Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • 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.

  • “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.