Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • Who goes Nazi?

    Via Benevolent Siren on Bluesky, here’s a piece written by Dorothy Thompson in 1941: Who goes Nazi?

    Mrs. E would go Nazi as sure as you are born. That statement surprises you? Mrs. E seems so sweet, so clinging, so cowed. She is. She is a masochist. She is married to a man who never ceases to humiliate her, to lord it over her, to treat her with less consideration than he does his dogs. He is a prominent scientist, and Mrs. E, who married him very young, has persuaded herself that he is a genius, and that there is something of superior womanliness in her utter lack of pride, in her doglike devotion. She speaks disapprovingly of other “masculine” or insufficiently devoted wives. Her husband, however, is bored to death with her. He neglects her completely and she is looking for someone else before whom to pour her ecstatic self-abasement. She will titillate with pleased excitement to the first popular hero who proclaims the basic subordination of women.

    …the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis.

    Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi.

     

  • Cowards

    My youngest is obsessed with skating right now, and that means I spend a lot of time taking them to skate parks, pump tracks and so on. For a bit of variety yesterday we went to one of the more far-away favourites, a track near the national football stadium in Glasgow’s south side, and that’s where I had to have a conversation with my ten-year-old when they showed me a particularly prominent and vicious sectarian sticker and asked what it meant.

    There’s no need to detail what the sticker said; it was a threat of violence towards Catholics. But it’s a conversation I’d really rather not have with my kid on a sunny Sunday morning.

    There’s something particularly repellent about bigots’ stickers, I think. They’re uniformly ugly, and they leave a mess behind – assuming you’re willing to risk taking them down, because since the days of the National Front there’s been the fear that there may be a razor blade underneath as a trap for would-be removers. They’re repellent because their vandalism is much more in-your-face than something sprayed on a wall.

    But I think what’s most repellent about them is the cowardice they demonstrate. At least spray painters risk being caught.

    What’s really sad about this sticker in particular is that when I saw it, my first reaction wasn’t horror but surprise: I’m used to removing a dozen or more bigoted stickers each and every week when I walk my dog near my home, but this wasn’t one I’ve seen before. That’s because the stickers I’m used to taking down aren’t anti-Catholic; they’re anti-trans. But the hatred and the cowardice are just the same.

  • Both-sidesing bigotry

    Stop me if you’ve heard this before: politicians, the BBC and the press are reporting outright bigotry as “concerns” and one side of a “controversy” or “debate”.

    Not genital-obsessed weirdos this time, at least not today, although I’m sure the Venn diagram of those people and today’s bunch has a lot of overlap: this time the “concerned” people are the English far-right rioters who over the weekend assaulted multiple people of colour, looted shops, burned down a library and attempted to burn asylum seekers out of a hotel.

    According to BBC news reporter Phillip Norton far right rioters in Manchester were a “pro-British march”; Home Office minister David Hanson told LBC Radio that some rioters “might be people who’ve got genuine concerns” and The Telegraph front page described people of all faiths and none being attacked by white racists as “far right and muslims clash in fresh riots”.

  • A sperm donor, not a dad

    Update, 26/7: Vivian, Musk’s estranged daughter, has given an interview to NBC: “if you’re going to lie about me, like, blatantly to an audience of millions, I’m not just gonna let that slide.” 

    Elon Musk has given an appalling interview to the appalling Jordan Peterson in which he demonises and deadnames his trans daughter, claiming that she is the reason he’s become a far right nutcase. I’m paraphrasing, but only slightly. It’s nonsense, of course: Musk, who grew up the rich son of a racist family in apartheid-era South Africa, and whose factories are famously cesspools of racism, was right wing long before he had children.

    I didn’t catch the name of the author but a post I saw earlier today made me laugh because it was both funny and accurate: a significant part of right-wing ideology can be summarised by two phrases, “my wife left me” and “my kids don’t talk to me.” Musk ticks both boxes: not only is he estranged from his trans daughter, but his long-term partner dumped him for a trans woman.

    I don’t doubt that his daughter’s very public estrangement – she made it clear in her court documents that she did not want to be associated with him in any way whatsoever – and his equally public break-up made him angry towards trans people and trans women in particular; spending billions of dollars on Twitter to turn it into an anti-trans hate machine is not a choice made with a cool head.

    Musk’s ongoing, obsessive campaign of revenge – a campaign that threatens not just the safety of trans people but all marginalised people – is one of the most expensive and destructive temper tantrums in human history, and it is all about rage. It’s the rage of a parent whose child won’t do what they’re told, the fury of a patriarch denied the obedience they demand.

    By choosing to exercise her own independence and her own bodily autonomy, Musk’s daughter did the one thing he can’t abide, let alone forgive.

    She said no.

    No to the path Musk mapped out for her.

    No to the life Musk decided she should live.

    No to the body Musk wanted her to have.

    No to being property instead of a person.

    Like so many weak and furious men before him, Musk’s impotent rage has sent him straight into the arms of the far right. He no longer flirts with fascism; he’s in bed with it.

    Transphobia is often fascism’s nursery slope, its training wheels, the shallow end of its swimming pool. It’s the bigotry you begin with, the intolerance it’s generally okay to express – and when you get even the gentlest pushback for it, which of course you will, that’s when the real radicalisation begins. The far right does what it accuses its enemies of: it grooms you and builds an echo chamber around you and radicalises you ever further.

    The appeal of the far right to weak, angry men like Musk isn’t hard to understand: it tells you that nothing is ever your fault. It’s a fantasy of victimhood, of DARVO – deny, accuse, reverse victim and offender. It enables the most powerful people in the world to claim oppression by the least powerful and turns that power against the powerless, all the while chanting the abuser’s anthem: look what you made me do.

     

     

  • Ignore the experts

    There’s a good piece about the puberty blocker ban in The Guardian by Aidan Kelly, a doctor, in which he explains how we’ve ended up in the farcical situation where fashion writers, bigoted journalists and arrogant celebrities are considered experts in trans healthcare but clinicians and prestigious medical organisations are not.

    In this area of healthcare, like no other I know of, the professionals with the requisite expertise are positioned by their critics as having been “captured by ideology” and therefore lacking in credibility. Meanwhile, those without the expertise are positioned as “independent”, which critics argue makes them better able to evaluate the evidence – despite having never worked in the field and having no understanding of its complexities.

    This simply wouldn’t happen in any other kind of healthcare, but in the UK the entire discussion has been given over to people who get their information from Twitter. Which perhaps explains why there’s been virtually no reporting on the international condemnation of the Cass Review from health professionals, or of the extensive analyses that demonstrate that the government is prioritising ideology over evidence in its healthcare policies.

    There’s a good overview here, from the US organisation FAIR:

    Though there is much more evidence now to support gender-affirming care than in 2008, there is also a much stronger anti-trans movement seeking to discredit and ban such care.

    British media coverage has given that movement a big boost in recent years, turning the spotlight away from the realities that trans kids and their families are facing, and pumping out stories nitpicking at the strength of the expanding evidence base for gender-affirming care. Its coverage of the Cass Review followed suit.

     

  • Whitewashing

    If it weren’t so horrific it’d be funny: to counter whistleblowers’ claims that since the puberty blocker ban more than 16 young people on waiting lists have taken their own lives, the new government hastily commissioned a report to disprove their claims by, er, discounting the deaths of people on waiting lists.

    The report’s author follows many anti-trans activists and anti-trans journalists on social media (but not, as far as I can tell, any trans-supportive voices) and, as Professor Stephen Whittle points out, “makes no count of those lives [lost by people] on waiting lists, or [of] coroner’s reports or deaths reported in the media. That is not academic, it is a whitewash.”

    It’s very clear that despite the change of government, there has been no change of policy: dead kids are just collateral damage in this lethal culture war.

  • Losers

    This has been one of the most dispiriting elections I can remember; rather than voting for anything, a lot of people were voting against the Tories. And it was particularly dispiriting for LGBTQ+ people like me: of the seven candidates on my ballot paper, five of them were from parties who are a danger to trans people’s rights and healthcare – whether ideologically in the case of Alba and the tories, or cynically in the case of Labour. In the closing stages of the campaign, Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting both enthusiastically embraced transphobia in a very obvious attempt to woo the genital-obsessed weirdo vote.

    What’s particularly saddening about it isn’t the betrayal, as bad as that is. It’s that it was completely unnecessary.

    As in other countries where transphobia has been on the ballot, it proved last night to be a vote loser. Most elected transphobes are currently looking for new jobs; the few that remain saw a massive collapse in their share of the vote and their majorities.

    Single-issue anti-trans extremists lost their deposits in every single constituency they stood in, with few even achieving the same share of the vote as Phin “Barmy Brunch” Adams of the Monster Raving Loony Party, a man with a baked beans mask on his head who promised to Make Brunch Great Again.

    The extremists claim to be the voice of the majority. But the polls, and the votes, say otherwise. I really hope that of the lessons Labour will have learnt from last night, that is one of them.

  • Facts checked

    The US advocacy group GLAAD just published an absolutely blistering fact-check of a very biased New York Times article that was yet again scaremongering about trans healthcare for teens, part of an ongoing panic that the paper has been fuelling for 16 consecutive months.

    Among the key points is a staggering statistic. The number of trans teens getting gender-affirming surgery in the US, the subject of the endless why-oh-why articles in the NYT, is around 514 per year. The number of cisgender teens getting gender-affirming surgery, which includes operations such as breast reduction or breast enhancement, is 229,000 per year. And yet the NYT is not running any articles about that.

    That’s not the only detail in the GLAAD response. It points out, using much more temperate language than I’d manage, that the supposed expert quoted by the NYT is a shill for the Alliance Defending Freedom whose testimony has previously been thrown out of court because he has no expertise whatsoever in trans-related healthcare. And the writer of the piece has been called out again and again for sloppy journalism that appears to be driven by an anti-trans agenda.

    We don’t have GLAAD in the UK, but a post doing the rounds on social media currently names the key anti-trans writers who’ve been pushing the moral panic here – a panic that’s been implicated in the deaths of at least 16 people. And when you see them listed it’s notable how many of them are friends with one another; it’s saddening to see how few people it’s taken to wage war on trans people and open the door for the extreme right.

    As someone put it on social media, you could pretty much end the UK media trans panic by poisoning the cocaine at just one dinner party.

  • Dead children don’t matter

    If you were in any doubt that the trans “issue” is a moral panic and that trans lives don’t matter to almost all of the media, the UK newspapers have provided ample evidence over the last few days.

    Every single paper, not just the right-wing ones, has ignored the news that the puberty blocker ban has been implicated in the deaths of 16 children and that the NHS and Cass Review appear to have tried to cover that up; instead, they have devoted endless column inches to whether Labour can become hateful enough to trans people to satisfy JK Rowling.

  • “Protecting children”

    Content warning: this is very, very bleak.

    Jolyon Maugham of the Good Law Project has posted a lengthy thread about what appears to be a national scandal: the deaths of multiple young trans people since the NHS began restricting their healthcare, and the NHS’s ongoing attempts at a cover-up.

    I have now seen further evidence that, since the Bell decision in the High Court (1 December 2020), there has been a huge increase in deaths of young trans people on the NHS waiting list – and that NHS management has sought to suppress that evidence.