Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: LGBTQ+

  • The war on Stonewall

    Stonewall is Europe’s leading LGBT+ charity, and for the last few weeks it’s been under sustained attack by The Observer, The Sunday Times, The Daily Mail, Spiked and The Spectator, as well as the UK government’s Equalities Office. The allegations against it are demonstrably false, but that hasn’t stopped gallons of ink being spilt.

    Stephen Paton writes in The National about the latest flood of bullshit, and notes:

    Without doubt, this Pride Month is taking place against a backdrop of the most open hostility toward lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people and queer folk in recent history.

    This manufactured outrage against trans people has now begun leading to dire outcomes that will affect the entire LGBTQ+ community in Scotland and the rest of the UK – as many of us repeatedly warned that it would.

    With its relentless attacks on Stonewall, the anti-trans brigade has handed the most right-wing British Government in recent history the means to begin cutting ties with Europe’s largest LGBTQ+ rights organisation with little in the way of push back – and it has gleefully snatched that opportunity.

  • Straight talking

    One of the many irritating things about the endless torrents of anti-trans bullshit is the false distinction between trans people and LGB people, as if trans people aren’t also lesbian, gay, bisexual or any other part of the rainbow. Fewer than 10% of us are straight.

    This is something that comes up again and again in large scale surveys of LGBT+ people. For example, according to the UK Government’s National LGBT Survey in 2018, 71% of trans people are gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual or queer; 5.4% are asexual, and 9.4% are straight. This aligns with previous surveys in the US that found 60% to 70% of trans people did not consider themselves to be straight.

    Anyone who tells you trans rights are in conflict with LGB rights is lying to you. Most trans people aren’t just the T in LGBT+: they’re the L and the G and the B (and the Q and the A).

  • Stick your rainbow

    I wrote a piece for T3 about Pride Month and the way some tech firms’ support for the LGBT+ community doesn’t go beyond putting a rainbow on their social media logo.

    Earlier this year, a damning study by GLAAD confirmed what marginalised people already know: every single major social networking platform is “categorically unsafe” for LGBT+ people. But hey! They’ve put a rainbow on their logo!

    If tech firms really mean it, we need them to do more than post platitudes. We need them to make their platforms safe for marginalised people by actually enforcing their policies against harassment and hate speech. We need them to stop financially supporting anti-LGBT+ politicians in order to get tax breaks. We need them to donate to LGBT+ organisations and advocacy groups who can make a practical difference in the lives of the people who’ve been affected negatively.

    But most of all, they need to hire and promote LGBT+ people – particularly people who are also marginalised by race, class, disability or gender. Good decision-making will only come from people who really understand the problems, and who understand the positive and negative impacts of their decisions.

    But if you think the tech world is bad, they’ve got nothing on the Tories. Today the Government Equalities Office and the Conservative party have posted their scheduled Pride tweets despite being demonstrably anti-LGBT+. It’s particularly galling to see the GEO claiming credit for equal marriage in Northern Ireland, something the Conservatives and their DUP allies fought tooth and nail.

    As I wrote in my piece:

    it’s a hollow, selfish gesture: the aim isn’t to help LGBT+ people, but to burnish the corporate image. Telling the world that you agree LGBT+ people exist means nothing when LGBT+ people’s rights, healthcare and safety are under unprecedented attack worldwide.

    And it means even less when you’re the ones doing the attacking.

  • “These words can be a revelation, but you are not beholden to them”

    This, by a poster called Pyrrhiccomedy on Tumblr, is very wise. It’s in response to a question asking them whether they still identified as asexual; the questioner thought they were, but is with a new partner and feels different.

    The words you put on your orientation are not elementally a part of you. They are tools, and as tools they should serve a function. That function can be to help you understand and categorize your own experiences and desires. It can be to help you find a community. It can be to help you get laid. It can just be to set social expectations. These words can be a revelation when you first apply them to yourself: they can be life-saving. But you are not beholden to them.

  • Read it and weep

    This is where all the anti-trans hysteria in the press and online leads: a young mum savagely beaten with a crowbar by a gang of 13 people for no other reason than they thought she was trans.

    Lauren Garrison was enjoying a night out with her friends when she was called a “dirty d***” and a “tr****” by a gang of 13 youths outside the Three Fishes pub in Chapel Road, Worthing on Monday.

    After confronting the group of ten boys and three girls, the 28-year-old was attacked with a crowbar, leaving her unconscious.

    The mother-of-one suffered a concussion and fears she may be left with permanent damage after bursting a blood vessel in her eye.

    As Jane Carnall, aka EdinburghEye, writes on Twitter:

    The woman this gang of thugs attacked had been visually identified as trans by these men & women who, like the anti-trans activists I was arguing with yesterday, were sure they could just “tell” when a woman is trans or cis.

    The crime these 13 anti-trans thugs committed is a transphobic and homophobic hate crime, They beat her, they said “trans people should be shot”, they used slurs – they attacked her violently because they had used that visual “check” & decided she wasn’t “really” a woman.

  • “If LGBTQ rights are the preserve of the woke, does that mean real people aren’t gay?”

    One of the downsides of not buying overtly transphobic newspapers is that I’m not supporting the work of good people such as Zoe Williams. Today’s column in the Guardian on the so-called war on woke is wise and witty:

    Your average transgender woman could be forgiven for wondering what exactly she did so wrong that she’s now seemingly held responsible for such a significant proportion of all political ills

    …Social conservatism, a loose and elastic concept, can simply roam about, choosing fresh things to dislike. Yesterday it was trans people; today it’s footballers showing solidarity with Palestine; tomorrow it’ll be Michel Barnier.

  • Eighties! We’re living in the eighties!

    Back in the 1980s, various fundamentalist right-wing loons decided that the board game Dungeons and Dragons and heavy metal music were corrupting the minds of children. Apparently the game was “an occult tool that opens up young people to influence or possession by demons.” This obvious lunacy came from the religious right, but it was laundered by the press who published such nonsense without investigation or criticism.

    In 2021, various fundamentalist right-wing loons are claiming that the board game Magic: The Gathering and Japanese anime cartoons are corrupting the minds of children and turning them trans. This obvious lunacy comes from the religious right, and will no doubt soon be laundered by the press who’ll publish such nonsense without investigation or criticism.

    Far-fetched? Just last month one of the leading anti-trans groups told the UK government’s Women & Equalities committee that people become transgender because they’re being hypnotised by “sissy porn” on YouTube. This group has been endorsed by all the leading anti-trans groups and many politicians too.

  • “Targeting children. Who does that? Well…”

    There’s a very good piece in the LA Times by LZ Granderson about the US Republican anti-trans bills.

    Well, if you follow the money and the lawsuits, the Alliance Defending Freedom is a good place to start looking for answers.

    …This isn’t the first time ADF has attacked the LGBTQ community. The organization supported banning gays from the Boy Scouts and the military. It has linked homosexuality to pedophilia. It fought to criminalize same-sex relationships in Texas. In Europe, ADF is supporting the forced sterilization of transgender people. And the same-sex wedding cake case that found its way to the Supreme Court? Yeah, the group was involved with that as well.

    …These are coordinated efforts by conservative organizations such as ADF, the Family Research Council and the Heritage Foundation to limit the rights of some people. This movement is driven by elected officials who are comfortable targeting transgender children in exchange for endorsements, campaign funds and, ultimately, reelection.

    As Granderson points out, “most lawmakers introducing these bills cannot point to other cases happening in their state.” They, or rather the Christian Right, are pushing supposed solutions to a problem that doesn’t exist.

  • A bad result for bigotry

    Something wonderful happened in the Scottish elections this week. A whole bunch of politicians who’d bet on transphobia being a vote-winner were either kicked out of office or failed to get elected in the first place.

    The most obvious example of that is self-confessed sex pest Alex Salmond’s sleepy cuddles party, Alba, which failed to gain a single seat or even a convincing share of the vote, and the Scottish Family Party doing predictably badly. But there were other losers too, such as the deeply unpleasant Joan McAlpine (SNP), Catriona MacDonald (SNP) and Andy Wightman (independent). Two other vocally anti-trans politicians, Johann Lamont and Jenny Marra (both Labour) also stepped down. In a single week the Scottish parliament has lost many of its anti-trans politicians.

    I’m not going to pretend that transphobia was the only reason why some of these candidates were defeated; for example McAlpine was defeated by a Tory, a party hardly famed for its pro-trans stance, and there are still fundamentalists such as John Mason in the SNP. But it’s abundantly clear that the obsessive transphobes making a lot of noise on Twitter and claiming to represent the views of Scots women are deluded: anti-trans groups urged Scots to vote with their feet and they did, by getting as far away from the bigots as they possibly could.

    It’d be nice if our media started to reflect that fact.

  • The hate slate

    The unprecedented legislative attacks on trans people, particularly teens, in the US are horrific. Writing in Jewish Currents, Jules Gill-Peterson explains why there are so many anti-trans bills being introduced by Republican lawmakers and what ideology is behind them.

    the right-wing proponents of this legislative avalanche have greater ambitions than mere electoral dominance. As HB 1476 shows, this legislative tactic is an attempt to use trans people as a pretext for a broader reformation of civil life and citizenship to advance an authoritarian, Christian state policy on sex and gender. From this vantage point, it shares its strongest affinities with antisemitic, Islamophobic, and New Jim Crow-era anti-Black politics

    …It is no coincidence, then, that Islamophobic, anti-Black, anti-immigrant, antisemitic, evangelical Christian, and white nationalist groups all find themselves on the same side of this issue