despite years of warnings – including in the Theresa May government’s own LGBT action plan – trans healthcare has been starved of resources; rather than follow its own committee’s advice on reforming our healthcare, the May government decided instead to go for the much cheaper and largely un-requested reform of the gender recognition act. Which as I’m sure you know has been a great success.

    And to make things worse, the online bullying and press demonisation of trans healthcare providers in a style very reminiscent of the Christian Right’s attacks on abortion providers has made it very hard to fill vacancies. Until recently the Sandyford Clinic in Glasgow had just two psychiatrists, each of whom only attended one day per week, to cover the whole of the catchment area.

    The problem with trans healthcare is very simple. Healthcare that could easily be provided by our GPs – the HRT I take is the same HRT cisgender women take; the occasional blood tests I need are the same blood tests cisgender women need; the process for referring trans people to surgery doesn’t need to be any different than the process for knee surgery or back surgery, and so on – is all forced through the gender clinics, where psychiatrists do exactly the same job as your local GP surgery does. But there are far fewer psychiatrists than there are general practitioners, so the waiting lists get longer and longer and longer until healthcare is stopped altogether because the service can no longer cope.

    There was outcry in the newspapers a few weeks ago over the news that some 7.6 million people in England were waiting for NHS treatment, and two out of five had been waiting for more than 18 weeks. But that 18-week target doesn’t apply to mental health services, so there’s no outcry when ADHD and autism waiting lists exceed two years (many trans people are neurodiverse) or when trans waiting lists run into the decades, or when all trans healthcare is simply stopped. Officially, we have the same right to NHS treatment as anybody else. But in reality, we really don’t.

  • Bottom of the barrel

    Queen graphic from the Yoto music player website

    Following in the ridiculous footsteps of the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph, The Spectator is the latest publication to get in on the manufactured outrage over the supposed censorship of Queen’s Fat Bottomed Girls. According to the article by noted thought leader Richard Madeley, what we’re seeing is “neopuritanical cultural censorship”.

    For the benefit of people whose mouths don’t move when they read, the background to this story is that Queen licensed its music to Yoto, a music player for toddlers. Yoto makes its target audience very clear: it describes itself as “Yoto, the screen-free music player for children”. And Yoto has decided not to include the song, which is quite clearly about having sex with fat women, in its child-friendly version of Queen’s music. I imagine it probably wouldn’t include NWA’s Fuck Tha Police, Cardi B’s WAP or The Sex Pistols’ Belsen Was A Gas either.

    As much as I like to imagine Richard Madeley playing the entirety of Flux of Pink Indians’ The Fucking Cunts Treat Us Like Pricks to soundtrack a four-year-old’s birthday party, I don’t believe for a moment that he doesn’t think there are some forms of media that are not appropriate for children – and I’m pretty sure that if Fat Bottomed Girls were Fat Bottomed Boys, he’d be leading the charge to ban it for adults and children alike.

    I honestly don’t know whether these outrage farmers really believe the shit that they write and publish, but it doesn’t really matter: it’s just more grist to the grievance mill, a machine powered by bullshit whose only product is spluttering bile and whose job is to make its solipsistic readers red-faced with rage.

  • Words as weapons

    A new study from Germany adds more evidence that violent online speech leads to violent attacks in the streets. The Economist:

    A paper by Karsten Müller and Carlo Schwarz of the University of Warwick finds a strong association between right-wing, anti-refugee sentiment on German social-media sites and violent crimes against refugees.

    For every four anti-refugee posts on Facebook, there was one additional anti-refugee incident. According to the Economist, “This relationship appears to be driven by violent crimes such as arson and assault, and cannot be explained by local social-media usage or demography.”

    Correlation is not causation, I know. But we’re well aware of the power of propaganda and its association with violence. So it’s hardly surprising that the same connection is apparent in other forms of hateful speech. For example, if you plot the number of anti-trans articles in the UK press and the number of anti-trans hate crimes reported to the police in the same period, the curves are strikingly similar.

    This, by Joshua Foust back in 2019, is very relevant today.

    While I do think we still don’t understand the precise mechanism by which someone shifts from believing abhorrent ideas to acting on them, there is copious research demonstrating that abhorrent beliefs do lead to increases in ethnic violence. If a belief system is encouraging of violence and dehumanization then it has to be considered alongside the violent actors who say it inspires them.

    Foust begins by writing about Anders Breivik, whose manifesto famously referenced Daily Mail writer Melanie Phillips multiple times, but expands his article more widely:

    I think we need to take a few moments to understand how, as the debate over hate speech is manipulated in profoundly bad faith by right wing public intellectuals, the proliferation of hate speech is having a measurably bad effect on us as a society. And, realizing that, I’ll also discuss why placing faith in internet companies to fix the problem absolves everyone else of the need to act… we have to take responsibility for the sort of language we will tolerate, whether online or in more traditional media.