Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • Incompetence and malevolence

    A superb piece by Parker Molloy on the awful people dominating the discourse around trans people.

    When you’re discussing a topic solely on the grounds of whether or not someone is allowed to talk about something, you’re able to completely sidestep ever having to address the actual content. If you want to have a “discussion” about something, then discuss it.

    But instead, these guys all stand around having a “discussion” about whether or not they’re even allowed to have discussions, despite regularly having this content-free meta-debate in front of massive audiences that critics can’t match.

    It allows them to avoid ever having to actually say anything. And they know it.

    It’s a typically good, well-researched and cited piece, and it goes to the heart of the problem over the so-called trans debate: it’s not a debate. One side publishes or broadcasts a constant flow of bullshit, and as soon as they’re criticised they retreat behind their cancel culture wagons.

    And that’s because all of these stories “just asking questions” aren’t about trying to figure out a world where we can all exist, but what society should do about us and tous. We are not included in this discussion, and our efforts to participate in it at our smaller blogs and newsletters, etc. never gain traction. Instead, it’s, “Hey, look, a trans person tweeted an insult at me, see how unreasonable they are?”

    We have a right to be a part of this conversation, and when we push back on things like publishing a glowing review of a book written by an anti-trans activist that’s filled with straight-up false information that demonstrates that the book hasn’t been fact-checked properly (see? there’s that word again, properly) and is written by someone who is friendly with the author, it’s not us saying, “OMG, you’re not allowed to write about this! OMG! Stoppppppp!” it’s us saying, “You’re not upholding even the tiniest, most minimal standards. You are letting your biases run wild and you are failing at the very concept of journalism.”

    Not to mention that a year later, the author of that book (that got the glowing NYT review) would call trans people “a huge problem to a sane world,” “damaged,” and then say she wanted “reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition.”

    As Sally Claire recalls her university journalism tutor saying: “If someone says it’s raining, and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the fucking window and find out which is true.” Too many journalists would rather brick the fucking windows up so nobody can call out their incompetence and malevolence.

  • A scandal at Sandyford

    The Sandyford clinic is where Glasgow’s gender clinic is based, alongside various sexual health and victim counselling services. I’ve been attending it since 2017, and I’ve been meaning to write a proper piece about it for some time: visiting in person, even before COVID, was like playing the abandoned-hospital level of a horror video game. Empty corridor after empty corridor, your footsteps echoing, sitting alone in a large waiting room wondering if the next person you see will be a psychiatrist or a serial killer.

    There were protests outside it yesterday by the loons and cowards of the Scottish Family Party, who said they were coming at 11am to brick up the entrance to protest its role in women’s reproductive freedom. In the end they arrived at 8am with cardboard boxes printed with bricks, took their photo and then hid at the Mitchell Library until the colourful and camp counter-protest – which attracted more than 100 people – was over, returning afterwards to take another photo at the wrong building.

    The moon howlers of the SFP weren’t there to protest its trans services, although I’m sure that was a bonus. But the Sandyford Clinic has been the subject of ridiculous scaremongering for years now, with anti-trans bigots and cynical Conservatives claiming yet again that the clinic is “experimenting on children” and fast-tracking them into surgery. The fact that children don’t get gender-affirming surgery and nobody is experimenting on anybody is an inconvenient truth they prefer not to address.

    This morning, The National newspaper printed a story about a scandal at the Sandyford. But it’s not the invented one of the bigots. It’s the real one anyone attending can tell you about.

    Just two psychiatrists, each working one day a week, cover adult services for the whole west of Scotland. The young person’s team is soon to consist of a single person, who will work half the week and cover all of the country

    I know both psychiatrists, and they appear to be good people. But they’re not magic people. They’re massively overworked in a department that’s desperately underfunded and understaffed. One position has been advertised for years now and nobody has applied, because who’d want to work in an environment like that?

    “There’s this massive waiting list and there’s going to be loads of scrutiny on you and people are going to be actively campaigning for your service to close down and there’s 1000 newspaper articles written about your client br every week. When you put it like that, nobody is going to want to do it.”

    When I self-referred to the Sandyford in 2016, it took 11 months before I was offered an initial assessment visit. Officially the adult waiting list is nearly five years long now. Anecdotally I’m hearing it’s even longer than that. And the lack of staff means the healthcare you do get is inadequate. Last May a really important appointment was made for me; nobody informed me about it and I didn’t discover it had been made until November. The earliest next appointment was in February.

    If this were any other branch of healthcare, the coverage would be deafening. But I think it’s a safe bet that the genuine scandal at the Sandyford, one that’s affecting the healthcare of a small but significant group of people, will get less coverage than any scaremongering. And that too should be a national scandal.

  • Murdoch’s minions want Section 28 back

    The Times has posted its latest culture war piece, in which parents are “shocked” by “graphic sex education in school”. Apparently “one mother says her son has ‘gone from finding out Santa Claus doesn’t exist to being told about anal sex’’, which is definitely a thing that actually happened.

    It’s a good piece to study if you’re interested in how culture wars are waged, though. The “graphic sex education” it talks about doesn’t exist, but the Times uses innuendo to suggest otherwise. The term “anal fun and frolics” that has The Times clutching its pearls is from a personal website written by an adult for other adults. The song about masturbation The Times refers to is from a different website, also by and for adults.

    What The Times is doing here, and not in a subtle way, is trying to make you scared of the queers again. The article opens with a 12-year-old apparently having a panic attack because someone told her trans people exist; the body copy’s deliberate focus on anal sex is code for The Gays. And telling people that the queers and the gays are coming for your kids is what brought us Section 28, which Murdoch’s minions clearly want to bring back.

    Update, 11 March

    The source of the story was The New Social Covenant Unit, an evangelical organisation co-chaired by Miriam Cates MP and Danny Kruger MP whose director Imogen Sinclair works for the Conservative Christian Fellowship. To describe them as social and religious conservatives would be an understatement.

    NSCU’s politics are stated in greater detail in their manifesto “12 propositions for a new social convenant”8. This manifesto is deeply socially conservative on the subject of marriage and family, claiming that marriage equality for same sex couples “removed [marriage’s] physical basis” and that the right of couples to end a marriage had “removed its emotional and practical basis, and voided the marriage vow itself”. The 12 propositions refer to the primary purpose of marriage as “regulation of baby-making”, implicitly valuing fertile, heterosexual couples over all other forms of families.

    The 12 propositions rail against immigration and “globalism”, promoting the antisemitic conspiracy theory9that “cultural Marxism”, purported to be an obscure school of political thought originating from largely Jewish academics in the 1950s, has infiltrated political and academic institutions with the aim of destroying the family and Western civilisation.

  • Hate never dies

    This week, MP Jess Phillips spent over five minutes in parliament reading the names of women and girls murdered, or believed to have been murdered, by men. One of those girls was trans teen Brianna Ghey, whose alleged killers are awaiting trial.

    The furious, hateful, inhuman response from the “reasonable concerns”, “protect women” crowd managed to shock me, and I thought I was pretty much unshockable by now.

    Part of the fury is because the list that Phillips uses is compiled by a very vocal anti-trans activist; Ghey’s name was (rightly) added by the MP.

    As Trans Safety Network’s Jess O’Thompson writes:

    “It is deeply concerning that transphobic rhetoric in this country is so prevalent and so vile that gender critical activists feel bold enough to jump on the grave of a dead child… This is not about single-sex spaces or safeguarding – there is no way to be trans which is not an affront to them. This pile on shows the entire movement for what it is – a vicious attack rooted in the hatred of trans people and our community, even our dead children.”

  • The smoking gun

    Today, The Telegraph and Radio 4 gave extensive coverage to a brand new anti-trans group supported by various famous transphobes. Meanwhile in America, Mother Jones reports on the smoking gun that proves collusion between evangelical Christians, right-wing politicians and supposedly grass-roots lobby groups. Many of the key players are also active in UK anti-trans activism.

    “The message was one in a trove of emails obtained by Mother Jones between Deutsch and representatives of a network of activists and organizations at the forefront of the anti-trans movement. They show the degree to which these activists shaped… repressive legislation, a version of which was signed into law in February, and the tactics, alliances, and goals of a movement that has sought to foist their agenda on a national scale.”

    Not just on a national scale. On a global scale.

    “The emails demonstrate close collaboration between groups working behind the scenes to push bills banning transgender health care, including ADF—which has defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people in Europe—and the ACPeds—which has opposed adoption by gay couples and supported conversion therapy for LGBTQ youth. In recent years, ADF has drafted legislation banning trans children from using school restrooms or playing on school sports teams that align with their gender identity. (Both groups are also staunchly anti-abortion; ADF, which drafted the Mississippi abortion ban at the heart of the case that overturned Roe v. Wade, is currently representing ACPeds in a closely-watched lawsuit to ban an abortion pill, mifepristone, nationally.)”

    Full details of the years of leaked emails are still emerging but from what I’ve seen already there’s plenty of really horrific stuff in there. Anyone who still believes that this is about protecting children or reasonable concerns about women’s safety is delusional.

  • Lethal words

    Last week at the US Republican CPAC conference, Daily Wire host Michael Knowles said that “for the good of society… transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely” to loud applause. He now claims that he didn’t mean that trans people should be eradicated; just “transgenderism”.

    Let’s try that with some other isms, shall we? How about, “for the good of society… Judaism must be eradicated from public life entirely”? No? “Islamism must be eradicated from public life entirely?” No? “Catholicism must be eradicated from public life entirely?”

    “Transgenderism” is primarily used as a pejorative term as a synonym for trans people, but in its most neutral sense it means having the quality or characteristic of being transgender. It’s not something we do. It’s who we are. So eliminating transgenderism means eliminating us.

    This is not a fringe view or limited to the US Right. Most of the UK anti-trans groups have signed a declaration demanding the elimination of “transgenderism”, and the founding text of the so-called Gender Critical movement is Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire, which says that “transsexualism” should be “morally mandated out of existence.” Author Helen Joyce, a leading UK anti-trans voice and part of the anti-trans Sex Matters lobby group, has said that trans people are a “huge problem for a sane world” and that the number of transitioned people should be “reduced”.

    This is genocidal rhetoric. It’s pretty clear that a lot of people don’t understand what genocide actually means, and they claim that as nobody’s currently putting trans people in camps then it isn’t genocide. But that’s not true. The Holocaust Museum notes that there are five ways to conduct genocide “with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part” a group. Killing is the best known one, but there are others. The five ways are:

    1. Killing members of the group
    2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
    3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
    4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
    5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

    Withholding vital, life-saving healthcare or forcing trans people to detransition meets 2, 3 and 5; making it effectively impossible for trans people to exist in society is number 3; refusing to legally recognise trans people without them having surgery, effectively demanding sterilisation, is 4; conversion therapy and refusing to recognise trans people’s identities is a clear example of 5.

    All of these things are in the anti-trans bills in the US, which include forced detransition, bans on public participation (including wearing your own clothes in public) and even legislation that would enable children to be kidnapped if you believed they might be exposed to trans-affirming support.

    Quibbling over language is a distraction. You cannot separate “transgenderism” from trans people, and that means you cannot eliminate the former without the latter. All the language does is enable you to try and pretend you aren’t saying what you are very clearly saying.

  • Say their names

    While the press continue to pretend that people who aren’t trans are being rushed into irreversible medical treatment, trans people continue to die from inadequate healthcare and disgracefully long waiting lists.

    The coroner’s report into the suicide of 21-year-old Northern Irish trans woman Sophie Williams, a report released this week, found that multiple failings by the NHS contributed to her death. This is from her family’s solicitor:

    “Two days before her death Sophie was informed by the Tavistock GIC that the four years that she had spent waiting for a first appointment at Belfast’s equivalent GIC service would not be recognised by the Tavistock, news that was devastating to Sophie. Sophie died on 20 May 2021 having taken an overdose of prescription medication.”

    This week would have been the 21st birthday of another young British trans woman, Alice Litman. She too took her own life after languishing for years on a waiting list. According to The Good Law Project:

    “Alice’s family believes her death was partly a result of not getting the care she needed, because she was transgender… at the time of her death, Alice had been on an NHS waitlist for nearly 3 years. Alice’s family feel that this long wait may have been too much for her to bear.”

    If Alice and Sophie weren’t trans, their deaths would be national scandals – as would the murder of 16-year-old Brianna Ghey just weeks ago. But it’s very clear that to much of our media and many politicians, trans lives simply don’t matter.

  • Poisoned pens

    Jude Doyle knocks it out of the park yet again with an incisive analysis of the increasingly poisonous New York Times:

    “Transphobia has been an unacknowledged norm of “objective” journalism for a very long time. It’s been an unacknowledged cultural norm for much longer. Yet it is still transphobia—still bigotry, still lethal—no matter how unconscious it may be. In 2023, when trans people are at the red-hot centre of a culture war and trans healthcare is being attacked in dozens of state legislatures across the nation, it is not a form of ignorance that any journalist can afford.”

    The superb If Books Could Kill podcast has just published an episode about the same thing, and comes to very similar conclusions about the polite bigotry of the paper of record.

    You could write a very similar article or episode about the UK.

    As Doyle also writes – and this is something that’s widely known among trans people who pay attention to the media, but still utterly shocking to see when it’s stated so baldly – “It’s a tough topic, media transphobia. It’s complex. It’s nuanced. You can almost forget that top editor Ian Katz — formerly the deputy editor of the Guardian, then the editor of BBC’s Newsnight, now head of programming for Channel 4 — was, until quite recently, married to Justine Roberts, co-founder of TERF forum Mumsnet, and that they were together for twenty-five years.”

    The links between Mumsnet, the so-called Gender Critical movement and their cheerleaders in the press and broadcast media would make a great Private Eye piece. Or at least it would if Private Eye weren’t part of the same incestuous bubble of bigotry.

  • The Onion nails it again

    When The Onion strikes, it strikes hard.

    It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible

    We just made Quentin up, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean stories like his aren’t potentially happening everywhere, constantly. Good journalism is about finding those stories, even when they don’t exist. It’s about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like, then offering misleading evidence in service of preordained editorial conclusions.

  • RIP, Brianna

    This is a photo of Brianna Ghey, the 16-year-0ld girl who was stabbed to death at the weekend. She was trans, but the newspapers didn’t know that at first – and when they found out, the Times went back through its news story about her and removed every reference to her being a girl.

    As journalist Mic Wright points out, it’s notable that the reporting of this particular murder – of a young, pretty, photogenic, white teenage girl – has not been reported in the same way the murders of other pretty young white girls have been.

    It’s possible to believe — and I do — that there are two terrible and cruel things at work here: Newspapers are both obscuring the relevance of Brianna’s identity and discussing her being trans in the worst possible way by deadnaming her and making other insinuations.

    We don’t yet know why Brianna was killed; the police are currently investigating whether it was, as seems likely, a hate crime. Whatever the explanation, the response within the LGBT+ community is one of absolute heartbreak. We have been trying to warn about the rising tide of anti-trans hatred in the media and online, and how that hatred is manifesting itself in the streets: hate crimes have skyrocketed, particularly against trans people, and against trans women and girls in particular.

    We’re heartbroken not just because of the senseless loss of life. We’re heartbroken because for years, we have been telling you that this is the inevitable outcome of demonising, defaming and scaremongering about trans people. The so-called gender critical people pretending to be sad about her death are only sad because it’s bad optics for their movement. They’re crying crocodile tears, because this is exactly what they want: fewer trans people. Trans people are very familiar with people urging them to kill themselves, with people trying to prevent them from getting the healthcare that’s proven to reduce mental distress, with people urging others to take action to prevent them from existing safely in society.

    As Helen Joyce, writer of the utterly disgraceful Trans and one of the UK’s most prominent anti-trans activists has said, trans people – all trans people – are “a huge problem for a sane world” and we must reduce their numbers. It looks like she’s getting her wish.