Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • Wars on woke don’t work

    The local election results demonstrate something we’ve seen in other countries, such as Australia: using a “war on woke” as your election strategy is a sure-fire way to be rejected at the polls.

    Byline Times:

    As the nation’s leading pollster Sir John Curtice told the Byline Times in an interview this week, “If you look at the long term trends, anti-woke views are becoming less and less common”.

    “You are chasing a declining zeitgeist, because in the end, one of the reasons why ‘anti-woke’ folk are so upset is because certain things that once upon a time nobody questioned, like the idea that same sex relationships are not a good idea… are no longer commonly held views.

    “On this whole argument about diversity, attitudes have shifted and they have shifted in a ‘woke’ direction.”

    The Sunak Tories are trying to roll back the clock, taking the party back to before the David Cameron “hug a hoodie” era to the nasty party of Michael Howard, and by doing so they’re swimming against a demographic tide: as Dr Natasha Kennedy writes on Twitter, demographics are moving the electorate in a less right-wing direction, something “that will only accelerate as the first postwar baby boom starts dying of old age in larger numbers in the second half of the decade while the 2008 mini-boom joins the electoral register in 2026”. The clock is ticking, and right-wing xenophobia in mainstream politics’ time is nearly up.

    Not that you’d know that from the press. But the press is facing its own demographic time bomb: the typical Daily Express reader is 69, and with its circulation down 19% year on year its future clearly isn’t very bright. The Daily Mail (average age 56) is down too (11% daily, 12% for the Mail on Sunday); other newspapers’ figures are so appalling they no longer publish them. The (Glasgow) Herald last published statistics in 2017, when it had 28,900 readers; in 2020, The Scotsman was down to 14,417. Given the ageing demographic of these papers’ readers, it’s probably tasteless but fair to say that a few hard winters could kill the print versions off entirely.

    Some, like cockroaches, will survive: the Daily Mail has been very successful in appealing to terrible people globally via the internet, and that’ll no doubt continue long after the print edition dies. But the press and the Tories’ war on woke is a short term strategy that can only be effective for a very short period of time: they’re swimming against a tide that will eventually sweep them away.

  • If you believe nothing, you’ll believe anything

    This, from Vice, is very good: America’s Most Influential Conspiracy Theorists Are Going All-In On Transphobia. It’s about how people with various agendas, from Qanon conspiracists to self-promoters, are finding transphobia the perfect vehicle for making the world demonstrably worse. And this is not a US-only phenomenon.

    The fact that these once-fringe subcultures and the so-called mainstream have merged to such an extent means that when they all focus their attention on something, the effect is especially devastating. And right now, that shared focus is an all-pervading panic and hostility about drag queens, “groomers,” transgender identity as being somehow “contagious,” the supposed sexualization of children by LGBT people, and the false claim that gender-affirming care is a form of abuse or mutilation. 

    …The relationship between the anti-vaccine and anti-trans movements makes logical sense, in that they both farm a specific suspicion of science and mainstream medicine. More subtly, both the anti-vaccine and anti-trans worlds also try to weaponize regret, sowing fear that a medical choice might go irreparably wrong.

    …This sort of explicit instrumentalization of conspiratorial ideas is the direction, it would seem, in which things are heading. Demonizing trans people is proving popular because it has political and social utility for so many different people, from Substack to the hall of Congress, from increasingly popular podcasts and the guests they can’t seem to give enough time to to parents confused, as parents always are, by the way the world has changed since they were young.

  • The E stands for enemy

    The Conservative government has been stuffing the EHRC – the Equalities and Human Rights Commission – with anti-equality bigots for some time, which is why it recently and very publicly u-turned on its guidance regarding trans people and the Equality Act. But even knowing that, the latest minutes from the EHRC’s Scotland Committee are absolutely devastating. The EHRC’s own staff said that its politically motivated attacks on trans people were wrong in law, would remove trans people’s human rights and posed an existential threat to the EHRC’s continuing existence. The EHRC is supposed to protect human rights, but in its current incarnation it is clearly the enemy of marginalised groups.

    Trans Safety Network has more:

    The Committee notes that the proposed amendments would ‘[undermine] the Commission’s long held position on trans rights’, which would pose ‘reputational risk’. The Committee also recommends that ‘the Board should consider the risk to our perceived political independence if we are perceived to be aligning with Government in the absence of robust evidence. This is a potential existential risk that such a perception could risk the Commission’s existence going forward’.

  • All the news that’s shit to print

    There’s been a very significant uptick in the amount of anti-trans bullshit in the newspapers this month, with papers such as The Express doing exactly what Express editor Gary Jones said in 2018 was “offensive… I wouldn’t want to be party to any newspaper that will publish such material”: running endless fabricated stories about a minority group to stir up hatred against them. But the best example of the bad faith and malicious intent of the anti-trans press comes via The Telegraph, which breathlessly reports the story of an evil transgender woman robbing London Marathon runners of their rightful place: her participation was “wrong and unfair”, the paper says.

    The woman placed 6,160th.

    She also raised £37,000 for charity, but that detail might make Telegraph readers think slightly positively about her so of course it wasn’t mentioned in the piece.

    This story, like the US right losing its mind over a free can of beer being given to trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney last week, makes it very clear what the beliefs of the anti-trans mob and their friends in the press are: trans people should not be allowed to participate in anything. To claim that a marathon runner placing 6,160th is depriving anyone of anything is simply malicious, malevolent bullshit.

  • Inhumanity

    Two days ago, Police Scotland Greater Glasgow posted an appeal for information about a missing woman, Amy Campbell. She hasn’t been seen since the middle of March and was reported missing on 4 April.

    As you’d expect from a missing-woman appeal, there are hundreds of comments. But those comments, by and large, aren’t expressing concern for her welfare. They’re misgendering her and posting anti-trans slurs because they believe she’s transgender.

    The worst aren’t the obvious bigots. The worst are the people trying to pretend their bigotry is just – you’ve guessed it – reasonable concerns: if the police were serious about finding Amy, they argue, they’d make it clear what genitals she had at birth. Many of the people posting this have the “gender critical” signifiers in their usernames or bios.

    Imagine seeing a police post about a missing woman and thinking the right thing to do is post “that’s a man” or an anti-trans slur. Imagine doing that and thinking the world is better with you in it.

  • Be joyfully you

    This Wired piece by Katherine Alejandra Cross is excellent.

    IT’S DIFFICULT TO overcome the momentum of algorithmic suppression, but our hearts and minds remain our own. We can defend them against colonization by hate-campaigners, who feed on our despair like some demon in a German fairy tale.

    What is needed instead of ceaseless portents of doom is a constant reminder of what we’re fighting for—especially for those trans people that rely on social media to have any sense of community at all, a point Branstetter returned to frequently. It’s especially important that they be able to see what trans thriving looks like. Especially our youth. As sociologist Tey Meadow put it over a decade ago, we need “inspiration for the kids who are still here … They need stories of teenagers just like them who are safe and happy now.”

  • Revelations

    The New York Times has a revelation: the US Christian Right deliberately targeted trans people as part of its strategy to rally its base in the aftermath of its equal marriage defeat.

    Or as I put it in my book, published six months ago and written quite a long time before that:

    …That tipping point occurred just as the Christian Right lost its decades-long battle against marriage equality. The UK was implementing the Marriage (Same Sex Couples Act) and the US Supreme Court heard Obergefell v Hodges, striking down all state bans on same-sex marriage.

    Faced with the absolute rejection of its scaremongering and demonisation of gay and lesbian people, the Christian Right found a new target.

    Me.

    Instead of going after the entire LGBT+ community, the Christian Right decided to focus on trans people. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. Multiple Christian Right groups talked openly of their strategy; several, including The Family Research Council, put it in writing on their websites.

    This is not something that anybody kept secret: the US Christian Right in particular has talked openly about this strategy – separate the T from the LGB in order to weaken the movement and battle equality, and do so by forging alliances with anti-trans “feminist” groups – since at least 2017. Trans journalists such as Katelyn Burns and the Trans Safety Network have written about it multiple times for multiple outlets. The award-winning podcast The Anti-Trans Hate Machine, among many others, covered it in detail in 2021.

    Here’s Rolling Stone in 2018.

    Facing such political headwinds, Christian-right activists desperately needed a fresh strategy. Provoking fear of infringement on religious liberty would likely only gain traction among fellow believers. They soon found an alternative in Shackelford’s home state, whose largest city was, at the time, led by a lesbian Democratic mayor. There, in Houston, a small band of well-connected far-right activists was resurrecting an approach from the oldest anti-LGBTQ playbook: to transform the civic debate about homosexuality into a panic about predators. As national activists fretted at the Ritz-Carlton, Houston players had already sketched out a plan to turn voters against nondiscrimination ordinances by framing the debate as one about safety for women and girls. It proved so potent that it prompted a shift in legislative strategy across the country.

    This is what I mean when I say that media is largely incompetent or malevolent when it comes to reporting on trans people. The US evangelical right, the European Catholic Church and right-wing horrors of various kinds have all deliberately and cynically targeted trans people as part of a wider war on LGBT+ people and women’s reproductive rights, they have done so in plain sight and they have provided endless evidence proving that that’s what they’re doing. And mainstream media has largely ignored all of that, or actively supported it. Not least the New York Times, which has spent much of the last six years amplifying every anti-trans dogwhistle it can.

    There is something very wrong with today’s journalism, and some of the worst people on Earth are exploiting it.

  • Breaking the law

    The Equalities and Human Rights Commission, EHRC for short, is technically the UK’s equalities watchdog. I say technically because in the last few years the Tories have been stuffing it with stooges who are actively and vocally hostile to minority groups. So it’s not a huge surprise to see it rubber-stamping the Tories’ war on trans people, even though its rubber-stamping is legally illiterate. So illiterate, in fact, that three (possibly four; it’s unclear today) of its legal directors have resigned.

    There’s a good explainer here on OpenDemocracy:

    Multiple former employees have alleged that opposing trans rights has become an institutional priority for the EHRC.

    As well as alleged resignations by staffers in response, two former legal directors have publicly decried the organisation’s apparent abandonment of the human rights values it is supposed to uphold.

    …Regardless of whether the letter becomes law, it signals a growing confidence to abandon human rights principles in order to further attack the trans community.

    I’m not going to lie. I’m scared by this. And I’m even more scared after reading this transcript of a meeting between the EHRC and Trans Media Watch’s Helen Belcher. 

    90:01 HB: Can you understand why trans people might be incredibly angry with you at the moment?

    90:04 silence

    90:06 MB: Yes

    silence

    90:09 HB: Do you think that means that you are trusted as the human rights body to defend our rights?

    90:16 silence

    What’s frightening about this is that it shows the EHRC’s utter contempt for trans people. They U-turned on trans rights over a year ago and still haven’t made the tiniest attempt to pretend there’s any justification for it, or to suggest there’s any evidence on which they based their U-turn or this more recent letter. The tories simply said FUCK TRANS PEOPLE and the EHRC jumped to attention, saluted and asked: how hard?

    One of my friends, the writer and trans health and policy expert Dr Ruth Pearce, is not mincing her words.

    I am done with being polite, and reasonable, and rational. These proposals represent a blatant attack not just on our civil rights but also on our rights to exist as human beings in public.

    …None of this is about details. It’s about terrorising trans people, and we are terrified.

    It’s about making our lives impossible. Ideally, we will disappear; our oppressors don’t really care if we suffer or we die. And we know, trans people know, that people around us are suffering and dying because we are actually a part of that community. I’ve spent the past 13 years producing research that formally documents the oppression we face, because when we simply say what we know is true because we are living that truth every day, nobody in power gives a shit.

    In the meantime, people in suits believe there are votes and clicks and money to be won through fighting culture wars, through distracting people from rising poverty and slow-burning climate collapse.

    Ruth is right; this is part of a bigger picture. I think in much the same way that attacks on gender recognition reform were a step on the way to the real goal, which was to change the Equality Act, I think the current EHRC move is part of a wider move towards EA repeal – something the likes of The Spectator and key anti-trans figures have been campaigning for for some time now alongside removing the Human Rights Act (something that’s in progress already) and withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights, to which we’re still a signatory.

    I’ve long since stopped expecting people to care about trans people’s rights. But the EA protects many other groups: pregnant people, people of colour, religious people, gay people, lesbian people, disabled people and so on. Removing that protection, which applies to everything from education and employment to housing, would be a significant step towards a low wage, no-rights economy where only the very rich and those considered ideologically pure are protected by the state.

    This is conservatism reduced to its most brutal. As Wilhoit’s Law puts it, “There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” Trans people are one of the out-groups, but we won’t be the only one.

    Dr Pearce:

    …If you’ve ever wondered “what would I have done in the face of rising fascism?” then wonder no longer.

    Your moment is here. The question is how you act.

  • Believe them

    This is a picture from an anti-trans rally in Melbourne yesterday. The men you see in the picture are neo-Nazis, members of the Nationalist Socialist Movement, and there are multiple videos and photos showing them proudly doing the Nazi salute. The reason you don’t see any swastikas is because displaying them in public in Victoria means fines of thousands of dollars.

    The rally was for Kelly-Jay Keen, aka Posie Parker, who is one of the most high profile members of the UK anti-trans movement. A supporter of far-right goon Tommy Robinson, Parker has long used an image of Barbie dressed in a Nazi uniform as her online avatar and has urged men to take guns into toilets to “protect women” from trans people. She has also posted videos promising that women who oppose her views will be “annihilated”.

    Remember the song “close to you” by The Carpenters? Replace birds with Nazis in the line “why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near?” and you’ve got a great theme tune for Parker. When she held a rally in Glasgow’s George Square a few weeks ago, the neo-nazis of Patriotic Alternative were there to lend their support. When she held a rally in Brighton in September, the neo-nazis of Hearts of Oak were there to lend their support. And when she held a rally in January, one of her speakers happily quoted Adolf Hitler while evidence emerged of Facebook discussions where her supporters invited known neo-Nazi groups along on the understanding that they wouldn’t say or do anything racist.

    I wonder what it is about the far right view-spouting, violance-advocating, Nazi-imagery-using Parker that makes her so attractive to neo-nazis? Maybe we’ll never know.

    The event, like Parker’s other events, was titled Let Women Speak. Here’s a photo from the event showing a woman trying to speak.

    The woman wanted to disagree with the views Parker and her fellow travellers were spouting. So Parker’s private security, cisgender men, grabbed her by the throat and wrestled her to the ground.

    It’s notable that even given all the above, very few people in the so-called Gender Critical movement are distancing themselves from this. They can’t help it if Nazis share their reasonable concerns! The organisers of the rally refuse to condemn the actual Nazis who rallied to their cause, claiming instead that the Nazis were actually there to stand with the trans people. Which is an interesting take on black-shirted thugs seig-heiling and shouting at trans people while waving a banner that says DESTROY PAEDO FREAKS.

    For the gendercrits, the presence of Nazis is actually helpful. They can look at the Nazis and persuade themselves that because they’re not that extreme, they can’t be the baddies.

    But of course, they are. The neo-Nazis at these rallies, and outside Drag Queen Story Hours, and outside school libraries, are the very people the gendercrits’ stochastic terrorism is designed to attract. The anti-trans movement can whip up the hatred, but when the thugs start cracking heads they can reassure themselves that they’re not the violent ones.

    When we tell you that the anti-trans movement is a fascist one, we’re not exaggerating. We’re not Rick from The Young Ones calling everything “fascist”. We’re pointing out that this is a movement that for many years has had strong, demonstrable links with actual neo-Nazis and their smiling, suited political enablers.

    As this cartoon puts it:

    When people tell you who they are, believe them.

  • Another smoking gun

    This, by Jude Doyle, is horrifying: more email evidence of how the Christian Right is pulling the strings of the anti-trans movement, this time in pushing the narrative of “detrans” people or “detransitioners”, people who undergo (or sometimes just propose to undergo) transition and then change their minds. The piece describes a huge and highly effective media machine that takes care of every detail, right down to writing the words it wants detransitioners to mime.

    At the beginning of her gender-critical career, Shupe’s public voice was more or less her own; that is, she actually gave the interviews and wrote the blog posts that appeared under her name. As Shupe entered the world of the Christian right, however, her voice was increasingly retooled or outright manufactured by her handlers.

    Sullivan quickly took over Shupe’s public image, instructing her to refer all requests for interviews or public appearances to him. In an email chain dated April 2019, he told her not to talk to a Washington Post reporter he deemed trans-friendly, and directed her to what he called “good Catholic media sources.” In another April 2019 email, Sullivan provided Shupe with what he called an “outline” for an op-ed, along with instructions for pitching: “You should shop it to the main liberal papers offering it to each one for 24 hours before offering it to a new one. After about four or five, you could then offer it to some more ‘conservative’ papers until you get one to bite.” The “outline” provided by Sullivan was a full essay of 1,609 words. One sentence was typed in red, indicating that Shupe should fill in the details herself. 

    This is clearly happening in the UK too.

    If you’re a reader of the (Glasgow) Herald, this bit might jump out at you:

    “ADF has some excellent writers familiar with the length and style that appeals to op-ed page editors, who could take even a very rough sketch or outline of thoughts from you—or just talk with you—and then create a draft that I think you will be very happy with.” 

    The ADF’s Lois McLatchie has popped up in The Herald’s pages several times recently as a columnist, and her columns are very good at what they do; unfortunately what they do is attempt to excuse the inexcusable and wage war on human rights. That The Herald publishes them without context is an indication not just of how effective the ADF’s machine is, but also how debased our journalistic institutions have become.

    The piece makes it clear, yet again, that none of this is about “protecting children” or “protecting women”. It’s a religious war.

    “I was gradually waking up to the fact that, you know, I was just a useful idiot, are the two words I would use,” Shupe tells me. “I got the vibe that they wanted me to help them, they wanted me to use them, but they wouldn’t trust somebody like me around their kids.”