Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: LGBTQ+

  • How to make the world a slightly better place

    I went to see Richard Hawley at the Barrowland Ballroom last night. The Barras is rightly known for being one of the world’s best music venues, and I go there a lot. But until last night I’d never been as me because I’ve been scared of doing it.

    So that’s what I did last night.

    Moving swiftly past the fact that there are far too few women’s toilets, the whole evening was a textbook example of how to treat people with thoughtfulness and respect. Every single person I dealt with – security staff, stewards, bar staff – was a credit to the organisation: friendly, helpful and treating me according to my gender presentation without any hesitation whatsoever.

    At the merchandise stall I got an abject lesson in how to be a complete badass who makes the world a slightly better place.

    I was looking at the T-shirts and asked the woman what sizes they had. Now, I’m there as me but I’m hardly Audrey Hepburn. How do you answer without making any assumptions?

    Here’s how:

    “These come in two versions: the women’s cut is smaller and quite fitted; the men’s is a lot roomier. I’m wearing the women’s in size XL, and as you can see it’s quite a small fit, but I often wear the men’s and roll up the sleeves. Which one do you think you would like?”

    I don’t know who you are, merchandise lady, but you made my night.

    The gig was pretty good too.

  • Hateful words cause hateful acts

    The latest Home Office figures show once again that hate crimes are soaring in England and Wales. The number of reported hate crimes has doubled since 2013.

    The majority of hate crimes are racial, and there were a shocking 78,991 such crimes in 2018 – an increase of 11%. And there are also worrying increases in hate crimes against disabled people (up 14%), Jewish people (up 50%), gay and lesbian people (up 25%) and trans people (up 37%).

    Remember too that the majority of hate crimes are never reported, and the ones that are rarely end in prosecution.

    As the Home Office reported last year:

    offences are less likely to be reported if they are considered more minor by the victim (such as verbal abuse) and not worth police time, or when committed against people who are regularly victimised and have normalised it as ‘part of everyday life’. Certain barriers are more specific to the victim community. For example, qualitative research with the LGBT community found that fear of being ‘outed’ was a frequent concern

    Part of the increase is better recording, but that isn’t the whole story. If it were, you would have consistent increases across all categories, and you wouldn’t see spikes such as the increase in race-hate crimes around the EU referendum and the 2017 terrorist attacks.

    If you look at those numbers again, the biggest increases are among the groups most commonly singled out by social media and mainstream media. Anti-semitism has come roaring back thanks to far-right social media users, who frequently spread hatred about disabled and LGBT+ people too; the massive rise in hate crimes against trans people corresponds with a period of hysterical scaremongering about them by supposedly respectable newspapers and broadcasters.

    Once again you’ll be told that this is the result of a snowflake generation reporting free speech on social media, but the Home Office’s own analyses in recent years show that that isn’t true. These are not arseholes being arseholes on Twitter; these are hate crimes that happen in the street, perpetrated by people who often commit other kinds of crimes, especially violent ones. More than half of hate crimes are public order offences and a third involve “violence against the person”.  Online hate crimes are a tiny amount (2% in 2016/17, mostly racist).

    Hateful words lead to hateful acts.

  • Scare quotes

    Update, 16 October:

    This is even worse than it looked. The Newsnight article says this:

    The results of the study are yet to be published, but a number of concerns were raised to BBC Newsnight and the British Medical Journal:

    Let”s spell this one out.

    The original BBC Newsnight item and article were put together by Newsnight’s Deborah Cohen and Hannah Barnes. 

    The allegations investigated by the HRA were made by Newsnight’s Deborah Cohen and Hannah Barnes. 

    The article in the BMJ that Newsnight’s Deborah Cohen and Hannah Barnes use to corroborate their own claims was written by Newsnight’s Deborah Cohen and Hannah Barnes. 

    The follow-up article strongly implying a whitewash was written by Newsnight’s Deborah Cohen and Hannah Barnes. 

    So a couple of BBC journalists filed a complaint, did a big item about how “someone” had made a complaint, and when the complaints were found to be groundless were allowed to cast doubt on the investigation into their own complaints.

    That’s shockingly, sickeningly unethical.

    Original post below… 

    In July, BBC’s Newsnight ran a feature raising significant concerns about the prescribing of puberty blocking drugs in London’s Tavistock Clinic.

    The story was based on claims that a key study that informed those prescription decisions was dodgy. It was alleged that researchers did not obtain proper consent, that they did not provide adequate information and that it was methodologically unsound.

    As Newsnight reported, those claims were being investigated by the NHS Health Research Authority.

    The investigation was ongoing at the time of the item, but a notorious anti-trans activist, a sociologist who was caught operating a pseudonymous Twitter account to post transphobic nonsense online, provided the BBC with documents he claimed demonstrated that children and their parents “were not given the information they needed in order to take this momentous life-changing step”.

    The HRA couldn’t respond in detail because its investigation was ongoing, so the Newsnight item was pretty much a hit piece based on allegations that couldn’t be disproved until the investigation was complete.

    Guess what? The investigation is complete and the claims were disproved.

    An official review by the HRA into the conduct of the study, has cleared the researchers of any wrongdoing.

    It found that researchers worked “in accordance with recognised practice for health research” adding that in some areas they were “ahead of normal practice at the time”.

    Don’t hold your breath for an equally prominent on-air correction. The BBC report about the HRA investigation quotes “experts [who are] only prepared to comment off the record for fear of reprisal”, and runs with the headline:

    Questions remain over puberty-blockers, as review clears study

    I’d interpret that as “study was wrong”, wouldn’t you? That’s certainly how it’s being framed on social media, where people are sharing the headline but not the detail.

    The piece concludes:

    While the evidence continues to emerge, debate will no doubt continue about use of puberty blockers in young people.

    Repeatedly giving trolls a megaphone isn’t a debate. It’s scaremongering, scaremongering that helps fuel the growing anti-trans sentiment in the UK: they’re coming for your children!

    Let’s see how that manifests, shall we? Here’s Danny Shaw, BBC News’ Home Affairs Correspondent, this morning:

    BREAKING: There’s been a ten per cent rise in hate crimes recorded by police in England and Wales [in 2018-2019]… Transgender hate crime went up 37%

  • I regret to inform you that the Sunday Times and the Christian Legal Centre are at it again

    Another weekend, another bunch of anti-trans stories in the Sunday Times (following on from four stories in the Saturday edition). Today’s selection includes a 3/4 page tale of a deeply troubled man who transitioned and then de-transitioned, something that’s incredibly rare but that does happen, usually because some trans people face terrible hostility when they come out.

    His story is being used to demonstrate that children are being coerced into surgical transition, even though it doesn’t do anything of the sort.

    Point one: he was middle-aged when he began transition.

    Point two: his transition was DIY and ignored the specialist advice that he should consider social transition before considering any medical treatment.

    In other words, the story demonstrates something rather different: that troubled middle-aged men who decide to ignore medical advice don’t always get the happy ending they hope for.

    It’s a sad story about a sad individual with various personal problems who faced terrible hostility (hostility the Times and its sister titles help to fuel) after a transition they began despite medical advice.

    That’s not how it’s being spun here, though. The Sunday Times is using it as yet more evidence of the fictional transgender cult – and the fact that the Christian Legal Centre is representing him casts even more doubt on the whole thing. The CLC is very good at coaching people to make lurid but conveniently unverifiable claims that fit its culture war narratives, claims that frequently turn out to be untrue. The Times has published many of those stories, but doesn’t return to them when they’re thrown out of court.

    The CLC are a bunch of culture war ambulance chasers, and they tend to represent two kinds of people: howling bigots and deeply troubled individuals. This looks like the latter. I feel sorry for the man in the story, but he’s just the CLC’s latest useful idiot.

     

  • Spreading hate

    What does hate look like?

    In many cases, it looks just like you.

    When we think of hateful bigotry, we tend to imagine stereotypes: the bomber-jacketed skinhead, the spittle-flecked preacher and so on. We don’t imagine nice people: our neighbours, our friends, the mums on the school run.

    But the stereotypes are often wrong. To take just two examples I know a bit about: those skinheads are often proudly anti-racist and their gigs raise money that goes directly to refugees; those school run mums are posting poison on the internet.

    Here’s an example. Yesterday, Flora margarine’s parent company terminated an endorsement deal with Mumsnet. It wasn’t the first and it won’t be the last major advertiser to cut ties with the wholesome-sounding message board over its inability to police a hard core of viciously bigoted users who use part of its feminism forum to post hate speech about trans people.

    Mumsnet posters are claiming a co-ordinated campaign against the site by sinister trans activists, but what really happened is that one woman, the mother of a trans kid, messaged the company and said “are you sure you want to be associated with this?” The company investigated and concluded: hell no.

    It’s important to be clear about this. Talking about trans people is not transphobic. Having worries about legal changes is not transphobic. Discussing even anti-trans articles is not transphobic. But that’s not what a hardcore of users are doing, and it’s not why advertisers leave.

    The new face of hatred is not a screaming skinhead shouting slurs. It’s nice middle-class people who choose their words carefully.

    Writing in Out magazine, Gillian Branstetter talks about the US hate group, the Alliance Defending Freedom, and its relationship to the Westboro Baptist Church. Both organisations are hateful, but the ADF understands that wandering around with placards saying “God hates fags” is counterproductive. The ADF is much smarter, and much more dangerous.

    Alongside branding standards, the ADF instructs its employees to replace words like “transgender” with “sexually confused,” “gay” with “homosexual behavior,” and “intersex” with — I’m not kidding — “sexually mutilated.”

    Perhaps most telling, however, is how Mr. Trent and his colleagues are instructed to describe their own work and the policies they defend. They don’t engage in “bigotry,” according to the style guide. They’re merely “defending biblical, religious principles.” They don’t oppose “sex education programs” in schools; they oppose “sexual indoctrination.” It’s not “gay marriage”; it’s “marriage imitation.”

    The Mumsnet crowd do this too. They use the debunked faux-diagnosis of “autogynephilia” as a way to call trans people fantasists, fetishists and perverts. They use “protecting sex-based rights” to agitate against trans people’s rights. They say they’re just a place where nice, friendly harmless women come together to debate the issues, campaign against Childline, try to defund trans-supportive charities and force charities to cancel discussions on preventing child abuse.

    To borrow a phrase from the feminist philosopher Kate Manne’s recent bestseller Down Girl, these tricks of language rely on the “naive conception” of bigotry. The ADF, allies of the president, and many others in Washington hope to manipulate the view that racism, ableism, misogyny, homophobia, or transphobia cannot be called for what it is until it’s screaming in your face, carrying a five-foot poster declaring your eternal damnation.

    …The Alliance Defending Freedom — as well as the Family Research Council, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and many others — are fighting for a world without LGBTQ+ people in it, where anyone can feel free to deny trans people our most basic rights because they feel God hates us. That fact should not go unnoticed simply because they aren’t holding signs declaring it.

  • “We come out in order to tell our young people that they can be loved”

    It’s National Coming Out Day in the US today. It’s often pitched as a celebration, but National Coming Out Day began as activism. For LGBT+ people, the personal is political – so coming out is a political act.

    Life is different if you’re LGBT+. The US Supreme Court is not currently discussing whether it should be legal to fire people for being heterosexual. Radio 4 does not invite lobby groups to tell its listeners that cisgender women will attack them in hospital wards. Straight people do not have to worry that strangers will beat them up for holding their partner’s hand in public*. Cisgender people do not have to pass extensive psychiatric assessments to get simple medication. Nobody’s protesting outside schools that tell children straight people exist. Cisgender people do not give themselves bladder infections because they’re too scared of being yelled at or worse to use public toilets. Heterosexual teenagers don’t need to fear homelessness or physical or sexual abuse if they tell their parents they’re straight.

    By coming out, by simply getting on with our lives, we can help fight that prejudice and bigotry.

    But not everybody can come out, or is ready to. It’s hard enough dealing with your own stuff without also setting yourself up as a target for every arsehole on Earth, bringing 57 varieties of bigoted bullshit into your life.

    We’ve come a long way in a fairly short time, but even in supposedly enlightened countries like the UK there are people who hate LGBT+ people. Those people do not always keep their bigoted beliefs a secret, wrap them in “reasonable concerns” or keep their hatred in the closet. Many of them are vocal. Some are violent. And not everyone is strong enough to come out and have to deal with that.

    Helen Boyd, author of the insightful and thought-provoking memoirs My Husband Betty and She’s Not The Man I Married, has written a powerful open letter about that very thing.

    your visible pride flag is for the young people who are LGBTQ+, who can’t come out, or be out, because they have so little autonomy in their lives, who don’t get to choose who their parents are or what their religion is or even where they go to school. It’s for the young people who are bullied because they are different and no one at their school is helping. It’s for the young people who worry about disappointing their mom or dad or grandma or uncle, who think it’s impossible to live a happy, productive life as an LGBTQ+ person, or who believe there is something wrong, or evil, about them because of who they are or who they love.

    …We come out in order to tell our young people that they can be loved, feel safe, have a job, be successful, have families. We come out so they know their elders are out here loving them even when we don’t know who they are yet. We come out so they know we’re here and that someone cares about them living their lives to their fullest potential. We come out so that those young people live to be adults because too many of them don’t.

    We come out because we can and we know others who can’t, won’t, shouldn’t – yet, or maybe ever.

    * Not all straight people, of course. People dating people from ethnic or religious minorities can be attacked for who they love too.

  • Useful idiots are still idiots

    I’ve written many times about useful idiots, members of minority groups who join anti-minority parties. One of the best-known examples is Winston McKenzie, the former Commonwealth spokesman for UKIP, whose presence in the party was used to prove it wasn’t racist. He ended up quitting the party because it was racist.

    Trans and gay people do it too. In the US, the “LGBT for Trump” campaign and the Log Cabin Republicans proved to be a bunch of idiots helping to rainbow-wash one of the most anti-LGBT presidents we’ve ever seen, a president whose campaign against LGBT people may see even basic anti-discrimination protections removed.

    Here in the UK we have ageing transsexuals joining anti-trans bigots to rail against the invented dangers of other trans people, and celebrity trans people pulling the ladder up behind them to leave other trans people behind. We even have transgender candidates standing for the thoroughly anti-trans Brexit Party.

    You’ll be shocked to discover that despite having trans candidates, the Brexit party – hardly the most progressive, inclusive party around – still hates trans people. Here’s PinkNews on its co-founder, Catherine Blaiklock.

    The only people this should come as a surprise to are the idiots who can’t see that they’re being accepted because they’re useful, not because they’re welcome. They are there for one reason and one reason only: to try and persuade the public that the organisation is less hateful than it really is.

  • Not so reasonable now

    Jezebel has posted a very comprehensive analysis of one of the LGBT+ human rights cases in front of the US Supreme Court.

    Tellingly, a who’s who of anti-trans bigots have signed on in support of Rost, from the Heritage Foundation’s Ryan T. Anderson to the Women’s Liberation Front, or WoLF, all of whom are attempting to make the same argument: that trans women are not women and that giving trans women civil rights protections would harm other women. (For the members of WoLF, the fact that a ruling against Stephens would possibly reify gender stereotypes in the workplace apparently matters less than ensuring trans women have fewer rights.)

    That who’s who also includes some of the most prominent anti-trans activists from the UK. For example Linda Bellos, a regular contributor to UK radio, TV and newspaper discussions about trans issues, travelled to the US to address the primarily right-wing and straight crowd of anti-LGBT+ protesters outside the Supreme Court. Messages of support from other high-profile UK activists were read out to the crowd.

    Bear in mind that these people have said repeatedly that they are only speaking out about trans issues because they have “reasonable concerns” about possible unintended consequences of reforming the UK gender recognition system. Nothing more, nothing less. They are absolutely not motivated by a hatred of trans women, and to suggest so is a vicious slur.

    And yet here they are, proudly standing in front of supporters of, and in front of banners bearing the logo of and paid for by, the anti-abortion, anti-lesbian, anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-diversity Alliance Defending Freedom.

    The links between British anti-trans activism and the US religious right are well documented, but they’re generally concealed on the grounds that holding hands with anti-women, anti-LGBT+ hate groups isn’t a very feminist thing to do even if you hate trans people as much as they do. And the ADF really is a hate group. It was classified as such by the SPLC in the US for its efforts to criminalise homosexuality and enable businesses to discriminate against LGBT+ people. It advises anti-LGBT+ organisations in other countries how best to keep anti-gay laws on the statute books, and it fought vigorously against the US decriminalisation of gay sex.

    Here’s Opendemocracy:

    The global wing of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has a multi-million dollar budget but does not disclose who its funders are. It opened an office in London two years ago and is now spending hundreds of thousands in the UK.

    Recently, this group has publicly opposed ‘buffer zones’ around British abortion clinics and supported calls for “freedom of conscience” provisions to enable medical staff to independently object to providing legal abortion services.

    …It was recently denied ‘participatory status’ at the Council of Europe because of its opposition to a convention on preventing and combating violence against women.

    …ADF International has worked with the British Christian right for years. It previously collaborated with its “allied organisation” the Christian Institute, for example, to support a London registrar who refused to officiate for same-sex civil partnerships

    Imagine standing proudly with people like that.

  • You’re probably a target too

    Arwa Mahdawi writes in The Guardian about the US court cases on LGBT+ discrimination.

    These cases are, to put it mildly, a huge deal – and not just for LGBT people. The ruling will have serious implications for straight people who don’t comply with gender norms. It could allow employers to fire women who don’t wear heels or makeup. It could allow companies to discriminate against men who are not considered manly enough. It could give employers a green light to act as the gender police.

    That’s not an accident. It’s part of the strategy. Globally we’re seeing a very well-funded attempt by the Christian Right to remove the separation of church and state, and to make the non-religious  and the non-Christian subject to Christian law.

    If this were a campaign to introduce Sharia law in secular democracies the mainstream media would be outraged; because it’s a strategy to create Christian theocracies many newspaper proprietors support it and actively promote the key players.

    It’s not, and it never was, just about LGBT+ people.

    Here’s the Guardian again, this time reporting on the Australian Christian Lobby. Like the ADF in the US, it’s demanding the power for employers to fire people based on the employers’ most regressive religious beliefs. And like in the US, it’s part of a wider move to protect discrimination by, not against, Christian extremists.

    ACL director Martyn Iles:

    defended the prospect of hiring and firing based on the “Christian sexual ethic … that sexual relations are for one man and one woman” to the exclusion of others.

    Once again Christian extremists are asking not just for protection from discrimination, but for the legal right to discriminate against anyone they disapprove of in the workplace, in housing and in healthcare. Gay people. Unmarried mothers. Feminists. Trans people. Women who aren’t saving themselves for marriage. People of other faiths. Anyone who doesn’t conform to a regressive view of human rights and behaviour.

    The headlines may say LGBT+, but even if you’re straight and cisgender you’re a target too.

    Mahdawi:

    We can’t draw a line between feminism and the fight for gay liberation or trans equality. LGBT rights are human rights – we are all in this together.

  • A scary day for LGBT+ people in America

    Today, the US Supreme Court will hear three cases with massive potential consequences for LGBT+ people.

    The court will be asked to declare whether it’s legal to fire people on the grounds of their sexual orientation or gender identity. If the court rules that it is, it’ll be a very bleak day for human rights.

    Reuters:

    Trump, a Republican with vigorous support among evangelical Christian voters, has pursued policies taking aim at gay and transgender rights. His administration has supported the right of certain businesses to refuse to serve gay people on the basis of religious objections to gay marriage, restricted transgender service members in the military and rescinded protections on bathroom access for transgender students in public schools.

    …A ruling in favor of the plaintiffs would give gay and transgender workers greater protections, especially in the 28 U.S. states that do not already have comprehensive measures against employment discrimination. A ruling against the plaintiffs would mean gay and transgender people in those states would have few options to challenge workplace discrimination.

    Kate Sosin covers LGBT issues for a number of outlets. As they posted earlier:

    To be clear, they don’t get to rule on our humanity. They’re ruling on their own.