Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: LGBTQ+

  • Evil with smiles and suits

    One of the major drivers in anti-trans media and legislation on both sides of the Atlantic is the Alliance Defending Freedom, ADF for short. When there’s a Christian bully taking legal action claiming oppression, the ADF is there. When there’s an anti-trans test case trying to remove healthcare, the ADF provides “expert” witnesses. And for at least six years, trans and other LGBTQ+ people in the UK have been trying to raise the alarm that their ultimate goal is the removal of LGBTQ+ rights and women’s reproductive freedom.

    This week, The New Yorker reports on how the ADF’s ultimate goal is the removal of LGBTQ+ rights and women’s reproductive freedom.

    There’s more to it than that, of course. As the article points out, the ADF is effectively trying to remove any and all restrictions on what religious extremists can do and say, even if that means opening the door to even more vile people such as violent racists. That may even be a feature rather than a bug, as bigotries tend to apply to multiple groups, even if the bigots are usually careful not to admit it.

    As ever with reporting like this, it’s both valuable and worthless: valuable because it’s well researched, accurate and clearly sets out the danger; worthless because the people who need to read it won’t read it. And here in the UK, both print and broadcast media will continue to platform the ADF without explaining to readers and listeners what it is and what its goals are. I’m long past the point of caring whether that’s incompetence or malevolence because the result is the same.

  • These things speak to me

    There’s an arresting quote in Jude Doyle’s superb profile of the late author Rachel Pollack that to me, sums up the experience of being trans when you haven’t come out:

    all of these things speak to me, but I am not welcome in the places where they are being spoken.

    The piece also links to an important slice of trans history, the manifesto Don’t Call Me Mister You Fucking Beast. The language around transness has changed a lot since it was written in 1972, the same year I was born, but it remains timely.

    When we’re alone we tend to accept the stereotypes. By getting together we’ve discovered how ridiculous they really are. No one in the group has ever said, ‘What horrible trick of nature has made me a woman trapped in a man’s body?’ We just don’t think that way.

    …The important thing is, no one should tell you, as a man or a woman, this is the role you have to play, and you have to play it all the time. 

  • A loaded question

    Someone made the rookie mistake of asking writer and academic Julia Serano to come on air and discuss the bigot dog-whistle “what is a woman?” Serano declined, and explained why.

    “What is a woman?” is not intended to be a question. It’s a slogan created and championed by UK “gender critical” activists who strongly oppose the social and legal recognition of trans people, with some even calling for eliminationist measures that would morally mandate us out of existence. Whenever gender-critical activists pose the “what is a woman?” question to politicians, organizations, celebrities, etc. (as they are wont to do), they are not looking to start a nuanced discussion or debate. Rather, they want a yes-or-no answer to their real question, the only question that counts in their minds: Will you support our anti-trans beliefs, policies, and legislation?

    Serano’s right, of course. “What is a woman?” is a loaded, rhetorical question asked by the kind of people who praise the Taliban or Russell Brand for “knowing what a woman is”, and it’s asked in much the same way as “when did you stop beating your wife?”

    It is a question with an agenda, and it is based on an underlying assumption, a belief, that there is a single, immutable definition of what a woman is. And of course, that isn’t true.

    The term “woman” is a classification and as Serano says, it has different criteria and meanings in different contexts. So for example in genetics, the criteria might be chromosomes; in reproductive health, reproductive anatomy; and in everyday conversation, social class: “people who move through the world as women and are interpreted and treated (and sometimes mistreated) as such.”

    …if I mentioned having a conversation with a woman that I know from work or ran into at the store, you wouldn’t think at all about her chromosomes or reproductive organs (unless, of course, you were some kind of creep). 

    Serano writes:

    …we all understand that “woman” is a broad category that comprises roughly half the human population. By necessity, it includes all sorts of diversity and seeming exceptions to the rule.

    This is why, in everyday life, nobody ever asks the question “what is a woman?” In fact, the only people who bother to raise the issue these days are anti-trans activists.

    And the reason they raise it, and the reason so many cisgender men parrot it, is because it’s a distraction from the very real issues all women experience, cis and trans. Because if we were to focus on any significant danger to women, we wouldn’t be looking at trans women. We’d be looking at cisgender men and some cisgender women too.

  • Now they’re closing clinics

    A US health clinic for trans people has closed its doors permanently after the introduction of a state-wide ban on healthcare for trans teens. As Xtra magazine reports, the ban was largely based on wild allegations by a single person, allegations that appear to be largely or completely baseless. But the national press, and the New York Times in particular, doesn’t let the facts get in the way of a good scare story – and those scare stories often end up being used as evidence by the bigots in support of their bans.

    From the article:

    While the bulk of the blame for the clinic’s shuttering lies with the state’s conservative legislature, its closure was also accelerated by a group of anti-trans journalists who presented Reed’s unsubstantiated allegations to a wide audience.

    …[despite the claims being debunked] Reed got a rosy portrayal from New York Times journalist Azeen Ghorayshi. Ghorayshi reported that she couldn’t substantiate most of Reed’s claims, and yet still went on to paint Reed as a brave truth teller in the pages of the paper of record.

    Evan Urquhart in Assigned Media has more, including interviews with the parents of trans teens.

    “We care about the clinic we take our children to. We care that it is providing ethical care. We care that it is following the standards of care. But using the words of this person [Reed] who has been shown to be unethical, to deny healthcare to all these people, just isn’t right. In Missouri, politicians are making health care decisions right now, none of whom are qualified to do so.”

    For too many journalists, this is a game. But for the people losing their healthcare – and the right-wingers have adults in their sights as well as teens – it’s a matter of life and death.

     

  • Double danger

    The Guardian reports today that the latest social attitudes survey shows that the UK is becoming more liberal in almost every way – with the notable exception of attitudes towards trans people. Since 2016, the first time such attitudes were recorded, people have become much more hostile to trans people:

    The proportion of the British public describing themselves as “not prejudiced” towards transgender people fell from 82% to 64% between 2021 and 2022, when the latest survey took place.

    So the number of people who say they’re prejudiced against trans people has doubled in a year. That’s astonishing, and horrifying.

    What could possibly have happened since the apparent golden age of 2016? If you go through The Guardian and The Observer’s coverage of trans issues in 2016, you’ll see that it’s very different from what they published in 2018, and things are even worse now: it turns out that “occasionally publishes hateful shit”, which was those papers’ position pre-2017, was as good as it was going to get.

    The big change in this period, of course, was the arrival of faux-feminist anti-trans groups and their immediate embrace by journalists in the left-wing press as well as the right. That happened in mid-2017 and grew very quickly, and you can see the change in the coverage and the language used.

    Initially at least, the anti-trans charge was led not by the right wing press, but by the left – notably the Guardian and The New Statesman. By 2018, the editorial policy of most of the UK press was clearly and often ridiculously anti-trans as the moral panic got into high gear.

    This is exactly what we saw in the period leading up to the introduction of Section 28.

    As I wrote in my book:

    [by 2018] newspapers’ star columnists were regularly railing against the invented evils of “trans activists” who were “silencing women”, and evangelical groups were being given a platform to describe support for trans and non-binary teens as “child abuse”, deliberately and cynically conflating changing gender markers with having “mutilating surgery”. The level of coverage was ridiculously one-sided, completely disproportionate for a minor change affecting such a small minority of people, and was an attempt to direct public opinion rather than reflect it.

    And direct it they have: in a very short time the press-driven hate campaign has seen a massive change in people’s attitudes towards legal gender recognition – something that doesn’t affect you at all if you aren’t transgender. From the Guardian report:

    while 58% of the British public agreed in 2016 that transgender people should be able to have the sex on their birth certificate changed if they wanted, that figure had dropped to 30% by 2022, suggesting an overall gradual erosion in support towards transgender rights” since 2018.

    The law today is the same as it was in 2016. What’s changed is the obsessive coverage of it, and of us.

    There’s a long list of villains here: not just the pressure groups and the journalists but the US right, the BBC, Channel 4, social media, the cowardice of the Theresa May government, the skeptics movement, the “mummy bloggers” and Mumsnet, the Hands Across The Aisle coalition and many more. One day somebody who isn’t risking financial ruin under UK libel laws will write the damning exposé the whole sorry saga deserves, hopefully making some of its key actors unemployable in the process. But for now, here’s the issue in a nutshell: since 2016, The UK’s leading left-wing paper has been a crucial part of a highly successful right-wing campaign to promote intolerance of and prejudice against some of the most marginalised people in the country. Well done, everybody.

  • Fake science, real cash

    The Huffington Post has an interesting exposé of the people making good money from bad takes and pseudoscience: you can make tens of thousands of dollars presenting pseudoscience in the employ of anti-trans religious extremists. And while the article is mainly about the US, the UK gets a look-in too. You may recognise the names here from their very frequent appearances in the UK press.

    The spike in anti-trans legislation means states need even more experts to defend it. And in order to deepen the bench, states have started enlisting academics who aren’t in health care or don’t even primarily research humans. One is a Manchester University professor named Emma Hilton, who mainly studies a particular species of frog and how it offers an understanding of inherited human genetic disorders. Hilton is a founder of a British group, Sex Matters, that advocates for legally segregating spaces by sex. She earned $300 an hour last year defending bans on trans girls playing on girls’ sports teams in Utah and Indiana.

    By way of explaining why she was qualified to weigh in on school sports, she told one court, “I participate keenly in sports at an amateur level, playing netball recreationally.”

    “Our understanding of human biology is in part a result of the study of animal models,” Hilton said in an email. She declined to address the relevance of netball, which is like basketball without dribbling.

    Another is Michael Biggs, an Oxford sociology professor who admitted in court to writing transphobic tweets under the pseudonymous handle @MrHenryWimbush and described himself as a “teenage shitlord [turned] Oxford professor.” “Transphobia is a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons,” reads one representative post.

    Florida paid Biggs $400 an hour to defend its Medicaid ban.

  • Pick-mes

    I’ve written many times that because trans people are normal people, they are just as varied as normal people – and that means some of us are idiots. Among the worst are people often described as “pick-mes”, which is a term used to describe members of a marginalised group who’ll happily throw their entire community under the bus to preserve their own status.

    I don’t know if it’s an age thing, but most of the trans pick-mes I’ve seen online are considerably older, transitioned a long time ago and tend to veer to the right politically. They don’t talk about trans rights much, but when they do it’s always victim-blaming: the war on trans people, in their view, is entirely trans people’s fault. It’s a profoundly ignorant and ahistorical perspective often expressed very vocally.

    Unfortunately this is nothing new. I’m reading Paul Baker’s superb Outrageous!, a history of the Section 28 era, and just like the trans pick-mes of today there were gay pick-mes in the late 1980s playing the same role: useful idiots against human rights.

    One strategy used by those in favour of [anti-gay legislation] was to try to separate off the ‘militant activists’ from ordinary ‘homosexuals’. Lord Annan said that the militants in the gay liberation movement wanted ‘a first-class row’ and ‘do not represent homosexuals any more than student union activists used to represent students. Homosexual men and women ask to be left to live their own lives.’ In a similar way, the Earl of Halsbury claimed he’d had a deluge of letters, many from homosexuals. He read out his ‘favourite letter’, which said, ‘I want to say how fed up I am with my fellow homosexuals. They have brought it upon themselves, their unpopularity. They are too promiscuous, too aggressive and exhibitionist. I cannot stand the sight of them. I wish they would keep themselves to themselves.’

    I try to have empathy for these people, who I know have suffered, but in all honesty it’s hard: they’d sacrifice the safety, dignity and human rights of the majority of trans and non-binary people to protect their own status as The One True Transsexual. And that means they’re enablers, human shields for some of the most hateful people on earth. Whether it’s stupidity, ego, trauma or a mix of some or all of these things I don’t know. But I do know that the people that hate the rest of us hate them too, and that those people won’t stop with us.

     

  • Carry on torturing

    In 2019, both the Tories in England and the SNP in Scotland formally pledged to ban conversion therapy. In 2023, both the Tories in England and the SNP in Scotland said that their bans would be introduced this year. This week, both the Tories in England and the SNP in Scotland decided they were no longer going to ban conversion therapy. Officially that’s just for this year, but realistically it’s never.

    The reason, inevitably, is the unholy alliance of anti-trans bigots, religious lobbyists and the right-wing press, a Venn diagram that’s close to a single circle. The claim is that a ban is too complex, that it would criminalise legitimate psychological help, or that it would criminalise the wrong people. But the facts haven’t changed, and the facts are that such bans have been introduced all over the world without any problems. As we’ve discovered in countries such as Canada, Brazil, Spain, Germany, France, Malta and New Zealand, you can avoid being prosecuted for torturing children by simply not torturing children.

    And make no mistake, conversion therapy is torture: the UN described it as such in 2020, calling for a global end to the cruel and hideous practice. Amnesty International agrees. Conversion therapy is a breach of people’s basic human rights – specifically, article 5 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights and Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The only psychologists and psychiatrists that support it are quacks: the practice has been condemned by both the British Psychological Society and the Royal College of Psychiatrists, as well as medical bodies worldwide.

    There’s no debate here; you’re either in favour of torturing children or you aren’t. Seeing politicians cave to the pro-torture camp is as despicable as it is predictable.

  • All the right friends

    I’d like to introduce you to my friends Laura, Amy and Steven. I don’t understand why Laura loves incredibly derivative and often idiotic punk rock, and she thinks that my beloved REM are one of the worst bands in human history. Other than that, we get on brilliantly. I don’t share Amy’s veganism, and she obviously doesn’t share my love of barbecuing steaks. Other than that, we get on brilliantly. I don’t share Steven’s love of country music, and he believes that my book should be banned and that I am a predatory paedophile who should be tarred, feathered and hung from a lamppost. Other than that…

    Steven isn’t real, of course, although there are many people who believe exactly what I’ve described. But of course, I’m not friends with those people any more than I would be friends with animal torturers, wife beaters or any other horrific humans. And this apparently makes me a bad person.

    One of the most annoying topics in the current awfulness of everything is the trope that the woke censorious left won’t be friends with people who don’t share their political views. That trope is bollocks, and AR Moxon has written an excellent explanation of why.

    It’s a very common lament: that there is no civility left these days, as compared to earlier days, and the main reason appears to be that those on the “left” refuse to be friends with those on the “right,” shunning them simply because of their political views.

    This implies something rather startling: American conservatives want to be friends with the rest of us. Had you realized? You’d never know it to listen to them, but apparently it is so, and the notion that some of us don’t want to be friends with them is one of the most pressing matters to be found in the opinion sections of our nation’s great newspapers and magazines and newsfortainment television programs.

    Moxon argues that the supposed polarity of left/right isn’t accurate, and suggests humanist/supremacist instead. The supremacist political view is that “other types of humans do not matter, and shouldn’t have space to exist and thrive as themselves, and should are abused and punished for any refusal to be dominated.” And yet “they feel strongly that friendship is something they still deserve, though it feels like something they actually want, and more like something they believe they’re owed.”

    I think Moxon makes a very important point about the discourse around this.

    Something I’ve noticed about professional civility mourners is that when they mourn the divisions over political views, they rarely mention what those views are, or what effect they have.

    That’s very true of the reporting around this, which frames “views” as some kind of abstract thing without any actual consequences. So for example the “view” that there are too many trans people and that their numbers should be reduced, which is genocidal, is presented as if it were an opinion about wallpaper or a TV show. All too often, “views” are considered more important than the actual people those views are about and targeted towards.

    There is not a debate if one side believes that all Black people, all Jewish people or all LGBTQ+ people should be killed and the other side is the Black people, the Jewish people or the LGBTQ+ people that the other side want to kill. And yet all too often that’s exactly how these things are presented, and have been for a very long time. The BBC famously used the headline “Should homosexuals face execution?” in a piece about Uganda’s anti-gay persecution just over ten years ago. The “should” turns what should be absolute horror into a nice dinner party chat.

    Of course, not all views are so extreme. But many supremacist ones are, no matter how politely they’re expressed. And there is not an equally hateful and violent other side.

    Moxon:

    nobody is trying to strip supremacists of their vote, or ensure that they will go bankrupt over medical care, or force them to give birth to their rapist’s baby, or murder them at the border, or take away their children, or frame the continuance of their lives as a cost rather than a value, as something that must be earned, as something that is undeserved. In fact, these are things that the humanist spirit is trying to ensure even they will be safe from, which actually seems like the friendliest posture a person can take, toward somebody who has decided to be their enemy.

    And yet we’re expected to be friends with people who want those things for us. Moxon uses the analogy of schoolyard bullies who want us to sit at their lunch table as sycophants: “If you want to be friends, why don’t you ever come sit with us? Why is the demand that we come sit with you instead? Why do you want so badly for only some of us to sit over with you, and why aren’t the rest of our friends ever welcome at your table?”

    If you want friends, why aren’t you willing to be friendly?

    Do you want to be friends? Is friends what is desired here?

    I don’t think so, actually.

    I think what’s being sought is accomplices.

    And I think that’s true. It’s freedom of speech as a demand for freedom of consequences all over again: some of the world’s worst people demanding that the world conforms to what they want, and never the other way around. It’s portrayed as a basic human right when it’s nothing of the sort. Friendship is a contract, and the terms of that contract is that if you turn out to be an arsehole, the deal is off.

    In a previous piece, Moxon talked about the abuse of freedom of speech in more detail.

    It’s almost gotten to be boring, the degree to which people believe that what they refer to as “free speech” should not only allow them to say whatever they want (which it does), but should also prevent other people from understanding them to be the sort of person who says those things.

    Moxon believes, as I do, that it’s perfectly appropriate for awful people to be shunned because of the things they say and do.

    There are worse things than shunning. There are shelves empty of books. There are people dying from deliberately manufactured medical policy. There are actual attacks upon freedom and speech. There is supremacy. There is genocide.

    …At a certain point, it seems to me that we have to conclude that what such people are actually advocating for is not to use sunlight to expose and disinfect our society of bigotry, but simply to have a society in which bigotry is free to dance in the sun.

  • Erasure

    It’s very hard to write about the grifters, bigots and assorted arseholes waging war on trans people and make it entertaining, let alone funny, but Liz Crash manages it with great aplomb in her piece about the supposed “erasure” of lesbian women by trans women, a claim beloved of far-right goons and their useful idiots. It’s as wise and well-informed as it is funny.

    Now, I’m something of a lesbian myself, and from my perspective—putting aside for a minute the housing crisis, COVID-19, the cost of living, psychiatrist fees, Sarina Russo, fentanyl in the pingers, climate change, and global fascism—there’s never been a better time to be a lesbian.