Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: LGBTQ+

  • These people think you’re stupid

    It didn’t take long for the newly created LGB Alliance’s mask to slip. As if its supporters weren’t bad enough – it’s being promoted by the likes of racist far-right troll Katie Hopkins and what appears to be the entire US alt-right on social media, and the list of people it follows on social media could easily be a guide to “trolls you should block on Twitter” – someone who claims to be one of its founding members is connected to the US organisation The Heritage Foundation.

    That’s the anti-gay, anti-lesbian, anti-bisexual, anti-women Heritage Foundation.

    On Facebook, Gary Powell posted that “I was at the first pre-launch meeting” of the LGB Alliance to help develop its strategy. He’s been very vocal about his connection to the group and uses #LGBAlliance in his social media profile.

    Here’s what Gary did in his holidays.

    He’s not the only problematic person supporting the LGB Alliance, which has already set up the inevitable crowdfunder to process conveniently anonymous donations so we don’t get to see who they are.

    Some of its staunchest supporters have previously gone on record to say they don’t trust bisexual people who – wait for it – are “erasing women”, or they have histories of posting anti-gay stuff online, which makes their support for a supposed LGB organisation look rather suspect. The LGB Alliance itself has been accused of posting anti-bisexual stuff online too, which isn’t a great look for an organisation that’s supposed to be full of bisexual people. Their spokesperson’s response?  “Sorry! I”m (theoretically) bi myself.”

    Theoretically bi. Maybe all those straight guys posting so enthusiastically about how if you don’t support the LGB Alliance against trans perverts you’re a queer paedophile (yes, people really are saying that) are doing so because they’re theoretically LGB. They’re not LGB, but they could be, if they wanted to be, and if they didn’t hate LGB people so much.

    Expecting the LGB Alliance to post sensible things online is probably me being generous. Yesterday it suggested that the solution to transphobic violence was to “explain that you are trans long before you are in a vulnerable position”. That way “there will be no misunderstandings, and no dangerous situations”, which I’m sure is news to the people sexually and/or violently assaulted and even murdered by people who specifically sought them out because they were transgender. Remember, girls. If a man assaults you, it’s probably your fault.

    Let’s give the group the benefit of the doubt: you can’t necessarily choose your supporters (although the clown cavalcade of bigots it’s connected to on Twitter does suggest it’s done just that). But to have a Heritage Foundation supporter in your inner circle is careless to say the least.

    Powell, a Conservative councillor, writes for Public Discourse. Public Discourse is the journal of the Witherspoon Institute, one of the leading Christian Right organisations opposing gay marriage, surrogacy and women’s reproductive rights. Powell knows this, because until he took his Twitter account private last night he linked to the Witherspoon Institute from his Twitter profile. He’s clearly proud of the connection.

    One of the Witherspoon Institute’s most famous creations is the Regnerus Study, a study of LGBT parents that was used repeatedly in court to argue against equal marriage for gay and lesbian people on the grounds that it is harmful to children. It’s a favourite of violent Russian anti-LGBT groups and a core plank of the movement to stop LGBT+ people being allowed to adopt.

    As you’ve probably guessed, the study was bunk. The scientific community called it “a disgrace”. It was financed by anti-LGBT organisations, it was peer-reviewed by the people who did the research, and it was motivated not by a desire to find the truth but to manufacture ammunition to be used against LGBT people. It was ideologically driven, methodologically flawed and did not meet the most basic standards of academic research.

    I’ve written before about the links between the US Christian Right and anti-trans activism in the UK, and how it’s part of a wider battle against women’s rights and LGBT equality. The Witherspoon Institute is one of many US organisations that’s pivoted from demonising gay men to demonising trans people with the same arguments about social decay, harm to children and so on. But the core goal is the same: legal protection for people who want to discriminate against, and refuse to provide healthcare for, LGBT+ people and women who need or have had abortions.

    The methods used to attack trans women, to attack LGBT+ equality and inclusive education and to attack women’s reproductive rights are almost identical, because they come from the same people. Science denial and the creation and promulgation of pseudoscience. Dark money. The creation of fake grassroots groups and the influencing of real ones. Alliances with the far right.

    It’s happening across Europe and it’s happening here in the UK too.

    OpenDemocracy:

    Between them, these groups have backed ‘armies’ of ultra-conservative lawyers and political activists, as well as ‘family values’ campaigns against LGBT rights, sex education and abortion – and a number appear to have increasing links with Europe’s far right.

    They are spending money on a scale “not previously imagined”, according to lawmakers and human rights advocates

    Here’s Sian Norris on the rise of US-funded anti-abortion groups in the UK.

    The anti-abortion movement is also not in a silo. Its rhetoric often goes hand-in-hand with far-right groups. For example, the founder of the UK Life League, Jim Dowson, is also involved with the far-right political group, Britain First. Articles published in their bi-annual Rescue magazine in 2018 blame abortion for a low birth rate in the “indigenous” population and describe a future where “the empty cradles, playgrounds and school chairs where our own children should be are occupied by aliens” unless abortion is made illegal.

    …Beyond graphic and aggressive imagery, there is another US-imported tactic being employed by the anti-choice movement in the UK: the sharing of false medical information in order to undermine abortion law.

    In a sane world, those are the alliances the press would be reporting on.

    Many anti-trans activists are close to the far right too, which is why Katie Hopkins’ and the alt-right’s support for the LGB Alliance isn’t so surprising: some of the highest-profile UK anti-trans activists are antisemitic, racist and religiously conservative. They too are connected to the Heritage Foundation and other Christian Right organisations.

    The Christian Right thinks that people are stupid. The people who are happily linking arms with them suggest they may have a point.

  • Less than human

    Yesterday was just another day in the UK press. The Telegraph suggested that trans people should be made to carry ID cards in order to go to the toilet. The Times lauded a new anti-trans hate group specifically set up to exclude trans people from the wider LGBT+ rights movement. The Daily Mail and The Sun continued to make hay from claims that two young trans people “forced” a multinational corporation to “erase women”.

    It was just another day on the internet too, with trans people being abused 8 times a minute. That abuse ranged “from insults and harassment to calls for the genocide of transgender people and their allies”, with people suggesting that it’s OK to kill trans people because they’re “less than human”.

    That’s courtesy of the anti-bullying charity Ditch The Label, which has co-authored a report about online transphobia.

    It makes for incredibly grim reading. On Twitter, 12% of posts relating to trans issues or people are abusive; elsewhere abuse makes up 18% of blog comments, 19% of news comments, 40% of forum discussions and 78% of YouTube comments. And that’s just clearly abusive posts. It doesn’t include dog-whistles where bigotry makes its point more carefully.

    Despite this, these are still very minority views. As the report notes: “constructive, pro-trans conversation far outweighs the negative. Transphobic conversation is in the minority, but it’s still very loud and very damaging.”

    These may be minority views, but they represent the majority of trans-related coverage in most of the UK press and broadcasting media. A vicious, vocal minority is being repeatedly platformed by editors and broadcasters who should, and I suspect who do, know better.

    Every single trans person I know is tired of this and terrified by it too.

  • A bad idea from history

    In the Telegraph, David Thomas wrote this:

    Thomas’s argument is simple. “If drivers, pensioners, students and disabled citizens have cards that establish their bona fides”, why shouldn’t trans people?

    There are two answers to that.

    One, drivers, pensioners, students and disabled people don’t have to produce ID so they can go for a piss in safety or get on with their lives without being beaten up.

    Here’s Ellen Murray from TransgenderNI:

    Having this for trans people “voluntarily” is against the law, absolutely unenforceable, breaches human rights grossly and is a very dangerous direction to go down.

    And two, because they have been tried before.

    Here’s one.

    These passes were “transvestite passes”, which were granted by German police until 1933 based on diagnostic interviews by sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld at the Institute for Sexual Research. The holders were allowed to wear the opposite gender’s clothing in public without fear of arrest.

    They weren’t granted after 1933 because on the 6 of May that year Nazi students and soldiers stormed the Institute, destroyed equipment and materials (the most famous photo of book-burning Nazis is of those people destroying Hirschfeld’s work), and seized the records of people who’d been interviewed by Hirschfeld. Those people were then specifically targeted by the Nazis and sent to concentration camps where they were ostracised by other prisoners, abused, experimented on and killed.

    If Thomas isn’t aware of this terrible history, he should educate himself. And if he is aware but chose to ignore it, he should be ashamed of himself.

  • We hate to say we told you so

    There was widespread revulsion on social media yesterday over this article.

    Mr Waiton here isn’t a tutor, he’s a senior lecturer. He’s also a Brexit Party candidate. And the newspaper this article is from, The Scotsman, is his occasional employer. He’s also a regular contributor to the Herald, Scotland’s other national daily, where he helps fuel the moral panic around the existence of trans people. Naturally he’s a regular Spiked contributor too.

    As ever, trans people told you he was a bad ‘un and nobody listened.

    As publisher and commentator Laura Waddell noted yesterday:

    Stuart Waiton was handed a microphone and met with applause at a Glasgow anti-GRA [Gender Recognition Act] event with subsequent national press writeups completely unequipped to see how the subject is like flypaper for those with broader reactionary, anti-feminist, anti-minorities agendas.

    …this abhorrent view is nothing new. And yet we have #buyapaper appeals from those papers who pay this guy and others like him for his views, while the press landscape in Scotland remains heavily skewed towards men? The problem isn’t just corporate cuts.

    Elsewhere in “people who are awful to trans people tend to be awful people full stop” news:

  • Straight-up hate

    The UK is rapidly approaching the point where there will be more anti-trans hate groups than there are actual trans people.

    The latest group. which launched this week, calls itself the LGB Alliance, and it’s a single-issue hate group: it wants to split the T from the wider LGBT movement. Despite (mainly straight) supporters saying it’s a pro-LGB group, it has no policies about any issues that affect gay, lesbian and bisexual people, issues of which there are many. It exists solely to target so-called “gender ideology”, a phrase beloved of the far right and the religious right.

    For a supposedly gay, lesbian and bisexual alliance it all looks very straight. Its Twitter account does not appear to follow anybody active in LGB rights, but it does follow every single anti-trans pressure group and bigot you can think of, most of whom are straight. Its membership seems to include an awful lot of straight people, and its online allies tend to be straight people too. Actual LGB people have been quick to distance themselves.

    As I’ve posted before, targeting the T in the LGBT community is straight out of the Christian Right strategy to attack the entire LGBT movement, a strategy discussed publicly  in 2017.

    [there are] three non-negotiables in the fight against the so-called gender identity agenda, a conspiracy theory touted by anti-LGBT groups that disavows sexual orientation and gender identity. The first is to “divide and conquer. For all its recent success, the LGBT alliance is actually fragile and the trans activists need the gay rights movement to help legitimize them.” In other words, separate trans activists from the gay rights movement, and their agenda becomes much easier to oppose. As Kilgannon explained, “Trans and gender identity are a tough sell, so focus on gender identity to divide and conquer.” For many, “gender identity on its own is just a bridge too far. If we separate the T from the alphabet soup we’ll have more success.”

    One of the people who pointed this out yesterday is Patrick Harvie, the Scottish MSP, who is a bisexual man. His posts attracted a great deal of negative comment on social media, much of it from straight people using far-right terms such as “cultural marxists” and “Christianphobia”.

    Isn’t it funny how straight, cisgender men who’ve shown no interest in, or active hostility to, feminism and gay/lesbian rights suddenly proclaim themselves defenders of both when it gives them an opportunity to attack trans people?

    Harvie:

    They’re already campaigning against sex education in this country. In others they’re rolling back abortion rights, domestic violence legislation, workplace equality… there are genuinely disturbing forces out there in the world, that threaten all the rights and freedoms we fought for. If they succeed and split our community against itself, don’t kid yourself that they’ll end with hostility to trans & NB people.

  • The sound of silence

    I’ve posted this cartoon by Barry Deutsch before, I know, but that’s because it’s good.

    I tend to gravitate towards people who are clever and kind, and as a result I’m friends with a lot of people who work in charities, voluntary groups and other good places. They’re generally trans-inclusive places but they don’t always have many or any trans staff or volunteers, so from time to time my friends will ask me about trans-related stuff.

    I’m not going to name any of the organisations for reasons that should become pretty obvious.

    The other day, one of my friends wanted my opinion on something. Her organisation is happily trans-inclusive, and it was considering publicly supporting this year’s Transgender Day of Remembrance. It’s an annual event to mark the people murdered for their gender identity (21 so far in the US alone this year), and it’s an opportunity to show support for the wider trans community. It wouldn’t involve any time, effort or money, just a statement of support on social media.

    My advice: don’t do it.

    That’s because some of my other friends also work for or with organisations that are happily trans-inclusive, and when some of those organisations have said so publicly – usually in response to social media queries – they’ve been the victims of ongoing campaigns of social media abuse. One of my other friends recently told me of the weeks of sustained abuse one particular organisation received over every social media channel, abuse that a year later still happens almost every day.

    These aren’t politicians or contrarians who say hateful things online and then run to the newspapers claiming abuse when people criticise them. These are good people in good organisations who can’t express the most innocuous sentiment –  we don’t hate trans people – without inviting sustained and often co-ordinated campaigns of abuse accusing them of the most terrible things.

    This happens on an individual level too. I was at a social media workshop for LGBT+ people the other day, and one of my fellow attendees was the mum of a trans kid. She was considering going on networks such as Twitter to help humanise trans people, to share her story so that others could understand.

    My advice to her: don’t do it.

    I know several mums of trans kids who use social media. Without exception they face constant, vicious abuse. People try to find their home addresses and private photos of their children. People repeatedly accuse them of child abuse. In some cases people even report them to social services in the hope of getting their children taken into care.

    Some of those women are much stronger than I am and continue to try and do some good online, but you need to be a very special, very strong and very secure person to deal with that every day. And the reality is that most people aren’t special, strong or secure enough to invite such hatred into their lives.

    As I’ve written endlessly, lots of people are making a good living from claiming to be “silenced” in their frequently published and handsomely paid articles for The Guardian, The Spectator, The Telegraph, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Daily Mail, The New Statesman and many, many more, as well as on national radio and on television and on the lecture circuit.

    These people claim to be oppressed, to be silenced, to be victims. And they do so while sending tens of thousands of social media followers to hound, harass and humiliate ordinary women. To claim victimhood while orchestrating online abuse against women who don’t have power, a platform or the Today Programme on speed dial is beneath contempt.

  • Love finds a way

    City Hall, Belfast

    Despite the best efforts of the DUP, Northern Ireland became a better place for women and for LGBT+ people last night. It’s testament to the hard work of grass-roots activists and campaigners who’ve fought for a very long time for Irish women and same-sex couples to get the same rights that the rest of the UK takes for granted.

    It’s also worth pointing out that none of the UK groups stirring up fear and hatred on the grounds of “protecting women’s rights”, “protecting women and girls” or “standing up for lesbians” campaigned to end restrictions on abortion or introduce equal marriage in Northern Ireland.

  • No, trans activists aren’t forcing anybody to do anything

    Today’s shock-horror trans story is a case study in how certain newspapers deliberately misrepresent stories to make their readers hate trans people. You’ve almost certainly seen it, or read someone’s hot take on it.

    The story is this.

    In June, two people on the internet posted two tweets that asked whether the logos on the packaging on one brand of sanitary products might upset trans men – that is, people transitioning from female to male – or non-binary people who were assigned female at birth. As they pointed out, many trans men and non-binary people have periods too: one of the posters knows this because they are a trans man.

    The company had a look, said “oh, we hadn’t thought of that” and made a minor change to the packaging.

    That’s it.

    Except, of course, it’s not. Those two tweets became “pressure” that “forced” the company to “ban” its packaging, which somehow is all trans women’s fault because reasons. Cue yet more anti-trans hatred, most of it directed towards trans women, across social media. It’s become so ludicrous that I’ve seen trans women angrily posting about it, saying it’s crazy to suggest that trans women have periods, even though nothing in the story has anything to do with trans women and nobody’s suggesting anything of the sort.

    Both of the posters have of course already been hounded off social media by irate Daily Mail, Sun and Telegraph readers.

    “Two people on the internet got mildly miffed about something that most people didn’t even notice” is not and should not be a news story, let alone part of a campaign to demonise minorities.

  • Careless talk costs lives

    The increasingly hateful rhetoric around trans people is going to get more people hurt, or worse.

    In Georgia, USA, a school district had to temporarily suspend its trans-inclusive toilet policy “as students and employees are facing extreme hate and death threats.”

    Of course, it couldn’t happen here, could it?

    It already does. The teacher at the centre of the anti-education protests in England has received death threats; threats of violence are common against LGBT+ people and their supporters online. I posted the latest England and Wales hate crime figures a few days ago; in the days following, my news feed has been full of local press stories detailing even higher increases in specific parts of the country. For example, the 25% national increase in hate crimes against LGBT+ people was bad enough, but in North East England the figure is up by nearly 60%.

    One of the reasons for the increasingly hateful climate is that people are now being told that LGBT+ rights, and trans rights specifically, are part of a war. That means it’s okay to make death threats to children: they’re enemy combatants.

    As ever, this framing began as Christian Right messaging and it’s since been adopted by anti-trans activists and bigoted trolls. The long-standing Twitter hashtag #waronwomen, used to tag issues such as right-wingers trying to remove women’s rights, has been hijacked by right-wingers trying to roll back LGBT+ rights – rights that of course include rights for cisgender women as well as trans women.

    Framing a minority as the enemy in a war is deliberate and dangerous. In a war, there are no shades of grey. The enemy must be destroyed. No quarter shall be given.

    This kind of language has been poisoning social media for some time now. For example, yesterday the SNP’s new women’s convener, Rhiannon Spear, was warned by multiple social media posters that she was now “the enemy” in the so-called war on women.

    Poster 1: You are the enemy now of the very people you dare to claim to protect. The enemy. And should be treated as such.

    Poster 2: I agree entirely. Rhiannon Spear is an enemy to women.

    Poster 3: #handmaidrhiannon #enemyofwomen #waronwomen

    Spear, a young pregnant woman, has been on the receiving end of this stuff for months now.

    There’s lots of this online, and of course it never gets reported because it doesn’t fit the narrative of sinister trans people silencing debate.

    Any woman who dares to say she isn’t against basic dignity for trans people is hounded and often abused by people using increasingly violent rhetoric. And the social networks, our press and even some senior politicians are turning a blind eye to it.

  • Look who’s talking

    Piers Morgan, who used to write homophobic stories in The Sun before that became socially unacceptable, is currently making hay from the idea that there are more than 100 genders. It’s based on a comment made in a video where someone was rather clunkily trying to express the idea that gender is a spectrum.

    We’re familiar with the gender binary: male or female, boy or girl. But most binaries are shortcuts. There’s a whole world of colours between black and white. We use binaries to simplify that, but sometimes they over-simplify. The trick is to understand them for what they are: quick descriptions that apply a lot or even most of the time, but that aren’t the only possibilities.

    The thing about this 100 genders thing is that when I go to LGBT+ and trans-specific events, nobody’s talking about it: the most obscure identity I’ve ever heard somebody describe themselves as is “non-binary”. Nobody’s getting irate about this stuff because they’ve got more important things to worry about, like basic human rights such as access to healthcare and not being murdered.

    That’s not to say there aren’t people out there coming up with ever-longer lists of possible genders, but those people are generally in the corners of social media and academia. Going too far is what they do.

    It’s important to question who’s telling you a story that makes a particular group look bad. These myriad genders are regularly trotted out by the right-wing press, but I simply don’t encounter LGBT+ people talking about it. It appears to be a classic case of people taking a couple of really extreme and/or niche views and trying to persuade people that they represent the entire group.

    Put it this way. Piers Morgan isn’t talking about the healthcare crisis for trans people or the elevated suicide rates among LGBT+ teenagers, the things that really affect LGBT+ people and that LGBT+ people really do care about. He’s just pointing and laughing at them and trying to get you to point and laugh too.

    Here’s an example of a big story about genders: Facebook’s infamous 50-something genders, which were then increased to 71. This was widely reported as 71 genders. It wasn’t. It was 71 possible responses on a form, most of them duplicates or slightly different ways of saying the same thing. For example:

    Cis, Cisgender, Cis Female, Cis Male, Cis Man, Cis Woman, Cisgender Female, Cisgender Male, Cisgender Man, Cisgender Woman

    …Trans, Trans*, Trans Female, Trans* Female, Trans Male, Trans* Male, Trans Man, Trans* Man, Trans Person, Trans* Person, Trans Woman, Trans* Woman, Transfeminine, Transgender, Transgender Female, Transgender Male, Transgender Man, Transgender Person, Transgender Woman, Transmasculine, Transsexual, Transsexual Female, Transsexual Male, Transsexual Man, Transsexual Person, Transsexual Woman

    The Royal Opera House in London used to do the same (and probably still does; I haven’t checked in lately). When you buy your tickets you can choose from these titles:

    Advocate, Ambassador, Baron, Baroness, Brigadier, Canon, Chaplain, Chancellor, Chief, Col, Comdr, Commodore, Councillor, Count, Countess, Dame, Dr, Duke of, Earl, Earl of, Father, General, Group Captain, H R H The Duchess of, H R H The Duke of, H R H The Princess, HE Mr, HE Senora, HE The French Ambassador M, His Highness, His Hon, His Hon Judge, Hon, Hon Ambassador, Hon Dr, Hon Lady, Hon Mrs, HRH, HRH Sultan Shah, HRH The, HRH The Prince, HRH The Princess, HSH Princess, HSH The Prince, Judge, King, Lady, Lord, Lord and Lady, Lord Justice, Lt Cdr, Lt Col, Madam, Madame, Maj, Maj Gen, Major, Marchesa, Marchese, Marchioness, Marchioness of, Marquess, Marquess of, Marquis, Marquise, Master, Mr and Mrs, Mr and The Hon Mrs, President, Prince, Princess, Princessin, Prof, Prof  Emeritus, Prof Dame, Professor, Queen, Rabbi, Representative, Rev Canon, Rev Dr, Rev Mgr, Rev Preb, Reverend, Reverend Father, Right Rev, Rt Hon, Rt Hon Baroness, Rt Hon Lord, Rt Hon Sir, Rt Hon The Earl, Rt Hon Viscount, Senator, Sir, Sister, Sultan, The Baroness, The Countess, The Countess of, The Dowager Marchioness of, The Duchess, The Duchess of, The Duke of, The Earl of, The Hon, The Hon Mr, The Hon Mrs, The Hon Ms, The Hon Sir, The Lady, The Lord, The Marchioness of, The Princess, The Reverend, The Rt Hon, The Rt Hon Lord, The Rt Hon Sir, The Rt Hon The Lord, The Rt Hon the Viscount, The Rt Hon Viscount, The Venerable, The Very Rev Dr, Very Reverend, Viscondessa, Viscount, Viscount and Viscountess, Viscountess, W Baron, W/Cdr

    Facebook’s 71 options are nothing compared to the 200-odd here. It’s exactly the same thing – titles that matter to the holder and maybe their peers, but hardly anybody else –  but you won’t find oleaginous presenters scoffing at that because they want to get an honorific one day too.

    I’m not suggesting we should shoot the messenger, as appealing as the thought of Piers Morgan in front of a firing squad might be. But it’s important to look at who the messenger is. Not all messengers are honest.

    For example, when I first came out my options about the supposed trans lobby were very different from the ones I have now. And the main difference is that back then, I didn’t know many trans people or organisations. My information came from a handful of journalists and an even smaller handful of idiots on the internet. Some of those journalists turned out to be in cahoots with bigoted pressure groups; some turned out to be listed as formal supporters by US evangelical outreach groups; still others just turned out to be hateful arseholes. They were deliberately framing stories in the worst possible way in order to demonise what I now know to be a very ordinary group of perfectly decent people who often have very difficult lives and who don’t deserve to live in the climate of fear and hatred that’s being created around them.

    I’ve written before about the loony-left reports of the 1980s, many of which were entirely fabricated, and about the anti-trans (and anti-immigrant, and anti-Muslim, and anti-disabled people, and anti-working class people) stories routinely run by certain outlets today. The idea that newspapers and other media outlets don’t lie is a wonderful one, but it just isn’t true.

    The stories we’re told are shaped by the people who tell them. All too often those people have an agenda.