Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: LGBTQ+

  • Why British media is so transphobic

    This, by VS Wells, is very good.

    A culmination of factors appear at play. Some point to the antiquated ideologies of a generation of journalists and publishers who have dominated the mainstream media. Others say it’s intrinsically linked to political leaders who have failed to denounce hate. No matter its origins, this rampant transphobia has become a nation’s accepted bigotry.

    The article rightly points out that the disproportionate influence wielded by a few well-connected people has been a significant factor.

    Media in the U.K. has long been white, wealthy and interconnected, and it’s within these circles especially that transphobia has “become very fashionable,” Jane Fae says. The chair of Trans Media Watch, a charity that advocates for better press coverage, Fae points to Ian Katz as an example: During his stints at the Guardian newspaper, BBC and Channel 4, each publication saw a rise in transphobic coverage. Katz is married to Justine Roberts, founder and CEO of Mumsnet, a website that’s become a hotbed of British TERFs. As writer Laurie Penny explains, “The ecosystem of liberal media and left-wing activism is smaller and more quarrelsome in Britain than it is in America, and a lot of people know each other, and a lot of [transphobia in media] comes down to in-group loyalty and personal drama.”

  • The NHS is getting information from US hate groups

    Thanks to a Freedom of Information Request, we now know the source for the recent change to NHS England information about puberty blockers.

    A US anti-LGBT blog.

    Christine Burns MBE, who was instrumental in the creation of the Gender Recognition Act, on Twitter:

    NHS England used justifications from a US hate campaign to alter its public facing web pages on puberty blockers, which were then cited in a Judicial Review

    As the account that published the FOI response explains, the website “is funded by US conservative think-tank The Witherspoon Institute. An anti-LGBT and anti-abortion far right group.”

    There’s a horrific mix of malevolence and incompetence around trans healthcare right now: incompetence within and malevolence without.

  • Fellow travellers

    Before they stormed the US Capitol building leading to the death of four people (so far), the MAGA mob cheered a “bizarre” anti-trans rant by Donald Trump Jr.

    Speaking before his father addressed the crowd at Wednesday’s MAGA protest against Congress certifying the presidential election, Trump Jr. brought up gender-neutral language as well as transgender women participating in sports as women.

    If you were to draw a Venn diagram showing the makeup of the mob – the neo-Nazis, the anti-vaxxers, the anti-semites, the racists and the guys who just want to break stuff – transphobia is where the circles overlap. And the same applies to their cheerleaders in the media, the pundits who’ll spend the coming days and weeks telling you that violent armed mobs are less dangerous than my pronouns. They will ask you to try and understand the angry mob and urge you to listen to their “legitimate concerns”.

    We already understand them, because we’ve been listening to them for years. The far right and its enablers always target marginalised groups first. Those groups have spent years trying to tell you about the violent rhetoric, the science denial, the conspiracy theories, the misinformation, disinformation and radicalisation, the rage. We should all be horrified by what happened at the Capitol. But nobody should be surprised.

  • I am a mirror

    There’s an odd but interesting series on The Good Men Project called Rideshare Confessionals, which sets out to “[examine] the human experience in passengers’ stories as delivered from a therapist moon-lighting as a rideshare driver.”

    I did say it was odd.

    This one is about a trans passenger, and while it’s all a bit overwrought for me I though this bit was insightful:

    When encountering a transgender woman, many cisgender men don’t see a person. They see a mirror.

    I think there’s a lot of truth in that. So much of the discussion about trans people is based not on who we are or what we do, but how our existence makes other people feel. And it’s very difficult to change that: to invert the right-wing trope, feelings don’t care about your facts.

    This also applies to other marginalised groups, of course. And sadly it’s often used to justify the mistreatment of members of those groups.

    You can bash the mirror by creating laws that marginalize people, try to drive them indoors so you never have to look at them. You can create labels and policies that stigmatize them so they are denied personhood. You can talk to them like objects, and heap all your judgments on them.

    …mirrors are fragile things. If not handled with care, they break

     

  • The paper of a broken record

    Jeffrey Ingold, Stonewall’s head of media:

    In 2020, The Times (incl. the Sunday Times) wrote 324 articles about trans people & ‘trans issues’. Zero of which were written by trans people themselves.

    For comparison, in 2019, The Times wrote 321 articles about trans people & ‘trans issues’. 3 were written by trans people.

  • Religious leaders demand a global ban on conversion therapy

    This is beautiful. Over 370 religious leaders from 35 countries have signed a declaration demanding a worldwide end to the dangerous practice of conversion therapy for LGBT+ people.

    The signatories include Archbishop Desmond Tutu; the Most Revd Linda Nicholls, Archbishop of Canada; the Most Revd Mark Strange, Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church; the Most Revd John Davies, Archbishop of Wales; Rabbi Aaron Goldstein, chair of the UK Conference of Liberal Rabbis and Cantors; and many other key figures from many faiths including the Sikh, Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu religions.

    Here’s an extract from their declaration:

    • We affirm that all human beings of all sexual orientations, gender identities and gender expressions are a precious part of creation and are part of the natural order.
    • We affirm that we are all equal under God, whom many call the Divine, and so we are all equal to one another.
    • We, therefore, call for all to be treated equally under the law…
    • We believe that love and compassion should be the basis of faith and that hatred can have no place in religion.
    • We call on all nations to put an end to criminalisation on the grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity, for violence against LGBT+ people to be condemned and for justice to be done on their behalf.
    • We call for all attempts to change, suppress or erase a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression – commonly known as “conversion therapy” – to end, and for these harmful practices to be banned.
    • Finally, we call for an end to the perpetuation of prejudice and stigma and commit to work together to celebrate inclusivity and the extraordinary gift of our diversity

  • “Maybe you haven’t found your people yet, but they will be there.”

    There’s a nice piece in Refinery29 by Robin Craig. It’s about chosen families, the networks of supportive people that can mean so much to LGBT+ people.

    A chosen family is, as the name suggests, a family that someone chooses for themselves. It blurs the lines between friends, siblings and parents. For trans people, relationships with biological families can often be strained or marked by transphobia. Chosen families can step in as replacement care networks that provide emotional and community support when biological family ties break down.

    There’s a song on my band’s current EP about this. It’s a very noisy guitar song called Tribe.

    The key line, which is also the chorus, is simple and true:

    Everybody needs to love and be loved.

  • “Extremely inappropriate”

    According to Dame Melanie Dawes, the head of Ofcom, it is “extremely inappropriate” for the BBC to platform organisations such as the LGB Alliance to “balance” stories about trans people, trans healthcare or trans people’s human rights.

    The video’s here. It’s in response to a question by MP John Nicolson, a gay man who’s been subject to vicious homophobic abuse from LGB Alliance supporters.

  • Life in the fast lane

    Oh, to be fast-tracked and rushed into medical treatment. Here are the latest gender clinic waiting times for the UK: in the Exeter area the waiting list for an initial appointment is now five years.

    The maximum waiting time for these services is supposed to be 18 weeks.

  • A disgrace

    The Good Law Project’s Jo Maugham notes that almost every supposed expert witness in the High Court puberty blockers case was dodgy. Most have overt links to anti-LGBT, anti-abortion Christian Right groups, notably the ADF and the Heritage Foundation.

    As Maugham writes:

    Even if you do not care to listen to the views of the trans community you should be deeply alarmed that these or some of these highly marginal figures in world medicine are influencing the law around healthcare for children in the UK.

    And if you do not care about the trans community – but you do care about abortion rights or gay rights – you should be deeply alarmed at the influence those who are no friends of ‘progressives’ are gaining in the UK.

    One of the things I find particularly disgusting about this is that it’s been happening in plain sight for years. There is a co-ordinated attempt by the Christian Right to use trans people as a wedge issue for a wider attack on LGBT+ rights and on women’s reproductive freedom. This particular case is just a particularly despicable example, but the religious right is behind pretty much every anti-trans legal case and is funding a great deal of the supposed grass-roots anti-trans groups. And since this verdict they have been talking openly about using this case as a springboard to attack abortion and contraception, which was the game plan all along.

    Very little of this is happening in secret, and yet the entire UK press and broadcast media chooses not to investigate or report on it. Instead, they are complicit. Shame on them.