Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • Radicalisation in real time

    Trans people and allies have been warning about the links between anti-trans activism and the far right for several years now, and this weekend has delivered a frightening example. The whole story is detailed here, but here’s the executive summary (updated a day later with additional details):

    • An evangelical Christian blogger produced a video claiming that a trans woman had been exposing herself to multiple children and adults in an LGBT+ friendly spa in LA.
    • There is no evidence to substantiate any of her claims.
    • Her video contains no evidence that the event happened.
    • Despite significant publicity, nobody has come forward to corroborate her claims.
    • The spa appears to have been the subject of online anti-LGBT+ activism for the last several months.
    • Far-right goons decided that a local trans woman was the culprit (in an event that does not appear to have happened) and sent her multiple death threats. The woman had not been at the spa.
    • Far-right and neo-Nazi groups spread the video, as did anti-trans activists.
    • Far-right and neo-Nazi groups organised a protest at the spa. Many of them turned up in military-style armour and carried weapons including metal bars, knives and pepper spray. One of the thugs was carrying a baseball bat with the Trump logo on it.
    • Far-right thugs including members of neo-Nazi group the Proud Boys attacked journalists and counter-protestors.
    • Two people were stabbed by one far-right thug, a middle-aged white man dressed in military-style gear. He stabbed a counter-protester multiple times in the leg; that person is now in hospital.
    • The same man accidentally stabbed another far-right protester in the arm. Images of the stabbing have been shared by multiple “gender critical” accounts claiming that the woman was the victim of a trans person or trans ally, not one of her fellow fascists. This is not true.
    • In addition to images of the stabbing, UK anti-trans activists have been sharing doctored footage by notorious far-right figures to try and perpetuate lies that the violence was perpetrated by trans people or allies rather than fascist or fascist-adjacent thugs. Some of the earliest such posts were on Mumsnet; they’re now being spread by UK journalists.

    I’m reading a lot about QAnon and other right-wing conspiracies right now, and this has frightening echoes of Pizzagate: the baseless claim that a child sex ring was operating out of a pizza parlour in Washington, a claim that lead a heavily armed man to visit the parlour intent on using violence to free the non-existent victims. Many people still believe that such a ring existed.

    As the Trans Safety Network article linked above puts it:

    Anti-trans tensions are reaching an incredibly worrying threshold, where instagram videos alleging wrongdoing, without any actual evidence of wrongdoing are enough to conjure right wing lynch mobs. In the wake of the protests, prominent UK anti-trans journalists and organisers have shared information from curated far-right sources… misrepresenting events is a well known tool of radicalisation and recruitment for the far-right. Extremist right wing provocateurs are creating partisan versions and hiding behind gender critical women and talking points to provide cover while they harass and terrorise innocent transgender people.

    The people sharing the far-right posts are not far-right activists: they’re liberal journalists who write for papers such as The Guardian. This is how radicalisation happens.

    Writing in The Herald, Neil Mackay quotes Dr Joe Mulhall, a leading expert on the far right.

    MULHALL notes that the culture war is also radicalising many – often online – and leading them towards far=right politics. “If someone gets tipped one way on the trans issue, for example, you start to see them echoing anti-Black Lives Matter stuff,” says Mulhall. “We see more anti-trans content from within the far right than against any other minority today.”

    English Defence League (EDL) figures “disproportionally talk about trans rights way more than Muslims now”.

    “There’s a debate to be had,” says Mulhall, about issues like women-only bathrooms although he personally says he’d leave that to “trans people”. “However, at a base level, wherever you fall on those debates, the trans community is being attacked by the far right. Whatever you think about trans athletes in the Olympics, it’s unacceptable trans people are being attacked.”

    The far right sees trans hatred as a “route to the mainstream. Talking about Jews isn’t. It ostracises you. But if you talk about trans issues it opens the doors to the mainstream. The far right are saying things they know will be echoed in the comment pages”.

  • Careless Wispa

    Over the weekend, Allison Bailey from the so-called LGB Alliance proved how divorced anti-trans activists are from the reality-based community. On discovering a Wispa bar and a lemon in her garden, she immediately came to the obvious conclusion: trans activists were trying to kill her dog.

    Nobody, least of all trans activists, was trying to kill her dog.

    The chocolate and lemon had been thrown there accidentally by the kids next door, who came round to apologise.

    It’s funny in a bleak “this clown is taken seriously by the UK press and the BBC” kind of way. But it also demonstrates the lunacy and paranoia of the anti-trans movement. Bailey’s ridiculous claim will become another anti-trans “fact” trotted out on social media and probably mainstream media too for years to come.

  • You can’t trust this story about the National Trust

    The National Trust did no such thing. It merely told its volunteers that if they wanted to wear face paint or glitter to mark Pride month, they wouldn’t get into trouble for doing it.

    See also: Stonewall supposedly banning the word “mother” or any of the other anti-trans culture war stories infesting both right- and left-wing media.

    This isn’t just disgraceful. It’s dangerous. This week in Hungary, the “anti-woke” government – of which Spiked and other right-wing bullshit factories are very fond – brought in some of the most repressive anti-LGBT+ legislation we’ve seen outside Russia to widespread public support from people who’ve been consistently lied to about “gender ideology” and “woke” policies.

  • Read it and weep

    This is where all the anti-trans hysteria in the press and online leads: a young mum savagely beaten with a crowbar by a gang of 13 people for no other reason than they thought she was trans.

    Lauren Garrison was enjoying a night out with her friends when she was called a “dirty d***” and a “tr****” by a gang of 13 youths outside the Three Fishes pub in Chapel Road, Worthing on Monday.

    After confronting the group of ten boys and three girls, the 28-year-old was attacked with a crowbar, leaving her unconscious.

    The mother-of-one suffered a concussion and fears she may be left with permanent damage after bursting a blood vessel in her eye.

    As Jane Carnall, aka EdinburghEye, writes on Twitter:

    The woman this gang of thugs attacked had been visually identified as trans by these men & women who, like the anti-trans activists I was arguing with yesterday, were sure they could just “tell” when a woman is trans or cis.

    The crime these 13 anti-trans thugs committed is a transphobic and homophobic hate crime, They beat her, they said “trans people should be shot”, they used slurs – they attacked her violently because they had used that visual “check” & decided she wasn’t “really” a woman.

  • Glasgow to exit lockdown in 2093

    I know it’s necessary but I’m long past the point of expecting Glasgow’s COVID restrictions to be lifted any time soon: that’s us going into week 38 of the temporary 2-week restrictions that we’ve been living under since September. As Fraser Stewart pointed out on Twitter, there are Glaswegians who fell pregnant at the start of those measures who’ll be due to give birth soon.

  • From “just asking questions” to this, in six months

    In Texas, bill SB1646 would make it illegal for parents to support their trans children. Merely consenting to a doctor’s prescription of puberty blockers would be child abuse and cause to remove the child from their parents.

    As writer Cassie Celeste put it on Twitter:

    We’ve gone from “just asking questions” to this in six fucking months. Listen to us when we tell you what the consequences of platforming transphobic thought are going to be.

    Here’s a good round-up of where this hatred is coming from and why it’s getting worse, with journalists proposing solutions to “the trans question” in chilling echoes of history.

    “The queers are coming for your children” is the oldest anti-gay slur, but it’s alive and well not just in Texan courtrooms but in Scottish political discourse. Alex Salmond’s Alba Party caused online uproar over the weekend when it falsely claimed that LGBT+ organisations want to reduce the age of consent to 10 years old. The allegations are completely untrue but have been echoed by the usual hateful groups such as the LGB Alliance and For Women Scot.

    It was good to see the widespread revulsion, but the very same people have been making equally vile allegations about trans people and trans-supportive charities for three years now and nobody seemed to have a problem with that. Quite the opposite: they have been repeatedly platformed and amplified by our press, politicians and media personalities.

    This is how you can go from “just asking questions” to legalised hatred.

  • When the facts don’t fit, fix the facts

    One of the problems with the Christian Right’s claims of trans kids being rushed into surgery is that trans kids aren’t being rushed into surgery. And that’s inconvenient when you’re trying to pass anti-trans legislation on the basis of protecting children from exactly that.

    What’s a bigot to do?

    Simple. Redefine the definition of kids to include adults.

    I’m not kidding. In North Carolina, anti-trans Republican lawmakers have classed adults aged 18 to 21 as minors.

    This enables them to do two things. One, claim that minors are being given cross-sex hormones and/or surgery, medical procedures that are indeed available to adults aged 18 to 21. And two, if the legislation is successful it means they can block healthcare for some adults as well as all teenagers.

    The proposed legislation – which, thankfully, is unlikely to pass – makes it very clear what the real agenda is behind all of this. In addition to banning healthcare for trans people, it would also compel state employees to notify their parents in writing if their child displays “gender nonconformity” or expresses a desire to be treated in a way that is “incompatible” with the gender they were assigned at birth. These bills, of which there are far too many, are based on deeply regressive stereotypes of masculinity and femininity that want to keep women barefoot and pregnant and LGBT+ people in the closet.

  • Friends in the Right places

    This week, tedious contrarian Julie Burchill’s new publisher was revealed to be white supremacist blogger “Miss Britannia”. Despite expressing her contempt for gay men, the blogger was a loud supporter of the LGB Alliance. Isn’t it funny how people who hate gay and lesbian people seem so drawn to an organisation that is supposedly pro-gay and lesbian people?

    Trans people, particularly trans people of colour, have been trying to raise the alarm about the links between anti-trans activism and far right groups for several years now. As far as I’m aware, not a single UK newspaper has covered it at all.

    The trans safety network has a good overview of the key players, most of whom are very well known.

  • Where are our allies?

    This, by journalist and trans dad Freddy McConnell, is very good.

    trans equality has not gone from progress to standing still. Under this parliament, and the watch of our current so-called equality ministers, the UK has lurched from progress to a measurable loss of rights for trans people, both young and old.

    If our allies in government and media do not become more vigilant and proactive as a matter of emergency, trans people – friends, colleagues, classmates, siblings, children and parents – will be legislated out of public existence without the majority even noticing.

    As in America, the Christian Right is currently targeting trans people at every level. The goal is really simple: it’s to make it impossible for trans people to live normally in society.

    They start with the schools, demanding trans lives be excluded from relationship and sex education and that trans kids be forced to use facilities according to their birth sex, not their lived gender. They demand trans kids be excluded from anti-bullying and anti-discrimination protections.

    For trans teenagers, they have already removed access to crucial healthcare. They want to go further and remove it for under-25s.

    For trans adults, they want to criminalise private sourcing of HRT while on current trends, the waiting list for a first NHS appointment may now be 26 years for someone joining the waiting list today.

    Also for trans adults they want to remove anti-discrimination protections in work, in employment and in public. They just spent £100,000 to try and stop the census counting how many trans people there are. They have demanded gender-neutral language in legislation be changed specifically to exclude trans men.

    O’Connell:

    The strategy itself appears to look like this: target laws and policies that accidentally or potentially protect trans people, no matter how seemingly inconsequential. In other words, death by a thousand cuts. The goal is to adjust our political and legal systems such that they operate as if a) trans people do not exist, b) trans people are not to be taken seriously, c) trans people are a threat, or d) all of the above.

    This dogged work is not headline grabbing stuff, but then groups like Woman’s Place UK, LGB Alliance and Transgender Trend have had their fill of that. After months or even years of uncritical news coverage, they might have realised fawning journalists can only get them so far. If a campaign’s goal is, in effect, the eradication of a protected class of people, the work itself cannot be all OBEs and Newsnight specials. The architects of anti-gay and anti-abortion campaigns in the US, who UK groups may or may not communicate with online*, could tell them that.

    The strategy is very simple: it’s to go after trans and non-binary people in every conceivable way, no matter how obscure. Who cares about the wording of a law that won’t affect most people, or the guidance in the census? But the mistake is to view these things in isolation, to see them as single events rather than an extremely well-funded and well-resourced war on a vulnerable minority that’s being waged not by feminists, but by the Christian Right and right-wing politicians.

  • “We need to say it: this is wrong”

    In Umberto Eco’s essay about Ur-fascism, he describes 14 signs of fascism or a pre-fascist state. The list includes the cult of tradition, the rejection of modernism and contempt for the weak; it also includes fear of difference and the obsession with a sinister plot orchestrated by the people who are different.

    The UK’s government is showing a worrying number of these signs in its demonisation of Black Lives Matter and its Trump-esque “War on Woke”, but anti-trans activism has been there for some years.

    Here’s Sarah Ahmed writing in 2015.

    Those who are oppressed – who have to struggle to exist often by virtue of being a member of a group – are often judged as the oppressors. We only have to turn the pages of feminist history to know this. When lesbians demanded entry into feminist spaces, we were called a “lavender menace.” We got in the way of the project of making feminism more acceptable. To be rendered unacceptable is often to be treated as the ones with the power (the power to take something away). I recently heard a heterosexual feminist speak of lesbians in feminism in exactly these terms: as wielding all the power. When black women and women of colour spoke of racism in feminism we were heard, we are heard, as angry, mean and spiteful, as hurting white women’s feelings. The angry woman of colour is not only a feminist killjoy she is often a killer of feminist joy. She gets in the way of how white women occupy feminism.

    The current media narrative is one of silencing. People with extraordinary power – politicians, millionaire authors, celebrities – claim to be silenced by a sinister trans lobby, a lobby so powerful that it controls the government, the judiciary and the media despite there being no trans MPs, newspaper editors, newsreaders or judges.

    The people who claim to be silenced make their claims loudly, repeatedly and in some cases lucratively as they go on programme after programme or write article after article about how you’re not allowed to share the views they constantly share. As I’ve written before, the sinister trans lobby is paying quite a few anti-trans writers’ mortgages right now.

    Ahmed:

    Whenever people keep being given a platform to say they have no platform, or whenever people speak endlessly about being silenced, you not only have a performative contradiction; you are witnessing a mechanism of power.

    Inevitably, many of our supposed free speech warriors are highly litigious. In recent months multiple authors and a politician have threatened people with defamation suits for daring to suggest that loudly expressing anti-trans views and supporting anti-trans hate groups might possibly be transphobic. And those are just the ones we’ve heard about: most SLAPP threats (strategic lawsuits against public participation) require a vow of silence.

    Ahmed:

    These dynamics are familiar to me from my work on racist speech acts (racism is so often defended as freedom of speech). Racists present themselves as injured/ under attack/a minority fighting against a powerful anti-racist lobby that is “busy” suppressing their voices.

    For some people the demonisation of the “woke” is a grift, an opportunity to build a media brand on the backs of vulnerable people; for others it’s misdirection, a way to distract attention from things like the UK having the highest per-capita COVID deaths in the world. And for others it’s part of a wider ideology of right-wing populism.

    Free speech has thus become a political technology that is used to redefine freedom around the right of some to occupy time and space. It is “the others” who become the oppressors; those who in speaking of a wrong are judged as speaking wrong.

    We need to say it: this is wrong.