Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: LGBTQ+

  • “Why has it taken you so long if you’re serious?”

    This Twitter thread by Helen Belcher, who has been analysing media coverage of trans people for many years, is worth your time. I’ve posted the text below.

    Most trans people I know tried for years not to be trans. The personal cost was often thought to be too high. So when some “white knight” rides in to say people like me are “lazy” and basically wannabe gay people, it understandably enrages many.

    Waiting lists to see medics are measured in years. Put that on top of the years trying not to be trans, and you start to see how much of our lives can start to feel wasted, just because of the fears imposed by others.

    That’s why medics are largely moving to a model where they start to trust the person they see in front of them, rather than the hostile questioning like I got from the first medics I saw. Questions, ironically, like “why has it taken you so long if you’re serious?”

    It means that people start to work with the medics rather than learning scripts, such as the one I was encouraged to learn, which run high risks of hiding real dangers.

    And, if someone decides that transition is not for them, and I suspect many still do before they get very far, that’s fine. The problem was that the medical model tended to focus on one clear surgical destination, and some now accept that that’s not always appropriate.

    All of this turgid, repetitive “debate” is predicated on the basis that being trans is a “bad outcome”, rather than it simply being what it is. There’s no kudos in being trans, and there should be no kudos in not being trans either.

    No trans person I know thinks it’s even possible to convert someone to be trans, yet the antis are full of people who want to convert some not to be trans, but never outline their criteria for how they know – just like they can apparently always identify trans women – they can’t.

    I also had a few years where I was treated as an issue rather than a person. Consider how dehumanising that is. Yet that’s what this turgid “debate” keeps trying to go back to – replacing pragmatic laws which allow people to live their lives with philosophically pure ones.

    If your philosophical debate only harms one group of people, and bears no resemblance to what actually happens on the ground, and relies on fears being whipped up, then it’s not worth the air used to broadcast it.

  • I don’t want to talk about her either

    …but Rowling is trolling again, and she’s moving into very dangerous territory. The government is considering whether to ban conversion therapy, which is discredited and dangerous. Rowling is trying to convince people that trans-affirming healthcare is also conversion therapy.

    Here’s The Trevor Project:

    Conversion therapists use a variety of shaming, emotionally traumatic or physically painful stimuli to make their victims associate those stimuli with their LGBTQ identities. According to studies by the UCLA Williams Institute, more than 700,000 LGBTQ people have been subjected to the horrors of conversion therapy, and an estimated 80,000 LGBTQ youth will experience this unprofessional conduct in coming years, often at the insistence of well-intentioned but misinformed parents or caretakers.

    Conversion therapy is the attempt to force people to change their sexual orientation or gender identity. It is almost always done against the person’s will and instigated by somebody with authority over them, such as a parent or religious leader.

    It ruins lives.

    NBC News:

    Exposure to “conversion therapy” — efforts by a secular or religious professional to change a transgender person’s gender identity — is associated with thoughts of and attempts at suicide, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.

    …“What this new study shows is that transgender people who are exposed to conversion efforts anytime in their lives have more than double the odds of attempting suicide compared with those who have never experienced efforts by professionals to convert their gender identity, he said.

    Turban said one of the most alarming findings from the study was the even higher risk of psychological distress for those who reported exposure to conversion therapy during childhood. Those who were subjected to the practice before age 10 were four times more likely to report lifetime suicide attempts than the general transgender population, according to the findings.

    Teen Vogue published an exposé on the “Gender Critical” parents who actively seek conversion therapy for their children.

    These parents don’t view “non-affirming therapists” as conversion therapists, but the connections are clear: “gender-critical therapy” is the newest cover of a song that’s been playing for the past 50 years. And while the methods aren’t perfectly aligned, the harm that can be caused by these kinds of practices can be as severe. The desired outcome — rejection of transgender identity — is a message that’s been broadcast by a network of quasi-medical organizations, the evangelical anti-LGBTQ right, and the old guard of conversion therapists who’ve been defending their harmful actions for decades.

    …As NCLR puts it: “While these contemporary versions of conversion therapy are less shocking and extreme than some of those more frequently used in the past, they are equally devoid of scientific validity and pose serious dangers to patients — especially to minors, who are often forced to undergo them by their parents or legal guardians, and who are at especially high risk of being harmed.”

    But what anti-trans bigots claim is that the real conversion therapy is when parents are not putting trans kids through conversion therapy. In their minds there are no trans teenagers; just gay teenagers who are forced, often by an international Jewish conspiracy, to become trans because it’s much easier than being gay.

    I don’t know where to start with this, I really don’t. The idea that it’s somehow easier to be trans or that homophobic parents would rather have a trans kid than a gay one is so deranged it’d be funny if it weren’t about something so serious.

    You cannot talk somebody into being trans any more than you can talk them into being gay. If you could, there would be no trans people and no gay people, because the world is very cruel to trans people and gay people.

    Conversion therapy does not work. You won’t turn a straight kid gay or a cis kid trans with any amount of propaganda. And you won’t turn a gay kid straight or a trans kid cis by torturing them. We know this, because many people have tried to do it.

    Gender-affirming healthcare operates from the approach of “do as little as possible”. In most cases it is no more than using a child’s preferred name and pronouns. In the teenage years, after many months or years of assessment, it may involve puberty blockers to delay puberty in order to give them more time. And then, years later, it may involve transition, a process with an exceptionally high success rate and a very low regret rate.

    Nobody goes into this lightly, and they definitely don’t go into it at high speed. There are tons of reputable studies that show that this approach is effective, that it leads to improved mental health outcomes, and it saves lives.

    So of course some bigots want to get rid of it. Better a dead kid than a trans kid.

    The people Rowling is amplifying want to remove all support, all healthcare and all affirmation from trans teenagers. They want trans teens to be deprived of any help and bullied until they break down and say they’re not trans.

    Let’s call it what it is. Torture.

    As the journalist Katelyn Burns put it, JK Rowling’s message to trans teens is simple.

    Your body. My choice.

  • Godzilla gets it

    This is lovely. How would you react to your child coming out if you were a giant fictional Japanese sea monster?

  • Unaffected doesn’t mean objective

    If you spend any time on social media you’ll know the power of the long quote printed on a photograph: the format is often used to elevate idiocy or to spread nonsense. A good example just now is of a Samuel Pepys diary entry about “gadabouts” in taverns spreading disease. It’s fake, and uses language that didn’t exist when he was alive.

    It’s not all bad, though. I saw this one today.

    When you debate a person about something that affects them more than it affects you, remember that it will take a much greater emotional toll on them than on you. For you it may feel like an academic exercise. For them it feels like revealing their pain only to have you dismiss their experience and sometimes their humanity. The fact that you might remain more calm under these circumstances is a consequence of your privilege, not increased objectivity on your part.

    It’s a good point, but it’s also looking at it from a pretty unlikely perspective: that the person who says they want to debate you is (a) the first and only person who has ever had this conversation with you and (b) that this person genuinely wants to discuss the issues in good faith.

    In the case of (a), that’s rarely true. Whether it’s structural racism, trans healthcare, women’s reproductive rights, poverty or anything else that directly affects specific and often vulnerable groups of people, it’s highly likely that people from those groups have heard – and answered – your questions many times before. In too many cases, they have heard and answered those questions many times for many years.

    To the questioner the points may be new and exciting and ground-breaking, because this is an area they are not familiar with. But to the person they’re asking, it’s simply a sign that the questioner is too lazy (or privileged, or both) to do the simplest Google search or visit a library. In effect, they’re asking a member of a marginalised group to drop what they’re doing and provide them with a free education.

    And in the case of (b), that’s rarely true either. Especially on the internet. Most of the people who come swarming with their “just asking questions” are not coming in good faith with a desire to have an open and honest discussion. They are well aware what the answers to their questions are, and they don’t care.

    They are not coming for a lively discussion in which both sides go away with new insights and a wider perspective. They are coming to attack you, to wear you out, and ideally to make you really angry. Because if they can do that they can turn to others and use tone policing to dismiss your entire argument.

    Tone policing means misogynists get to frame women as “hysterical” or “too emotional”; white supremacists and transphobes get to claim that their targets’ anger demonstrates their simmering, dangerous rage. Whereas all it really demonstrates is that people have been goaded to the point where they’ve lost patience with the same shit they’ve heard again and again and again.

    There’s a great encapsulation of the problem in Reni Eddo-Lodge’s superb book Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race. The title has been used by people who haven’t read it to claim that it’s an attempt to shut down an important debate: how can you debate racism if you refuse to talk to white people?

    You can tell they haven’t read it, because it says this on the very first page (and on Eddo-Lodge’s blog here).

    I’m no longer engaging with white people on the topic of race. Not all white people, just the vast majority who refuse to accept the legitimacy of structural racism and its symptoms. I can no longer engage with the gulf of an emotional disconnect that white people display when a person of colour articulates our experiences. You can see their eyes shut down and harden. It’s like treacle is poured into their ears, blocking up their ear canals like they can no longer hear us.

    I just can’t engage with the bewilderment and the defensiveness as they try to grapple with the fact that not everyone experiences the world in the way that they do. They’ve never had to think about what it means, in power terms, to be white- so any time they’re vaguely reminded of this fact; they interpret it as an affront.

    …if I express frustration, anger, or exasperation at their refusal to understand, they will tap into their pre-subscribed racist tropes about angry black people who are a threat to them and their safety.  It’s very likely that they’ll then paint me as a bully or an abuser. It’s also likely that their white friends will rally round them, rewrite history and make the lies the truth. Trying to engage with them and navigate their racism is not worth that.

    …The balance is too far swung in their favour. Their intent is often not to listen or learn, but to exert their power, to prove me wrong, to emotionally drain me, and to rebalance the status quo.

    Members of marginalised communities face all kinds of obstacles every single day. They have no obligation to add to that burden by trying to educate people who have no desire to learn.

  • Is the government going to break another promise?

    I mentioned in a previous post that the UK government promised to ban dangerous “conversion therapy”, a form of psychological torture, two years ago.

    Today, the UK House of Commons posted on Twitter:

    How does #conversiontherapy affect the #LGBTQ community? Should it be made illegal? What would that mean to you? ‪@HoCpetitions‬ is investigating a petition calling for the practice to be made illegal. Click the image to share your insights

    You’d think they’d be aware of the Memorandum of Understanding On Conversion Therapy In The UK, which was signed by NHS England, NHS Scotland, The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, The National Counselling Society, The Royal College of Psychiatrists, the UK Council For Psychotherapy and many others.

    As it explained:

    All the major psychological professional bodies in the UK have concluded that conversion therapy is unethical and potentially harmful.

  • “LGBT lives are being lost”

    Lockdown has acted as an amplifier for many social problems. One sign of that is the increase in LGBT+ people struggling with suicidal thoughts.

    BBC News:

    In total, eight charities told BBC News they had seen an increase in LGBT people accessing their support for suicide prevention.

    The LGBT Foundation has received more calls about suicide “than ever before”.

    Mermaids, which helps young trans people, has had to alert police following concerns about callers wanting to kill themselves

    We know – and the government knows – that LGBT+ people suffer disproportionately from mental health issues due to multiple factors: discrimination, lack of family support, long waiting lists for essential treatment, social isolation and so on. Lockdown has stopped many essential support services, and it has of course also stopped the social contact and face-to-face support that some people find life-saving. Charities are trying to fill the gap, but many of them were desperately understaffed and underfunded long before lockdown.

    Various branches of the UK government have spent the last month wrapping rainbows around their Twitter logos and proclaiming their support for the LGBT+ community. But it’s an empty gesture when again and again the government fails to keep its promises to LGBT+ people. It launched an LGBT Action Plan specifically to reduce suicides among LGBT people back in 2018 and has not implemented any of it. A year ago it announced a “rapid evidence review” of LGBT suicide. That hasn’t started. And two years ago this week it promised to ban conversion therapy, which has a horrific effect on LGBT+ people’s mental health. It hasn’t kept that promise either.

  • It’s never “just a joke”

    I wrote about The Last of Us Part 2 the other day, and one of the things I mentioned was its portrayal of LGBT+ characters. One thing I didn’t mention was that their very existence was enough to rouse an army of entitled man-babies to scream about political correctness destroying video games, as they have with many other video games that had the temerity to centre characters who weren’t straight white male “bros”.

    I also didn’t mention the way LGBT+ characters are portrayed in other video games. This is from the marketing around GTA V, a very popular title that will be re-released for next-generation consoles next year. It’s considered one of the jewels in gaming’s crown.

    It’s nighttime in the game and the streamer, playing as a middle-aged man, approaches a group of people standing outside of a club. They’re all broad-shouldered with cut biceps, and they’re wearing an assortment of wigs, crop tops, mini skirts, lace stockings and bikini bottoms. Chest hair pokes out from some of their shirts, and under layers of dramatic makeup, a few jawlines are dusted with stubble. The tight clothing highlights obvious crotch-level bulges.

    The streamer’s character walks up to one of these NPCs and says, “Hello, sir. I mean, madam. I mean, whatever.” He turns to another and says, “Well, hello, mid-op.” And then a third: “Hey, you need to keep taking your hormones!” And then he pulls out a crowbar and beats one of them to death.

    The defence? It’s satire. Just a joke. And anyway, the game doesn’t discriminate: you can beat cisgender sex workers to death too.

    Let’s see how the audience responds to such clever satire.

    …there are dozens of videos featuring GTA V players happily hunting down and killing trans characters, because they are trans.

    What you see on screen is a reflection of the lack of diversity behind the scenes. The games industry is largely male (over 70% of employees are men), and the Scottish developer of GTA is no exception. Engadget reports that in 2019, women who worked for GTA V’s developer earned 29.3% less than their male colleagues for similar jobs and 91.2% of senior positions were held by men. Those figures were significant improvements over previous years.

    When the only perspective you have belongs to straight white guys, the only perspective that matters to you is that of straight white guys. So your co-founder isn’t being ironic when he says GTA V tells “nuanced stories” and doesn’t trade in “archetypes”. There are nuanced stories, but only for the characters that are straight, white, cisgender and male.

    The focus on such a narrow demographic doesn’t just affect what you see on screen. It affects who gets hired, who is valued, and who can get away with toxic behaviour.

    Gaming has a problem with toxic men. Women have been trying to speak out about sexual harassment and abuse in and around the gaming industry for many years, and they were met with horrific online abuse as a result. Here’s Vox:

    In the fall of 2014, under the premise that they were angry at “unethical” games journalists — a lie that persists today — thousands of people in the games community began to systematically harass, heckle, threaten, and dox several outspoken feminist women in their midst, few of whom were journalists. The harassment occurred under the social media hashtag “Gamergate,” which is still a hotbed of debate and anti-feminist resentment today.

    …One of the most frustrating things about watching Gamergate unfold is that the seeds of it had been in place for years. Targeted online harassment against women had been occurring for years, across numerous communities, from men who spent years harassing one woman who complained of getting hit on at a professional conference to harassment of actors for playing unlikable women.

    Here’s the New York Times on the latest attempts to detoxify the industry:

    More than 70 people in the gaming industry, most of them women, have come forward with allegations of gender-based discrimination, harassment and sexual assault since Friday. They have shared their stories in statements posted to Twitter, YouTube, Twitch and the blogging platform TwitLonger.

    …This isn’t the first time gaming has been said to be having its #MeToo moment. Last summer, several game developers went public with accusations of sexual assault, harassment and abuse, and were met with a swift backlash from the gaming community.

    The article quotes researcher Kenzie Gordon:

    The gaming industry is particularly conducive to a culture of misogyny and sexual harassment, Ms. Gordon said, because straight white men have “created the identity of the gamer as this exclusive property.” When women, people of color or L.G.B.T.Q. people try to break into the industry, she said, the “toxic geek masculinity” pushes back in ways that often lead to sexual abuse and bullying.

    Gaming studios are often reluctant to defy those fans, Ms. Gordon said, but recently it has become clear that there is a demand for a variety of video games that appeal to all types of people, which requires more diversity among game designers and could necessitate changes in the industry.

  • “Dear Baroness Nicholson”

    This, by Munroe Bergdorf, is really something.

    While this poisonous conversation may constitute an amusement to those who are in a position to pit their privilege against a minority, for people like me, it is an extremely painful onslaught on the very core of who we are.

    It would be insulting your intelligence as well as my own and the intelligence of those who follow us both, to suggest that your tweets were posted in error. They were not out of character for a high profile politician who has a long and proven record tweeting what I consider to be cruel taunts and unfounded allegations against trans people, including a child, and trans organisations such as Mermaids, for whom I am a proud patron.

    …I worry that your activity during the last few hours speaks to the truth behind your apology. That you are more concerned for your own reputation as complaints gather and grow by your name than you are for any need to reconcile our considerable differences.

  • Toxic, yes. Debate, no

    Jayne Ozanne and Rabbi Elli Tikvah Sarah talk about trans people’s fears about GRA reform in The Guardian. It’s a perspective that the UK edition of the paper rarely allows into its pages.

    …people must have an equal opportunity to be heard, particularly by those in power. Few trans people have access to national news platforms to counter the views laid against them. If we listen only to the loudest voices, or worse, silence those we don’t wish to hear, things can quickly turn toxic.

    A prime example of this toxic discourse is how the conversation about “single sex spaces” for women has evolved. Trans women have been safely accessing these spaces for years. We are deeply concerned that leaked proposals calling for trans women to be barred from these spaces will ultimately victimise all women, trans or otherwise.

    …we too have received hateful rhetoric for being lesbians and feminists. But this vitriol pales in comparison to that experienced by our friends in the trans community, who suffer prejudice and discrimination on a daily basis.

     

  • “The extremism and the routine abuse of any woman online needs to stop.”

    The other day, I linked to the TIE Campaign’s messages about the onslaught of sickening abuse they’ve received from homophobes and transphobes. One of the people I quoted was their chair Rhiannon Spear, who is also the National Women’s Convener of the SNP, and she’s gone into more detail in a new blog post.

    Opponents to the GRA would have you believe that the women’s sector in Scotland does not care about the protection of women. That the first ever female First Minister does not care about the safety of women. That the woman at the head of legal of the Equality and Human Rights Commission doesn’t understand the proposed changes in the GRA and how they impact women’s sex based rights in the Equality Act. That women like me who support GRA reform do not care about the safety of women.

    Instead of critically engaging with why I and many others support GRA reform, opponents now want you to believe that I am a threat to women and girls. That I am a predator, that I groom children and at worst I am a paedophile. We have reached a point where trans women are openly equated to predators and their allies are accused of being paedophiles and child groomers.

    This rhetoric is not normal and cannot become normal.