Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: LGBTQ+

  • Revelations

    The New York Times has a revelation: the US Christian Right deliberately targeted trans people as part of its strategy to rally its base in the aftermath of its equal marriage defeat.

    Or as I put it in my book, published six months ago and written quite a long time before that:

    …That tipping point occurred just as the Christian Right lost its decades-long battle against marriage equality. The UK was implementing the Marriage (Same Sex Couples Act) and the US Supreme Court heard Obergefell v Hodges, striking down all state bans on same-sex marriage.

    Faced with the absolute rejection of its scaremongering and demonisation of gay and lesbian people, the Christian Right found a new target.

    Me.

    Instead of going after the entire LGBT+ community, the Christian Right decided to focus on trans people. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. Multiple Christian Right groups talked openly of their strategy; several, including The Family Research Council, put it in writing on their websites.

    This is not something that anybody kept secret: the US Christian Right in particular has talked openly about this strategy – separate the T from the LGB in order to weaken the movement and battle equality, and do so by forging alliances with anti-trans “feminist” groups – since at least 2017. Trans journalists such as Katelyn Burns and the Trans Safety Network have written about it multiple times for multiple outlets. The award-winning podcast The Anti-Trans Hate Machine, among many others, covered it in detail in 2021.

    Here’s Rolling Stone in 2018.

    Facing such political headwinds, Christian-right activists desperately needed a fresh strategy. Provoking fear of infringement on religious liberty would likely only gain traction among fellow believers. They soon found an alternative in Shackelford’s home state, whose largest city was, at the time, led by a lesbian Democratic mayor. There, in Houston, a small band of well-connected far-right activists was resurrecting an approach from the oldest anti-LGBTQ playbook: to transform the civic debate about homosexuality into a panic about predators. As national activists fretted at the Ritz-Carlton, Houston players had already sketched out a plan to turn voters against nondiscrimination ordinances by framing the debate as one about safety for women and girls. It proved so potent that it prompted a shift in legislative strategy across the country.

    This is what I mean when I say that media is largely incompetent or malevolent when it comes to reporting on trans people. The US evangelical right, the European Catholic Church and right-wing horrors of various kinds have all deliberately and cynically targeted trans people as part of a wider war on LGBT+ people and women’s reproductive rights, they have done so in plain sight and they have provided endless evidence proving that that’s what they’re doing. And mainstream media has largely ignored all of that, or actively supported it. Not least the New York Times, which has spent much of the last six years amplifying every anti-trans dogwhistle it can.

    There is something very wrong with today’s journalism, and some of the worst people on Earth are exploiting it.

  • Breaking the law

    The Equalities and Human Rights Commission, EHRC for short, is technically the UK’s equalities watchdog. I say technically because in the last few years the Tories have been stuffing it with stooges who are actively and vocally hostile to minority groups. So it’s not a huge surprise to see it rubber-stamping the Tories’ war on trans people, even though its rubber-stamping is legally illiterate. So illiterate, in fact, that three (possibly four; it’s unclear today) of its legal directors have resigned.

    There’s a good explainer here on OpenDemocracy:

    Multiple former employees have alleged that opposing trans rights has become an institutional priority for the EHRC.

    As well as alleged resignations by staffers in response, two former legal directors have publicly decried the organisation’s apparent abandonment of the human rights values it is supposed to uphold.

    …Regardless of whether the letter becomes law, it signals a growing confidence to abandon human rights principles in order to further attack the trans community.

    I’m not going to lie. I’m scared by this. And I’m even more scared after reading this transcript of a meeting between the EHRC and Trans Media Watch’s Helen Belcher. 

    90:01 HB: Can you understand why trans people might be incredibly angry with you at the moment?

    90:04 silence

    90:06 MB: Yes

    silence

    90:09 HB: Do you think that means that you are trusted as the human rights body to defend our rights?

    90:16 silence

    What’s frightening about this is that it shows the EHRC’s utter contempt for trans people. They U-turned on trans rights over a year ago and still haven’t made the tiniest attempt to pretend there’s any justification for it, or to suggest there’s any evidence on which they based their U-turn or this more recent letter. The tories simply said FUCK TRANS PEOPLE and the EHRC jumped to attention, saluted and asked: how hard?

    One of my friends, the writer and trans health and policy expert Dr Ruth Pearce, is not mincing her words.

    I am done with being polite, and reasonable, and rational. These proposals represent a blatant attack not just on our civil rights but also on our rights to exist as human beings in public.

    …None of this is about details. It’s about terrorising trans people, and we are terrified.

    It’s about making our lives impossible. Ideally, we will disappear; our oppressors don’t really care if we suffer or we die. And we know, trans people know, that people around us are suffering and dying because we are actually a part of that community. I’ve spent the past 13 years producing research that formally documents the oppression we face, because when we simply say what we know is true because we are living that truth every day, nobody in power gives a shit.

    In the meantime, people in suits believe there are votes and clicks and money to be won through fighting culture wars, through distracting people from rising poverty and slow-burning climate collapse.

    Ruth is right; this is part of a bigger picture. I think in much the same way that attacks on gender recognition reform were a step on the way to the real goal, which was to change the Equality Act, I think the current EHRC move is part of a wider move towards EA repeal – something the likes of The Spectator and key anti-trans figures have been campaigning for for some time now alongside removing the Human Rights Act (something that’s in progress already) and withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights, to which we’re still a signatory.

    I’ve long since stopped expecting people to care about trans people’s rights. But the EA protects many other groups: pregnant people, people of colour, religious people, gay people, lesbian people, disabled people and so on. Removing that protection, which applies to everything from education and employment to housing, would be a significant step towards a low wage, no-rights economy where only the very rich and those considered ideologically pure are protected by the state.

    This is conservatism reduced to its most brutal. As Wilhoit’s Law puts it, “There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” Trans people are one of the out-groups, but we won’t be the only one.

    Dr Pearce:

    …If you’ve ever wondered “what would I have done in the face of rising fascism?” then wonder no longer.

    Your moment is here. The question is how you act.

  • Why they come for books

    I had the great honour of delivering the closing remarks at this year’s Scottish Youth Publishers conference in Edinburgh, stepping into shoes previously worn by Denise Mina, Douglas Stuart and Nicola Sturgeon. My talk was about what I dubbed the four Ps of publishing: possibility, personality, power and people, and I’d like to share a short extract where I talk about the people removing books from libraries in the US and the people – including elected politicians and the right-wing press – wanting to do the same in the UK and in Ireland.

    [in the era of Section 28] Books about people like me, the LGBT+, were banned in school libraries and nowhere to be found in my local library. People in power genuinely believed that if they could just starve us of information, if they could remove our representation, they could stop us being ourselves. It didn’t work, of course, and it did untold damage to a generation of us. And there are moves to try and make that particularly horrible history repeat.

    Of the top 10 most banned books in the US last year, four were by and/or about LGBT+ people; the most banned, Gender Queer, was a trans memoir just like mine. 

    This is not just an American problem. Last summer, a senior girls’ school in London censored sections of Understanding The Modern World, a GCSE history resource, to remove all references to gay people in a section about the Nazis’ genocidal policies; another school, also in London, cancelled a planned visit by gay author Simon James Green on World Book Day because the event promoted a “lifestyle choice” that had “no place” in a Catholic school.

    We have US-style pressure groups here in Scotland campaigning against what they call “sickening sex lessons” in schools, lessons that dare to tell kids what the parts of their body are called; in England, the same lurid claims of “extreme” sex education are being made by elected MPs in parliament as well as in the pages of the right-wing press.

    …The Times, The Telegraph and the Daily Mail are currently campaigning against books in school libraries that mention LGBT+ people. Just two weeks ago, the Daily Mail ran a double-page spread – “Do YOU know what’s in your child’s school library?” – claiming that “violent and pornographic sex education books are available to 10-year-olds”. The accompanying photo strongly suggested that those books were two trans memoirs, Gender Queer and Beyond Magenta. 

    …There’s a reason the bad guys want to ban or burn books. They don’t want us to know who we are, to know that we are not alone, to have others empathise with us.

  • To know me is to love me

    New research proves something many of us already knew: people who actually know trans people are much more likely to be trans allies. Bigotry thrives in ignorance: as I point out in my book, a survey of Fox News viewers found that they were much more likely to say they have seen a ghost than ever met a trans person, which makes it easy for people to tell lies about us.

    The findings are here.

    In a survey of 3,695 adults aged 18 to 25, 74% of those who described themselves as “not supportive” of trans people said they do not know anyone who is transgender. 

    Of those who do not know any transgender people, just 33% described themselves as “very supportive” of trans people. However, this is compared to 64% of people who do know a trans person, whether they are close to them or not. 

    Just 3% of people who know a trans person said they are “not supportive”.

  • Friends like these

    It’s trans day of visibility today, which means we get to see the rank hypocrisy of politicians tweeting about their supposed support for trans people while openly supporting the removal of trans people’s rights.

    The latest front in the forever war against trans people is pushing the idea of “parents’ rights”. Based on a report from a right-wing think tank, a report fronted by horrific transphobe and Labour MP Rosie Duffield, multiple newspapers have run stories this week expressing their anger that some schools are not notifying parents of teens changing their pronouns or appearance. Or as it’s better described, following the law and safeguarding kids from potential abuse.

    The report comes from Policy Exchange, which is very clearly rubber-stamping already decided policy. The tories intend to use trans people as political footballs in the next election – something they’ve stated openly – and this latest scaremongering gives them the opportunity to say they are responding to the will of the people. People who are being repeatedly and cynically misled by a primarily right-wing press pushing narratives created by the Christian Right. Parents’ rights is the label currently being used by Republicans all over the US to try and eliminate trans teens by removing their protections and healthcare.

    And Labour? Kier Starmer never met a transphobe he didn’t like, so of course he is entirely with the tories on this one.

    For the benefit of people who aren’t LGBT+ or who don’t work with vulnerable people, the reason we have safeguarding is because parents are often the most dangerous people of all. Many of the horrors LGBT+ people experience are perpetrated by their families and communities. “Corrective rape” and other forms of sexual abuse. Domestic violence. Conversion therapy. LGBT+ people are much more likely to be made homeless by their parents, and to be made homeless at much younger ages; in the UK, almost 1/4 of young homeless people are LGBT+. That’s horrifically disproportionate.

    LGBT+ people know this. Teachers know this. And I suspect the politicians do too, but they simply don’t care. To them, LGBT+ lives simply don’t matter.

    As one teacher posted in response to the news:

    My first year teaching, a girl I taught got caught kissing another girl behind the gymnasium. She begged our admin not to tell them it was a girl – just say she got caught kissing someone. They refused.

    The next day she came in with a swollen jaw.

  • Happy and we know it

    This photo is the front page of the Washington Post, in which it surveyed hundreds of trans people and found that the overwhelming majority of us – nearly 80% – said our lives were happier post-transition. And as any trans person could have predicted, the people who said their lives weren’t happier said it was largely because of how other people treated them, how they found it hard to access healthcare and so on.

    None of this is remotely surprising to me, but the fact that it’s a front page newspaper story does surprise me. It’s such a contrast to how trans people are usually discussed in broadsheets, such as The Times here and the New York Times in the US: most coverage is framed on the assumption that to be trans is a terrible thing, the worst of all possible outcomes, a “contagion” to be eliminated.

  • Believe them

    This is a picture from an anti-trans rally in Melbourne yesterday. The men you see in the picture are neo-Nazis, members of the Nationalist Socialist Movement, and there are multiple videos and photos showing them proudly doing the Nazi salute. The reason you don’t see any swastikas is because displaying them in public in Victoria means fines of thousands of dollars.

    The rally was for Kelly-Jay Keen, aka Posie Parker, who is one of the most high profile members of the UK anti-trans movement. A supporter of far-right goon Tommy Robinson, Parker has long used an image of Barbie dressed in a Nazi uniform as her online avatar and has urged men to take guns into toilets to “protect women” from trans people. She has also posted videos promising that women who oppose her views will be “annihilated”.

    Remember the song “close to you” by The Carpenters? Replace birds with Nazis in the line “why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near?” and you’ve got a great theme tune for Parker. When she held a rally in Glasgow’s George Square a few weeks ago, the neo-nazis of Patriotic Alternative were there to lend their support. When she held a rally in Brighton in September, the neo-nazis of Hearts of Oak were there to lend their support. And when she held a rally in January, one of her speakers happily quoted Adolf Hitler while evidence emerged of Facebook discussions where her supporters invited known neo-Nazi groups along on the understanding that they wouldn’t say or do anything racist.

    I wonder what it is about the far right view-spouting, violance-advocating, Nazi-imagery-using Parker that makes her so attractive to neo-nazis? Maybe we’ll never know.

    The event, like Parker’s other events, was titled Let Women Speak. Here’s a photo from the event showing a woman trying to speak.

    The woman wanted to disagree with the views Parker and her fellow travellers were spouting. So Parker’s private security, cisgender men, grabbed her by the throat and wrestled her to the ground.

    It’s notable that even given all the above, very few people in the so-called Gender Critical movement are distancing themselves from this. They can’t help it if Nazis share their reasonable concerns! The organisers of the rally refuse to condemn the actual Nazis who rallied to their cause, claiming instead that the Nazis were actually there to stand with the trans people. Which is an interesting take on black-shirted thugs seig-heiling and shouting at trans people while waving a banner that says DESTROY PAEDO FREAKS.

    For the gendercrits, the presence of Nazis is actually helpful. They can look at the Nazis and persuade themselves that because they’re not that extreme, they can’t be the baddies.

    But of course, they are. The neo-Nazis at these rallies, and outside Drag Queen Story Hours, and outside school libraries, are the very people the gendercrits’ stochastic terrorism is designed to attract. The anti-trans movement can whip up the hatred, but when the thugs start cracking heads they can reassure themselves that they’re not the violent ones.

    When we tell you that the anti-trans movement is a fascist one, we’re not exaggerating. We’re not Rick from The Young Ones calling everything “fascist”. We’re pointing out that this is a movement that for many years has had strong, demonstrable links with actual neo-Nazis and their smiling, suited political enablers.

    As this cartoon puts it:

    When people tell you who they are, believe them.

  • Baa baa bullshit

    When I was young, the press routinely made up stories about the “loony left”. Probably the most famous one is the story that nurseries were getting kids to sing “baa baa green sheep” instead of “baa baa black sheep” because the nursery rhyme was racist.

    It sounds ridiculous, I know, but it was a deliberate campaign against the Labour Party and other progressives. British tabloids ran some 3,000 news stories about such “loony left” ideas between 1981 and 1987; the vast majority were either partially or wholly fabricated and were targeted against the handful of London councils under Labour control.

    Very similar stories were fabricated about the European Union too, most notably by a young journalist called Boris Johnson. 

    This week, the Daily Mail ran a front page story about the charity Oxfam banning the words “mother” and “father”. The Times and other right-wing papers ran with it too, and it was the topic of angry discussion online and on shows such as Good Morning Britain.

    You can guess where this is going.

    Oxfam hasn’t banned anything, and it hasn’t told people that they can’t say mother or father. In a piece of guidance specifically referring to the use of language when you’re talking to trans and non-binary people,  it recommends using gender neutral language if you’re unsure what terms the people you’re talking to prefer.

    If you look at the document it’s very clear that that’s the case, but the version used by the newspapers has been deliberately cropped to remove the context by its source, a high profile anti-trans activist and friend of JK Rowling. In some cases, at the very end of the article in the bit most people don’t read, the newspaper reports admit that the document doesn’t say what the article’s entire premise is based upon. But they got their headline, and that’s what matters when you’re waging a war on human rights.

    “Oxfam tells staff: stop saying mother and father”, The Times thunders.

    It’s baa baa bullshit.

  • Another smoking gun

    This, by Jude Doyle, is horrifying: more email evidence of how the Christian Right is pulling the strings of the anti-trans movement, this time in pushing the narrative of “detrans” people or “detransitioners”, people who undergo (or sometimes just propose to undergo) transition and then change their minds. The piece describes a huge and highly effective media machine that takes care of every detail, right down to writing the words it wants detransitioners to mime.

    At the beginning of her gender-critical career, Shupe’s public voice was more or less her own; that is, she actually gave the interviews and wrote the blog posts that appeared under her name. As Shupe entered the world of the Christian right, however, her voice was increasingly retooled or outright manufactured by her handlers.

    Sullivan quickly took over Shupe’s public image, instructing her to refer all requests for interviews or public appearances to him. In an email chain dated April 2019, he told her not to talk to a Washington Post reporter he deemed trans-friendly, and directed her to what he called “good Catholic media sources.” In another April 2019 email, Sullivan provided Shupe with what he called an “outline” for an op-ed, along with instructions for pitching: “You should shop it to the main liberal papers offering it to each one for 24 hours before offering it to a new one. After about four or five, you could then offer it to some more ‘conservative’ papers until you get one to bite.” The “outline” provided by Sullivan was a full essay of 1,609 words. One sentence was typed in red, indicating that Shupe should fill in the details herself. 

    This is clearly happening in the UK too.

    If you’re a reader of the (Glasgow) Herald, this bit might jump out at you:

    “ADF has some excellent writers familiar with the length and style that appeals to op-ed page editors, who could take even a very rough sketch or outline of thoughts from you—or just talk with you—and then create a draft that I think you will be very happy with.” 

    The ADF’s Lois McLatchie has popped up in The Herald’s pages several times recently as a columnist, and her columns are very good at what they do; unfortunately what they do is attempt to excuse the inexcusable and wage war on human rights. That The Herald publishes them without context is an indication not just of how effective the ADF’s machine is, but also how debased our journalistic institutions have become.

    The piece makes it clear, yet again, that none of this is about “protecting children” or “protecting women”. It’s a religious war.

    “I was gradually waking up to the fact that, you know, I was just a useful idiot, are the two words I would use,” Shupe tells me. “I got the vibe that they wanted me to help them, they wanted me to use them, but they wouldn’t trust somebody like me around their kids.” 

  • Incompetence and malevolence

    A superb piece by Parker Molloy on the awful people dominating the discourse around trans people.

    When you’re discussing a topic solely on the grounds of whether or not someone is allowed to talk about something, you’re able to completely sidestep ever having to address the actual content. If you want to have a “discussion” about something, then discuss it.

    But instead, these guys all stand around having a “discussion” about whether or not they’re even allowed to have discussions, despite regularly having this content-free meta-debate in front of massive audiences that critics can’t match.

    It allows them to avoid ever having to actually say anything. And they know it.

    It’s a typically good, well-researched and cited piece, and it goes to the heart of the problem over the so-called trans debate: it’s not a debate. One side publishes or broadcasts a constant flow of bullshit, and as soon as they’re criticised they retreat behind their cancel culture wagons.

    And that’s because all of these stories “just asking questions” aren’t about trying to figure out a world where we can all exist, but what society should do about us and tous. We are not included in this discussion, and our efforts to participate in it at our smaller blogs and newsletters, etc. never gain traction. Instead, it’s, “Hey, look, a trans person tweeted an insult at me, see how unreasonable they are?”

    We have a right to be a part of this conversation, and when we push back on things like publishing a glowing review of a book written by an anti-trans activist that’s filled with straight-up false information that demonstrates that the book hasn’t been fact-checked properly (see? there’s that word again, properly) and is written by someone who is friendly with the author, it’s not us saying, “OMG, you’re not allowed to write about this! OMG! Stoppppppp!” it’s us saying, “You’re not upholding even the tiniest, most minimal standards. You are letting your biases run wild and you are failing at the very concept of journalism.”

    Not to mention that a year later, the author of that book (that got the glowing NYT review) would call trans people “a huge problem to a sane world,” “damaged,” and then say she wanted “reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition.”

    As Sally Claire recalls her university journalism tutor saying: “If someone says it’s raining, and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the fucking window and find out which is true.” Too many journalists would rather brick the fucking windows up so nobody can call out their incompetence and malevolence.