Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • Lying by implication

    Look at the photo, then the headline, then back at the photo. What kind of person do you think the police are cuffing?

    That’s right! A far-right, anti-trans, “gender critical” thug!

    But of course, that’s not what you’re supposed to see here. The Telegraph, very deliberately, is encouraging you to think that this is a trans person or ally. It isn’t. He’s a former member of the neo-nazi EDL, a thug who turned up in support of Kellie-Jay Keen’s anti-trans rally. Maybe he was there to offer a nuanced critique of the works of Judith Butler, as far-right thugs so love to do. Or maybe he just wanted to crack some trans kids’ heads. It’s a mystery!

    The Telegraph knows what it’s doing and what he is, but it wants some of those sweet, sweet anti-trans clicks that it seems so dependent on lately. And now the far-right media ecosystem has burst into life and will forever circulate the photo as supposed proof of how violent trans people are.

    This isn’t journalism. It’s hatemongering. And if you write to the press regulator to complain, you’ll be told that it isn’t breaking any rules. And that’s true, because the rules don’t exist to protect the public; they exist to protect newspaper proprietors.

  • Why we decline

    I’ve written many times about the asymmetry of trans coverage: of the hundreds of stories and items published and broadcast about trans people every week, hardly any of them feature trans people or allies and most platform anti-trans activists, often misleadingly presenting them as ordinary mums or feminists with “reasonable concerns”. So you’d think that when trans people are given a platform, we’d gladly take it.

    Nope.

    With very, very few exceptions I stopped accepting invitations to talk about trans issues more than a year ago after it became very apparent that I was being set up. The best I could hope for was the chance to listen to an anti-trans fanatic spouting lies that I would only be given 30 seconds to try and counter; sometimes I would be ambushed, only told when I went on air that the item I’d been asked to come on was actually an excuse for someone from Spiked to talk shite about trans people for almost all of it. I’m much more cynical now, and on a few occasions I’ve listened to items I’ve declined to appear on and had my fears confirmed: mostly they’re intended to titillate, not educate; gladiatorial battles where the trans person is the Christian.

    It’s easy to fall for this stuff, though. Media people are so nice, and they’ll tell you how important it is for your voice to be heard, and how keen they are to show the real story. And then they put you in a room with a bunch of pissed bigots shouting “penis!” at you.

    You’d think I made that one up, but no. In May 2018, Channel 4 aired a programme called “Genderquake: The Debate”. It wasn’t a debate; it was more like an episode of Jerry Springer or Jerry Kyle. The trans participants were shouted down by an audience that appeared to be a bunch of pissed bigots; it later transpired that the audience was a bunch of pissed bigots. Posting on Mumsnet, audience member Posie Parker – yes, the same Posie Parker of “Adult Human Female” fame, an avowed anti-feminist who runs anti-trans events popular with neo-nazis – said that “we were repeatedly encouraged to heckle” by Channel 4’s floor manager. Professor Stephen Whittle, a trans man who was also in the audience, confirmed this.

    Sadly it seems that Professor Whittle has been tricked again.

    In October 2022, Trans Safety Network – a group of academics and researchers who do great work reporting in depth about trans rights, healthcare and anti-trans activism – posted on Twitter:

    We have become aware of a documentary being produced by Brook Lapping Productions, on behalf of Channel 4 that is currently attempting to recruit transgender people and allies to talk about “the trans debate”… [we] are very concerned at reports that the suggestion of including some transgender people on the production crew “wouldn’t be impartial”. We would strongly urge anyone contacted to think about engaging…”

    They also shared a document by one person who’d been invited to contribute, a document that laid out their serious concerns about the show.

    And those concerns have been proven correct.

    Rather than the documentary contributors were told they’d be in, a documentary trying to give a fair account of the trans “debate”, it turns out to be a puff piece about anti-trans activist, academic and author Kathleen Stock that frames trans people as sinister figures hell-bent on silencing the brave professor.

    Some of the contributors, including Professor Whittle, have put together a blog about it.

    On the documentary you will see many trans & non-binary (TNB) people & their allies. Most will be shown taking part in lawful but noisy protest. Only a few TNB people and one ally will speak, and only one is given any substantial opportunity to speak.

    There are some specific complaints about errors and what appears to be false framing of trans people throughout the documentary, which hasn’t been broadcast yet but the contributors have been shown. But the core issue is much more fundamental: the contributors simply weren’t told that they were being invited to contribute to a documentary about Stock, whose views are well known and endlessly publicised in print, online and on radio and TV, and had they known that was the subject they would have refused to have taken part. They may not have been put in front of bigots shouting “penis!” this time, but they were tricked just the same.

    In their conclusion, the contributors say:

    We took part in good faith hoping to find a way forward. We all had doubts about taking part, but in the end took the production team at their word.  

    We were misled and misinformed.

    This is horrifically unethical, of course, and it shouldn’t happen. But deception is something trans people and allies are sadly very used to. As Elaine Scattermoon, a trans woman who herself has been tricked by a supposedly friendly journalist, posted on Twitter:

    This keeps happening to the extent that most trans people in the UK I know will just refuse to take part in any TV or radio show just because there’s an extremely high chance it’s just a trap and the framing will be used against them. We’re jaded but for good reason.

  • Race/hate

    The Daily Mail, which was once condemned by a coroner for hounding a trans woman to suicide, is actively targeting trans women again. Its latest story claims that a trans woman “smashed to smithereens” a cisgender woman’s record. Here’s the opener:

    A trans athlete who ‘smashed to smithereens’ a women’s Parkrun record is today revealed as Siân Longthorpe – who was living as a married man until just over four years ago.

    A park run is a fun run, not a race or an athletic competition, and the record in question is for a very narrow group: women aged 45-49. The goal of these events is to get more people running and the trans woman named in the article came in fifth overall, significantly slower than the winner. But why let facts get in the way of a moral panic?

    And the Mail was just getting started. In an article that is really just “trans woman doesn’t win race”, the Mail strongly implies that the runner may be murderous: it tells its readers that another parkrun record is held by a trans woman who, several years later, was jailed for attempted murder of an official, and it devotes almost all of its article to the details of that horrific case. The implication is obvious: if you let any trans people run anywhere the streets will run red with blood.

    This is sometimes called the Klan Fallacy: the framing of an entire marginalised group as violent has long been used by bigots who want to eradicate them, and it’s a favourite of the right-wing press too. The whole purpose of it is to stir up hatred, and judging by the Mail comments and related social media posts it’s doing its job fantastically well.

  • “Rights for me, not for thee”

    This report into the Women’s Declaration International, previously the Women’s Human Rights Campaign, is a must-read if you want to understand anti-trans lobbying and press. The WDI is supported by most of the UK’s anti-trans groups and most of the UK’s anti-trans advocates, including politicians and pundits; you may remember them from claiming to the UK government in a written submission that trans people were caused by watching “sissy porn” on YouTube. Which would be funny if the group weren’t so dangerous.

    Little is known about WDI’s true origins rooted in historical anti-trans and anti-sex work activism in the United States and United Kingdom, their deep involvement with the Christian Right, and how those origins have impacted trans rights movements on a global scale. This report describes the scale and influence of WDI against a background of growing anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and violence across the globe… WDI works to roll back international human rights law to the 70s–the same time period when the Christian Right was ’declaring war’ against LGBTQ people.

    As ever, the target may be trans people but the damage will be to all kinds of marginalised people.

    A new carceral feminist beast has been born, growing in strength as they link arms with the Religious Right and state bodies, with catastrophic effects.

  • Hiding hatred in plain sight

    Have you ever wondered why bigots all seem to recite the same talking points and use the same words? It’s because they’re working to scripts, either literally – many Christian Right groups offer step-by-step guides for you to print out that teach you how to sign up for Twitter, how to post a message and what specific words and phrases to use; some even provide the full tweets, indicating which bit you should personalise – or because they’ve memorised them.

    Here are some examples of the anti-trans talking points set out by Heritage Action in the US as it fought against changes to the Title IX legislation. The goal is to demonise trans people in sports, almost all of them in non-elite, school-level sports, one of the key campaigning issues set out by the evangelical right in 2017. I’m going to use a screenshot so you can see how it’s set out.

    Isn’t it funny how closely so many newspaper columns follow that template, and how many supposedly objective news items recycle the talking points?

    The links are to bullshit, of course, and the one about suicide is particularly repellent: it’s a deliberate distortion of a 2011 Swedish study that found that before 1989, trans people in that country had shitty healthcare that fucked with their mental health (post-89, as healthcare and support improved, there was no increase in suicidality); the study’s author has explicitly condemned the many misrepresentations of their work.

    Bigots lie, here’s Dave with the weather. I know. But look at the language. The whole document is about transgender kids, but the word “transgender” is only used twice in the entire thing (the image is just an excerpt). Instead, trans kids are called “male athletes”, “men” and “males”. The intent is to stop you seeing trans kids as the girls and boys they are.

    There’s another linguistic trick beloved by bigots and frequently parroted uncritically in media, and that’s to replace “people” with “-ism” or “-ology”. So people will say with a straight face that of course, they support trans people; they’re just against gender ideology. Or of course they don’t want to eliminate trans people; they just want to eliminate “transgenderism”.

    Except the only way you can eliminate “transgenderism” is to eliminate trans people.

    There’s a more polite version doing the media rounds today, on the anniversary of Section 28’s introduction: a call to “remove pronouns” from schools. But pronouns here is a proxy for trans and non-conforming children; what “removing pronouns from schools” means is bullying trans and gender non-conforming children to try and stop them being trans. I’ve seen many people go for the easy dunk, pointing out the pronouns used by the person who wants to remove pronouns, but that’s falling into the trap: you’re accepting the framing, that the proposal is about stopping an abstract linguistic thing rather than harming actual children. Because harming actual children is the goal.

    Once you see it, you see it everywhere. The escalation from “trans debate” to “trans issue”, “trans problem” and most recently, “trans crisis”; LGBT+ equality being described as a “virus”; the repeated use of “misgendering” in headlines about people who lost their jobs for despicable bullying campaigns or for gross misconduct; Again and again weasel words are used to conceal blatant bigotry, a bigotry that knows it can hide in plain sight behind euphemisms that will be repeated again and again but never challenged.

    I’m very scared by this. When you call a marginalised group a “crisis” or a “virus”, when you openly call for the “elimination” of transgenderism, you are following a path we’ve seen countless times before all over the world. Defining marginalised groups as a “problem” inevitably invites a “solution”.

  • Reversal

    There’s an acronym, DARVO, used to describe the behaviour of abusers: it stands for Deny, Accuse, Reverse Victim and Offender. And the press does it all the time with bigots, as two of today’s news stories demonstrate.

    The first story is that the head of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission is being investigated by a KC over multiple very serious allegations of bullying and harassment of staff. Over 20 members of staff have been interviewed by Channel 4 News, which is going to screen a report about the allegations.

    The Daily Mail put it on its front page as “REVEALED: Plot to drive out equality chief who’s standing up for women”.

    The second story is about a teacher, Joshua Sutcliff, who was dismissed by two consecutive schools for very serious professional misconduct. He directed pupils to a video he’d made claiming Muhammad was a “false prophet” and to his website that railed against abortion, homosexuality and Islam. He also committed a clear breach of safeguarding rules by talking about a pupil on national television in a way that made the pupil clearly identifiable. That alone is enough reason to fire him and prevent him from working with children ever again.

    The Telegraph has reported this as “Teacher who ‘misgendered’ pupil banned from profession”. The details of what he was actually banned for – multiple cases of unacceptable professional conduct with no remorse or apology – are hidden behind a paywall, so most people won’t see them. As is so often the case with extremist bullies, he is represented by the Christian Legal Centre. [Update, 24 hours later: the teacher is now appearing on TV claiming that “all sin” – adultery, homosexuality etc – “deserves the death penalty.” Nice guy!]

    One of the problems with this kind of thing isn’t just that it’s a complete reversal of reality. It’s that so much of the broadcast news agenda is dictated by the press, and in particular by articles like these. So there will be phone-ins about the woke mob coming after the equalities chair, and about a teacher getting the boot for a mere one-off misgendering, when neither of those things are true. But they won’t be corrected, and the broadcasters will spread the DARVO more widely. And so the moral panic continues.

  • “They’re afraid of us”

    This, by Soleil Ho, is absolutely horrifying: I attended a secretive anti-trans dinner in San Francisco. And then I puked.

    During a Q&A session at the end of the event, the speakers gave the audience the moment they were waiting for. An attendee asked them, “Who are the powers of interest behind transgender indoctrination, and what is their end goal?”

    “The end goal is really dark,” said Garfield-Jaeger, and the crowd hissed and whooped in anticipation of the revelation. “Trans humanism, pedophilia … destroying the family, our culture and our society. Marxism.” The crowd went wild.

  • LGBT+? Join a union

    Luna Spain, a trans woman, was fired from her job at Starbucks after a video of her losing her temper with a customer went viral; the right-wing press went out of its way to demonise her and send bigots to her door in coverage horribly reminiscent of the press campaign that ultimately made trans teacher Lucy Meadows kill herself, a death that the coroner laid squarely at the feet of Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn.

    Inevitably, the video turns out to have been a deliberately engineered confrontation by bigots.

    Ben Hunte, writing in Vice:

    Police have told us they are investigating the incident, which took place in April, as a potential transphobic hate crime, and Spain said she was considering legal action against the customers as well as her former employer. 

    …VICE News has spoken to current staff and customers who were all there when the incident occurred, and the details are very different to what has been reported and shared so far.

    …VICE News has seen Thomas’s and Andrews’s social media profiles, where they and their friends repeatedly use transphobic slurs. In the comments of the original post where Andrews uploaded the video of the incident, they refer to Spain as “he”, “it” and “that”. They also claim they were never scared of Spain, using laughing emojis throughout, with Thomas writing: “I would have knocked it out if there weren’t cameras,” adding another cry-laughing emoji. 

    Deliberately causing confrontation and using it to falsely play the victim is a well-established tactic of conspiracists and bigots alike (two categories that often overlap very significantly). I’ve just finished reading Off The Edge by Kelly Weill, a book that begins with flat earth conspiracies and goes into the conspiracy/bigotry world more widely. In one section she profiles a belligerent extremist who likes to go into coffee shops, abuse the customers until they snap at him and film it on his iPhone. The video is then uploaded as evidence of the unreasonableness of flat-earth deniers.

    It’s a live action equivalent of the bear baiting that bigots do online, deliberately pushing people in the hope that eventually they’ll snap so you can use their anger as evidence of their unreasonableness. That tactic’s a big favourite of anti-trans bigots who want to get screenshots and quote tweets they can use to claim trans women are just angry men. It’s a less polite version of the “provoke trans allies to ban you, threaten them with legal action they can’t afford to fight, and go on every news outlet whingeing about how silenced you are” tactic so beloved of more affluent bigots who use their power to pick on marginalised people.

    If you’re reading this and you’re trans, gender non-conforming or potentially likely to be considered trans/GNC by the ‘we can always tell’ brigade, I’d strongly advise you to join a union and to be aware, and to make your employer aware, of the possibility that you might be targeted by these assholes. This is not the first time anti-trans bigots have done this and it won’t be the last.

  • A fall from great

    In 2015, the UK was number one in the ILGA Europe Rainbow Europe rankings. It’s an annual study of the LGBTQ-friendliness of European countries, and for a long time the UK was proud to lead the way.

    The latest rankings have just been published. The UK has fallen to 17th. And it’s doing its best to fall further.

    Stonewall’s Robbie de Santos, on Twitter:

    This is a story about stagnation in the UK and progress across Europe. Our score has stayed steady, while other countries modernise their legal protections for LGBTQ+ people. The UK now sits at the bottom of the middle & countries like Slovenia and Croatia will soon overtake us.

    The index covers issues such as gender recognition legislation, hate crime protections and so on – things that, since 2022, have become demonstrably worse as the UK government chips away at LGBT+ people’s legal protections and the media fuels ever rising anti-LGBT+ sentiment; what started as an anti-trans moral panic, sadly and predictably, is now targeting the LGBT+ community more widely as the UK seems hell-bent on becoming a rainy version of Florida.

    Stonewall CEO Nancy Kelley sums it up:

    Shameful.

    The UK used to be, could be and should be better than this.

  • The wedge

    It’s been obvious for many years that if you vote for an anti-trans politician you get an anti-abortion politician; the whole trans panic has been manufactured by an unholy alliance of political and religious conservatives who believe that they, not you, should decide what you can do with your body. But even by their low standards they’re not usually as blatant as the Republicans in Nebraska.

    As the Washington Post reports, Ben Hansen filed amendments to the anti-trans bill 574, already a dangerous and hateful piece of legislation designed to remove trans people’s healthcare, that would ban abortions after 12 weeks – effectively a ban on all abortions. Senator Merv Riepe blocked the amendments, for now at least. But the amendments, and the furious reaction to Rip’s blocking of them, should remove any doubt that the war on trans people’s bodily autonomy is part of a wider war against everybody’s bodily autonomy, or that the “gender critical” movement is at best a useful tool for the evangelical right.