Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: LGBTQ+

  • Two days today

    It’s Mother’s Day today (hi mum!), and it’s also international transgender day of visibility. The former is a celebration of mums; the latter, a celebration of their sons and daughters. I know Mother’s Day can be hard for some women, cisgender or transgender: not everybody who desperately wants to be a mum can be one, and of the people who are parents not everyone gets to spend today with their children. I hope that if you’re one of the people who finds today difficult you find a way to be good to yourself today.

    International transgender day of visibility is about raising awareness. It’s about reminding people that we are sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers. We are your friends, your colleagues, your next door neighbours. And it’s also about raising awareness of the discrimination and intolerance transgender people still face; intolerance that may well be in the pages of the newspapers you read today.

    This, from BBC’s The Social, is wonderful.

  • Playing with fire

    This is from BBC Question Time this week: the question was pre-vetted, selected for broadcast and posted on social media to get publicity for the show.

    Is it morally right for the nation’s broadcaster to imply that “LGBT issues” may be immoral?

    If you don’t have your thesaurus handy, here are some synonyms for immoral: Wicked. Evil. Depraved. Vile. Villainous. Degenerate. Perverted.

    Whether by accident or design, this is letting a handful of religious extremists set the terms of discussion (and it really is a handful: while this is being reported in the papers as muslims being intolerant, over in Germany every single muslim MP voted for equal marriage this week; in the UK in the same week, a whole bunch of Christian MPs voted against teaching inclusive sex and relationship education).

    It’s suggesting that there’s something inherently shameful about discussion of LGBT people, that children have to be protected from the very notion. The use of the word “exposed” in much of the so-called debate is telling, because there’s no positive connotation to the word. You’re exposed to unpleasantness, to sickness, to perversion. Nobody talks about people being exposed to family values.

    A reminder: you can’t catch being gay, or trans. If social attitudes could influence sexuality or gender identity there would be no gay or trans people. The only difference social attitudes make is to whether people feel it’s safe to be themselves.

    Another reminder: every school will have LGBT pupils and parents, and probably teachers too.

    This isn’t about an informed debate. It’s about a small bunch of intolerant yahoos trying to drag other people’s children back to the Stone Age. Some people out there think the world is flat, but we don’t have debates on whether we should stop exposing children to the fact that the Earth is a sphere.

    To adopt the position of bigots once would seem careless. To do it again and again… here’s Woman’s Hour.

    This tweet demonstrates another too-common occurrence: the so-called debate is about LGBT people and without LGBT people. That’s like running a piece on racism and only featuring the voices of white people (which happens a lot too). Woman’s Hour has been doing this for a couple of years now with trans people.

    Here’s the Today programme, also on Radio 4.

    We put the hateful Section 28 legislation to bed just under two decades ago, but thanks to right-wing fundamentalists and social media rabble-rousers there’s a concerted attempt to re-open a “debate” that was settled a long time ago: LGBT rights are human rights.

    I’m not the only person who thinks this. The BBC’s own journalists are appalled.

    BBC Breakfast presenter Ben Thompson said he had concerns with the phrasing of the question: “LGBT ‘issues’? Like what? That we exist? One of them, RIGHT HERE, is on your TV every morning … Would you ask if it’s ‘morally right’ to learn about gender/race/religion/disability ‘issues’?”

    BBC News senior foreign producer Tony Brown added: “Replace LGBT with black or Jewish and this question would never have been asked on national TV.”

    One on-screen BBC journalist said there was growing concern among the corporation’s LGBT employees about how the BBC debates such issues: “We are supposed to set things in context – but that doesn’t mean accepting a position that is wrong, or failing to call it out as offensive. We wouldn’t ask ‘Is terrorism morally justified?’

    “I look at the care we take over our other reporting and this leaves me totally confused. We are meant to educate as well as inform.”

    There is something deeply wrong in that part of the BBC: it’s the same thinking that invites neo-Nazi group Generation Identity on to discuss the Christchurch massacre, the same thinking that enables former EDL leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, to portray himself as a free speech martyr instead of a vicious, hateful racist. Not all views are equal. We don’t invite the KKK on to talk about racism. Or at least, we don’t just yet.

    It strikes me that a big part of the problem is that the people making the decisions don’t have to live with the consequences. If, say, Jenni Murray pontificates on whether trans people are human, she isn’t going to suffer from the increase in hate crime that we’ve seen since mainstream media started echoing anti-trans bigots’ talking points. If Newsnight features former EDL people fanning hatred, their producers don’t need to worry about getting their heads kicked in on the way home. This applies to other media, of course, but the BBC is the organisation that sets much of the news agenda and frames much of mainstream political debate.

    Writing in The Guardian today, Owen Jones puts it very well:

    too many of those working in the British press act as hatemongers who play with matches then express horror as the flames reach ever higher

  • Me and my shadow

    Me after another successful electrolysis session.

    Every week, I pay around £150 to lie on a table for two hours and have a procession of heated, electric needles jabbed into my skin. I’ve been doing it for about eight months now, and I’ve got at least another eight months to go.

    Electrolysis permanently removes facial hair, but for me it’s exceptionally painful even after applying anaesthetic cream and munching co-codamol tablets: for financial reasons last week I scheduled four sessions in a week instead of my usual one, and by the end of the third session I was writhing on the table, weeping and asking the technician to stop.

    I hate electrolysis and dread every session, but it’s a necessary evil. The world isn’t kind to bearded ladies, to people who don’t fit a gender binary; if like me you’re clearly trans rather than cisgender, you might feel that anything you can do to minimise unwanted attention is worthwhile for the sake of your mental and physical health.

    Here’s Lucy Diavolo, writing in Them.us:

    I’ve found that there is no correct color of lipstick that will make people stop seeing me as a man in a dress. Whether it’s the stubble on my cardboard box of a jaw, my big hands with hair between each knuckle, or the way my shoulders test the limits of my clothes, something always gives me away. And despite my best efforts at invisibility — wearing a healthy coat of foundation and bra pads that would make a 13-year-old embarrassed for me — I have always been painfully attuned to passersby who can’t accept what I’m serving at face value; who are clearly trying to figure out what they’re looking at, not who.

    That’s something I can really relate to: being seen as a thing, not a person. But where Diavolo lives, it’s more than just a look.

    Strangers ask me if I’m a dude. They make lewd comments about me on the street and online. I once heard a stranger loudly tell his friend that I was his “favorite kind of boy in prison.” All of these comments mean the world I walk through is littered with eggshells, and my only hope of not stepping on them with bare feet is to somehow fly like a bird.

    Trans women are regularly and loudly criticised by anti-trans activists for supposedly perpetuating feminine stereotypes (but also for not living up to feminine stereotypes – it’s as if they just don’t like trans women!). But for many of us, the stereotypes aren’t just about personal expression. They’re about survival.

    If the world around us didn’t single people out for not conforming to the stereotypes, we wouldn’t try so damn hard to live up to them.

    I hate electrolysis. I hate trying to change my voice. I hate feeling that in the days running up to electrolysis, when I can’t shave, I have to present as a gender I don’t feel comfortable in. But these things are necessary in a world that doesn’t like people who aren’t one thing or the other, that looks at us as things rather than people, that feels it’s okay for complete strangers to get in our faces and destroy our days. The closer we cleave to either gender binary, the more chance we have of strangers leaving us the hell alone.

    Diavolo:

    As much as I never want to be clocked as trans again, I’m far too proud of who I am to give up because I can’t achieve full stealth. I’ve seen too many people spend decades in hiding only to lose the families, careers, and lives they built when they decided to finally come out.

    Again, I can relate. I’m proud of who I am – but unlike Diavolo I can’t wear my transness as a badge of pride just yet; I can’t proudly flout gender norms and say to the world: “I am the gender ideologue the pope has warned you about and the burden the president can’t abide.” I’m just trying to make it through the days, and right now that’s hard enough.

  • “It seems you have been leading two lives, Mr Anderson.”

    The Matrix, a fun if daft bit of sci-fi, is 20. Lots of publications are running retrospectives on its impact, which was significant: among other achievements it introduced the world to the concept of “red pilling”, where you take the red pill and finally see reality.

    Red pilling is a trope among far-right goons and anti-LGBT men’s rights activists. And that’s funny, because the red pill is estrogen.

    The Matrix was written and directed by the Wachowskis, who came out as tran women in the years afterwards. While I think Marcy Cook’s analysis of the film as a protracted trans coming out story is perhaps a little keen to see everything through a trans lens, there’s clearly a whole lot of trans going on: the film is about someone trapped in a soul-sapping life who only discovers their true self after popping the aforementioned red pill. Back in 1999 in the US, the most common prescribed estrogen pills were red.

    Cook:

    “It seems you have been leading two lives, Mr Anderson.”

    One of these lives is cisgender and one is real, a very obvious comment on that fact that many trans people do lead two lives for potentially decades. Before transition, trans people are always playing two roles, attempting to fit into cisgender-normative society, playing along for appearances just like Neo at the office. We are often not out to everyone at once; sometimes no one else knows or only friends know, or we hide the fact we’re transgender from work.

    “One of these lives has a future, and the other … does not,” Smith says with finality.

    Once you realise that The Matrix is at least partly a trans allegory, the clues are everywhere. Here’s the guru figure, Morpheus:

    “What you know, you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life—that there is something wrong. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me.”

    Queer people have a long history of hiding their stories in plain sight, and The Matrix definitely fits into that tradition: if you’re queer and an artist, it’s really hard not to let your own life bleed into the art you create – but if the cultural environment around you is intolerant and ignorant, as it certainly was for trans people in 1999, then you code it, camouflage it, present it in such a way that your fellow travellers can still see it but your enemies can’t or won’t.

    “I can’t go back, can I?” Neo asks, his voice plaintive.

    “No. But if you could, would you really want to?” replies Morpheus.

  • Stop us if you’ve heard these ones before

    I think what I hate most about bigots is their laziness. The stuff they write about trans people is just the stuff they said about gay people, with “gay” Tipp-Exed out and “trans” scribbled in its place.

    The Implausible Girl on Twitter has some examples. First, the silencing of people by a sinister lobby (2000):

    Evil activists “encouraging confused women” to join them in deviance (1990):

    Press regulators refusing to accept that newspapers are inciting hatred against a minority  while Murdoch-owned newspapers increase their abuse against that minority (also 1990):

    There’s so much more. How dare gay people compare their plight to those of genuine battles for civil rights? How dare gay people use people’s suicides to battle bigots? You get called a bigot if you disagree with science that says gay people are natural! Just because we say we hate gay people doesn’t mean we’re homophobic, it’s free speech! There are only two sexes, and no variation within!

    Last, but not least, here’s the mother of modern feminism admitting that she was wrong to battle against the inclusion of lesbians in the feminist movement for so many years. She had called them “the lavender menace” and claimed they were a danger to women and to feminism.

    That last one makes an important point. Unlike being lesbian, gay, bi or trans, being ignorant and hateful is something you can change.

  • This is what trans looks like

    This is wonderful. Fed up with the difficulty of finding decent stock photography of trans and non-binary people, Vice/Broadly commissioned its own – and it’s made the photos available for free under a Creative Commons licence, so pretty much anybody can use them. The Gender Spectrum Collection is online here and features 180 photos covering useful categories such as relationships, work, school and health.

    Editor Lindsay Shrupp explains:

    Broadly editors have worked diligently to think more thoughtfully and critically about how we represent trans and non-binary people in our work. But even at our best, we have been limited by the stock imagery available to us. Today, we’re launching The Gender Spectrum Collection, a stock photo library of over 180 images of 15 trans and non-binary models, shot by artist and photographer Zackary Drucker, and made available to the public for free.

    Transgender and non-binary people are likely more visible in mass media today than ever before in history, but they’re often portrayed in ways that are misrepresentative, and at times outright destructive. Because only 16 percentof Americans say they know a transgender person, the majority of Americans understand what it means to be trans through the media they consume, making media imagery depicting transgender people particularly significant.

    This isn’t the first big name to offer good stock photos of trans people – Adobe Stock launched a decent collection last year and Getty has some nice shots too – but it’s significant because of the size and scope and the normality of it. Unlike other collections these are shots of normal people doing normal stuff.  The other stock libraries tend to be much more model-y, so for example the next two are from Getty:

    Portrait of happy transgender female with handbag and tattoo

    Portrait Of Transgender Couple Against Gray Background

    The Getty Images are great shots, but you’re not going to use them to illustrate a piece on, say, trans discrimination in the workplace or trans teens in school. Whereas with the Vice/Broadly collection, I’ve seen a few publishing friends nod approvingly at the images: these are photos that picture editors will actually want to use.

    I think the photos are great, and it’s particularly important to see people of colour and non-binary people represented: all too often, images of trans people focus on binary trans men and women. My only criticism is that the photos are very American, but then they’re from an American publication aimed at an American audience. It’d be nice to see a UK equivalent. I’m up for a bit of modelling if there’s a free makeover in it ;-)

  • The girl in the picture

    My friend drew this in the pub last night. I got a bit emotional.

    For the last 10 days I’ve been in enforced boy mode: because I’ve taken on quite a lot of extra electrolysis sessions to remove my facial hair, I haven’t been allowed to shave. You can’t zap and pull stubble out if there isn’t any stubble to zap or pull.

    It’s been really horrible. I normally get electrolysis once a week, a necessary evil that I’ve timed so I can stay smooth-faced over the weekend and into Tuesday, but I haven’t been able to do even that.

    One positive is that with the extra stubble I could see how much progress I’m actually making with the electrolysis – where I would previously have had a full ginger beard after a week without shaving, now I just have a bit of white stubble on my face and a bunch of white hairs on my neck. After eight months you do start to feel that the sessions will go on forever, so it’s good to see visual evidence that you’re making progress.

    But that’s about the only good thing about it. The sessions have been painful, more so than usual, and I’ve spent ten days with a red, swollen, stubbly face feeling hideous, feeling I’m taking a massive step backwards.

    I hate presenting as male now. I feel like a fraud, an actor playing a part I was never any good at and which I’m even more hopeless at now.

    Going to work at the BBC yesterday in boy mode for the first time since I came out felt particularly horrible. I bumped into people I like and respect, people who haven’t seen me in boy mode for a very long time, and couldn’t help wondering what they thought of seeing me like that. It brings back all the negativity of being trans, the feeling that people are looking at you and laughing behind your back.

    Being mid-transition is horrible. My hair isn’t long enough yet. I still have stubble. HRT has made me put on weight but hasn’t yet redistributed fat deposits and given me a more feminine shape. You’re stuck between two lives, or at least I am: presenting male in front of the kids and until electrolysis, then trying to cram being you into Sunday and Monday. All the while you hear the voices: what the hell do you think you’re doing? There’s nothing remotely feminine about you. You’re not right in the head. You’re a laughing stock.

    I was finally able to get rid of it all yesterday, so I made a bit of an effort before heading to the pub. I wore a nice, flattering dress and put a lot of effort into my make-up, and when I was done I looked in the mirror and saw something I haven’t seen for a couple of weeks now, something I was told for too many years that I would never see.

    Me.

    Last night, after I took it all off, I paused at the digital photo frame in my hallway. It’s packed with family photos, me and the kids, and I was stopped in my tracks by one in particular. It’s me and my son, about three years ago. We’re both laughing; he has long hair and I have a beard, which is how I can date the photo: that was before I came out so it’s early to mid 2016.

    I looked at the photo of the man I used to be. And I looked up, into the mirror.

    He wasn’t there.

    It’s more than makeup, more than a nice dress, more than jewellery. It’s about a couple of years of hormones making subtle changes, changes that don’t seem like much individually but that make a difference over time, changes that you don’t necessarily notice until you really look at a picture of who you used to be.

    I looked in the mirror, and I didn’t see him. I saw the girl in the picture, the me I am and should always have been.

  • The damage done

    Last year, anti-trans rabble-rouser James Kirkup wrote an article in The Spectator about the terrible rise of trans rights. Today, IPSO forced The Spectator to admit that the lurid claims at the centre of the story were complete and utter bullshit, invented by the writer. This happens an awful lot with trans stories: many of Andrew Gilligan’s lurid claims in The Sunday Times have been quietly rescinded too.

    The article was a cover feature; the admission that it was based on bullshit is buried in a corner; the damage was done a year ago and no amount of corrections will undo it.

  • Follow the money

    OpenDemocracy reports that the US anti-LGBT hate group Alliance Defending Freedom has been funding supposed “grassroots” organisations in the UK. In this particular case it has been funding groups that campaign against euthanasia; it also funds anti-abortion campaigners and other lovely people.

    Here are some interesting coincidences.

    The ADF works closely with another anti-LGBT hate group, the Family Research Council. In late 2017 the FRC outlined its “divide and conquer” strategy to roll back LGBT equality by attacking trans people.

    “Trans and gender identity are a tough sell, so focus on gender identity to divide and conquer… if we separate the T from the alphabet soup we’ll have more success.” The strategy would specifically seek out allies such as separatist feminists, “ethnic minorities who culturally value modesty” and “female athletes forced to compete against men and boys”. It would wrap its intolerance in feminist rhetoric to try and recast rolling back LGBT rights as protecting women. Its key talking points would focus on the supposed dangers of trans people in toilets, in shelters and in prisons, of the supposed unfairness of trans people in competitive sport and of the “erasure of women” by trans people.

    Since late 2017, a number of suspiciously well-funded “grassroots” organisations have put anti-trans scaremongering at the top of the UK news agenda. They have attempted to split the T from LGBT, and have been joined in their efforts by ethnic minorities “who culturally value modesty” – the ones currently shouting through megaphones outside primary schools – and female athletes. They campaign to roll back LGBT rights in order to “protect women”. Their key talking points have been the supposed dangers of trans people in toilets, in shelters and in prisons, the supposed unfairness of trans people in competitive sport and of the “erasure of women” by trans people.

    Some of the most high-profile anti-trans activists were listed as members of the Hands Across The Aisle coalition (a list now conveniently deleted from its website), which brings US evangelicals together with anti-trans activists. Hands Across The Aisle is one of the coalitions the FRC praised in 2017 in its description of how to use grassroots organisations to help it roll back LGBT rights.

    As I said. Interesting coincidences.

  • Just an ordinary day

    How’s your day going?

    Just after midnight, I saw The Economist tweet this.

    It turns out that the article was about Japan, and it has since been corrected with a less inflammatory headline. But as the writer Diana Tourjeé pointed out, “should trans people be sterilised?” is part of the regular media discourse on trans people alongside whether we should be banned from public toilets, whether we should be allowed to participate in sports, whether we should be acknowledged in the history books and in education, whether we should be allowed in homeless shelters, whether we should be given life-saving healthcare, whether we should be allowed correct identity documents, whether we should be allowed to serve in the military, whether we should be given normal health screening, whether killing us should be a hate crime, whether we should be allowed to adopt or raise children, whether we should be protected from discrimination. After all, “they chose this. They are sick. They are perverts. They are not normal.”

    Responding to the thread another journalist, Katelyn Burns, noted that “Every single one of these questions in this thread has been the subject of major media coverage, op eds in large publications, or proposed in legislation over the last 6 months.”

    On my way back from the school run, I listened to Radio Scotland where the discussion was about gender neutral toilets, a largely cost-based decision by local councils building new schools. Much of the discussion was about trans people; online, some listeners condemned the PC agenda, trans people etc. One approvingly shared links to news articles about parents getting “LGBT rights classes” dropped: “We desperately need a revolution” against LGBT people, he said.

    Back home, on Twitter I saw Andrea Leadsom apparently supporting parental “choice” about whether or not children get to know that LGBT people exist, and I saw footage of Donald Trump nodding approvingly while Brazil’s bigoted president said he and Trump stand “side by side” in the war on “gender ideology”. Gender ideology is a meaningless phrase beloved by the hard right to describe all kinds of things they disapprove of: trans people, mainly, but also equal marriage, immigrants and women’s reproductive rights.

    Also on Twitter, I saw that one Scottish school has canned its inclusive education because of it featured this poem:

    Despite my best efforts my news app continues to show me right-wing newspapers, one of which is defending a woman who accused the CEO of trans charity Mermaids of “mutilating” her child and promoting “child abuse”. Almost all of the press and TV coverage has portrayed this not as vicious libel, but as a nice Catholic lady being victimised for using the wrong pronouns.

    This is exceptionally common online: anti-trans activists will conduct a prolonged campaign of bullying against trans people or allies, and when it gets bad enough for the police to get involved they run to the papers claiming they’re being picked on for using the wrong pronouns. The police don’t give a shit what pronouns you use, but they do investigate harassment and malicious communications. The misreporting simply fuels anti-trans hatred.

    My news app also gives me the terrible news that not only is Ricky Gervais still alive, but that his latest material includes more stuff punching down on trans people.

    All of this before 11am on an entirely typical day.  I am so, so tired of this.