Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: LGBTQ+

  • “With the gender clinic, your answerphone messages are prayers”

    (Content warning: suicidal ideation)

    I was asked by LGBT Health and Wellbeing to speak at an event about LGBT+ mental health yesterday: the three other panelists and I were asked to share our own experiences of mental health provision, where it falls short and where it might be improved. This is a slightly more coherent version of my talk.

    I decided not to tell my NHS counsellor that I was trans when she looked me in the eye and said “you need to remember, there are babies in Africa who have it even worse.”

    We were talking about me wanting to kill myself. I figured that if this was the high quality help I was going to get, there wasn’t much point asking her how I could come to terms with my gender stuff too. After all, when she asked if I’d planned to kill myself since our last meeting and I said yes, yesterday, she said “But not today! So we’ll just tick no!” as she tapped her iPad.

    It wasn’t the first time I’d gone to mental health services and bottled it. In my 20s I was referred to a psychologist with what I now understand was depression. Guilt and fear and shame meant I didn’t tell him the single most important reason for why I was so sad. With imperfect information, he gave me imperfect advice.

    So I stayed sad for another 24 years.

    My counsellor with the baby comment was an aberration: most of the people I’ve met in the NHS have been skilled, dedicated and kind. My current counsellor is a life-saver. But at the time, it confirmed everything I thought about being trans: nobody could help.

    I certainly couldn’t talk to my GP about it. He resembled Jacob Rees-Mogg and he clearly didn’t like me; when he diagnosed severe depression in my early 40s it was with the kind of disdain you get from a disapproving dad. God knows how he’d react if he knew I was the kind of person the Daily Mail warned him about.

    I know now that all was wrong with me was a bit of body chemistry and a boring wardrobe, but I didn’t get the help I needed because I didn’t want to tell a doctor or a nurse or anyone else that I was trans.

    There were no rainbow flags in my GP’s surgery, no posters about LGBT+ helplines, just a bunch of magazines about expensive things for straight people. With hindsight, if there had been even the slightest hint that someone in my GP’s surgery understood LGBT+ issues, I might have tried talking about the gender stuff years earlier. But there wasn’t, and I didn’t.

    On the day I came out, many years later, I called the gender clinic, hands shaking so badly that I could barely hold the phone, and for the very first time I said out loud that I was transgender. I told the answering machine that I needed help. I told it that I needed to talk to somebody.

    That was October 2016.

    My first counselling session was March 2019.

    I was lucky. I was able to do tons of research myself and I was able pay to for private treatment: a counsellor who helped me through a very dark period; hormones that made the depression drugs unnecessary after just a few weeks; a private GP to make sure my medication wasn’t killing me. By the time I finally got my initial appointment at the gender clinic, I was already well on the way to addressing my mental health issues.

    But I’d had to do it outside the NHS.

    I’m absolutely certain that if I hadn’t been able to see a private counsellor, if I hadn’t been able to take the admittedly dangerous route of self-medication, I wouldn’t be here now.

    Waiting times are not the beginning of our journey. We don’t wake up one morning and go “eek! I’m a girl! I must call a gender clinic!” I spent three decades working it out, fighting it and being too scared to tell anybody about it.

    So there’s an accidental cruelty to the process where you finally sum up the courage to tell somebody and nothing happens for more than a year.

    When I phone my gas provider they keep telling me I’m important to them and that I’m 16th in the queue. But with the gender clinic, which is a bit more life and death, your referral and your answerphone messages are prayers: you hope someone got your message, but you’ve no way of knowing for sure.

    Waiting times are probably the cruelest thing about trans healthcare: I waited thirteen months for my first appointment, four more for my second, two more months for a counselling assessment and another ten months before I finally started the counselling that’s helping me hang in there.

    But there are little cruelties throughout the system.

    • The complete silence during the year-plus between referring to the GIC and getting an appointment.
    • The lack of information about what’s involved in assessment, so you turn to forums who convince you you’ll be judged Not Trans Enough if you say the wrong thing or wear the wrong shoes.
    • The phone greeting that says you must not call unless it’s absolutely urgent: send an email instead, so you do, and you never, ever get a reply.
    • The assumption that you know the system, so when you phone up to ask about your next appointment date you’re told coldly that you should have made the appointment when you were in three months ago and they might be able to fit you in in a month.
    • The follow-up appointment you’re told you can’t schedule at all because your doctor’s quit and nobody’s taken her place.
    • The blood tests the labs reject because their system says you’re male, so those levels can’t possibly be right. So you’re told you have to change your gender marker on the NHS system, oh and by the way if you’re admitted to hospital you’ll be put in a female ward and you haven’t even thought about that yet because you’re so early in transition and the prospect terrifies you.
    • The delays that mean you get bloods drawn in February to see if your chemistry is making you miserable again, and nobody looks at the results until August.
    • The letter about your prescription that takes three months to travel the half-mile between the gender clinic and your GP.
    • The pharmacist who refuses to fulfil part of your prescription because he’s pretty sure the NHS board doesn’t fund it, even though you know it does.

    With the exception of one counsellor, every single person I’ve dealt with in the NHS since I came out has been great.

    But it feels like they’re part of a system that just isn’t fit for purpose, a system where reception staff are unaffordable luxuries, a system where it takes a year and a half to get a counselling assessment and another year for your first appointment, a system where people trained in psychiatry are expected to do bloods and monitor hormone levels while the waiting lists for psychiatric assessments grow longer, a system where staff are so overloaded a letter dictated in July isn’t delivered until late September.

    If you were to design a system that worked for LGBT+ people, you wouldn’t design it like this.

    And maybe the biggest cruelty, the waiting list, isn’t fixable by anyone who isn’t in government. But someone, somewhere has the power to fix the little cruelties. It won’t make the system perfect. But it’d make it hurt a little less.

  • Hack comedians are not the heirs of Lenny Bruce

    Dave Chappelle, whose net worth is believed to be $42 million.

    (Content warning: extreme violence)

    Writing in The New Republic, Osita Nwanevu offers a recap of legendarily offensive comedian Lenny Bruce’s demise.

    Over the course of a six-month trial, critics, academics, psychiatrists, and even a minister spoke in Bruce’s defense—none more beseechingly than Bruce himself.

    “Don’t finish me off in show business,” he pleaded before his verdict was delivered. “Don’t lock up these six thousand words. That’s what you’re doing—taking away my words, locking them up.”

    None of it mattered. He was convicted and sentenced to four months of service in a workhouse. On August 3, 1966, Bruce, out on bond for the appeal of his case, was found dead of a morphine overdose. In his 1971 book Ready for the Defense, Bruce’s attorney Martin Garbus quoted a statement of remorse from Assistant District Attorney Vincent Cuccia, one of Bruce’s prosecutors. “We drove him into poverty and bankruptcy and then murdered him,” he said. “We all knew what we were doing. We used the law to kill him.”

    To some modern comedians, this is exactly the same thing as criticising one of their jokes on Twitter.

    Nwanevu’s piece is a devastating demolition of so-called “cancel culture” in comedy, where comedians squeal censorship after making lame jokes about women and minorities. As he points out, the supposed cancelling of Dave Chappelle (anti-Asian and anti-trans jokes), Aziz Anzari (sexual misconduct) and others appears to have had little or no effect on their careers.

    Ansari, reputedly dead, in a professional sense, released a new Netflix special in July and returned to Forbes’ highest paid comedians list this year for the first time since 2015, having earned an estimated $13 million between this and last spring.

    Lenny Bruce he ain’t.

    As far as comedy is concerned, “cancel culture” seems to be the name mediocrities and legends on their way to mediocrity have given their own waning relevance. They’ve set about scolding us about scolds, whining about whiners, and complaining about complaints because they would rather cling to material that was never going to stay fresh and funny forever than adapt to changing audiences, a new set of critical concerns, and a culture that might soon leave them behind. In desperation, they’ve become the tiresome cowards they accuse their critics of being—and that comics like Bruce, who built the contemporary comedy world, never were.

    One of the minorities brave, marginalised warriors such as Dave Chappelle (net worth: $42m) likes to pick on is trans women; this week, a member of the US Cabinet cribbed from Chappelle’s act to justify stripping trans folks of their human rights .

    As Nwanevu notes:

    This isn’t to say, of course, that there aren’t real instances of intolerance and repression around for our putative chroniclers of cultural ostracism to take an interest in. In April, a 23-year-old Dallas woman named Muhlaysia Booker backed into a car in an apartment parking lot. The driver of the other car then held her at gunpoint to force her to pay damages. As the confrontation took place, a bystander was offered $200 to attack Booker. He obliged. In a video that subsequently went viral, a mob—a real one—can be seen joining in, punching and kicking her in the head and yelling slurs as she squirms and struggles on the ground. She was hospitalized with a concussion and facial fractures.

    Muhlaysia Booker isn’t going to be given a column in which she might describe her treatment to the public. She won’t be appearing on any panels or podcasts. She won’t be doing any standup sets. Muhlaysia Booker is dead. A month after the attack, her body was found face down in an East Dallas street with a gunshot wound. She was one of nineteen transgender people to have been murdered so far this year in a wave of violence the American Medical Association has called an epidemic.

    The cultural power the critics of cancel culture breezily ascribe to progressive identity politics did not save them.

    Last night in Dallas, a trans woman was shot repeatedly and is in serious condition after what police believe is a hate crime.

    Investigators say a man driving a pickup pulled alongside the woman late Friday, yelled slurs about her gender identity and fired several times, striking her in the chest and arm.

    I’m sure Dave Chappelle will find that “fucking hilarious”.

  • How to ensure your LGBT+ child hates you

    Right-wing shite-peddler The Federalist has printed a piece urging parents of trans and gender non-conforming kids to cut them off from the internet and their peers and beat them daily until they renounce transgenderism and its Satanic ways.

    I’m exaggerating, but only slightly. The latest in a string of similar pieces misrepresents research, makes unsubstantiated claims and advocates a course of action that we know to be incredibly damaging to children: conversion therapy.

    As author and commentator Brynn Tannehill points out, it won’t have the consequences the parents want. But it will have consequences.

    If you do this, and it doesn’t end up driving your kid to suicide, you kid will hate you for the rest of your fucking life.

    Tannehill has interviewed many trans people whose parents did exactly what The Federalist is advocating.

    Universally, they have zero desire to ever see their parents again after they were treated in exactly the manner described above. Turning 18 was like getting out of jail, and they have no intent of going back. They ghost their parents and disappear.

    That’s the best case scenario. Not all kids with unaccepting parents make it to 18.

    Conversion therapy causes lifelong harm, and transgender adults who were exposed to it are 4X more likely to have attempted suicide than those who weren’t, whether the therapy was professional or religious.

    There are Internet forums haunted by angry, bitter, lonely parents whose children severed contact with them as soon as they legally could. The parents rage and the parents mourn, and the parents tell each other that their children hate them because of social contagion, because of peer pressure, because of invented pseudoscientific bullshit such as “rapid onset gender dysphoria”.

    Occam’s razor offers a better explanation, an explanation that they are unwilling or unable to accept: they lost their children because they made it clear to them that they’d rather have a dead child than a trans one.

    I’ve written before that I have some sympathy for unaccepting parents of LGBT+ people:

    …to the point where I can understand the fury and denial that leads some of them to excommunicate their family members and even become anti-trans activists.

    But the more I think about it, the more I’m starting to think that no, I don’t have sympathy for them after all. It’s one thing to find it difficult to understand or accept your child’s sexuality or their gender, or to worry that their lives will be harder because of it. It’s another thing altogether to be the one to make their life harder, to embark on a course of action that will traumatise them or perhaps even put them in an early grave.

    I’ve been thinking about this kind of thing a lot recently, probably because I’ve spent a lot of the last fortnight in hospital rooms looking at my son with tubes going into various parts of him, the only soundtrack a mix of his breathing, the beeps of the monitors and the thoughts in my head.

    There’s a particular agony to seeing your child so vulnerable, to seeing your child in pain. All parents know that primal urge to protect, the urge to do absolutely anything to take that pain away, that unshakeable desire to make everything okay – so I understand why parents stay loyal to children who have done terrible, unspeakable things.

    What I don’t understand is parents who do terrible, unspeakable things to their children. And conversion therapy is one of those things.

    Tannehill:

    Let’s get down to the brass tacks: if you think its better to have a child who never sees you again than to have a transgender child, do what The Federalist says.

    If you would rather bury your kid in the clothes you pick out for them than accept their gender identity, by all fucking means do what The Federalist says.

  • Damned lies from statistics

    The National Catholic Register has published a terrifying article implying that there have been thousands of deaths from puberty blocking.

    Is it bullshit? Of course it is. Even if you didn’t know that the National Catholic Register is a right-wing religious rag that really hates trans people, the use of the phrase “transgender industry” in the copy is a pretty big clue that we’re not dealing with good faith here.

    The Implausible Girl has looked at the statistics. How many deaths of gender dysphoric people have been linked to the drugs over ten years?

    None.

    How many serious adverse reactions among gender dysphoric people over ten years?

    Two.

    How much bullshit is in the article?

    100%.

    They conveniently ‘forgot’ to mention that the drug is used for LOTS of conditions. It has been prescribed to tens of millions of people over decades.

    It is a very effective and safe drug that is on the WHO’s Model List of Essential Medicines.

    …What they’ve done is, quite deliberately, is used rare adverse events from a drug given to many, many people for other conditions and implied that it was a deadly threat to trans children ‘because adverse events and deaths’.

    You could do the same thing with acetaminophen [paracetamol].

    The article has, of course, made its way to the anti-trans activists on Mumsnet with surprising speed, so it’s no doubt just a matter of time before it’s written about by Janice Turner in the Times, James Kirkup in the Spectator or the rest of the anti-trans mob. At which point it will become yet another piece of scaremongering bullshit that trans people will have to debunk again and again and again.

  • You can’t trust The Times

    The Sunday Times published its usual collection of anti-trans scaremongering at the weekend. One story in particular managed to demonstrate everything that’s wrong with the former paper of record: it was based primarily on the comments of an anti-trans activist, and it presented fake science as fact.

    This is the same newspaper that told its readers AIDS was a PR move by the homosexual lobby, remember.

    Yesterday’s story once again attempted to conflate puberty blockers with cross-sex hormones, trotted out the completely discredited idea of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” which only exists in the minds of bigots, and presented Michael Biggs as an impartial expert.

    Biggs has been in the papers before.

    Professor of Sociology and Fellow of St Cross College Michael Biggs has been posting transphobic statements online under the Twitter handle @MrHenryWimbush, The Oxford Student can reveal.

    The Twitter account, named Henry Wimbush and still online at the time of publication, has been tweeting statements such as “transphobia is a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons” since first Tweeting in January.

    Biggs is a contributor to Transgender Trend, which is linked to the US Christian right and advocates dangerous and discredited conversion therapy.

    Meanwhile in Australia, another newspaper has been waging what one website describes as “a Holy War on trans youth”. Its favourite experts are right-wing conservatives who support conversion therapy.

    The paper, The Australian, is owned and its editorial policy steered by one Rupert Murdoch.

    Guess who owns and steers The Times.

    Today, The Sun warned its readers about the national census being queered by the “transgender agenda”.

    Guess who owns The Sun too.

    Update:

    Incidentally, The Sun’s piece is based entirely on the false claim that trans people want to change the way the census records their gender. They don’t. As the Equality Network points out, the demand for change is coming from anti-trans academics who want to change the government’s guidance.

  • This hateful ignorance costs lives

    Anti-trans bigots are the climate change deniers of gender: despite overwhelming scientific evidence that they’re full of shit, they continue to lobby against life-saving action and push long-discredited pseudoscience.

    One of their favourite conspiracy theories is the idea that being trans is contagious, that it’s a conscious choice and that you can be persuaded to become trans through peer pressure. This social contagion conspiracy theory has been debunked endlessly, but it still persists – so this report by the Australian Psychological Society won’t change any bigot’s mind.

    The APS isn’t mincing its words here.

    “Empirical evidence consistently refutes claims that a child’s or adolescent’s gender can be ‘directed’ by peer group pressure or media influence, as a form of ‘social contagion’,” APS Fellow Professor Damien Riggs said.

    “To say that there is a trans-identity crisis among young Australians because of social media pressure is not only alarmist, scientifically incorrect and confusing, but is potentially harmful to a young person’s mental health and wellbeing.

    “There is no evidence to suggest that such approaches work in terms of changing a person’s gender.  What such debunked ‘therapies’ do produce, however, are high levels of shame, disrespect and distress.

    Belief in “social contagion” goes hand in hand with belief in conversion therapy, the dangerous and discredited “pray the gay away” so-called cure that’s caused incredible damage to so many LGBT+ people: if you believe that being LGBT+ is a choice, then you’re likely to believe that people can be persuaded not to be LGBT+.

    Of course, it doesn’t work like that. But bigots’ feelings don’t care about facts.

    What conversion therapy does do is persuade LGBT+ people to kill themselves. The latest study into such “therapy” demonstrates yet again that there’s a strong link between it and mental health problems, including suicide attempts. Exposing transgender people to conversion therapy makes them twice as likely to attempt suicide.

    The bigots don’t see that as a problem, though: to them, one less trans person in the world is a result. These are people who are currently crowing about the prospect of Brexit-related medicine shortages cutting off trans women’s HRT supplies. Who cares if diabetics don’t get their insulin or cancer patients don’t get essential medicines? If it hurts (or better still, kills) trans people, it can only be a good thing.

    You don’t need to wear a swastika to be part of a hate group. Some of the most hateful people in modern society could be your neighbours.

    Here’s an example. The crowdfunding site GoFundMe has finally pulled down the page raising money for campaigns against inclusive education in schools (but not before they raised thousands). Here’s one of the key groups who campaigned for the page’s removal, the British Humanist Society:

    ‘This homophobic crowdfunder was in support of protesters who have been holding disruptive and intimidating rallies that have absolutely no place near a school. There is strong evidence that the protesters involved in these demonstrations have been uttering outrageous homophobic slurs and even calling members of school staff paedophiles which surely was in breach of GoFundMe’s terms.’

    The backlash against LGBT+ equality encompasses trans rights and relationship education at schools. It is co-ordinated and well funded and originates in the US. OpenDemocracy:

    At the London meeting of Christian conservatives this summer, our reporter – posing as a prospective teacher, to learn what these campaigners were telling teachers about sex education – found an energised opposition movement.

    In a room filled with LGBTIQ children’s books, tea and biscuits, the keynote speaker argued that equalities legislation “is not all-powerful”. Rather, he said it can be limited to protect “health and morals” of other students or teachers.

    This was Roger Kiska, in-house lawyer at the Christian Concern group that organised the event. He previously worked for Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian right ‘legal army’ and one of a dozen US groups that openDemocracy revealed have spent millions of dollars in Europe.

    Christian Concern, you’ll be amazed to discover, is a great believer in the efficacy of conversion therapy. Their communications manager claimed in late 2018 that conversion therapy is “just about any practice that offends the taste of social liberals” and added:

    If ‘conversion therapy’ means anything at all, it should surely refer to a process that treats people with cross-sex hormones, damages fertility and cuts up their bodies to portray them as something other than what they really are. In other words, gender reassignment.

    If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s exactly the same argument – using exactly the same words and phrasing – that the anti-trans activists use.

    That’s not a coincidence.

  • “This unholy alliance”

    Writing for Vox, Katelyn Burns describes how a primarily English anti-trans lobby is fuelling anti-LGBT+ sentiment and anti-women legislation here and in the US. There’s a long MetaFilter thread about it here.

    It’s a long read but a worthwhile one.

    TERF ideology has become the de facto face of feminism in the UK, helped along by media leadership from Rupert Murdoch and the Times of London. Any vague opposition to gender-critical thought in the UK brings along accusations of “silencing women” and a splashy feature or op-ed in a British national newspaper. Australian radical feminist Sheila Jeffreys went before the UK Parliament in March 2018 and declared that trans women are “parasites,” language that sounds an awful lot like Trump speaking about immigrants.

    According to Heron Greenesmith, who studies the modern gender-critical movement as a senior research associate with the social justice think tank Political Research Associates, gender-critical feminism in the UK grew out of a toxic mix of historical imperialism and the influence of the broader UK skeptical movement in the early aughts — which was hyper-focused on debunking “junk science” and any idea that considered sociological and historical influence and not just biology. Those who rose to prominence in the movement did so through a lot of “non-tolerant calling-out and attacking people,” Greenesmith said, much like gender-critical feminism. “Anti-trans feminists think they have science on their side. It is bananas how ascientific their rhetoric is, and yet literally they say, ‘Biology isn’t bigotry.’ In fact, biology has been used as bigotry as long as biology has been a thing.” (See scientific racism, eugenics, and the justification for slavery that black people were intellectually inferior to white people.)

    Many of the women in the skeptic movement blogged for Mumsnet, whose feminism discussion board has become a cesspool of anti-trans hatred and whose owners and moderators seem quite happy about that. A former moderator wrote in Huck Magazine, in 2018:

    Mumsnet has become a breeding ground for transphobic voices; a space where they can laugh about sabotaging an NHS surveyaimed at LGBTQ+ users and scorn trans participation in sport, or ponder that trans rights are a millennial issue. On Twitter, where transphobia has less of a platform, ‘Gender Critical’ users began to recommend Mumsnet as a safe space for cis women to openly attack the trans community.

    Twitter has since become much more of a safe space for transphobes, but even it draws the line sometimes and bans some of the most abusive users. More of that in a moment.

    Burns is particularly good on the links between English women building personal brands on the  back of transphobia and the US religious right. She describes the links between the most prominent English transphobes – including some high profile journalists – and US evangelical groups, and notes the way in which the work of transphobic English academics is used by evangelical front groups to advance anti-LGBT+ and anti-women legislation.

    One of the key differences between England and the US here is race. In the US, “White Feminism” – feminism that centres on white, often heterosexual, often middle-class women to the exclusion of other women – has largely been shown the door. So when people come along demanding the exclusion of a particular group women, in this case trans women, feminists can see history trying to repeat.

    the recent gender-critical wave has largely failed to gain traction in the US outside of the very far-right spheres. “I don’t think American women are buying it,” she said, pointing out that nearly every major US feminist advocacy group is vocally pro-trans rights and inclusion. “It’s because they understand what it means to be marginalized. They understand that any strict rules placed around gender are to the benefit of nobody.”

    Self-declared feminists with transphobic views were previously described as TERFs, which is short for trans-exclusionary radical feminists. Some women claim that the term was coined by trans people (it wasn’t; it was coined by feminists), that it’s a slur (it isn’t; it describes a very specific set of views among people who describe themselves as radical feminists) and that the term is misogynist (it isn’t; a significant number of TERFs are straight, cisgender white men with very unfeminist views who nevertheless claim to be feminists so they can be abusive to trans women).

    We’re in “the real racism is calling the racists racists” territory here.

    People who previously proudly identified as TERFs now describe themselves as “gender critical”. Burns quotes Gillian Branstetter of the National Center for Transgender Equality:

    Branstetter compares the deployment of so-called feminists to oppose trans rights to the white nationalist movement rebranding themselves as the “alt-right” to achieve a veneer of respectability.

    “It’s portraying it as this divide within the progressive movement or this divide within the LGBTQ community that only serves to benefit people who hate women and the LGBTQ community, including Heritage, the FRC [Family Research Council], and the ADF. Certainly, we should not be shocked that they’re desperate to sort of put up decoys — I just can’t imagine how you can walk through the doors of the Heritage Foundation as a heralded guest and continue to call yourself an advocate for women’s equality.”

    The comparison to the alt-right is important, because there are significant links between the anti-trans movement and the far right. Some of the anti-trans activists detailed in the Vox piece are loud supporters of Tommy Robinson and spout anti-immigration rhetoric; others have formed alliances with right-wing politicians or have right-wing publications on speed dial. Some even dig up old tropes of “scientific racism” but aim their pseudoscience at trans people rather than people of colour.

    Whether intentionally or accidentally, they’re playing with fire. Across the world, right-wing politicians rail against so-called “gender ideology” which to anti-trans activists means trans rights but to the right, often means feminism and women’s reproductive rights too.

    The far right sees anti-trans activists not just as allies, but as potential recruits. Neo-Nazis on message boards (including the boards where “incels” discuss their hatred of women) talk openly of their intention to “redpill” (reeducate) anti-trans women to make them “tradwives”, which the NYT describes as “the housewives of white supremacy”. They believe that these women’s ideologies are already very close to their own.

    Over the past few years, dozens of YouTube and social media accounts have sprung up showcasing soft-spoken young white women who extol the virtues of staying at home, submitting to male leadership and bearing lots of children — being “traditional wives.” These accounts pepper their messages with scrapbook-style collections of 1950s advertising images showing glamorous mothers in lipstick and heels with happy families and beautiful, opulent homes. They give their videos titles like “Female Nature and Advice for Young Ladies,” “How I Homeschool” and “You Might be a Millennial Housewife If….”

    But running alongside what could be mistaken for a peculiar style of mommy-vlogging is a virulent strain of white nationalism.

    As if to illustrate the point, just last month many of the “gender critical” people finally banned from Twitter for sustained abuse and harassment of trans women found a new home.

    Gab, the social network for neo-Nazis.

  • “Where is the child that you loved?”

    I’ve sung the praises of Heather Havrilesky on this blog before: the agony columnist for New York’s The Cut is an interesting, insightful, compassionate and sometimes uncomfortable read.

    This week, she responds to a parent who’s deeply upset that her child is non-binary. The parent writes:

    My darling girl, my only child, is now a “they,” with a very masculine appearance, and a new life that is unfamiliar to all I know. I felt lost, bewildered, and deeply sad when they came out, and I have not been able to recover. What makes it all so much worse is that I feel extremely guilty about my sadness, and afraid that any acknowledgment of it, even inadvertently, will immediately label me a transphobe, which I am not.

    It’s a long letter, and the response is even longer. As often happens with Havrilesky’s columns, it doesn’t go where it first appears to be going.

    You want what you want. It’s not logical. You want your girl.

    I want to give you the space to want that. That doesn’t mean, “Hey, call your kid and tell them that you want them to be a girl again.” But you need space. Sometimes in life we want things that we can’t exactly justify or defend. We’re embarrassed by things that we can’t explain, and it’s even more embarrassing to realize that. We want to be better than we are. We want to rise above our bizarre, irrational desires, but it feels impossible. I have empathy for that.

    I have empathy for it and I also want to scold you a little.

    I have a lot of sympathy for the parents of trans and non-binary people, to the point where I can understand the fury and denial that leads some of them to excommunicate their family members and even become anti-trans activists (my understanding does not mean approval, of course: some people weaponise their own hurt and cause devastating harm to others).

    But while I appreciate that it’s incredibly hard for them, it’s even harder for their children.

    And what’s already incredibly hard is made much worse if their own parents don’t accept them. According to the charity The Trevor Project:

    LGB youth who come from highly rejecting families are 8.4 times as likely to have attempted suicide as LGB peers who reported no or low levels of family rejection.

    Another study, of trans and gender non-conforming people specifically, reported attempted suicide rates of 33% for those with supportive families and 57% for those without.

    Multiple studies show that the difference between LGBT+ people’s suicide, self-harm and substance misuse rates doesn’t appear to be because they’re LGBT+; it’s the way the world, and their family in particular, treats them.

    Havrilesky:

    Where is the child that you loved? Are they gone the second they take off the princess dress? How do they feel, underneath their carefree words, when you seem unable to move forward with them? How do they feel about how much you love who they really are, underneath the princess dress?

    …Part of what you shared with them and taught them lives in their current choices. Their strength is a reflection of your past together. Their independence is an echo of what you taught them.

    I don’t know if I agree with everything Havrilesky writes here, but I’d recommend reading the whole thing: it’s a really fascinating column that makes some interesting and thought-provoking arguments.

    You need to try to slowly move away from this place of shock and sadness and start to recognize how thoughtful your child is, and how hard they’ve worked not to look away from this world, in all of its pain and its disappointments. You need to realize that their independence is an echo of yours.

  • The Tories are just as toxic as before

    Yesterday, I blogged about right wing parties deliberately stoking anti-LGBT+ sentiment for political gain.

    Last night:

    The Conservatives deny the report, as they denied reports last week that the Prime Minister would prorogue Parliament.

    Leaving aside the implication that the Tories think everybody north of Watford is a bigot, there’s a very cynical calculation here. Trans people are such a tiny minority you can demonise them without losing a significant number of votes.

    Sure, your attack ads will get many of them beaten up, maybe keep a few more in the closet, persuade a couple more to kill themselves. But that’s okay. They don’t really vote anyway, and when they do they don’t vote for the Conservatives.

  • Straight Pride isn’t about sexuality or gender. It’s white supremacy

    I’ve written before about Straight Pride and how it’s a front for the far right.

    The much-hyped Boston event took place this weekend and proved that – surprise! – it’s a front for the far right. To all intents and purposes it was a Make America Great rally, complete with police pepper-spraying counter-protestors.

    Other marchers waved placards saying “Build The Wall”, because apparently racism is an important part of straight culture too.

    Here’s Corinne Engber writing for JewishBoston:

    Bigots cannot count on a silent majority to look the other way anymore, so how do they continue to dig in their roots?

    Easy. Construct a parade in direct contrast to Pride, tapping into the homophobic leanings of those not quite convinced to join the alt-right. After all, if LGBTQ people get their day, why shouldn’t straight people? Claim straight people as an “oppressed majority” facing discrimination from the city of Boston. Claim that denying straight people their right to parade in the street is unconstitutional. Gather the wavering masses under a single umbrella and disseminate the us-and-them mentality from there. When fascism can’t take hold through overt means, move it underground. Create a system of cycling dog whistles. Enmesh bullied kids into a toxic echo chamber of propaganda and build a new generation of fascists. Easy.

    There will be other Straight Pride events, because what these rallies do is tell racists and bigots three things. One, you are not alone. Two, you are in the right. And three, the police and the state are on your side.

    Here’s how that pans out elsewhere.

    In Poland, July’s gay pride march was watched by spectators from over 30 anti-LGBT, mostly far right groups who outnumbered the marchers four to one. Those spectators didn’t just watch. They attacked the marchers with rocks. Dozens of LGBT people were physically assaulted before, during and after the event. Journalists were spat on and beaten. The police, while present, didn’t appear to do very much.

    As The Telegraph reports:

    Both the Catholic Church and the Polish state actively work to create a hostile environment for the gay community.

    …The ugly scenes in Bialystok were not an isolated incident. Several Polish regional parliaments have declared their districts to be “LGBT-free zones” in recent months…

    …Officially the government decries the violence seen in Bialystok, but at the same time hints that LGTBQ groups are out to provoke. The education minister Dariusz Piontowski has questioned whether such marches should be allowed since they “awaken resistance” in the wider public.

    The government stance is also backed by a powerful conservative media that has loaded Poland’s newstands with brazenly anti-LGBTQ magazine covers. One publication, Sieci, warned of a “Massive attack on Poland coming”, while another, Do Rzeczy, showed a mocked up prime ministerial podium flanked with rainbow flags.

    A third, the Gazeta Polska, went even further, printing a cover warning that the LGBTQ movement wanted to “destroy their civilisation” and giving readers a “LGBT-free zone” sticker showing a black cross over a rainbow flag.

    This is happening throughout Eastern Europe and in Russia, but it’s also happening elsewhere. Anti-LGBT sentiment is being deliberately stoked by right-wing politicians and media in Western Europe and in North and South America too. And that’s what Straight Pride marches are all about. They’re organised by the far right; the marchers are from the far right; their banners and memes and outfits are from the far right. And their claims of being oppressed, of being silenced… they’re from the far right too.

    Let’s not play their game and pretend Straight Pride marches are about sexuality, or about gender identity. They’re about white supremacy.

    As Anthony Oliveria put it on Twitter:

    reviewing all the footage from the Straight Pride Parade hey so quick question I don’t spend much time at straight events are there always so many swastikas when we gays aren’t around or

    Corinne Engber believes that the strategy is ultimately doomed.

    Ultimately, this recruitment attempt will fail before it begins as the environment of the country leans toward support for Jewish people, people of color and LGBTQ people.

    I hope she’s right.