Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: LGBTQ+

  • Dog whistling

    Scotland’s parliament will begin debating the gender reform bill this week, so I wrote to my MSPs asking for their support. I suspect my email is unusual, because I know what the law is and what a GRC does. As I’ve been shown again and again, most anti-trans voices either don’t, or pretend not to.

    I’ve had four responses, three of which – from the SNP, from the Scottish Greens and from Scottish Labour – were unequivocally supportive of reform. The fourth, from Conservative MSP Annie Wells, is extracted here:

    However, I should add that I am aware there have been concerns raised regarding safeguards for children and young people in the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. This is a very sensitive area, however the welfare of children and young people must come first. That means balancing the need to help those who are suffering from gender dysphoria with the need to protect vulnerable children and young people who are unsure of their identity and risk embarking on gender hormone treatment prematurely. We will not support any reforms that put the welfare of children and young people at risk.

    Gender recognition has nothing whatsoever to do with the welfare of children or any medical treatment. Nothing. This isn’t so much a dog whistle as an entire pet shop display of the damn things.

  • This should not be unusual

    Apple TV’s The Problem With Jon Stewart began its new season last night with an episode about the “gender wars”. It struck me that it couldn’t be made in the UK: it featured parents of trans children and experts in trans medicine, but not an audience of bigots shouting “penis!” and “groomer!” at them.

    Instead, Jon Stewart let the Attorney General of Arkansas slowly hoist herself on her own petard by asking something really simple: what’s the evidence behind your anti-trans legislation? The answer, inevitably, turned out to be: there isn’t any.

    This is a masterclass in interviewing.

    It’s interesting to compare this with the last few days’ coverage of JK Rowling, who donned an anti-Nicola Sturgeon t-shirt designed by a far-right goon to protest against the Scottish Government’s plans for gender recognition reform and ended up on the covers of all the major newspapers. There hasn’t been any attempt whatsoever to ascertain whether Rowling’s anti-reform beliefs are right (spoiler: they’re not; the evidence, or lack of, is here: “when asked about evidence of abuse and concerns, no witness was able to provide concrete examples.”). Too much of our media has no interest in establishing the truth when there’s a culture war to push.

    In the 30 days from 27th June this year, the UK press published 1,142 articles about trans people, mostly trans-hostile with claims of hate groups taken as fact. That’s 33 anti-trans articles a day. Between them, the Times, Telegraph and Daily Mail publish up to 27 trans articles a week, most of them hostile. On just one day, those papers published 26 articles about trans people; the Telegraph alone published 11.

    There’s a saying I like: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. As Stewart so deftly demonstrates, the anti-trans mob don’t have any evidence to back up their assertions; they are at odds with the entire medical establishment, because ultimately their “reasonable concerns” boil down to a belief that trans people are icky weirdos.

    If our journalists were doing their job, the current anti-trans moral panic wouldn’t exist and hate crimes against LGBT people wouldn’t be up 42% year on year, with anti-trans hate crimes up 56%. Culture wars may be a game in newsrooms, but they’re terrifyingly real for the people they demonise.

  • It’s real

  • Things that are different are not the same

    A typically incisive piece by Parker Molloy on the censorious clowns who claim that legitimate criticism of what they say and write is the same as the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie.

    That is the problem people have with the “cancel culture” discourse. It’s selective, it flattens important distinctions between horrific acts (beheadings and physical attacks!) and free speech (dissent, boycotts, protests). The “cancel culture” brigade sure loves to claim that speech it doesn’t like (dissent, boycotts, protests) is a threat to speech, while sitting mostly silently on actual threats to free expression, like the Republican plan to use obscenity laws to make certain books on LGBTQ topics illegal to sell, the Republican-led purging of books from school and local libraries, and the Republican-led re-writing of textbook standards to remove “divisive” issues. Funny how none of that is “cancel culture,” and yet they think someone speaking out against J.K. Rowling’s factually incorrect rants about trans people (i.e. using their freedom of speech) represents a threat to the very concept of “free speech.” The reason is simple: one of these advances their own agenda, the other doesn’t.

  • An evergreen post

    I posted something on Twitter last night that I could post pretty much any time, any day, in response to someone doing something utterly vile: trans people have been trying to warn you about this person, this organisation or this publication for years.

  • Leopards

    With crushing predictability, the faux-feminists in the UK press have decided that the real villain in the decades-long plot to overturn Roe vs Wade en route to establishing a Christian theocracy is… trans women.

    The argument, if you can call it that, is simple: trans men wanted to be included in discussions of reproductive healthcare; that somehow erased women; because there is no such thing as a woman any more the US Supreme Court banned abortion. So it’s all trans women’s fault.

    Better to concoct a ludicrous conspiracy theory than admit the truth: much of our media has spent years ignoring the Christian Right’s attacks on LGBT+ people and reproductive rights, preferring instead to publish a constant torrent of Christian Right anti-trans talking points and to platform Christian Right-funded anti-trans groups.

    As the internet cliche goes: I can’t believe leopards are eating my face, says woman who voted for the Leopards Eating Your Face Party.

    The simple fact is that the global anti-trans movement is part of the global anti-gender movement, whose target isn’t just trans people. It wants an end to same-sex marriage, to LGBT+ rights, to contraception, to abortion, to human rights for anybody who isn’t a socially conservative cisgender straight Christian.

    You couldn’t ask for a better example of how this is all connected than the anti-abortion goons intimidating and filming people outside the Sandyford Clinic in Glasgow. They’re there to target women seeking abortions, but – happily for the goons – the Sandyford’s other services mean they get to intimidate people going for sexual health services, for rape counselling and for transgender health care. Over the weekend they moved to the City Centre to harangue people going to Pride, because of course they did. The war on women’s reproductive freedom and the war on LGBT+ people are the same war.

    And this morning there was another example. On BBC Scotland, the discussion about whether we should have buffer zones around abortion clinics – zones that would separate the Sandyford clowns from vulnerable people – invited the ADF to contribute.

    The ADF isn’t just the organisation responsible for funding many anti-abortion groups around the world or the organisation involved heavily in anti-abortion legislation in the US, including the Mississippi case that led to the Supreme Court overturning Roe vs Wade; it’s also the organisation that provides “experts” in anti-trans legal cases in the UK, and which promotes intolerance and hatred towards LGBT+ people globally. And part of its job is to launder that hatred, by providing nice-seeming, media trained people who will absolutely come on air to discuss their ‘reasonable concerns’.

    Opendemocracy:

    Another US group that’s long tried to influence classic “culture war” cases in the UK is the anti-abortion “dark money”-funded legal army Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). openDemocracy revealed in 2019 that its international wing had spent nearly half a million pounds on lobbying in the UK over just two years. The group does not disclose who its donors are, and has even gone to the US Supreme Court to defend donor secrecy.

    ADF’s lawyers have previously said they are working to ensure ‘that bad European precedents don’t spread further in Europe, then across the sea to America’. It worked on the high-profile ‘gay cake’ cases in both the UK and US, defending Christian bakers using free speech arguments.

    ADF has also publicly opposed protest-free “buffer zones” around abortion clinics and supported calls for “freedom of conscience” provisions to enable medical staff to object to providing legal abortion services. And it claims the UK government adopted its recommendations on free speech and academic freedom at universities.

    Rather than platforming them, journalists should be investigating them.

  • Here, always

    There’s a really nice piece in National Geographic about historians documenting the lives of trans people, and in addition to being really interesting it’s a much-needed corrective to the oft-spoken belief that trans people were invented in 2015.

    There’s ample evidence of gender variance throughout human history. Among the earliest are accounts of galaand galli, priests assigned male at birth who crossed gender boundaries in their worship of a variety of goddesses in ancient Sumer, Akkadia, Greece, and Rome. Other cultures acknowledged a third gender, including two-spirit people within Indigenous communities and Hijra, nonbinary people who inhabit ritual roles in South Asia.

    I’m sure I’ve written about this before, but our current gender binaries (and persecution of LGBT+ people) are primarily a western Christian invention. In addition to the cultures mentioned above there are multiple genders in the Torah and many Islamic cultures are accepting of trans people (more so than they are of gay and lesbian people, in some cases; there’s a belief that being trans is something you’re born with but that homosexuality is a sin). But the spread of the British Empire and the colonisation of the US by European settlers meant that that belief was imposed on many other cultures, often with extreme violence. The modern social conservatives and religious extremists trying to eliminate LGBT+ people from society are as ignorant of history as they are of biology.

  • BOOM!

    I’m delighted to reveal the cover for my book, Carrie Kills A Man, which you can pre-order directly from my lovely publisher here. The cover, by the hugely talented Wolf, is just perfect.

    You have no idea how hard it’s been to keep this secret.

  • “The sign of a severely broken system”

    Longreads has an excellent article by Mailee Osten-Tan about the people who travel to Thailand for gender confirmation surgery. It’s great journalism, based on extensive research and interviewing (there’s a behind-the-story piece detailing it all here) and the story Osten-Tan tells is interesting, insightful and empathetic.

    Thailand is famous in trans circles, and the more broken the NHS’s trans healthcare becomes the more people will save or borrow the money to go there. The NHS was already woefully underfunded before COVID; now the waiting lists, already horrific, are many months and years longer.

    “The effect of the pandemic has been to exacerbate a problem which already existed,” said James Bellringer, an NHS and private GCS surgeon in the U.K. for over two decades, in an email. But even apart from the pandemic, he wrote, the U.K. lacks trained staff to meet the demand for surgeries. “It’s not just surgeons but the gender specialists working in the clinics. Gender has been chronically underfunded everywhere (not just the U.K.) for years, and the elastic has finally snapped.”

    One of the saddest parts of the article for me was this bit.

    For those who want but cannot afford surgery, the longer they are made to wait, the greater their chance of developing serious mental health ramifications. These often relate to the chronic high levels of stress experienced by trans people over the course of their lives — also known as minority stress — brought on by factors such as poor social support, discrimination, rejection, abuse, and/or violence.The majority of trans women I interviewed… wanted to remain anonymous out of fear of being doxxed, harassed, or targeted by hate speech.

    At the risk of sounding like a broken record here, these are the “transgender issues” we should be talking about. But trans people rarely get to speak: the only people speaking in the trans “debate” are the intolerant, the ill-informed and the ill-intentioned.

  • In Rainbows

    June is Pride Month in the US, and because so many brands are global now that means it’s Pride Month here too. Social media managers have changed their brand avatars to include rainbows, and at the end of the month they’ll take the rainbows away again. And in the meantime, they may not do a single damn thing to support LGBT+ people, let alone help them. All too often a rainbow flag on a corporate Twitter account is an empty gesture.

    Not all firms wrap themselves in the rainbow as an empty marketing ploy. Apple lobbies against anti-LGBT+ legislation, for example. But many firms, including the likes of Comcast, AT&T and Amazon, have given considerable sums of cash to anti-LGBT+ politicians. And many broadcasters, publishers and streaming services have been happy to profit from anti-LGBT+ abuse masquerading as legitimate comment or edgy comedy.

    “Corporations in hypocrites shocker”, I know. But while it’s always fun to mock such firms’ hypocrisy on social media, I think it’s more important to try and do something positive around Pride. There are countless LGBT+ owned businesses who would really appreciate your custom; countless LGBT+ authors whose books would be a brilliant addition to your reading list; amazing LGBT+ artists of all kinds who are doing great things. Whenever you see a rainbow, think of it as a reminder that your money and your attention can make a real difference to LGBT+ people and organisations.