Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • From despair to where?

    Earlier today I wrote a post about the newspapers claiming that trans kids are identifying as cats, horses and the moon, a classic piece of demonisation straight out of the classic text Folk Devils and Moral Panics.

    This morning, Elon Musk – whose trans daughter has cut all ties with him, and whose wife apparently left him for a trans woman – claimed that the word cis or cisgender, which is to transgender what heterosexual is to homosexual, is a slur that will get people who use it banned from Twitter. Twitter has no such concerns about actual slurs or threats of violence against trans people or their allies. While Musk was preening to his blue-tick sycophants, I received some Twitter report updates letting me know that actual death threats I’d reported on the service were not in breach of the Twitter rules.

    This afternoon, it leaked that the long-delayed UK ban on conversion therapy – aka torture – will have a consent clause, so if you’re coerced or bullied into being tortured then that will remain perfectly legal.

    The US evangelical right’s colonisation of our politicians and press is more evident than ever, and their strategies couldn’t be any more obvious.

    One of the bigot brigade’s favourite strategies is what far-right goon and Trump strategist Steve Bannon called “flooding the zone with shit”: you put out so much misinformation that your enemy simply can’t fight back against it. It takes much more effort to clean up bullshit than to spread it.

    Elon Musk knows “cis” isn’t a slur; he doesn’t care, either. He’s doing exactly what Sartre described 1940s anti-semites as doing.

    Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

    Toni Morrison famously wrote that the purpose of white racism was to wear Black people out.

    The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

    It’s the same with the demonisation of other minorities. Trans people (and the wider communities we’re being used as a wedge to attack) are under constant assault on multiple fronts: in the courts, in the infiltration of school and health boards, in the pages of the press, over the airwaves and on social media. Endless airtime is given to people asking “what is a woman?” and discussing the fever dreams of bigots, a constant discussion about us by people who know nothing about us – and who care even less.

    When the moral panic against folk devils like you is stripping trans kids and adults of their healthcare, when people feel emboldened to call you predators and paedophiles simply for existing, when hate crimes are rocketing and you’re more scared of the outside world than ever before, how do you feel anything other than despair?

    Writing in Slate, Evan Urquhart says what many of us think: “Just a few years ago, it felt as though the lives of queer Americans were steadily improving… it’s different now.”

    It’s a provocative piece, and deliberately so. And it’s very much where my head is too, because while I’m not directly affected by what’s happening in places such as Florida I can see the tide crossing the Atlantic, as it has been doing for the whole time since I came out as me. Interviewee Ryan Campbell puts it very well:

    “I try to hold on to the idea that hate burns hot, but it burns out,” Campbell said. “I think things will probably continue to get worse for a bit. This is a thing that will rise and fall, but in the meantime, people are getting hurt now.”

    There’s a lot here that resonates strongly with me.

    When I was a child, in the late ’80s, I remember first learning that being gay was something bad, and understanding what gay meant well afterward. “Transgender” didn’t exist in my world growing up as that type of human being, but I saw the crude stereotype of a man in a dress as something to laugh at and as something frightening, a predator. As a trans person, my understanding of myself was crippled, distorted by confusion, doubt, shame, and self-hatred. As I came to accept myself, first as a queer woman and then later as transgender, I came to hope that children wouldn’t need to grow up like I had.

    …The loss of that promise comes hard. 

    The shock for me wasn’t that some people hate us, or that some of the most hateful will incite violence against us and campaign against our rights. No. What shocked me was that nobody cares. We told our peers what was happening. We showed them the bad actors – the religious extremists, the fascists, the grifters – telegraphing their plans like movie villains. We predicted every step of the process, from the reasonable concerns to the refocusing on the wider LGBT+ community and women’s reproductive freedom. And the response was… nothing.

    We raised the alarm and nobody came.

    Urquhart:

    For many in the queer community, we’ve moved well past the point of fearing something might happen, and on to figuring out how we’re going live through this. Our despair is grounded in grim acceptance and practicality. We are learning that life goes on after you accept the fact that no help is coming, and you’ve been left alone to defy or defend or escape, or just bear witness.

  • Don’t have kittens

    We’ve been in the “making shit up” stage of the anti-trans culture war for a while now, but this story takes the biscuit: the completely invented tale of a school pupil identifying as a cat has moved from the Telegraph and the Independent into Radio 4, because our media is hopelessly broken.

    Imagine calling yourself a journalist or editor and writing or publishing this as a news story.

    The student in question is in Year 11, but began using the pronoun “catself” in Year 9 “when the whole thing with neo pronouns started”, the pupil said.

    She described how lessons could be completely derailed if a teacher attempted to get the child to reply to a question in English rather than meowing.

    It took three Telegraph writers to write that, presumably with crayons.

    What’s particularly bad about this is that there’s audio of the supposed event, and that audio demonstrates that all the reports about it are lying: it’s a recording of a child being bullied. And nobody seems to care, apart from Mic Wright. He writes:

    Now the Mail, along with The Times, and The Telegraph — the three central pillars of anti-trans coverage in the UK — are pretending the story is about a child identifying as a cat rather than two students picking on another student by comparing their gender identity to “[identifying] as a cat or something…”

    [writers and editors know] that there was no child “identifying as a cat” and the claim that the teacher reprimanded students for not accepting the other student’s feline identity is totally in bad faith.

    The cat-child is an urban legend beloved of anti-trans campaigners, and it’s made the press in various guises in the US, Australia and the UK. Every single time, it’s been complete bollocks. The origin is simple and sad: a few years ago it was revealed that in the aftermath of a school shooting, one US school started keeping cat litter as part of its terrorist kit: in the event of another shooting, the litter would be helpful because kids trapped in an ongoing attack would be able to go to the toilet.

    But that’s not all. Our schools are also packed with children identifying as horses, dinosaurs and the moon. Except, of course, they aren’t.

    The Daily Telegraph does not have extraordinary evidence, it has anonymous sources, obvious horseshit, and an ideological motivation to push this story.

    What we’re seeing here is a particularly clear example of how the bullshit pipeline works. I actually posted about it on Twitter, only to be proved right about ten minutes later:

    The danger of that Telegraph article, as ever, isn’t that its few readers will believe the made-up story. It’s that it launders hate group propaganda into the mainstream. It’s sitting on a BBC researcher’s desk right now as a possible phone-in discussion or news item.

    Ten minutes later, I discovered that they were talking about it as if it were a real news story on the Today programme.

    Here’s the pipeline in action.  First of all an anti-trans pressure group invents a story and passes it to a tame journalist in the right-wing press, who is perfectly happy to print absolute shite if it enrages the readers.

    That newspaper then makes its way to the BBC, where it becomes an item on the Today programme and gets the attention of politicians and other media outlets.

    That in turn circulates the made-up story more widely, encouraging the right-wing press to push the story more with a little bit of help from rent-a-gob MPs. And before you know it, the Prime Minister is promising to take action against something that didn’t happen, doesn’t happen and won’t ever happen – action that will likely cause very real harm to the very real people the anti-trans pressure group concocted the whole story to attack.

  • Women should beware of period apps

    Yesterday, a UK court jailed a woman for taking abortion pills shortly after the UK limit during lockdown, when normal medical care was unavailable. There’s a great deal to be angry about here, not least the complete absence of the “protect women” crowd when it comes to protecting women’s reproductive rights. But there’s also a warning: if there’s any possibility that you might need an abortion at some point in your life, be very wary of what data you share with apps and websites.

    One of the details of this particular case is that the English police, as the US police have also been known to do, used the woman’s digital footprint as evidence against her; in this case it was her search history and message history. In the US, social media and smartphone location histories have been used to target women travelling out of state for abortions. Women and non-binary people have been flagging up the potential dangers of cycle tracking apps for some time too.

    We like to think that we’re more enlightened than the US, but we’re not: abortion in the UK is not decriminalised. And people seeking abortions can be betrayed by their digital footprint just as easily here as across the Atlantic.

  • Panic! At the newspaper

    I wrote about moral panics in my book:

    When I was younger, there were moral panics over heavy metal records and the board game Dungeons & Dragons; the former allegedly contained backwards messages to worship Satan and/or kill yourself, and the latter was accused of pretty much everything. Similar panics occurred around video games, the Harry Potter books, the urban legend of Killer Clowns and so on.

    I’ve lived through other moral panics too, including the Satanic Panics of the 1980s and 1990s and the attempts by the Keep The Clause campaign and campaigners against equal marriage to persuade people that gay, lesbian and bi people were dangerous predators.

    The problem with moral panics is that while the subject is fictional, the damage the panic does is not. And it can spread far beyond the original subject of the panic too. Scientific American on the current anti-trans panic:

    The anti-trans laws send a message that nonreproductive sexuality, reproductive health and bodily autonomy are not acceptable. Ultimately this tells a story about who has power: if we can erase trans people then we can erase anyone; if we can remove gay books we can remove any book; if we can silence drag queens, we can silence you.

  • History revealed

    It’s well known – well, well known outside anti-trans circles – that trans people were targeted by the Nazis; the famous book-burning photograph that pretty much everybody in the world has seen was taken in 1933 when Nazi thugs looted the Institute of Sexology and burnt its research into trans and gender non-conforming people. However, like most people aware of this I thought that trans people were targeted not so much because they were trans, but because as far as the Nazis were concerned trans and gay were the same thing.

    That’s partly true, but not wholly true. It turns out that some trans people were indeed targeted, and murdered, simply because they were trans.

    This horrifying piece in The Conversation is about how scholars are uncovering more details about how trans people were treated by the Nazis. It isn’t a fun read.

    The author of a 1938 book on “the problem of transvestitism” wrote that before Hitler was in power, there was not much that could be done about transgender people, but that now, in Nazi Germany, they could be put in concentration camps or subjected to forced castration. That was good, he believed, because the “asocial mindset” of trans people and their supposedly frequent “criminal activity … justifies draconian measures by the state.”

    There are some very clear parallels with present-day anti-trans activism and politicians, and not just because Neo-Nazis keep turning up at anti-trans rallies. It’s because othering and oppressing marginalised groups is what fascism does: it tells you that group X is a conspiracy, that their very existence is a threat to your nation, your women and your children. It calls them a virus, a contagion, dehumanises them and demands their elimination.

    This is something the academic and writer Judith Butler tried to express in an interview with The Guardian in late 2021, only for the relevant sections to be deleted after publication.

    You can read the deleted sections in full here, but here’s an extract:

    It is very appalling and sometimes quite frightening to see how trans-exclusionary feminists have allied with rightwing attacks on gender… The anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times. So the Terfs will not be part of the contemporary struggle against fascism… we are living in anti-intellectual times, and neo-fascism is becoming more normalized.

  • Careless talk costs lives

    Casey Newton is one of the smartest people writing about technology, and this piece – the platforms give up on 2020 lies – is absolutely chilling. It’s about social networks’ reversal of their disinformation policies and their new unwillingness to censor dangerous content. As ever, Elon Musk is in the mix.

    One function Musk now serves in the tech ecosystem is to give cover to other companies seeking to make unpalatable decisions. Across a variety of dimensions, Musk has moved fast and loudest — and when others have followed, the response has been barely a whimper.

    Mass layoffs, stricter job performance requirements, a war on remote work, paid verification for social accounts — all of these served as a kind of aphrodisiac for other Silicon Valley CEOs, who proceeded to implement their own, slightly softer versions of Musk’s cultural reset.

    Most recently, Twitter’s decaying policy and enforcement systems have proven to be enticing for other social platforms.

    We’ve known for a very long time that unchecked, unregulated media can easily become a disinformation machine, a sewer full of the most poisonous propaganda. Here’s Jonathan Swift back in 1710.

    Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…

    And of course, the Big Lie was at the heart of Nazi strategy too. We know how this works: not so long ago Facebook was a key vector of hatred that lead to the Myanmar genocide. Social media is a powerful thing, and all too easily becomes a powerful weapon.

    Newton:

    We are in for an ugly time. And should the worst happen, I hope we remember this: the moment when tech platforms, having briefly banded together to do the right thing, looked each other in the eye and one by one all gave up.

    It’s no coincidence that just yesterday we saw violent thugs attacking parents outside a Pride Month school board meeting in California while social media influencers incite violence against LGBT+ people, their families, their supporters and their healthcare providers; I really hope I’m wrong, but I think this year’s Pride Month is going to have a body count – and social media will have played a huge part in making that happen.

  • Satanic

    According to Media Matters, in the last seven days Fox News has given airtime to two stories about protecting children.

    The first story was the false allegation that Target was selling “satanist kids’ clothes” as part of its Pride merchandise. Fox News gave that two hours and twelve minutes.

    The second story was the horrific revelation that in Illinois, between 1950 and 2019 nearly 2,000 children were sexually abused by Catholic priests. Some 450 priests were revealed as abusers.

    Fox gave that story 22 seconds.

  • A cabal

    Reality continues to make satire redundant.

    In mid-April, a group of senior writers and editors at The Guardian met as part of the company’s ‘Diversity and Inclusion Week’ to discuss pushing gender-critical narratives ‘fearlessly’… The meeting of four senior members of The Guardian’s staff (leader writer Susanna Rustin, financial editor Nils Pratley, chief sports writer Sean Ingle, and chief leader writer Sonia Sodha [was] watched by approximately 120 others from the company, including Guardian US, Guardian Australia, and The Observer.

    Taking place on the same day as their Pride event, I was told that ‘Untangling sex and gender’ was the most well-attended event of the week.

    What’s particularly galling about this is that The Guardian is still believed by many people to be a left-wing newspaper, so when its openly transphobic staff conspire to publish terrible articles demonising trans people those articles have an air of false legitimacy: leftish people are more likely to believe a Guardian story than a Daily Mail one, even if it’s written by the same kind of bigot.

  • “me best + them bad”

    This, by Catherynne M Valente, is a glorious howl into the void: There’s No Such Thing As a Smart Fascist.

    there’s been such an astonishingly effective PR campaign, ongoing through multiple generations, striving to convince you that there was and can be true human genius and vast ability behind the industrialized evil perpetrated by Nazis, their historical forefathers, and their infinitely damned present-day children… We call it fascism because me and my friends get to be murderkings kind of gives the game away.

  • The hate factory

    In news that’ll surprise nobody, Elon Musk’s Twitter has become a hate factory. Hate speech on Twitter has existed for a long time, but it was previously considered a problem; now, it’s a feature. A new report shows that if you pay for a Twitter Blue subscription, you get a free pass for hate speech.

    The Daily Beast:

    Researchers at the Center For Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) flagged hate speech to the company in tweets from 100 Twitter Blue subscribers. Four days later, they say, 99 percent of the tweets were still up and none of the accounts had been removed…

    “What gives blue tick hate actors confidence to spew their bile is the knowledge that Elon Musk simply doesn’t care about the civil and human rights of Black people, Jews, Muslims and LGBTQ+ people, as long as he can make his 8 bucks a month,” Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the CCDH, said in a statement to The Daily Beast, “Our society has benefited from decades of progress on tolerance, but Elon Musk is undoing those norms at an ever-accelerating rate, by allowing hate to prosper on the spaces he administers, all with the tacit approval of the advertisers who remain on his platform.”

    If you’re a Twitter user this won’t surprise you: posts by or about marginalised groups attract swarms of blue tick bigots, and because their replies are now prioritised you’ll see their hateful replies ahead of any other comments. And that hatred is profitable: as the article says, “five high-profile Twitter accounts responsible for consistently linking LGBT to ‘grooming’ were set to generate $6.4 million a year in advertising revenue for Twitter.”