Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: LGBTQ+

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

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

    The story is this.

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

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

    That’s it.

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

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

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

  • Careless talk costs lives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Poster 3: #handmaidrhiannon #enemyofwomen #waronwomen

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

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

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

  • Look who’s talking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • 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.