Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • “Forbidden knowledge”

    One of the many frustrating things about the current anti-trans moral panic is that supposedly reputable journalists are fuelling it with bad faith “just asking questions”, the answers to which are easy to find.

    This damning piece about the New York Times is just as appropriate to many other publications, including most of the UK press.

    “The ordinary liberal reader may be squeamish about this or that aspect of abortion, but they are fundamentally committed to the idea that abortion patients and their doctors are the ones best equipped to figure out what to do with a pregnancy. It is not the job of some outside party or institution—a controlling parent or spouse, a church, a Republican legislative majority, a major national newspaper—to step in and second-guess what they do with their bodies. 

    For trans care, this liberal theory of autonomy and decision-making is cast aside. The theoretical Times reader is ready to consume 15,000 words about the risks, controversies, and downsides of contemporary gender treatment because, at bottom, they are assumed to be dismayed by it all. An abortion patient is really pregnant, but trans youth—children who “say they’re transgender,” as the Atlantic put it back in 2018—maybe aren’t really trans, or wouldn’t be, if they had more time and better information.”

  • Honesty

    We’ve been trying to tell you for a long time that the goal of anti-trans activism and legislation is to eliminate trans people from society and to prevent trans people from transitioning. And one of the reasons we know that is because the anti-trans activists and legislations make it very clear that that’s their goal.

    In a new New York Times article, one of the key figures behind that activism and legislation admits it. Terry Schilling, leader of the American Principles Project (which has been working in tandem with the Alliance Defending Freedom, one of the key drivers of anti-trans cases in the UK) put it baldly:

    Mr. Schilling, of the American Principles Project, confirmed that his organization’s long-term goal was to eliminate transition care. The initial focus on children, he said, was a matter of “going where the consensus is.”

    One of the most frustrating things about this whole movement is that they’ve never made a secret of their aims or their strategy: it’s been publicly documented (by the anti-trans movement) since evangelicals’ conferences and strategy documents back in 2017. And there’s similar honesty in the Women’s Declaration, which has been signed by most of the high-profile anti-trans activists and groups in the UK: it describes legal recognition of trans women as “discrimination against women and girls” and demands its “elimination” in service provision and in law.

    As Mallory Moore points out, “The Women’s Declaration is unambiguously a document for the abolition of trans people’s civil rights… It was written by Maureen O’Hara, Sheila Jeffreys (who has openly described trans women as “parasites”, and regularly as perverts and various other epithets), and Heather Brunskell-Evans (who is a major backer of antisemitic theories about the funding behind Transgenderism).”

    When people show you who they are, believe them.

  • Twenty-eight

    I’m one of the contributors to a new book, Twenty-Eight, which looks at the impact of the hateful anti-LGBT legislation that lasted from the late 1980s until the early 2000s.

    It’s generally agreed that Section 28 was a terrible stain on our history, but what people tend to forget is that the majority supported it. As Scott Cuthbertson of LGBTI Scotland recalls:

    Not a single poll supported the repeal of Section 28. That’s because a millionaire and the media collaborated to create a moral panic. Now the vast majority of the public are horrified that they ever treated LGBT people that way.

    He notes that in 2000, the year Scotland repealed the law (England was a few years later), a poll for the Daily Mail found that 54% of respondents wanted to keep the legislation in place.

    Many of the pundits and publications that contributed to the moral panic over LGBT+ people then are doing the same now.

  • It was never about sports

    This, by Erin Reed, is a good analysis of the Alliance Defending Freedom’s war on trans people and its use of a gullible/complicit media.

    A ban on gender affirming care is not the endgame here. With attacks on gay people rising through book bans and Don’t Say Gay or Trans bills, all LGBTQ+ rights are in the crosshairs. Terry Schilling of the American Principles Project makes that clear when he claims that the debate over gay marriage was a sham and that “essentially we went from Obergefell and gay marriage to now sex changes for gay minors, hormone treatments, and puberty blockers.”

    The ADF is a key driver of the anti-trans movement in the UK and in Scotland too, with its representatives given columns in the Scottish and national press without any explanation of who they are and what they represent; they typically provide witnesses in anti-trans legal cases too, such as the (now reversed) ban on puberty blockers in the UK.

    The anti-trans movement in the US is a Christian Right assault on LGBT+ people. And so is the UK one, although it tries to convince itself otherwise. Whether it’s Scottish Nationalists standing with the right-wing Christian fundamentalists, bored millionaires publicly supporting avowed anti-feminist Christian theocrats or self-proclaimed left-wing writers throwing themselves into the warm embrace of the Daily Mail, The Times and The Telegraph, anti-trans bigots in the UK are doing the work of the religious right.

    A key part of the Christian Right’s strategy is to frame trans people’s basic human rights as a “debate”, in much the same way creationists pushed the idea of “teaching the debate” as a way to get fundamentalist religious beliefs into classrooms. As Katelyn Burns writes in Xtra, that “debate” is no such thing: it’s a constant barrage of anti-trans propaganda. Whether due to malevolence or incompetence, supposedly liberal journalists are doing the devil’s work.

     

  • “How come you never thought it before?”

    There’s an article in today’s (Glasgow) Herald claiming that a ban on conversion therapy will “criminalise parents”, throw psychotherapists in prison and have you arrested if you question your child’s gender or sexuality.

    It’s nonsense, and it’s based almost entirely on baseless claims by the Christian Institute – the same Christian Institute that the same newspaper described as anti-LGBT “Christian Fundamentalists” in 2017 when it had yet to join the anti-trans culture war.

    As The Herald reported back then:

    The charity has previously campaigned against gambling, abortion, euthanasia and homosexuality, opposing same sex marriages and seeking to raise the age of consent. The charity once produced an organ-donor style plastic card that read: “In the event of my death, I do not want my children to be adopted by homosexuals”.

    None of that context is in today’s piece, despite being extremely relevant. It’s almost as if that’s a calculated editorial decision.

    This column, from the Belfast Media Group, is doing the rounds today although it was published last summer.

    if you are indeed one of those suddenly convinced that the trans issue is desperately worrying, ask yourself this question: How come you never thought it  before?

    Is it a coincidence that you suddenly started thinking and fretting about it at exactly the same time as the Tory press started to fixate upon it at a time when the Conservative Party is in dire trouble?

    You never cared about trans women in toilets, even though they’ve been there for decades and never did you any harm. You never cared about trans women athletes because they’ve been competing in the Olympics for 20 years. You’re only worried about them now because the right-leaning media is telling you to. Last time it was migrants. Time before that teachers. Time before that junior doctors. Time before that judges. Time before that people on benefits. Time before that gay people and HIV. Time before that… 

    When we do ban conversion therapy, like so many other countries have done and will do, it’ll become very clear that the fundamentalists lied. But don’t forget who passed them the mic to spread those lies.

  • “Stop talking to each other and start hurting each other.”

    This, by Cat Valente, is a superb piece about the inevitable ruin of social media – a pattern that repeats again and again.

    I’m so tired of just harmlessly getting together with other weird geeks and going to what amounts to a digital pub after work and waking up one day to find every pint poisoned. Over and over again. Like the poison wants us specifically. Like it knows we will always make its favorite food: vulnerability, connection, difference.

    As someone who’s been in online spaces since the early 90s I’ve seen the pattern Valente describes so many times.

    I’ve joined online communities, found so much to love there, made friends and created unique spaces that truly felt special, felt like places worth protecting. And they’ve all, eventually, died. For the same reasons and through the same means, though machinations came from a parade of different bad actors. It never really mattered who exactly killed and ate these little worlds. The details. It’s all the same cycle, the same beasts, the same dark hungers.

    Incidentally, if you’re wondering why I’m back blogging it’s because of what Valente writes about in that piece. In recent years Twitter was a much more convenient way to connect with people, but now that Musk is running around like a comic book villain opening all the doors of Arkham Asylum it’s very clear that what we’ve always called a hellsite is going to become considerably more hellish.

    I know people who are effectively trapped on Twitter at the moment: they hate what it’s becoming but it’s where they live online; it’s where they’ve spent years building connections, and networks, and in many cases careers. They can’t just move to Mastodon and replicate all of that. So because Twitter can be and has been sold to someone who doesn’t give a fuck about them, everything they’ve made is now under threat. Twitter has become a Titanic and they’re clinging on for dear life.

    As Valente writes in the linked article, this is not new. It’s more extreme because of Twitter’s place in the culture, but it’s not new. People build communities online on platforms they don’t own or control, and sooner or later the people who do own and control those platforms destroy everything that was good about them. It’s more profitable to have people buying things and hurting each other.

     

  • “The politest possible version of blood libel”

    An absolutely blistering piece by Ben Miller on the Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs:

    I have been expecting a mass shooting at a gay bar for at least a year. This is not because I’m clairvoyant, but because I am a gay person with eyes and ears. The mass-murder at Club Q in Colorado Springs on November 19 was the result of what is now all-too-familiar rhetoric—a campaign that is both a cynical attempt to gain political power and a conscious effort to inspire stochastic violence that murders gay and trans people on the theory that there should be fewer of us.

    The only reason this hasn’t happened in the UK yet is because we don’t have the same access to guns. The rhetoric may be (slightly) milder, albeit not online, but there is the same intent: to  create a climate of fear and rage against trans people that encourages someone to act violently. It’s hardly a new tactic: the line “will no-one rid me of this turbulent priest?” is attributed to Henry the second, and he was kicking about in the twelfth century.

    Miller:

    What liberals are desperate to call “legitimate debates” are united with the cruder, crasser incitement of less-sophisticated reactionaries by the same underlying argument: that some nebulous group of queer and trans “activists” are pushing an “agenda” that might permanently mutilate children, who must be protected from the threat. Matt Walsh and Chris Rufo say it’s drag queens committing sexual abuse in gay bars. Abigail Shrier says it’s the “transgender craze seducing our daughters” into “Irreversible Damage.” The liberal outlets describe it as misguided doctors and activists going too far, contributing to a social contagion of trans kids. All of them are making versions of the same argument designed to convince different audiences of the same age-old blood libel about queer people: that we are preternatural abusers from whom your children need protecting.

  • Things that are different are not the same

    A typically incisive piece by Parker Molloy on the censorious clowns who claim that legitimate criticism of what they say and write is the same as the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie.

    That is the problem people have with the “cancel culture” discourse. It’s selective, it flattens important distinctions between horrific acts (beheadings and physical attacks!) and free speech (dissent, boycotts, protests). The “cancel culture” brigade sure loves to claim that speech it doesn’t like (dissent, boycotts, protests) is a threat to speech, while sitting mostly silently on actual threats to free expression, like the Republican plan to use obscenity laws to make certain books on LGBTQ topics illegal to sell, the Republican-led purging of books from school and local libraries, and the Republican-led re-writing of textbook standards to remove “divisive” issues. Funny how none of that is “cancel culture,” and yet they think someone speaking out against J.K. Rowling’s factually incorrect rants about trans people (i.e. using their freedom of speech) represents a threat to the very concept of “free speech.” The reason is simple: one of these advances their own agenda, the other doesn’t.

  • An evergreen post

    I posted something on Twitter last night that I could post pretty much any time, any day, in response to someone doing something utterly vile: trans people have been trying to warn you about this person, this organisation or this publication for years.

  • Leopards

    With crushing predictability, the faux-feminists in the UK press have decided that the real villain in the decades-long plot to overturn Roe vs Wade en route to establishing a Christian theocracy is… trans women.

    The argument, if you can call it that, is simple: trans men wanted to be included in discussions of reproductive healthcare; that somehow erased women; because there is no such thing as a woman any more the US Supreme Court banned abortion. So it’s all trans women’s fault.

    Better to concoct a ludicrous conspiracy theory than admit the truth: much of our media has spent years ignoring the Christian Right’s attacks on LGBT+ people and reproductive rights, preferring instead to publish a constant torrent of Christian Right anti-trans talking points and to platform Christian Right-funded anti-trans groups.

    As the internet cliche goes: I can’t believe leopards are eating my face, says woman who voted for the Leopards Eating Your Face Party.

    The simple fact is that the global anti-trans movement is part of the global anti-gender movement, whose target isn’t just trans people. It wants an end to same-sex marriage, to LGBT+ rights, to contraception, to abortion, to human rights for anybody who isn’t a socially conservative cisgender straight Christian.

    You couldn’t ask for a better example of how this is all connected than the anti-abortion goons intimidating and filming people outside the Sandyford Clinic in Glasgow. They’re there to target women seeking abortions, but – happily for the goons – the Sandyford’s other services mean they get to intimidate people going for sexual health services, for rape counselling and for transgender health care. Over the weekend they moved to the City Centre to harangue people going to Pride, because of course they did. The war on women’s reproductive freedom and the war on LGBT+ people are the same war.

    And this morning there was another example. On BBC Scotland, the discussion about whether we should have buffer zones around abortion clinics – zones that would separate the Sandyford clowns from vulnerable people – invited the ADF to contribute.

    The ADF isn’t just the organisation responsible for funding many anti-abortion groups around the world or the organisation involved heavily in anti-abortion legislation in the US, including the Mississippi case that led to the Supreme Court overturning Roe vs Wade; it’s also the organisation that provides “experts” in anti-trans legal cases in the UK, and which promotes intolerance and hatred towards LGBT+ people globally. And part of its job is to launder that hatred, by providing nice-seeming, media trained people who will absolutely come on air to discuss their ‘reasonable concerns’.

    Opendemocracy:

    Another US group that’s long tried to influence classic “culture war” cases in the UK is the anti-abortion “dark money”-funded legal army Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). openDemocracy revealed in 2019 that its international wing had spent nearly half a million pounds on lobbying in the UK over just two years. The group does not disclose who its donors are, and has even gone to the US Supreme Court to defend donor secrecy.

    ADF’s lawyers have previously said they are working to ensure ‘that bad European precedents don’t spread further in Europe, then across the sea to America’. It worked on the high-profile ‘gay cake’ cases in both the UK and US, defending Christian bakers using free speech arguments.

    ADF has also publicly opposed protest-free “buffer zones” around abortion clinics and supported calls for “freedom of conscience” provisions to enable medical staff to object to providing legal abortion services. And it claims the UK government adopted its recommendations on free speech and academic freedom at universities.

    Rather than platforming them, journalists should be investigating them.