Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: LGBTQ+

  • Fight club

    One of the key attack strategies of the anti-trans movement is to attack the idea of trans women participating in sports. It’s quite clever, because elite athletes are very different from us “normal” people: people like Michael Phelps or Sharron Davies are basically freaks of nature. Davies has been (wrongly) tagged on the internet as trans, which is quite funny given her anti-trans views.

    So if you can find an example of a trans woman competing at an elite level, you can quite easily persuade people that trans women are incredibly athletic and powerful. Rather than, like me the other day, spending three minutes trying to open a jar of garlic, hurting my wrist and bursting into tears.

    That process of picking an outlier and pretending they’re everywhere is pretty much what happened with Laurel Hubbard, the first and only openly trans woman to compete in an individual Olympic event in the 18 years since the Olympics opened their arms to trans people in 2004. She placed last.

    If we’re taking over sports we’re doing a pretty shit job of it.

    But of course, we’re not. If you look at the stories about supposed trans domination of sports, there’s no such thing happening. In every case I’ve ever seen, the trans woman’s success was either an outlier or wasn’t even success: I’ve seen many stories featuring aggrieved athletes complaining about trans domination when they and the trans person they’ve gone to the papers about finished very far behind many other cisgender athletes. But “I lost because I’m shit” doesn’t make for quite the same clickbait as “I was robbed of my rightful win by a trans woman”.

    But of course, transphobes’ feelings don’t care about facts. And I couldn’t have come up with a better example of that than the video currently doing the rounds that shows a trans woman absolutely destroying a cisgender woman in an MMA wrestling match.

    Here are some of the comments. The second one is from an American politician.

    “When a guy isn’t good enough to compete with the guys, it’s easier to pretend to be a woman.”

    “Who is responsible when a real girl gets hurt? How is this fair for actual females? Why do we not see women posing as men and stepping on the field as a linebacker? If you support this you’re as mentally ill as they are. If you’re silent then you support it.”

    “this is totally unfair to real women IMO.”

    “This is so wrong on so many levels. Men do not belong in women’s sport”

    There’s just one problem.

    Nobody in the video is trans.

    The supposed trans woman in the video is Gaby Garcia, a very successful MMA fighter from Brazil. She’s one of the most successful competitors of all time, in fact. And she’s cisgender.

  • Hate never dies

    This week, MP Jess Phillips spent over five minutes in parliament reading the names of women and girls murdered, or believed to have been murdered, by men. One of those girls was trans teen Brianna Ghey, whose alleged killers are awaiting trial.

    The furious, hateful, inhuman response from the “reasonable concerns”, “protect women” crowd managed to shock me, and I thought I was pretty much unshockable by now.

    Part of the fury is because the list that Phillips uses is compiled by a very vocal anti-trans activist; Ghey’s name was (rightly) added by the MP.

    As Trans Safety Network’s Jess O’Thompson writes:

    “It is deeply concerning that transphobic rhetoric in this country is so prevalent and so vile that gender critical activists feel bold enough to jump on the grave of a dead child… This is not about single-sex spaces or safeguarding – there is no way to be trans which is not an affront to them. This pile on shows the entire movement for what it is – a vicious attack rooted in the hatred of trans people and our community, even our dead children.”

  • The smoking gun

    Today, The Telegraph and Radio 4 gave extensive coverage to a brand new anti-trans group supported by various famous transphobes. Meanwhile in America, Mother Jones reports on the smoking gun that proves collusion between evangelical Christians, right-wing politicians and supposedly grass-roots lobby groups. Many of the key players are also active in UK anti-trans activism.

    “The message was one in a trove of emails obtained by Mother Jones between Deutsch and representatives of a network of activists and organizations at the forefront of the anti-trans movement. They show the degree to which these activists shaped… repressive legislation, a version of which was signed into law in February, and the tactics, alliances, and goals of a movement that has sought to foist their agenda on a national scale.”

    Not just on a national scale. On a global scale.

    “The emails demonstrate close collaboration between groups working behind the scenes to push bills banning transgender health care, including ADF—which has defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people in Europe—and the ACPeds—which has opposed adoption by gay couples and supported conversion therapy for LGBTQ youth. In recent years, ADF has drafted legislation banning trans children from using school restrooms or playing on school sports teams that align with their gender identity. (Both groups are also staunchly anti-abortion; ADF, which drafted the Mississippi abortion ban at the heart of the case that overturned Roe v. Wade, is currently representing ACPeds in a closely-watched lawsuit to ban an abortion pill, mifepristone, nationally.)”

    Full details of the years of leaked emails are still emerging but from what I’ve seen already there’s plenty of really horrific stuff in there. Anyone who still believes that this is about protecting children or reasonable concerns about women’s safety is delusional.

  • All the things she said

    I’ve seen my name in print quite a lot recently, but it hasn’t all been book-related. I’ve been dragged into the culture war because of a BBC Radio Scotland item I contributed to, and as a result I ended up in publications ranging from PinkNews to The Independent and the LA Times. As a journalist, you rarely want to be the story. But as a journalist it’s interesting to see how the sausage is made from the other end of the process.

    The short version: the BBC publicly apologised to JK Rowling about a piece I contributed to.

    The long version: I didn’t say what PinkNews and The Independent claim I said.

    I suspect The Independent has just cribbed from Pink News, because the misrepresentation is the same.

    PinkNews in February:

    During the BBC broadcast, trans writer Carrie Marshall said she boycotted the game because she believed it to be funding “the anti-trans movement”.

    The Independent today:

    A week later, the BBC apologised again after a transgender woman appearing on BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland show said that the new PlayStation game Hogwarts Legacy was funding “the anti-trans movement”.

    Both of these reports are misrepresenting what I said, and I’ve asked both publications to correct them [Update, 9 Mar: The Independent has said “oops, sorry” and corrected their article] [13 Mar: PinkNews has also corrected its piece, and a second piece based on the first]. I didn’t say I was boycotting the game, and I definitely didn’t say it was funding the anti-trans movement.

    If you’re quick you can catch the whole item on BBC Sounds for a few more days; it expires this weekend. And if you do, you’ll hear me say that “This is money that people believe very strongly is going to fund the anti-trans movement”. I didn’t share my own views on that, or say whether or not the belief is correct. Asked to come on air as a trusted journalist to explain what some people were saying about the game, I came on air and explained what some people were saying about the game.

    Here’s the full extract, which only the LA Times included any of for context; it’s no coincidence that US newspapers are famed for their fact-checkers, a role that’s largely absent in UK media.

    “Quite a lot of LGBT people are concerned about the Harry Potter franchise, because JK Rowling has been very proud of her association with the so-called Gender Critical movement and some of its leading figures, and has also strongly suggested that she considers her income as proof that people share her views. So this has become about much, much more than the video game. To some people, this is about a culture war issue. We’re now seeing quite a lot of people who are now harassing trans gamers saying ‘I’m buying ten copies of this. What are you going to do about it?’ and it’s become really quite horrible online.”

    “This is money that people believe very strongly is going to fund the anti-trans movement, which has over 300 anti-trans laws in front of US legislators and has become a real battleground in Britain as well. This is having a measurable effect on trans people’s lives and perhaps our safety too, so it’s not just an abstract issue about the ‘death of the author’. It’s about real people’s lives. And I think that’s why so many trans people are concerned about this game.”

    To add insult to incorrect quoting, PinkNews originally said I was a “trans activist” – it’s now been changed to “trans writer”.

    I’ll let you decide whether the apology was justified, but by comparison I’d like to share the BBC Complaints response when I was one of thousands of people who complained about a 2021 BBC article that defamed trans women as rapists. The article’s sources were a sex offender and an anti-trans hate group; the former’s name was removed from the article a few days later when she posted death threats targeting trans people. Here’s what the complaints department had to say.

    “The article was carefully considered before publication, went through a rigorous editorial review process and fully complies with the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards.”

    The article is still online. The complaints department remains unapologetic.

  • Horse Child and Dinosaur Boy

    Writing in The Spectator, Mary Wakefield has a terrible tale to share.

    “A friend in the education world has told me he knows of several British schools in which children are identifying as animals. There’s a horse child who’s taken out by staff for gallops; a boy dinosaur who is fed on strips of meat.”

    The Onion already beat her to it.

    “We just made Quentin up, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean stories like his aren’t potentially happening everywhere, constantly. Good journalism is about finding those stories, even when they don’t exist. It’s about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like, then offering misleading evidence in service of preordained editorial conclusions.”

  • Lethal words

    Last week at the US Republican CPAC conference, Daily Wire host Michael Knowles said that “for the good of society… transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely” to loud applause. He now claims that he didn’t mean that trans people should be eradicated; just “transgenderism”.

    Let’s try that with some other isms, shall we? How about, “for the good of society… Judaism must be eradicated from public life entirely”? No? “Islamism must be eradicated from public life entirely?” No? “Catholicism must be eradicated from public life entirely?”

    “Transgenderism” is primarily used as a pejorative term as a synonym for trans people, but in its most neutral sense it means having the quality or characteristic of being transgender. It’s not something we do. It’s who we are. So eliminating transgenderism means eliminating us.

    This is not a fringe view or limited to the US Right. Most of the UK anti-trans groups have signed a declaration demanding the elimination of “transgenderism”, and the founding text of the so-called Gender Critical movement is Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire, which says that “transsexualism” should be “morally mandated out of existence.” Author Helen Joyce, a leading UK anti-trans voice and part of the anti-trans Sex Matters lobby group, has said that trans people are a “huge problem for a sane world” and that the number of transitioned people should be “reduced”.

    This is genocidal rhetoric. It’s pretty clear that a lot of people don’t understand what genocide actually means, and they claim that as nobody’s currently putting trans people in camps then it isn’t genocide. But that’s not true. The Holocaust Museum notes that there are five ways to conduct genocide “with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part” a group. Killing is the best known one, but there are others. The five ways are:

    1. Killing members of the group
    2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
    3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
    4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
    5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

    Withholding vital, life-saving healthcare or forcing trans people to detransition meets 2, 3 and 5; making it effectively impossible for trans people to exist in society is number 3; refusing to legally recognise trans people without them having surgery, effectively demanding sterilisation, is 4; conversion therapy and refusing to recognise trans people’s identities is a clear example of 5.

    All of these things are in the anti-trans bills in the US, which include forced detransition, bans on public participation (including wearing your own clothes in public) and even legislation that would enable children to be kidnapped if you believed they might be exposed to trans-affirming support.

    Quibbling over language is a distraction. You cannot separate “transgenderism” from trans people, and that means you cannot eliminate the former without the latter. All the language does is enable you to try and pretend you aren’t saying what you are very clearly saying.

  • Profits of doom

    This graph is astonishing, if unsurprising: the UK press is publishing an average of 38 articles about trans people per day, most of them negative.

    Graph showing relentless rise of transphobic articles

    Writing in advertising industry site Outvertising, Marty Davies makes it clear that brands, via advertising, are funding this – and that online advertising incentivises it.

    “We’re finding ourselves funding a forever intensifying, never-ending campaign of hate against the trans community. The World Association of News Publishers assessed that over 50% of news publisher revenue comes from advertising. The ‘gender critical’ journalists are pumping out execution after execution of this hate campaign and are paid generously from our hands. This campaign is setting the news agenda and leading our whole media and politics to become infected by its poison.

    It’s important for us also to consider the role of our social platforms and broadcasters in this ecosystem. They also have questions to answer. TV and Radio broadcasters are platforming ‘gender critical’ voices unchallenged – framing anti-trans narrative as ‘legitimate concerns’. Sensationalist stories act like kindling for conversation across social platforms, allowing hateful views to burn like wildfire and become reinforced in algorithmic bubbles. Hate speech is commonplace and sanctions from platforms on users are slow if forthcoming at all. This commentary then provides content to be platformed and amplified by the media vying for attention to then sell on to us advertisers.”

  • Say their names

    While the press continue to pretend that people who aren’t trans are being rushed into irreversible medical treatment, trans people continue to die from inadequate healthcare and disgracefully long waiting lists.

    The coroner’s report into the suicide of 21-year-old Northern Irish trans woman Sophie Williams, a report released this week, found that multiple failings by the NHS contributed to her death. This is from her family’s solicitor:

    “Two days before her death Sophie was informed by the Tavistock GIC that the four years that she had spent waiting for a first appointment at Belfast’s equivalent GIC service would not be recognised by the Tavistock, news that was devastating to Sophie. Sophie died on 20 May 2021 having taken an overdose of prescription medication.”

    This week would have been the 21st birthday of another young British trans woman, Alice Litman. She too took her own life after languishing for years on a waiting list. According to The Good Law Project:

    “Alice’s family believes her death was partly a result of not getting the care she needed, because she was transgender… at the time of her death, Alice had been on an NHS waitlist for nearly 3 years. Alice’s family feel that this long wait may have been too much for her to bear.”

    If Alice and Sophie weren’t trans, their deaths would be national scandals – as would the murder of 16-year-old Brianna Ghey just weeks ago. But it’s very clear that to much of our media and many politicians, trans lives simply don’t matter.

  • Number crunching

    “Average use of the word ‘trans’ in UK media stories about Brianna Ghey: 0.5

    Average use of the word ‘trans’ in UK media stories about Isla Bryson: 16,427.1

    The first is a victim of a terrible crime, likely targeted for being trans; the latter a perpetrator of a terrible crime, in which her trans status has no bearing.”

    – Andrew Carter

  • Poisoned pens

    Jude Doyle knocks it out of the park yet again with an incisive analysis of the increasingly poisonous New York Times:

    “Transphobia has been an unacknowledged norm of “objective” journalism for a very long time. It’s been an unacknowledged cultural norm for much longer. Yet it is still transphobia—still bigotry, still lethal—no matter how unconscious it may be. In 2023, when trans people are at the red-hot centre of a culture war and trans healthcare is being attacked in dozens of state legislatures across the nation, it is not a form of ignorance that any journalist can afford.”

    The superb If Books Could Kill podcast has just published an episode about the same thing, and comes to very similar conclusions about the polite bigotry of the paper of record.

    You could write a very similar article or episode about the UK.

    As Doyle also writes – and this is something that’s widely known among trans people who pay attention to the media, but still utterly shocking to see when it’s stated so baldly – “It’s a tough topic, media transphobia. It’s complex. It’s nuanced. You can almost forget that top editor Ian Katz — formerly the deputy editor of the Guardian, then the editor of BBC’s Newsnight, now head of programming for Channel 4 — was, until quite recently, married to Justine Roberts, co-founder of TERF forum Mumsnet, and that they were together for twenty-five years.”

    The links between Mumsnet, the so-called Gender Critical movement and their cheerleaders in the press and broadcast media would make a great Private Eye piece. Or at least it would if Private Eye weren’t part of the same incestuous bubble of bigotry.