Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • There will be blood

    We’re having a bit of a moment here in Scotland over that favourite target of the US Christian right, drag queen story time. The current Scots story is a gift to conservatives: a drag performer booked to read to kids delivered a perfectly age-appropriate reading because, hey! Performers can have different personas for different age groups! However, one look at their social media should have suggested that perhaps it would be wise to book someone whose Instagram wasn’t quite so adult. There was no way there wouldn’t be a reaction.

    But this reaction has been extraordinary, both in terms of the volume and the viciousness of the response: a lot of it has been variations on the theme of “queers are paedos, stay away from my kids or I swear I’ll do time”. It has been astonishingly, frighteningly ugly, and pretty much everybody who’s been actively demonising trans people over the last few years has been pouring petrol on the flames.

    Christine Burns MBE was one of the architects of the gender recognition act and is the author of Trans Britain, a book detailing the long history of trans people, trans rights and anti-trans abuse in the UK. A few days before this particular story broke, she posted:

    After two and a half years of pretty sustained vilification of Britain’s trans people across most of the press and corners of political discourse I worry that we are heading for a watershed event. That is the way things go and I’m worried sick about which of my friends will die.

    I hope she’s wrong, but I fear she isn’t.

  • We can’t have nice musical things any more

    Just when you think things are as miserable as they can get, a new piece of idiocy turns up. Now, in our post-Brexit wonderland, it seems that the only live bands and classical musicians that’ll be able to tour the UK from the EU as of 2021 are the ones who are able to pay £244 for each member’s visa and demonstrate that they each have at least £1,000 in savings. That’s a lot of money for an orchestra to hand over, and it’s a lot of money to expect struggling musicians to have in the bank.

    According to the Incorporated Society of Musicians, “this is taking a shotgun and shooting ourselves in the foot” – not least because the EU may then impose similar tariffs and rules on UK musicians touring the EU.

    We’ve already seen this in operation for non-EU musicians, with significant consequences for world music festivals such as Womad. Apparently the department of media, culture and sport fought against it but were overruled by the Home Office.

  • “Hot takes and salacious hate-reads”

    There’s an interesting piece in The Guardian by Andrew Marantz about trolls, technology companies and how both have helped to fuel the resurgence of the far right. He argues that part of the rise is because journalism and traditional media was spectacularly unequipped to deal with it: the desire to remain neutral that’s appropriate for writing about tariffs and treaties can be exploited by “a racist movement full of creeps and liars”. You see a similar dynamic in bigotry, climate change denial, anti-vaccination and so on where extremist views are presented as one perfectly valid side of an equally balanced argument.

    Neutrality has never been a universal good, even in the simplest of times. In unusual times – say, when the press has been drafted, without its consent or comprehension, into a dirty culture war – neutrality might not always be possible. Some questions aren’t really questions at all. Should Muslim Americans be treated as real Americans? Should women be welcome in the workplace? To treat these as legitimate topics of debate is to be not neutral, but complicit. Sometimes, even for a journalist, there is no such thing as not picking a side.

  • This is the future bastards want

    And so it begins. South Dakota has made the first step towards making evidence-based medicine illegal. Doctors who try to help trans teenagers face a year in prison. Another seven US states are set to follow suit; anti-trans groups in the UK want similar bans here.

    As Christine Burns MBE put it:

    Can we all agree now that trans people and our allies aren’t “overreacting”, “misunderstanding” or “making stuff up” about the true intentions of those ranged against us? Making laws to prohibit doctors from providing evidence-based treatment is not normal and people will die.

  • “We are living in Bigot Christmas”

    Ellie Mae O’Hagan writes about the “anti-woke backlash”. She argues that in the 1990s and 2000s socially liberal values became the “new normal”, with even the Conservative party becoming nicer and introducing legislation such as equal marriage. It seemed unimaginable at the time, but that consensus is unravelling very quickly.

    …as the tide of 90s social liberalism has ebbed, it has also revealed another group of people (primarily older, white homeowners and pensioners) who had never bought into the consensus in the first place, and are aggressively hostile to its newer, more radical iteration.

    We all know a member of this demographic: alienated by the modern world and displeased by change, they are fond of complaining that “You can’t say anything any more!” – even as their opinions are widely reproduced in the nation’s print media.

    And the nation’s print media are happy to pander to them, not least because they’re the demographic that still buys the nation’s print media and that advertisers most want to reach.

    Having spent so long feeling silenced by the liberal consensus, people in this group have been given a new lease of life by the right’s new insurgents. Not only were they correct all along; they were actually victims, zealously persecuted by an oversensitive and censorious society. It is this righteous indignation that lends their antipathy to wokeness a defiant and almost celebratory quality. As a friend of mine puts it, we are living in “bigot Christmas”.

    As O’Hagan points out, if this group’s claims of persecution were really true the country and the world would look very different. But just because something isn’t true doesn’t mean people don’t believe it.

    O’Hagan’s piece isn’t an attack on those people. It’s a warning to the rest of us, because the so-called anti-woke are often “parroting arguments that are largely advanced by the far right”. And they’re winning.

    Progressives need to wise up to the fact that they are losing this argument and decide what they are going to do in response. If they don’t, they may soon find that the future they always assumed was theirs is being made without them.

  • They are coming for your children

    Katelyn Burns reports on the coordinated assault on trans kids’ healthcare by right-wing US lawmakers.

    eight state legislatures — including Missouri, Florida, Illinois, Oklahoma, Colorado, South Carolina, Kentucky, and South Dakota — have already introduced bills this year that would criminally punish doctors who follow best practices for treating adolescents with gender dysphoria. In South Dakota, for example, doctors who prescribe puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones could face a $2,000 fine and a year in prison under the proposed law. South Dakota’s version of the bill was even prioritized and became the very first bill of the decade to pass out of committee… should any of the bills become law, they would effectively cut off many adolescents from medically necessary and, often, life-saving treatment for gender dysphoria.

    …Bills banning trans care for kids are the new bathroom bills, part of conservatives’ larger culture war against trans people. Conservative media and politicians have been fanning the flames for this fight for years in hopes of rallying the base over a non-existent threat — a threat that only puts trans lives in danger.

    Whenever the religious right realises a tactic isn’t working, it finds a new one. When it lost its war on equal marriage, it changed tactics and started attacking trans people – it’s no coincidence that the current media obsession with trans people began after 2017, when various evangelical groups agreed and began to implement their new focus on demonising trans women.

    At first, they tried to make people scared of trans women in public places, but the public is well aware that you’re more likely to be sexually assaulted by a Republican politician or evangelical rabble-rouser than a trans person. So they refined that one and started to say that predatory men would pretend to be trans so that they could start acting like Republican politicians.

    That didn’t fly either, so it’s time to kill some kids.

    Puberty blockers are rarely prescribed. When they are, they save lives.

    Study after study have shown that affirming trans and gender-diverse kids in their self-exploration improves mental health and lowers suicide risk. The affirming model, which allows children to explore their own gender identities at their own pace and can include puberty blockers, has been recommended by nearly every major American medical association, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the Endocrine Society, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and many others.

    But of course, bigots don’t really do facts – especially when there are votes to be won.  “Your children are under threat from minority X and only I can protect them” may be one of the oldest and most despicable political tactics in the book, but it works so it’s being rolled out again. Under the pretence of protecting children, these yahoos are quite happy at the prospect of killing quite a few of them. What’s a few more dead trans kids to people who wish trans people didn’t exist at all?

    We’re starting to see exactly the same thing shift in strategy happening here in the UK, although not from openly evangelical and/or right-wing groups: from the same anti-trans activists who previously parroted the evangelical right’s previous attack lines and whose suspiciously well funded pressure groups didn’t exist before the evangelicals started their war on trans people in 2017. Many of those groups have overt or covert links to the US evangelical group The Heritage Foundation, which plays a key role in the US bills.

    What conservative lawmakers are doing with their legislation is removing parents’ and kids’ choices altogether, forcing their own political ideology on the medical choices of private citizens.

    This is a murderous ideology that chants “think of the children!” while trying to ban healthcare that keeps some of them alive.

  • Faking the news

    Writing in The Guardian, august journalism commentator Roy Greenslade writes about a crisis that never existed: the supposed immigration crisis facing the UK.

    “It never was news. It was a wholly media-manufactured ‘crisis’,” he writes. Editors “readily published evidence of individual misbehaviour as if it was a universal problem”, published “dodgy figures, as if plucked from mid-air” and ignored facts “in favour of appealing to public prejudice.” They published endless streams of thinly-veiled bigotry from their columnists. They were guilty of “ignoring rational arguments that exposed their distorted agenda” to inflame their readers against a group that in reality is a persecuted minority.

    And it worked, because these papers also drive the wider news agenda: what they print is then picked up by the likes of the Today Programme and discussed on Question Time. It gets circulated on social media and regurgitated on talk radio.

    At the peak of the anti-immigrant newspaper scare, 60% of people thought immigration was the most important issue affecting the country. Now the papers have largely stopped their scaremongering, that figure has dropped to 20%.

    As Greenslade put it, the newspapers manufactured the so-called crisis “through repetition, disinformation, misinformation… and the omission of any positive material.”

    The papers stopped demonising immigrants because it no longer sold copies. That has created a vacuum – when your newspaper’s editorial policy is to scare your readers every day, you still need an enemy.

    The papers haven’t stopped trying to scare their readers or abandoned their dirty tricks. They’ve just chosen a different minority to demonise.

  • The tedious mediocrity of the “anti-woke”

    Novelist and journalist Huw Lemmey asks why the UK media is so obsessed with demonising the “woke”.

    The English media is in the middle of a full-throated culture war, from bendy bananas to woke snowflakes, Stormzy to burqas, trans rights to free speech on campus. It seems like over the past decade the intensification of that journalism, combined with the exaggerating effect of social media on editorial choice, has created a print and TV comment culture dedicated to creating a popular spook or ogre, then to ripping it apart. The English press has developed into a unique combination of bullying and blackmail, where a relentlessly vicious tone of mockery and enforced conformity is policed with the justification that either the enemy is at the school gates, or that their furious mockery is “only banter”. In the process, from sheer incuriosity, a whole generation of journalists have confused disagreement with taking offence, criticism with trolling.

    …if you want to know what “woke” means, and why a “woke elite” are trying to shut down all criticism, why not read Andrew Doyle’s new book, ‘Woke’, in character as Titania McGrath, with glowing reviews from Rod Liddle, Sarah Vine and Ricky Gervais? Why not read Brendan O’Neill’s spiked editorial on Markle, “A woke Wallis Simpson”? Why not read Rod Liddle’s latest on the “wokeplace romance”? Why not check out Toby Young on how the Labour Party got woke and broke? Why not see what Sarah Vine likes so much about Ricky Gervais, “the Wokefinder General”? Why not read Helen Lewis on the superwoke elite, or listen to Helen Lewis on the News Quiz, supposedly the country’s leading news satire radio programme, where the assassination of Soleimani revolved around a joke that the Left wouldn’t have criticised the attack if the Iranian general had misgendered someone.

    As Lemmey points out, the attack lines and tropes are so lazy that last week, Rod Liddle and Giles Coren wrote almost identical articles with almost identically unfunny jokes. I guess it makes a change from using pseudonymous social media accounts to post racist or antisemitic messages.

    I thought this bit was interesting.

    We are reaching the culture war singularity. To all intents and purposes, in terms of England, the right have won the culture war on most fronts. But now they’re left with a problem — they need an enemy. After we leave, and Francois has had his bongs, what replaces the narrative of EU tyranny that has driven English Euroscepticism?

    We’re starting to see the answer to that. It’s the blacks, and the gays, and the trans, and the young, and the feminists, and anyone else who can be dismissed as “woke”. It’s no coincidence that the people spearheading this backlash are white, straight, cisgender, middle-aged and largely male; the people who applaud them on social media are from the same demographic.

    The thing about being “woke” is that being woke is a good thing. It means being aware of injustice in society, particularly racism.

    The Guardian:

    Criticising “woke culture” has become a way of claiming victim status for yourself rather than acknowledging that more deserving others hold that status. It has gone from a virtue signal to a dog whistle.

    What we’re seeing here is exactly what happened with political correctness: the perversion of a term by right-wingers in an attempt to claim that the real victims are the people who have all the power.

    Comedian Stewart Lee skewered that one a decade ago.

    The only time you ever see PC mentioned is when people are complaining about PC. For money. And usually on the very publicly funded radio stations that these dicks believe are involved in a politically correct conspiracy to silence them.

  • At home with the Hitlers

    This week, the BBC introduced people to the “tradwife” movement – “a growing movement of women who promote ultra-traditional gender roles”. The tone of the piece is warm and fluffy, and says that people who claim “tradwives” are connected with the far right are mistaken.

    The BBC is very wrong on this. “Tradwife” is yet another example of neo-Nazi signifiers moving into the mainstream because organisations such as the BBC don’t do sufficient research.

    This information is hardly difficult to find; for example, the New York Times covered the phenomenon in 2018.

    Enter the tradwives.

    Over the past few years, dozens of YouTube and social media accounts have sprung up showcasing soft-spoken young white women who extol the virtues of staying at home, submitting to male leadership and bearing lots of children — being “traditional wives.” These accounts pepper their messages with scrapbook-style collections of 1950s advertising images showing glamorous mothers in lipstick and heels with happy families and beautiful, opulent homes. They give their videos titles like “Female Nature and Advice for Young Ladies,” “How I Homeschool” and “You Might be a Millennial Housewife If….”

    But running alongside what could be mistaken for a peculiar style of mommy-vlogging is a virulent strain of white nationalism.

    Nicolette Michelle, writing on Medium:

    By mobilizing sites like Twitter, the #tradwife, as they label themselves, are utilizing their social platforms to spread white nationalist ideologies, all under the domestic guise of be a perfect wife, and you’ll live a perfect life, but as long as it’s also a white life… their way of life and thinking is almost eerily cult-like, especially with their emphasis on preserving the European race and disdain towards anyone that is non-white.

    TradwivesSeyward Darby, writing on Topic.com about the women activists in the far-right movement:

    On her website, [Ayla] Stewart promotes #tradlife—traditionalist homemaking and white culture—and the “white baby challenge,” in which she encourages “white people to have children to combat demographic decline.”

    …Once in the fold, women are potent disseminators of racist ideology, palatable voices who provide the Far Right with a thin, dangerous veneer of feminine domesticity and normalcy.

    As the NYT writer Annie Kelly noted two years ago:

    Tradwives may seem like a lunatic fringe at present, but they may not stay one for long.

    Especially not if organisations such as the BBC whitewash – pun fully intended – where the movement comes from.

  • Nobody should be forced to come out

    Popular YouTube beauty blogger Nikkie de Jager, aka NikkieTutorials, has come out to her many millions of followers as transgender.

    It wasn’t her choice: as Stylist magazine points out, she came out because unnamed persons were threatening to “out” her to the press.

    That isn’t just a gross invasion of privacy, although of course it is: somebody’s decision about when (or if) to come out and who to come out to is entirely their business, and being outed or forced to come out can mean having to deal with a lot of really big stuff before the person is ready or able to deal with it. Coming out is hard even if you are ready and do have support; it’s harder still if you aren’t and don’t.

    Outing somebody is also very dangerous.

    As Stylist notes:

    Online harassment and abuse of transgender people has been on the increase in recent years, and it has been especially prevalent on YouTube.

    While the initial reaction to de Jager’s announcement has been positive, she’ll now receive transphobic abuse on every YouTube clip she posts – and she may experience worse. High profile trans women are often on the receiving end of terrible online abuse, some of it orchestrated by even higher profile Twitter users who send the mob after anyone they disapprove of. The abuse some LGBT+ people experience online has led them to take their own lives; the fear of it has led others to do the same.

    As Harron Walker writes on Vice, outing trans women is nothing new: it happened to Bond actress Caroline Cossey, effectively ending her modelling career.

    Speaking to the Huffington Post, Cossey recalled:

    the tabloids were able to destroy my professional career and even my personal life, fueled by the ignorant thinking about transgender people in mainstream society and the laws of those times.

    It was a similar story for Tracey Africa and April Ashley, who were also outed by the tabloids. Vice:

    De Jager might have been the one to release her coming out video, but only after her would-be blackmailers forced her hand. Four decades after a hairdresser’s assistant outed Tracey Africa on the set of an Essence shoot and News of the World published Caroline Cossey’s backstory without her consent, transness remains a liability to a woman’s career, one that can be weaponized against her even if she chooses not to make it known.

    This, incidentally, is one of the reasons we have the Gender Recognition Act in the UK: under Section 22 of the Act it’s an offence for someone in an official capacity to disclose that the possessor of a Gender Recognition Certificate has a trans history, for example by selling the story to a tabloid newspaper (although here’s a fun fact: the number of prosecutions brought under Section 22 in the 16 years since the law was introduced is zero).

    Of course, the threat of outing by the tabloids has long been used not just against trans women, but against LGBT+ people more generally. Just this month Lib Dem MP Layla Moran was forced to come out as pansexual because the newspapers were about to out her.

    over the last couple of months journalists have been sniffing around this story. They’ve asked friends, made indirect approaches, and more recently, very direct approaches to people I know, asking for information about my personal life.

    One of the newspapers that was about to out her, the Mail on Sunday, then accused her of “weaponising” her sexuality to “look woke” and quoted the usual rabble of Mumsnet trolls saying awful things. Hell hath no fury like a tabloid deprived of its salacious scoop.

    And salacious is all that it is. What kind of people Layla Moran loves, what genitals Nikkie de Jager was born with, are none of our damn business. Moran isn’t hypocritically pushing an anti-LGBT+ agenda in her politics; de Jager’s history is not relevant to her celebrity. And yet the tabloids and their demonic helpers will happily expose and potentially damage their private lives for a fast buck because web clicks matter more than ethics.

    Many of us will look back at the 80s outing of Caroline Cossey and consider it a despicable invasion of privacy, but in 2020 the tabloids are still doing it. Not only that, but they’re approaching LGBT+ people with Hobson’s choice: try to stay closeted and we’ll out you; spoil our scoop and we’ll do our best to destroy you.

    As Moran wrote:

    It’s possible that to some journalists and readers this is a jolly jape where they get one over me, but to me, this is my life.