Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: LGBTQ+

  • “Walk a mile in her shoes”

    Bigots like to pretend that being trans is easy, that it’s something people do on a whim to make themselves more interesting and popular. The reality, of course, is very different, as this piece in Byline Times points out: “Call me Chloe”: the reality of life for my transgender daughter.

    I bristle when I hear people talk of the ‘trans debate’ as if my daughter’s right to exist peacefully and safely in the world is somehow up for discussion. But I do wish that all those who think this is a process any young person would ‘choose’ would walk one day in her shoes. It’s not a walk they’d want to repeat.

    Being trans is hard. Being young and trans is harder still, and requires a bravery far beyond anything the bigots possess. Culture-war cowards run in packs; trans people often walk the world alone.

  • An admission

    It’s yet another week in the ongoing demonisation of trans women; former prime minister Liz Truss wants to introduce a member’s bill that would ban healthcare for trans teens and make it illegal for trans women to use women’s spaces, and a bunch of bigoted right-wing shits have made a film mocking trans women in sports. The coverage of both has been dreadful – for example most reports of Truss’s bill use the sense-free dog-whistle “biological males” instead of trans women, while the bigots’ film has been described as a comedy – and in the case of the movie, the coverage has missed a crucial point.

    According to risible bigot Ben Shapiro, the film was not originally intended as a scripted movie. It was supposed to be a documentary. His intention was to get men to join women’s sports teams by claiming they were women, but when the men tried to do that they were told (politely, I assume) to fuck off – because you can’t just join women’s sports teams by claiming to be a woman. As Shapiro has admitted, the men “weren’t willing to go the full distance in terms of, you know, the actual hormone treatments and everything to play in some of the ladies’ leagues.”

    Right-wing bigots in “making shit up to demonise minorities” shocker? This is my surprised face.

    As is so often the case, writer and academic Julia Serano has been talking about this for years: as she wrote in her book Whipping Girl, if changing gender were that simple, that easy, far more people would do it. Actors would do it for roles, criminals would do it to go undercover, reality show contestants would do it for fame, women would do it to escape the glass ceiling and other discrimination, struggling gay or lesbian people would do it for an easier life. And right-wing assholes would do it to get on women’s sports teams.

    The reason they don’t is because deep down, they understand that gender transition is not something anybody does lightly, that hormones have a profound effect on your brain and on your body. To be blunt, they weren’t willing to risk feeling for even a few weeks what many trans people have to feel for years or even decades.

  • A true original

    It’s Wendy Carlos’s birthday today. Carlos is one of the most influential electronic musicians of all time: half-artist, half-scientist, she is a pioneer without whom today’s music would sound very different. Her 1968 album Switched-On Bach introduced a generation to the synthesiser, she was an early creator of what we now call ambient music, and her soundtrack for Clockwork Orange is just as astonishing now as it was back in the 70s. You could say she’s the godmother of modern music, particularly electronic music.

    Wendy is trans, and transitioned in 1972 – the same year I was born. And sadly her trans status means she missed out on many of the rewards her talent should have brought her: she has previously said that she “lost an entire decade” avoiding performing live (in a few cases she disguised herself as a man, crying in her hotel room beforehand) and working with other musicians because she didn’t want to go public about her transition. Carlos later said that those fears were unfounded – “The public turned out to be amazingly tolerant or, if you wish, indifferent […] There had never been any need of this charade to have taken place. It had proven a monstrous waste of years of my life” – but there were still many indignities, accidental or otherwise. The most recent version of the Clockwork Orange soundtrack that I’m aware of, from 2001, still credits her under her deadname.

    I’m a huge admirer of her, and in addition to her recorded work I’d really recommend checking out podcasts in which she’s interviewed; her appearance on History Is Gay is really fun. She’s a true talent as well as a very entertaining storyteller.

  • Awareness

    I’m deeply cynical about awareness days and weeks: while well intentioned, I think any Awareness Day also provides an easy way for people to pretend they’re part of the solution without actually doing anything – and in some cases, while being part of the problem. Mental health awareness weeks are a very good example of that, with politicians posting platitudes to social media while simultaneously enacting policies to make mental health provision even worse.

    This week is Trans Awareness Week, which started in the US as the lead up to Trans Day of Visibility – a day to mourn the many trans people, mostly trans women of colour and often sex workers, murdered worldwide. As the bigots are quick to point out, trans people are much less likely to be murdered here in the UK – although it does happen, as this month’s trial of teenager Brianna Ghey’s killers demonstrates. But the awareness week is also about raising awareness of healthcare problems, of discrimination, and of anti-trans hate. And those things are global and in countries like the UK, growing.

    The problem, I think, is that the sharing of these things is largely a waste of time. Trans people are already very aware of the dangers and issues we face. And people who aren’t trans will often post in support before returning to the very things that make trans people’s lives so difficult.

    There will be people posting in support of trans awareness week on X/Twitter, the social network that has done more than any other network to facilitate (and now, promote and pay for) anti-trans hatred. There will be people posting in support of it that will then pick up their copy of The Guardian or The New Statesman, publications that have helped normalise anti-trans bigotry on the left instead of just its usual home on the right (and there’s plenty on the right). There will be people posting in support of it while listening to Spotify or watching YouTube, which both pay enormous sums of money to anti-trans rabble-rousers.

    Forget awareness. There’s plenty of awareness already. What we need isn’t empty platitudes or hollow social media posturing. We need people to stop financing, amplifying and excusing hate-spewing platforms, publications and people. Until they do, the flags they wave are worthless.

  • Trans attacks don’t work

    The results of yesterday’s US elections make something very clear: attacking trans people, which Republicans did with great energy and at even greater expense, doesn’t work – and in fact such relentless demonisation of marginalised people may well motivate people to banish the bigots. This isn’t a huge surprise, because we saw the same in Australia and more recently in English by-elections, where anti-trans culture war bullshit was roundly rejected. But I doubt that it’ll change the planned ratcheting up of anti-trans rhetoric by the UK Conservative government and by their friends in the press in the run-up to the next election.

    As satisfying as it was to see so many bigots rejected yesterday, and as satisfying as it’ll be to see the same happen in the UK next year, that satisfaction doesn’t begin to compensate for the damage these hateful bastards and their useful idiots in the media have done, the lives that they have ruined and the lives that anti-trans policies and rhetoric will continue to ruin. The religious and conservative right have lit fires that will take a long time to extinguish.

     

  • Dead cats

    In 2013, then-London mayor Boris Johnson described an Australian political trick which would come to be known as the dead cat strategy.

    There is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table – and I don’t mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true, but irrelevant. The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout, ‘Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!’ In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat – the thing you want them to talk about – and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.

    Johnson himself has used it many times when in self-inflicted political peril, but the most recent example of it was yesterday when it was deployed by Elon Musk to distract from news that under his leadership Twitter has lost $25 billion in value in just one year. His dead cat of choice, like that of many politicians, was anti-trans bigotry – and it worked. There’s much more discussion online of whether, as Musk claims (bizarrely), “cis is a heterosexual slur” than of Musk’s disastrous time in charge of the social network.

    As Evan Urquhart writes in Assigned Media:

    What he’s doing so transparently is the same thing the entire right wing media establishment, backed by conservative billionaires, has been doing with the entire anti-trans panic.

    In many cases the people pushing anti-trans nonsense don’t necessarily believe it; it’s just convenient and when it stops working they’ll find another kind of cat to throw. But while I think this is absolutely a dead cat strategy, I also think that with Musk it’s coming from a more personal place: one of his children is trans and wants nothing to do with him. Which is worth bearing in mind whenever Apartheid Clyde, Space Karen, Poundland Iron Man or whatever else you’d like to call him embarks on another round of transphobia. He’s the trope made flesh of the racist, vaccine-denying, gammon-faced Fox News viewer furious that their kids don’t visit any more.

    On a slightly related note, Musk also announced yesterday that he intends to turn Twitter/X into a dating app. Suggested names in my social media feeds so far include OKStupid, Plenty of Fash, OKKKupid and my own contribution, Fash-ly Madison.

  • Donating to hate

    The Huffington Post has a new article about another very rich American donating money to fund anti-trans groups. This one is Joseph Edelman, a billionaire hedge funder. He’s not alone: rich men’s money has been funding huge swathes of the anti-trans movement for some years now, and not just in the US and its UK affiliates: there’s a lot of Russian oligarch money in there too, especially in mainland Europe. You might argue that Paul Marshall, a significant funder of right-wing media in the UK including UnHerd and GB News, is part of the same pattern – the super-rich funding outlets that push division and portray the world’s most privileged people as victims of sinister, shadowy “elites”.

  • Acceptable damage

    My friend was humiliated on the Glasgow subway last night.

    My friend is a conventionally attractive thirtysomething cisgender woman with great fashion sense and brightly coloured hair. This, apparently, was enough to convince a carriage full of men that she was transgender. In between breaks to snort cocaine from a shared bag, the men loudly abused her, shouting the t-slur and other transphobic and homophobic abuse.

    She’s as okay as you can be in such circumstances, but it was a horrific experience – and it’s an experience that’s becoming increasingly common in public for anybody who doesn’t fit a very narrow view of acceptable femininity, because transphobia has become the bigotry it’s okay – and often even encouraged – to express. To the anti-trans mob, the abuse of cisgender women is simply acceptable, collateral damage mixed with victim blaming: if cis women don’t want to be abused by howling arseholes on public transport, they should present themselves more demurely.

  • Unethical. Unscientific. Unsafe

    The ever-growing waiting times for adult trans healthcare have effectively privatised medicine for trans adults: good luck waiting 25 years or more for a first appointment if you can’t afford a private GP and a life of private prescriptions; shared care, where a private GP prescribes your medicine and your local GP oversees it, is largely banned (so for example it’s been stopped in my bit of Scotland). And now the NHS in England is turning its attention to teenagers. Its new policies are unethical, unscientific and unsafe, and have effectively banned best practice healthcare for trans teens.

    Healthcare will be withheld – a clear human rights violation – if patients don’t agree to be part of research studies – another human rights violation; patients have the right not to be forced into such studies – and private clinicians who provide the care the NHS denies may be investigated by regulators with the threat of withdrawing their licence to practice medicine. The proposed protocols enshrine dangerous and discredited conversion therapy as a preferred course of action instead of providing evidenced and effective treatment we know to be life-enhancing and in some cases life-saving.

    This article by Susie Green goes into the detail.

    What we’re seeing here is healthcare decisions made not by clinicians but by columnists; not by medical experts but by propagandists.

    Green:

    So where did these protocols come from? Who created them? We don’t know and they aren’t telling us. It seems ridiculous that they would ignore WPATH Standards of Care V8, especially when you consider the rigorous work done to ensure that it is based on extensive literature review and contributions, and scrutiny from over 4,000 clinicians worldwide who specialise in transgender healthcare. But with a government hellbent on damaging trans people as a way to distract from their failings, I don’t think it is difficult to work out that NHSE has become a politically manipulated service. And trans people are the ones who are suffering because of it… [the NHS] doesn’t want to improve trans healthcare for children. They want to stop it.

    These new protocols aren’t medical. They’re political.

  • Training wheels of hate

    I don’t generally comment on modern horrors such as the deaths in Gaza or in US classrooms because I don’t have anything to say beyond heartfelt but trite platitudes. But there’s a detail about the ongoing situation in Maine, where a man recently discharged from a mental hospital has killed nearly 20 people, that’s worth highlighting.

    At the time of writing the mass murderer Robert Card is still on the run, but there’s a growing body of evidence showing what motivated him. And surprise surprise, Twitter is in there – so much so that Elon Musk apparently had Card’s account pulled from the service, presumably because it shows how much time Card spent on Musk’s timelines and on those of other right-wingers. The logs are widely available online and it’s very much a case of Musk Musk Musk Carlson Musk Donald Trump Musk… you get the idea.

    Not only that but one of the paths to his radicalisation appears to be that favourite of the far right, the supposed danger of trans people: among his recent likes on Twitter, Card liked posts from Donald Trump Jr and by Tucker Carlson railing against the supposed dangers of “trans/non-binary mass shooters” and how the trans movement is the “natural enemy” of Christians and “pushing their gender affirming bullshit on our kids”. As Wired puts it, his Twitter profile “was filled with conspiracy theories about trans mass shooters and pro-MAGA content.”

    I’ve written about this before: it’s called stochastic terrorism, a way of inciting violence while keeping your own hands clean. The Donald Trump Jrs, Tucker Carlsons and other sulphurous bastards of the world don’t commit acts of terrorism. But their words are read by and fuel the hatred of people who do. And in a country where severe mental illness and domestic violence convictions are no barrier to assault rifle ownership, that hatred can lead to unspeakable horrors.

    It’s too early to say definitively what caused Card to become a killer, and of course these things are multi-factorial: this particular toxic cocktail appears to include severe mental illness, among other things. But again and again we’re seeing the internet radicalising people to kill, and increasingly that radicalisation includes anti-trans propaganda – because the far right use that as a gateway to further radicalisation, the training wheels of hate.