Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: LGBTQ+

  • Rectal research

    A new report by Policy Exchange, the right-wing think tank whose job is to give the Telegraph and Daily Mail some scary headlines and rubber-stamp whatever hateful policies the Tories want to bring in, is a great demonstration of what I’ve seen described as “rectal research”: the report’s supposed facts have clearly been pulled out of the author’s arse.

    The report pretends to be an analysis of trans participation in sport, but it’s nothing of the sort: the figures it presents are complete fiction. For example, it claims that there are 527 trans women and 61 trans men participating in professional rugby; the correct figure is zero, as trans people are banned from the sport; before the ban there were fewer than 10 trans people taking part. It claims that there are nearly 9,000 trans people competing in professional swimming; again, the real number is zero. It claims nearly 500 trans competitors in athletics; the correct number is, again, zero.

    The best example of this rectal research is in cycling, where it claims that there are over 4 million men and over 2 million women taking part in the sport: not riding for fun, but competing professionally. That’s ludicrous, as is the claim that there are over 16,000 trans athletes competing in the sport.

    Update, 31/12: A number of people, including Vivian Wulf on Twitter, have investigated the source of the cycling numbers because they’re so clearly nonsense. The figures are taken from the Active Lives survey by Sport England, which wasn’t about elite sport: its cycling numbers tell you how many people used a bike at least twice in one month for more than ten minutes for the purpose of leisure, travel or sport. Policy Exchange took the number of positive respondents, multiplied it by the estimated proportion of trans people in the UK, and published it as supposed proof of a trans takeover in competitive cycling. 

    In total, the Policy Exchange report claims that tens of thousands of trans women are competing professionally in sport. Given that the UK census – which anti-trans groups say overestimates the number of trans people in the UK – reports that there are 166,000 trans women in the UK, that would mean somewhere between one-seventh and one-fifth of all trans women are professional athletes.

    It’s complete fiction, but it’s doing its job: it’s being reported in all the press as if it’s a credible document rather than the fever dream of anti-trans bigots, and those reports will be cited in future as proof of the entirely invented trans takeover of professional sports.

    Once again, the brave and fearless British press proves Humbert Wolfe correct:

    You cannot hope to bribe or twist
    thank God! The British journalist
    But seeing what the man will do
    unbribed, there’s no occasion to

  • Just the facts

    Since around 2017, it’s been very clear that if you hate trans people you can make up any old shite and have it printed or broadcast without anybody fact-checking it before, during or afterwards – and as a result, many anti-trans activists have taken full advantage of that to spread absolute bullshit with impunity. So it’s refreshing, albeit years overdue, to see some fact checking finally take place.

    Irish newspaper The Journal did some fact checking of a claim made by anti-trans obsessive Graham Linehan on Newstalk radio. According to Linehan, if you search the crowdfunding site JustGiving and look for people crowdfunding top surgery, there are “nearly 38,000 girls” raising money for surgery.

    The actual number of fundraisers is 38.

    What the Journal has done here is not difficult, but despite fact-checking being fundamental to good journalism it’s incredibly rare: there continues to be an assumption that contributors are coming in good faith, an assumption that is widely abused by endless bad actors. Their success should shame the journalists, editors, presenters and producers who’ve let them get away with it so publicly for so long.

  • Guilt

    Two teenagers were found guilty of the murder of teenage girl Brianna Ghey today, after what the Crown Prosecution Service described as “one of the most distressing cases the Crown Prosecution Service has had to deal with. The planning, the violence and the age of the killers is beyond belief.” I had to stop following the case because it was so upsetting, the manner of her death so horrific.

    Brianna was chosen in part because she was trans.

    Brianna didn’t go out much because she’d been the victim of anti-trans bullying (according to fellow pupils; her mother didn’t know about it); her anxiety and loneliness meant her killers saw her as “prey” that would be “easier” for them to kill. One of the murderers, Girl Y, told police that Brianna was “not a normal person”; messages between the two killers showed that the other murderer, Boy X, said that “I want to see if it will scream like a man or a girl.”

    You can read more about the trial in the many newspapers or hear about it from the many broadcasters that, since 2017, have paid many thousands of pounds to transphobes stirring up hatred about girls just like her. Time it right today and you’ll see that the news of her killers’ conviction is just above equalities minister Kemi Badenoch continuing to claim that it’s “harmful” for schools to support trans kids.

    Update, 22 Dec

    Predictably enough, the newspaper coverage of this has been vile. The Daily Mail, which you’ll remember bullied trans teacher Lucy Meadows to her death and which has spent the last several years demonising trans people, did one of its “this beautiful angel has been taken too soon” front pages while prominently plugging its Brianna Ghey podcast; it still hates trans people, but it’ll pretend otherwise when there are papers to sell and podcasts to promote. It’s back on its bullshit today, giving vocally anti-trans columnist Sarah Vine the masthead to claim it was the internet wot dunnit. Vine has written many anti-trans articles for the paper, including ones demanding schools don’t support trans kids.

    Meanwhile The Guardian, many of whose writers are proudly anti-trans, was quick to say on its front page that the police had ruled out transphobia as a motive for the killing. That simply isn’t true, as the transphobic messages produced in evidence by the police demonstrated. The police ruled out transphobia as the *sole* motive, presumably because a straightforward murder charge would be more likely to result in conviction.

  • Dee eye ess see oh

    There’s a wonderful new documentary on BBC iPlayer (and on PBS in the US) called Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution. It traces disco from its origins in the basement bars and warehouses of 1970s New York to its eventual world domination, and it’s a fantastic programme with a celestial soundtrack.

    While the music is of course the focus, it’s also very good at putting that music in its wider context: disco was music by and for marginalised people from the Black, Latin and queer communities, and the backlash against it was often because of precisely that: the Disco Sucks protests, which the show covers and which included a “disco demolition night” in a Chicago stadium, were toddler tantrums by largely straight, cis, white men railing against music embraced by Black, Latin and queer people of all genders. As Mark Anderson would later write:

    The chance to yell “disco sucks” meant more than simply a musical style choice. It was a chance to push back on a whole set of social dynamics that lay just beneath the surface of a minor battle between a DJ and a radio station that decided to change formats. More importantly, it was a chance for a whole lot of people to say they didn’t like the way the world was changing around them, or who they saw as the potential victors in a cultural and demographic war.

    As one of the interviewees puts it in the first episode, disco was political because the dancers’ lives were political.

  • A hateful echo

    In the same week that we heard closing arguments in the trial of Brianna Ghey’s killers, two teenagers who brutally murdered the young girl in part because she was transgender, the Tory government has finally published its draft guidelines regarding trans and non-binary kids in schools. As expected it’s a bigoted shitshow.

    The Department of Education’s own legal team says it’s unlikely to survive any legal challenge. And the fact that no LGBTQ+ organisations were consulted, but every bunch of passing bigots was, makes it clear what the agenda is here. If it weren’t clear enough, the introduction doesn’t even manage to make it into its third paragraph before using the Christian Right dogwhistle “gender identity ideology.”

    Smarter people than me will publish detailed analysis in the coming days and weeks, but the short version is that the guidance acts as if the Equality Act does not exist and often tells schools to act in ways that are against the law. As equality lawyer Robin Moira White put it, it is “a cruel attack on a vulnerable minority by a nasty government focused on running a culture war”.

    The guidance encourages teachers and other school officials to treat trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming children – who remain a tiny minority of pupils – illegally and unethically, which will make it harder for those children to live their lives. It’s a bullies’ charter, a bigots’ wish list, a hateful echo of Section 28.

  • The quiet part

    One of the not-too-hidden secrets of the anti-trans movement is that their goal is the total elimination of trans people. As with the forced birth movement, activists are very careful to disguise their goals, to self-censor and say only what they know they can get away with when they talk to the media. Hence “pro-life” instead of “forced birth”, “reasonable concerns” instead of saying the quiet bit out loud. But in their own events and their own social media, the masks come off.

    The strategy is gradualism, or a wedge strategy: you start small and use your win as a wedge for your real agenda. The US forced birth movement was a fringe movement for decades, but with cynical and significant help from the US GOP it began decades of gradualism to build the foundations for what we’re seeing now: the revocation of Roe vs Wade and moves towards the ultimate goal, which is to prohibit abortion without exception everywhere in the US (and elsewhere too). But even now they continue to pretend that their goal isn’t really their goal: again and again, forced-birther Republican politicians say the right thing about exceptions for rape, incest and medical emergencies before either removing those exceptions or, as ProPublica reports, making those exceptions almost completely inaccessible. The horrific case of Kate Cox, forced to flee Texas in order not to die after the Supreme Court said her life was worthless, shows how hollow those promises are.

    These extreme anti-women laws were always the goal, but the forced birthers pretend otherwise. And the anti-LGBTQ+ eliminationists are doing the same. Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law was initially pitched as for children from kindergarten to third grade, which means kids up to the age of nine; a year later it was extended to twelfth grade, which is 17 and 18-year-olds. Bans on LGBTQ+ books have pretended to be about pornography and protecting children, but explicitly targeted any books by or that mention LGBTQ+ people. Similarly the push for bans on trans healthcare on both sides of the Atlantic initially claimed only to be about protecting pre-pubescent children; the same activists are now pushing for a complete ban on healthcare for trans adults and the removal of all their legal protections too.

    It’s not that they don’t want us to be in sports. They don’t want us to be anywhere. One of the leading voices of the UK anti-trans movement says that trans people’s numbers should be reduced; our equalities minister, who has communicated and met extensively with anti-trans bigots but not LGBTQ+ organisations, claims that we are an “epidemic” and that “predators” are “choosing to exploit rights given to transgender people”, dogwhistling that “I’m not saying that transgender people are predators, but there are more people who are predators than there are people who are trans.”

    This is elimination by a thousand cuts as set out by the Christian right back in 2017: demonise trans people in every possible way. Go after trans people in sports, go after trans people’s use of public facilities, go after trans people’s healthcare, go after trans people’s protection from discrimination, go after trans people’s ability to live normal lives. Ban trans people who go through the wrong puberty; ban the healthcare that can ensure that they do not.

    You can see this in microcosm with Riley Gaines, the US swimmer who was beaten in a race by four other women and tied with a fifth. Gaines has since embarked on a highly lucrative campaign of revenge – not against the women who came first, second, third or fourth, but the trans woman who came equal fifth with her. It turns out that attacking trans people is much better for your profile and your bank balance than being a not-good-enough-to-win swimmer, a lesson other famous swimmers also appear to have absorbed.

    Remember the official line here: trans women must be banned from women’s sports because going through male puberty gives them a biological advantage. That claim is not necessarily true – while there are some sports where it may be a factor in some circumstances, it’s been used to demand bans on trans participation in snooker, darts, croquet and Irish dancing too – but that’s not the point: it’s the stated reason for anti-trans sporting bans. The post-pubertal body, they claim, is simply too powerful for fair competition.

    Except Gaines and the far right doesn’t want trans women to compete in anything at all, which is why she’s just turned the right-wing media machine against a teenage trans girl. The girl, who is 17, began transitioning before puberty and therefore doesn’t possess any of the claimed biological advantages. But the news that she had apparently been offered one of a dozen volleyball scholarships by the University of Washington was enough to set the anti-trans hate machine in motion. It now appears that the university has withdrawn the offer, depriving the girl not just of a sporting opportunity but an educational one too.

    This particular story appears to be another case of something we’re seeing a lot of in the US at the moment: bad losers (or their parents) invoking the spectre of trans people to harm their rivals. Sometimes it’s levelled at girls who are not trans but who aren’t pretty blonde white girls – something trans people and LGBTQ+ allies more widely have been warning about for years. Those warnings, like many others, were ignored – because the collateral damage is welcome too. Bigotry and intolerance run in packs, and they will not stop running when they’re done with us.

  • Pain is privileged

    There’s a good piece in Nieman Labs about the biases, often unconscious, that mean journalists adopt the evangelical right’s framing when it comes to reporting on trans people.

    How else to explain the tens of thousands of words this year and last devoted to questioning whether trans people have too much access to health care, rather than to understanding the forces behind legislation to deny us that care? How else could a major news organization devote a major investigative report on the sliver of trans people who regret their transitions rather than on the many tens of thousands who don’t have the opportunity to transition to begin with? Or how else could an in-depth story about a clinic faced with an increase in trans minors question whether those minors really needed care rather than focus on how the healthcare system was failing them.

    One group’s pain is privileged; the other’s, invisible.

    The reporting over “detransitioners” is an excellent example of that. The number of people who detransition – that is, abandon their transition altogether and return to living in their assigned gender – is vanishingly small, and largely consists of people who found that prejudice, discrimination and bullying, and in the UK the decades-long waiting lists for even the most basic treatment, made their lives hell to the point they had to once again hide who they are in order to survive.

    Those stories should be told, but they’re not; instead, media focuses on the even tinier number of celebrity detransitioners, the three or four people touring the globe with the evangelical right who demand an end to all trans healthcare because they made bad calls as grown adults.

    Exceptions make the news. Of course they do: as the adage goes, dog bites man isn’t news; man bites dog is. But what the press is doing around trans people and detransition is to tell you that it isn’t safe to let your pets out of the house at all because the streets are full of rabid dog-biting hordes ready to chomp on your chihuahua, munch on your mastiff or chow down on your chow chow.

    The number of people who regret transition surgery are far fewer than the number who regret any other form of surgery; the number of people who regret transition are a fraction of a fraction of a fraction compared to the number of people who find that it improves or even saves their lives. But only the celebrity detransitioners get the column inches and the airtime, almost always unchallenged.

    The Nieman Labs piece uses an analogy:

    If you’re covering access to abortion care, do you sic your crack investigative team on the sub-1% of women who regret their abortions, or on the multiple attempts to deny them care?

    This is exactly what happens with trans people.

    I think there are two problems with the article, though. The first is that it doesn’t take into account how much journalism is actually churnalism, based not on reporting or research but on regurgitating press releases and talking points from pressure groups. Sometimes that regurgitation is down to pressure: in many newsrooms and production studios people are overworked, underpaid and don’t have the time to check whether a group is astroturfed, let alone whether the contents of its press release are factual. It’s why anybody with a logo, a Twitter account and an axe to grind can get on the BBC or in the pages of the press as a supposed authority.

    And the second problem is that the article talks about a particular type of journalist, the one who wants to do their job well, and I’m not so sure there are so many of those journalists left. Unfortunately with trans people, many of the people writing and speaking about us know exactly what they’re doing; the misrepresentation and disinformation is not accidental but intentional.

    How do you persuade journalists to report the truth when their social media followers, their book deals and their TV appearances depend on them doing otherwise?

  • “Do we have them castrated?”

    Byline Times:

    Just days after Rishi Sunak reportedly dropped plans to introduce a conversion therapy ban, Byline Times can reveal that a project of a charity registered in Northern Ireland held a conference in Poland where delegates heard about conversion therapy techniques, how fundamentalist Christian leaders met with British MPs and lords to convince them to fight against conversion therapy bans, and asked whether castration would get rid of “LGBT freaks”.

    One of the things this article demonstrates is how these hateful bigots pretend to be transparent but censor their own videos before publishing them and sharing them online; they’re very aware that without such self-censorship, reasonable people would be repelled.

  • “Irish dancing has fallen”

    Is there any sport that trans women won’t dominate with their superhuman strength, laser vision and ability to fly without wings? Apparently not: the latest news out of Bigot Central is that, and this is a direct quote, “Irish dancing has fallen”. Which is astonishing language considering the news item the post is sharing: in next year’s Irish Dancing World Championships in Glasgow, one of approximately 5,000 contestants will be a 13-year-old trans girl.

    “Fallen” is being used deliberately: it’s language usually used in war reporting to describe when a place is captured by the enemy, and it’s a favourite of the far- and religious right in their attempts to portray oppression as victimisation.

    This, like the attempts to remove trans women from snooker, darts and chess, is saying the quiet part out loud: the bans on trans people have never been about protecting women or protecting women’s sports from some supposed biological advantage. The motivation is identical to the moves to ban any books by or about trans people from schools and libraries: these people do not want trans people to exist in society in any way, shape or form.

  • Ignorance is strength

    The Tory government have confirmed that they intend to ban conversion therapy but not for trans people: according to equalities minister Kemi Badenoch, providing a safe space for kids to explore their feelings about gender rather than mentally torturing them is the real conversion therapy.

    It’s egregious bullshit, of course, but it’s entirely in keeping with Badenoch’s war on trans people, a war she and Liz Truss have been waging for several years now.

    The idea that gender-affirming care is really conversation therapy is a fiction concocted by the evangelicals and parroted widely by their useful idiots. Once again, our politicians are happily dancing to the evangelical right’s tune.