Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: LGBTQ+

  • An evil plan

    In bad movies, villains like to explain in advance what they’re going to do. And in the bad movie we currently appear to be living in, the Christian Right does that too. Often, the most hateful plans and strategies are discussed openly at their conferences or published in their strategy documents.

    A good example of that was the 2017 Values Voter Summit in Washington DC, where the strategy to attack trans people was set out in full: by using a divide and conquer strategy to try and separate the T from the LGB, the Christian Right believed they could use trans people as a wedge against human rights more widely. They would do that in two ways: first of all, by portraying their attempts to remove trans people’s rights as trans people demanding more rights; and secondly, by pushing the message that those rights would remove the rights of others, such as lesbian women and female athletes. As you know, it’s a strategy that so far has been highly successful both in the US and the UK, partly through the Hands Across The Aisle initiative to team up Christian evangelicals with supposedly left-wing feminists and feminist journalists.

    If you thought that one was bad, you should see what they’re working on now.

    As Brynn Tannehill reports, Project 2025 – a coalition of despicable organisations including our old friends the Heritage Foundation (a key influence on the UK government and the main driver of this project), the Alliance Defending Freedom (a key player in anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and rhetoric on both sides of the Atlantic) and many others – has published a 900-page strategy document that’s truly terrifying and that it hopes will inform the next US presidential term. I’m looking at it here from a trans perspective but it’s also horrifying for Black people, for women, for disabled people and civilisation generally.

    “The Mandate for Leadership” is a 920-page document that details how the next Republican administration will implement radical and sweeping changes to the entirety of government… The business wish list calls for eliminating federal agencies, stripping those that remain of regulatory power, and deregulating industries. The president would directly manage and influence Department of Justice and FBI cases, which would allow him to pursue criminal cases against political enemies. Environmental law would be gutted, and states would be prevented from enforcing their own environmental laws.

    As Tannehill says, it’s effectively a wish-list for the evangelical right. And their wishes regarding LGBTQ+ people are frightening.

    “The Mandate for Leadership” makes eradicating LGBTQ people from public life its top priority.

    It’s important to consider the document in its wider context, because at the moment in the US many states are passing laws to restrict people’s access to pornographic content. But the Right’s definition of pornography probably isn’t your definition, because it includes the simple existence of LGBTQ+ people.

    So when you read this:

    Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.

    You need to understand that “it” includes my book, this blog, The Advocate, Autostraddle, the Trevor Project’s suicide hotline and anything else that provides any information whatsoever about LGBTQ+ people. We know this because they’re already trial-running it in the form of laws such as Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation.

    And that’s just the beginning. Tannehill:

    It could be argued as well that people who are visibly trans in public are pornographic or obscene, because they might be seen by a minor. This understanding of intent is in line with the call to “eradicate transgenderism from public life.”

    That eradication is real.

    The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule 

    The document decries “the toxic normalisation of transgenderism” that it claims is “invading” school libraries and says that its very top priority is to:

    Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.

    That’s not a dog whistle. That’s a five-alarm wake-up call in a document that sets out very clearly how the Christian Right intends to turn the US into a theocracy.

    Tannehill:

    The question remains: Will they be able to get all of this past the Supreme Court? Perhaps not in the short run. But over time, if given the power, they will replace current justices with those they hand-pick to give them the decisions they want, just as they did to end Roe v. Wade. Conservatives at the Claremont Institute have stated that they intend to seize power for generations and remake the U.S. entirely in their image. The “Mandate for Leadership” is an announcement of their goals, and the roadmap to achieving them.

  • Taliban fans

    Last year, trans people wryly joked that it was just a matter of time before some anti-trans dolt praised the Taliban because “at least they know what a woman is”. That dolt turned out to be Julia Hartley-Brewer, who tweeted on 29 August: “At least the Taliban know what a woman is” in response to a tweet noting that the Taliban “beheads and murders women and gay people”. Hartley-Brewer’s tweet appears to have been liked by JK Rowling, whose people told the press earlier this year that she’d helped people trying to escape the same regime.

    Praising the profoundly, viciously misogynist, homophobic and transphobic Taliban is very much on brand for so-called gender criticals, and many of them display a level of ignorance and idiocy that’s truly impressive. Such as today’s post by “Joanna”, who told a trans woman that “you, as a man, would not be subjected to what women in Afghanistan are. Why? Because you are a MAN.”

    As the woman in question, Katy Montgomerie, pointed out, there are only two possible fates for trans women under the Taliban. If they pass – ie they’re perceived to be cisgender women – then they will be oppressed just like any other woman. And if they don’t, they will be treated like other LGBTQ+ people, many of whom are attacked or sexually assaulted because of their orientation or gender identity: abused, attacked, sometimes even tortured or executed.

    Human Rights Watch has an excellent and horrifying article about life for queer people under the Taliban.

    Despite making repeated pledges to respect human rights, the Taliban have engaged in widespread rights abuses since retaking control of the country, including revenge killings, systematic discrimination against women and girls, severe restrictions on freedom of expression and the media, and land grabbing. The danger now facing LGBT people in Afghanistan—in an environment devoid of legal protections, under authorities that have explicitly pledged not to tolerate LGBT people—is grave.

    As Foreign Policy reports:

    Since the Taliban takeover last August, members of the Afghan LGBTQ community have faced electrocution, torture, killings, and fear.

    Here’s DW talking about Danish, a trans person.

    Danish has been living in semidarkness for weeks. Since the Taliban’s takeover in mid-August, he has been hiding in the windowless back room of a friend’s now-closed shop in Kabul. He no longer dares go outside. Under the Islamist Taliban, he and many like him face the death penalty… Everyday discrimination against LGBTQ individuals is ubiquitous, as is violence against them.

    But at least the Taliban know what a woman is, right?

  • Not fair. Not reasonable

    In the last few weeks, two stories have stood out to me among the usual avalanche of anti-trans content. The first story is the introduction of a new open category in the swimming World Cup for “all sex and gender identities”. And the second is the story of a trans woman who was turned away from a beauty salon and set up her own inclusive salon, marketed primarily towards trans and non-binary people.

    What they have in common is that both are examples of what anti-trans bigots claim would satisfy their “reasonable concerns”: they’re about trans and non-binary people being segregated from cisgender women.

    And yet both stories have been met with howls of protest and the usual online abuse.

    It doesn’t make sense. Or at least, it doesn’t if you think that anti-trans people have been telling the truth about their so-called reasonable concerns or their desire for so-called fairness.

    The thing about bigots, though, is that like the fascists they like to pal around with, they lie. They lie, and they lie, and they lie some more. They lie about statistics, about science, about the medical consensus. And most of all, they lie about what they want.

    It’s exactly the same playbook as the anti-abortion activists, who will claim that of course they don’t want to ban all abortion. They just want X, Y or Z. But they *do* want to ban all abortion. They’re just wise enough to know that the vast majority of people don’t want that, so they pretend to be more reasonable than they actually are. Given the reins of power, the mask falls off – as you can see in the US where there are serious attempts being made not just to ban all abortion, but to ban contraception and sex education too.

    It’s the same with anti-trans activists. Their goal is the complete elimination of trans people from the world, but again they realise that genocide doesn’t tend to go down well with most people. So they change the language to dehumanise – we’re never people; we’re a cult, an ideology, an agenda – and they pretend the multiple fronts aren’t connected.

    But when you look at the wider picture – attempts to ban trans people from sports, attempts to remove trans people’s legal gender recognition, attempts to ban trans people’s healthcare, attempts to remove trans people’s legal protections from discrimination, attempts to remove any references to trans people in schools, attempts to remove any books about trans people from libraries, attempts to censor the internet to prevent people from reading about trans people, attempts to incite violence against trans people by claiming they’re a danger to your women and children… you’d need to be a very particular kind of stupid to still believe that any of this is about “fairness” or “reasonable concerns”.

    To steal the old joke: how do you know when an anti-trans activist is lying? Their lips are moving.

     

  • The Sun sinks lower

    If you thought The Sun newspaper had changed its spots since the days of demonising AIDS sufferers and pissing on the Hillsborough dead, it would like to show you otherwise. Here’s its Sun Says column:

    Yes, it’s using dead babies as cannon fodder in its war on LGBTQ people. Those babies were not murdered by someone who was LGBTQ, and the lack of action was nothing to do with “wokeness”; quite the opposite, as it appears that racism played a significant part in the difficulty whistleblowers had in getting management to listen to them.

    Even by the Sun’s terribly low standards, to blame a murder committed by a straight, cisgender white woman and covered up by straight, cisgender white people on the LGBTQ community is utterly disgusting – and no different from the internet bigots calling LGBTQ people child abusers to try and incite violence against them. If you buy or work for any Murdoch property, you’re helping to pay for this.

     

  • We are trickster gods

    This superb piece by Niko Stratis is a must-read about the no-point-in-reading news stories telling you that some old rich guy or other thinks trans women are icky and probably murderous.

    We are trickster gods, barbed and poisonous, waiting to rip the seams of the tender fabric of this gentle world. But we are never the interviewer, never the storyteller, rarely the writer and seldom real.

    …After the run of Cooper news, it was announced that legendary guitar player and songwriter Carlos Santana went on a baffling on-stage tirade about trans people. This wasn’t the result of a poorly planned question, by all accounts this was unprompted. When I saw the news first, it was in Billboard, and it was in their “Pride” section.

    I ask you, what “Pride” do we take away from this knowledge? There is no value gained here certainly, and I am not surprised that Santana doesn’t like trans people because I am rarely surprised by such facts anymore. There is no easier path to a headline than making baseless comments about trans people into whatever microphone will have you.

    Stratis’s piece makes the well-worn but still important point that right now, trans people are among the most talked about and least listened to group in society: publication after publication uses us for outrage marketing by asking famous people whether they hate trans people and love JK Rowling, or the famous people do it themselves because they have a product to push. But the voices you never hear over the shouts of the supposedly silenced are those of trans people. Far too much media is about us, without us.

  • Years and years

    One of the more irritating barks of the anti-trans sealions is “what rights don’t trans people have, exactly?” It’s irritating because it’s deliberately obtuse: many of the rights we have on paper are rights that are not enforced, which means they might as well not exist. And the sealions know that but pretend not to.

    A good example of that is the right to NHS treatment that most UK nationals take for granted. But Cumbria, Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust has just announced that for the foreseeable future, it will not be accepting any referrals to the Northern Region Gender Dysphoria Service (NRGDS). You cannot get trans-related treatment through the NHS via any other avenue, so the NHS has effectively just scrapped trans healthcare in the region. We know that this healthcare is life-saving for many people, and yet in that part of England it simply isn’t available to anybody who isn’t already on the years-long waiting list.

    This isn’t the first time this has happened. In 2021, it emerged that Northern Ireland’s only gender identity clinic hadn’t accepted a single new patient since 2018. The Sandyford in Glasgow stopped taking new patients for its youth services for a while last year too.

    Even where new patients are being accepted, the backlog isn’t being cleared quickly enough. According to a freedom of information request earlier this month, trans people in Yorkshire can expect to wait thirty-five years for a first appointment at current clearance rates.

    The reason for this awful state of affairs is because there aren’t enough staff or resources to cope with demand for healthcare that remains part of the desperately underfunded and short-staffed mental health division of the desperately underfunded and short-staffed NHS. Despite years of warnings – including in the Theresa May government’s own LGBT action plan – trans healthcare has been starved of resources; rather than follow its own committee’s advice on reforming our healthcare, the May government decided instead to go for the much cheaper and largely un-requested reform of the gender recognition act. Which as I’m sure you know has been a great success.

    And to make things worse, the online bullying and press demonisation of trans healthcare providers in a style very reminiscent of the Christian Right’s attacks on abortion providers has made it very hard to fill vacancies. Until recently the Sandyford Clinic in Glasgow had just two psychiatrists, each of whom only attended one day per week, to cover the whole of the catchment area.

    The problem with trans healthcare is very simple. Healthcare that could easily be provided by our GPs – the HRT I take is the same HRT cisgender women take; the occasional blood tests I need are the same blood tests cisgender women need; the process for referring trans people to surgery doesn’t need to be any different than the process for knee surgery or back surgery, and so on – is all forced through the gender clinics, where psychiatrists do exactly the same job as your local GP surgery does. But there are far fewer psychiatrists than there are general practitioners, so the waiting lists get longer and longer and longer until healthcare is stopped altogether because the service can no longer cope.

    There was outcry in the newspapers a few weeks ago over the news that some 7.6 million people in England were waiting for NHS treatment, and two out of five had been waiting for more than 18 weeks. But that 18-week target doesn’t apply to mental health services, so there’s no outcry when ADHD and autism waiting lists exceed two years (many trans people are neurodiverse) or when trans waiting lists run into the decades, or when all trans healthcare is simply stopped. Officially, we have the same right to NHS treatment as anybody else. But in reality, we really don’t.

  • A century of “contagion”

    I’ve written many times about the entirely fictional phenomenon of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” which, despite not existing, is being used by right-wing politicians to justify their hateful assaults on trans healthcare as well as by UK culture warriors online and in newspaper columns and comments sections. This, in Scientific American, is yet more evidence that there’s no evidence.

    If ROGD is new to you, the short version is that it’s pseudoscience based solely on interviews with furious anti-trans bigots whose children don’t speak to them any more. And the longer version is that it’s the same old shit that bigots have been churning out for nearly a century now.

    Like most anti-trans bullshit, ROGD is a rebranded version of anti-gay bullshit: the belief that gay people were turned gay by “social contagion”. That’s a confection by the religious right, who want you to believe that being gay is not natural, not normal and not innate; it’s a deliberate choice, an immoral, unhealthy and freely chosen sin.

    They’ve been banging on like that for nearly a hundred years now. As this paper by Nancy J Knauer notes, the outcry over the 1928 novel The Well Of Loneliness, aka The Well, in which a lesbian character’s sexuality was “depicted as an innate, God-given and potentially noble characteristic” was greeted with “a hostile counter-narrative of homosexuality as contagion, resulting in sensational obscenity trials on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.”

    Those trials even enshrined the idea of social contagion in law:

    Courts in New York and London adjudged The Well obscene under the prevailing “Hicklin rule,” finding that it had the tendency “to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort might fall.”‘” Although the New York decision was overturned on appeal, The Well remained banned in Great Britain until 1949.

    As Knauer notes:

    The arguments used to suppress The Well are strikingly similar to those used today to silence positive images of same-sex desire, relationships, and identities in a wide variety of contexts including education, public employment, and 6 government-funded programs.

    The outcry over The Well established the six principles of the “contagion” argument. See how many you recognise from the anti-trans movement:

    1. Being gay is a freely chosen vice, not a medical or scientific category; nobody was “born this way”;
    2. Gays prey on innocent victims, particularly children;
    3. Gays have no shame and insist on flaunting their sexuality in public, infringing on the rights of others;
    4. Gays demand special rights, not just tolerance;
    5. This is a battle for the future of society, a war between good and evil (with gay people as evil, of course);
    6. Because homosexuality is so contagious, especially for children, any public image of homosexuality that is not negative or the presence of an openly gay person such as a teacher could transmit the contagion and therefore must be forbidden.

    Every time you read about rapid onset gender dysphoria you’re reading 100-year-old bullshit reported by people who either don’t know history or do know and simply don’t care.

  • The trick is to keep peeling

    It’s nearly six years since I started transitioning, and my relationship to my body has changed quite significantly since I began. As I wrote in my book, I never had the severe body dysphoria that many trans people experience, the discomfort, unhappiness or even horror that comes from your body and mind not matching up. But over time, I’ve found that those feelings have grown.

    On the face of it, that seems odd. After all, I’m six years further down the HRT road now so my biochemistry is better. I’ve had over 230 hours of facial electrolysis. So I’m closer to where I need to be than I was back then. But I don’t feel that way.

    It turns out that I’m not the only transitioning person who feels like that. Writing in Stained Glass Woman, Doc Impossible has some thoughts, and while I’m not sure I agree with all of them I think it’s an interesting piece.

    To summarise it: think of gender dysphoria as pain.

    Pain isn’t a constant. I’ve been getting facial electrolysis for four years now and last week’s session was one of the most painful ones I’ve ever had. It was the same technician, the same machine, the same needle size and strength. If anything it should be a walk in the park by now because the really thick hairs, the one that felt like they needed the entire National Grid to electro-shock, are long gone. But my pain threshold was different that day, possibly because I’ve been going through some things and not looking after myself as well as I should have been. So the needles really hurt – and things I normally would barely have noticed were very noticeable and very painful. It was absolutely excruciating.

    What if dysphoria works like that too? As I’ve written in my book, sometimes I ask myself: how strong do I feel today? Some days I’m stronger than others, and things bounce off that would normally hurt. And of course the reverse applies too. If your threshold for physical pain can vary, then surely the same applies to your threshold for psychic pain.

    What about the phenomenon I’ve experienced, of increasing dysphoria as I transition? In Doc Impossible’s piece they suggest that perhaps dysphoria is like an onion, with multiple layers – so if you address one of the issues that makes you dysphoric, you remove a layer. And that’s good, but what’s underneath it? Another layer, one that you might not have been aware of because you were focused on the layer now gone. And now you have a new, completely exposed layer to deal with.

    those sources of constant, moment-by-moment pain? They’re either gone or dramatically reduced.

    Which means that your brain can stop shutting off lesser, but still significant, sources of pain.

    When we start noticing “new” dysphorias, the truth is that they were always there.

    I think that’s a really interesting way to look at it, because I do think there’s more to it than just frustration: of course after 230 hours of electrolysis I’m pissed off with my weekly face stabbing, and the whingeing part of me thinks it’s very unfair that other trans women can achieve full clearance in a fraction of the time, and for a fraction of the money, than it’s taking me. But while there’s definitely an element of flagging after the halfway or three-quarters point, I think there’s also an element of onion peeling here. I’m unhappy about different things than I was six years ago, because there were bigger things I had to deal with first.

    The trick, it seems, is to keep peeling.

  • Words as weapons

    A new study from Germany adds more evidence that violent online speech leads to violent attacks in the streets. The Economist:

    A paper by Karsten Müller and Carlo Schwarz of the University of Warwick finds a strong association between right-wing, anti-refugee sentiment on German social-media sites and violent crimes against refugees.

    For every four anti-refugee posts on Facebook, there was one additional anti-refugee incident. According to the Economist, “This relationship appears to be driven by violent crimes such as arson and assault, and cannot be explained by local social-media usage or demography.”

    Correlation is not causation, I know. But we’re well aware of the power of propaganda and its association with violence. So it’s hardly surprising that the same connection is apparent in other forms of hateful speech. For example, if you plot the number of anti-trans articles in the UK press and the number of anti-trans hate crimes reported to the police in the same period, the curves are strikingly similar.

    This, by Joshua Foust back in 2019, is very relevant today.

    While I do think we still don’t understand the precise mechanism by which someone shifts from believing abhorrent ideas to acting on them, there is copious research demonstrating that abhorrent beliefs do lead to increases in ethnic violence. If a belief system is encouraging of violence and dehumanization then it has to be considered alongside the violent actors who say it inspires them.

    Foust begins by writing about Anders Breivik, whose manifesto famously referenced Daily Mail writer Melanie Phillips multiple times, but expands his article more widely:

    I think we need to take a few moments to understand how, as the debate over hate speech is manipulated in profoundly bad faith by right wing public intellectuals, the proliferation of hate speech is having a measurably bad effect on us as a society. And, realizing that, I’ll also discuss why placing faith in internet companies to fix the problem absolves everyone else of the need to act… we have to take responsibility for the sort of language we will tolerate, whether online or in more traditional media.

  • Red flags

    On Friday, 27-year-old Travis Ikeguchi murdered a 66-year-old mother of nine, Lauri Carleton, because he took exception to her shop’s Pride flag. According to US police he tore down the flag and hurled homophobic slurs before killing her in cold blood.

    Ikeguchi’s social media is still available to view, and it’s interesting to see how much he has in common with the leading lights of the UK anti-trans movement: he’s clearly a big fan of self-proclaimed theocratic fascist Matt Walsh, who JK Rowling recently praised on Twitter, and some of his posts share the same inflammatory rhetoric as the “groomer” posts by everybody’s favourite failed comedy writer. “We need to STOP COMPROMISING on this LGBT dictatorship” is fairly typical.

    Travis Ikeguchi's pinned Tweet from June 2023 showing a pride flag burning and describing it as the LGBTQP flag
    Travis Ikeguchi’s pinned Tweet from June 2023

    What’s also clear is that this killer was radicalised online, and that social networks didn’t do anything to stop it. On Twitter, Ikeguchi posted an image of a burning Pride flag with the caption “What do to with the LGBTQP flag?”. The addition of the letter P to denote paedophiles is a right-wing slur like the “groomer” slur, and burning or defaced Pride flags are a trademark of the “anti-woke” and so-called gender critical movements. When @medic_russell reported Ikeguchi’s post as hate speech, Twitter told him that “there were no violations of the Twitter rules in the content you reported”.

    That’s not a surprise. Travis Ikeguchi’s anti-Pride rhetoric is not significantly different from the anti-Pride rhetoric espoused by respected members of the so-called gender critical movement, so for example on his Twitter feed he reposted Jordan Peterson, who was sharing a baseless Daily Telegraph article about schoolchildren identifying as cats. Twitter generally doesn’t have a problem with abusive rhetoric around the Pride flag: for example, a tweet implying that trans women are violent men, demanding the removal of the “TQ” from the Pride flag and captioned “GET YOUR SHIT OFF OUR FLAG” apparently didn’t break the rules and was proudly shared by JK Rowling, not previously believed to be a member of the community “OUR FLAG” belongs to.

    Similarly when Helen Joyce posed with a pride flag from which the arrows representing trans people and people of colour had been cut out and trodden upon, Twitter didn’t think that was against the rules either. When minor actor turned anti-woke arse Lawrence Fox burned Pride flags in his back garden, flags he called “child mutilation bunting” before adding that “[Pride] isn’t pride. It’s just a celebration of the mutilation of children”, Twitter felt that was just fine. The post is still up.

    Anti-trans tweet reposted by JK Rowling in March 2023
    Author Helen Joyce poses proudly with a vandalised pride flag in 2022
    Photo shared by Helen Joyce on Twitter in 2022
    Actor turned culture war goon Laurence Fox burns pride flags in his back garden
    Laurence Fox on Twitter, June 2023

    Violent imagery and violent rhetoric begets violence. And while we don’t have the US gun culture that led in part to Lauri Carleton’s death, we do have the violent homophobia and transphobia that helped radicalise her murderer. And that leads to violence here too. Just last week two men were stabbed outside a London gay bar in what appears to be a hate crime; we’re awaiting the trial of the murderers of teenage trans girl Brianna Ghey, whose death also appears to be a hate crime. In March a gay man was beaten by a gang of youths in Bournemouth because he was holding hands with his husband;  in July a Birmingham estate agent was jailed for a similar attack in which he attacked a gay couple with a glass bottle and a metal pipe.

    There’s not a single day that passes where my news feed doesn’t contain stories of hate crimes perpetrated against members of the LGBTQ+ community, usually by straight men, usually because they have convinced themselves – or more likely, been convinced by others – that LGBTQ+ people are evil, perverted and dangerous. The people who push this rhetoric are not typically the ones who act on it. But they have blood on their hands just the same.