Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: LGBTQ+

  • Boo!

    Thanks to an important new study, I now realise that I have been possessed by a ghost.

    It’s not just me. As this wonderful PinkNews headline puts it:

    Completely legitimate, rational and not at all offensive study says 85% of queer people are possessed by ghosts

    It seems that even in the spirit world, ghosts are stuck with binary definitions of gender: gay men have lady ghosts inside them, and gay women have man ghosts. The study does not provide an indication of what kind of ghost people like me (assigned male at birth but now transitioning, attracted to feminine people and therefore a slightly harder-to-label kind of gay) have inside us. Maybe we have multiple ghosts. There could be a ghost party going on inside me right now.

    The PinkNews piece gets some good jokes out of a nonsense “spiritual group” and its scientific approach, which finds that the symptoms of being a ghost include absolutely everything in the world ever and that the cure is to chant while never, ever thinking about really hot gay, bi or lesbian men, women or non-binary people getting hot and naked and doing hot naked sexual things to your hot naked body as you writhe in orgasmic, ecstatic joy and end up having to wipe gloopy lumps of ectoplasm off the sofa.

    WHATEVER YOU DO DON’T THINK OF THAT.

    Cheap gags aside, though, here’s a question.

    What’s the difference between bullshit, evidence-free stories claiming that LGBT+ people are possessed by ghosts and bullshit, evidence-free stories claiming they’re brainwashed members of a sinister cult?

    The answer’s simple. The UK press is not currently commissioning and publishing endless articles claiming that members of the LGBT+ community are possessed by ghosts.

  • How hateful conspiracy theories make it into the papers

    The Christian Post is yet another evangelical newsletter from America, and it’s part of an axis that includes the Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council – two organisations with strong links to the British anti-trans movement. It’s just published an article about the “trans cult” that could have been lifted from The Sunday Times.

    You know how these things go by now. Sinister cult members stealing children by the dead of night, chopping bits off them, selling them to Satan.

    Here’s Gillian Branstetter, media relations manager for the US National Center for Trans Equality.

    The article is astonishing in its sensationalism, but quite typical of anti-trans fear mongering. The Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council use similar language. The goal is to activate disgust–an extremely strong emotion–in the reader.

    It’s why almost all of these articles talk about a sinister push towards surgery for children, even though children do not get gender confirmation surgery. When they can’t scare you about surgery, they’ll tell you that children are being given cross-sex hormones. That doesn’t happen either. And when they’ve ran out of things that don’t happen to scare you about, they’ll redefine “children” to mean “32-year-olds”.

    The Sunday Times was doing it today, in yet another piece about the “state-sponsored sterilisation of trans children”. The “children” in the article were 20, 21 and 32. The article is uncannily similar to the one in the Christian Post.

    It’s worth looking at the Sunday Times piece in a bit more detail, because the most shocking revelation was that one of the “children” – the 32-year-old – had committed suicide after a history of such attempts. The fact that the parent repeatedly misgenders their dead child suggests that lack of parental acceptance and support might just have been a factor. We know that the suicide rate for trans people with accepting families is the same as the wider population; for those with unaccepting families, it’s sky high.

    If like me you’ve experienced the gender clinic system, there’s a lot of this story that just doesn’t add up. If this person, as stated, had a history of clinical depression, anxiety and suicide attempts, nobody from the GP to their psychiatric assessors would have ignored that let alone recommended transition in any form as the way to fix their problems.

    Another parent, a father, said:

    “I couldn’t change my daughter’s mind so I have to change the minds of those doing this to her.”

    His child, who would presumably prefer to be called his son, is 20.  Does that sound supportive and accepting to you?

    My daughter is not transitioning, she is being transitioned by an LGBT cult and by medical professionals.”

    Which suggests that again, the adult child has undergone extensive psychiatric assessment by those “medical professionals”.

    Last but not least, our case study, now 21. They have been persistent, consistent and insistent about their gender identity for five years and did not access any NHS gender services until they were an adult.

    “I trusted the NHS with my child and cannot believe the harm it has done,” their mum says.

    What terrible procedures did they make her child endure?

    [The child] has had no medical interventions.

    So in five years of attending gender services, the NHS has pushed the woman’s child – her adult child – towards no medical treatments whatsoever.

    This, somehow, is evidence of the NHS pushing children – child children, not adult ones – into treatments that we know the NHS does not provide to children.

    But of course, nobody wants to let the facts get in the way of a good satanic conspiracy theory.

    The points Branstetter makes about the Christian Post piece, and similar pieces by the Heritage Foundation and FRC, apply just as well to the Sunday Times piece and most of the other anti-trans scaremongering in the UK press.

    But it also relies on tropes we see in any number of moral panics and conspiracy theories. PizzaGate + QAnon– like Satanic panics of the 80s–all rely on secretive cabals sacrificing children under cover of night. But it’s actually an ancient fear even older than that.

    One of my favorite reads this year was @annamerlan‘s deep dive into the state of conspiracy theories today. She does a wonderful job finding the common threads through 9/11 trutherism, anti-vaxxers, and many more to discover what makes these absurd ideas so appealing to so many.

    On PizzaGate, she notes the fear of child sacrifice is an anti-Semitic trope dating to the Middle Ages. Such “nocturnal rituals” are used to justify violence against other groups (namely Jews)

    You can find the same myths in anti-native writings of European colonialists, anti-Roma sentiment throughout the last few centuries, and anti-Semitism up to the current era.

    The primary purpose of these myths is playing into parental fears. They hope to animate a protective instinct against a ghostly “other”, unleashing an animalistic rage that will excuse any violence against the targeted group.

    …By animating fears of child abduction, ritual abuse, and sexual exploitation, anti-trans activists are–knowingly or not–following a very old roadmap for justifying oppression. The goal is to build so much fear that the cost trans people pay will be deemed a worthwhile bargain.

    They also try to fudge the other side of the equation–are trans people really oppressed? How suicidal are they? Are they really facing *that* much violence?

    It’s a two-pronged strategy: you tell people that trans people are dangerous even though you know they are not. And you tell people that trans people do not face any victimisation or discrimination, even though they do.

    …If trans people are a cult–dangerous and deranged–and the potential cost is your own children, then such framing justifies oppression of us by any means necessary. All the violence and rape and poverty and suffering trans people face is, in their eyes, an acceptable cost.

    Its important to note that the exchange posed by them is, of course, completely imaginary. Nothing about trans people, our rights, or our health care is a danger to anyone. Period.

    You’ll find that the majority of anti-trans hate groups claim to care about “real” trans people. But they don’t. That’s why they offer no solutions, accept no statistics, believe no experts. They are motivated not by a desire to help anyone, but to hate and hurt people.

    And if you don’t believe me, ask yourself: What is the conservative solution to anti-trans discrimination? How would these activists end anti-trans violence, raise trans people out of poverty, or stem the public health crisis taking trans children by suicide?

    Their solution, of course, is to deny that any of these issues exist.

    They don’t have an answer because they don’t care–and they need you not to care, either. They need you to believe trans people are a sickly cult of perverts unworthy of your empathy, let alone equality. They need you to believe the price is just too high to pay.

  • The world does not smell of paint

    There’s an old Billy Connolly routine where he talks about The Queen. “A guy once told me that The Queen thinks the world smells like paint, because ten feet in front of her there’s a guy going [mimes frantic painting].”

    Like the best jokes, there’s a grain of truth in it. When a dignitary comes to visit the flower beds are tidied up, the overflowing bins emptied, the rusty railings repainted, the homeless people moved to somewhere less embarrassing. It’s the same world we all live in, but the visiting dignitary sees a very different and much nicer version of it.

    I was reminded of it yesterday when Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, spoke about coming out as a gay man in an interview with People En Espanol. When Cook came out five years ago, he was the only leader of a Fortune 500 company to do so. Ever since, he’s used his platform to advocate for a better world for gay and trans people: as he says, outside Apple the world is still a very unfriendly place for us.

    Back to the paint. In his interview, he talked about how he believes that being gay is one of the greatest gifts God has given him.

    at least for me, I can only speak for myself, it gives me a level of empathy that I think is probably much higher than average because being gay or trans, you’re a minority. And I think when you’re a majority, even though intellectually you can understand what it means to be in a minority, it’s an intellectual thing. It’s not intellectual for me to be in a minority. I’m not saying that I understand the trials and tribulations of every minority group, because I don’t. But I do understand for one of the groups. And to the degree that it helps give you a lens on how other people may feel, I think that’s a gift in and of itself.

    I think a lot of people in minority groups will relate to that. To be in a majority group (not necessarily a numerical majority; you can still be in power when there are fewer of you, so for example men have more power than women even though they’re fewer in number) is to live in a world that smells of paint and fresh flowers.

    I’ve certainly experienced that, and since coming out three years ago I’ve seen a very different version of the same world. It’s made me question pretty much everything, to look at the things I thought I knew and ask: is this true, or what I’ve been told is true? If this is how my particular tribe is treated, is this how other groups are treated too?

    The answer is often yes.

    As Tim Cook says, being gay (or trans, or a single mum, or Muslim, or…) does not mean you understand the trial and tribulations of every minority group. But it gives you a lens on how they may feel, and how they may be treated. And I think he’s right that it gives you a level of empathy that’s higher than average.

    The converse can be true too. If you’re not part of a marginalised group, you can have a level of empathy that’s much lower than average. For example, here are some posts this week from the Daily Mail, a newspaper whose readership is primarily older, affluent, white, Christian, heterosexual and cisgender. The story was the horrific deaths of 39 people in the back of a truck.

    “I’m personally over the moon. Sneaking in and stealing our benefits.”

    “39 less people we have to support.”

    “Hope this serves as a deterrent.”

    “Tough.”

    “Thanks for the news, it’s brighten [sic] up my day it has.”

    #notallolderaffluentwhitechristianheterosexualcisgenderpeople, obviously. But there’s precious little difference between the hate in the comments and the hate in the pages.

    Here’s a promotional image from a paper that caters for a similar but slightly less affluent and educated readership. It’s a few years old now but you’ll recognise the name: she’s still saying much the same, and often much worse, on social media.

    Look at that banner at the bottom. The Sun used those horrific sentiments in a marketing campaign. Buy our paper! We’re racist and inhuman!

    The column also claimed that migrants were “cockroaches”. A few months later, Hopkins published her infamous “Rescue boats? I’d use gunships to stop migrants” column.

    Hopkins’ print career ended shortly afterwards, but not because of those columns – the management were fine with those. Her gig ended because her legal bills were getting too much for the paper’s accountants to bear.

    There’s no difference between Hopkins’ comments and the ones on the Daily Mail website.

    This is what you get when your media isn’t diverse, when you cater for (and in some cases, constantly try to stoke fear and anger among) a very specific group of people.

    Of course, members of minority groups can be hateful arseholes too, especially if they’re fed the same kind of bullshit against other groups: divide and conquer is the oldest strategy in the book. But it’s an interesting exercise to really look at the people who tell us to hate and fear others in this country, the ones fuelling transphobia or islamophobia, the ones telling you to hate foreigners and celebrate their deaths.

    Whether they’re writing columns or waving poisonous placards, they’re people whose worlds always smell of paint.

  • 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.