Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: Media

Journalism, radio and stuff like that

  • Revelations

    The New York Times has a revelation: the US Christian Right deliberately targeted trans people as part of its strategy to rally its base in the aftermath of its equal marriage defeat.

    Or as I put it in my book, published six months ago and written quite a long time before that:

    …That tipping point occurred just as the Christian Right lost its decades-long battle against marriage equality. The UK was implementing the Marriage (Same Sex Couples Act) and the US Supreme Court heard Obergefell v Hodges, striking down all state bans on same-sex marriage.

    Faced with the absolute rejection of its scaremongering and demonisation of gay and lesbian people, the Christian Right found a new target.

    Me.

    Instead of going after the entire LGBT+ community, the Christian Right decided to focus on trans people. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. Multiple Christian Right groups talked openly of their strategy; several, including The Family Research Council, put it in writing on their websites.

    This is not something that anybody kept secret: the US Christian Right in particular has talked openly about this strategy – separate the T from the LGB in order to weaken the movement and battle equality, and do so by forging alliances with anti-trans “feminist” groups – since at least 2017. Trans journalists such as Katelyn Burns and the Trans Safety Network have written about it multiple times for multiple outlets. The award-winning podcast The Anti-Trans Hate Machine, among many others, covered it in detail in 2021.

    Here’s Rolling Stone in 2018.

    Facing such political headwinds, Christian-right activists desperately needed a fresh strategy. Provoking fear of infringement on religious liberty would likely only gain traction among fellow believers. They soon found an alternative in Shackelford’s home state, whose largest city was, at the time, led by a lesbian Democratic mayor. There, in Houston, a small band of well-connected far-right activists was resurrecting an approach from the oldest anti-LGBTQ playbook: to transform the civic debate about homosexuality into a panic about predators. As national activists fretted at the Ritz-Carlton, Houston players had already sketched out a plan to turn voters against nondiscrimination ordinances by framing the debate as one about safety for women and girls. It proved so potent that it prompted a shift in legislative strategy across the country.

    This is what I mean when I say that media is largely incompetent or malevolent when it comes to reporting on trans people. The US evangelical right, the European Catholic Church and right-wing horrors of various kinds have all deliberately and cynically targeted trans people as part of a wider war on LGBT+ people and women’s reproductive rights, they have done so in plain sight and they have provided endless evidence proving that that’s what they’re doing. And mainstream media has largely ignored all of that, or actively supported it. Not least the New York Times, which has spent much of the last six years amplifying every anti-trans dogwhistle it can.

    There is something very wrong with today’s journalism, and some of the worst people on Earth are exploiting it.

  • Happy and we know it

    This photo is the front page of the Washington Post, in which it surveyed hundreds of trans people and found that the overwhelming majority of us – nearly 80% – said our lives were happier post-transition. And as any trans person could have predicted, the people who said their lives weren’t happier said it was largely because of how other people treated them, how they found it hard to access healthcare and so on.

    None of this is remotely surprising to me, but the fact that it’s a front page newspaper story does surprise me. It’s such a contrast to how trans people are usually discussed in broadsheets, such as The Times here and the New York Times in the US: most coverage is framed on the assumption that to be trans is a terrible thing, the worst of all possible outcomes, a “contagion” to be eliminated.

  • Lend me your lugs

    I love audiobooks, especially ones read by the author. And it turns out I really love recording audiobooks, especially ones written by me.

    The audiobook of CKAM is making its way to your favourite audiobook providers; it’s already live on Kobo and should appear on Audible very soon too.

    In addition to the narrator (me) talking about my favourite subject (me), there’s a wee audio treat in one of the latter chapters. And you can hear me being highly amused by my own jokes throughout.

    I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed recording it.

  • Baa baa bullshit

    When I was young, the press routinely made up stories about the “loony left”. Probably the most famous one is the story that nurseries were getting kids to sing “baa baa green sheep” instead of “baa baa black sheep” because the nursery rhyme was racist.

    It sounds ridiculous, I know, but it was a deliberate campaign against the Labour Party and other progressives. British tabloids ran some 3,000 news stories about such “loony left” ideas between 1981 and 1987; the vast majority were either partially or wholly fabricated and were targeted against the handful of London councils under Labour control.

    Very similar stories were fabricated about the European Union too, most notably by a young journalist called Boris Johnson. 

    This week, the Daily Mail ran a front page story about the charity Oxfam banning the words “mother” and “father”. The Times and other right-wing papers ran with it too, and it was the topic of angry discussion online and on shows such as Good Morning Britain.

    You can guess where this is going.

    Oxfam hasn’t banned anything, and it hasn’t told people that they can’t say mother or father. In a piece of guidance specifically referring to the use of language when you’re talking to trans and non-binary people,  it recommends using gender neutral language if you’re unsure what terms the people you’re talking to prefer.

    If you look at the document it’s very clear that that’s the case, but the version used by the newspapers has been deliberately cropped to remove the context by its source, a high profile anti-trans activist and friend of JK Rowling. In some cases, at the very end of the article in the bit most people don’t read, the newspaper reports admit that the document doesn’t say what the article’s entire premise is based upon. But they got their headline, and that’s what matters when you’re waging a war on human rights.

    “Oxfam tells staff: stop saying mother and father”, The Times thunders.

    It’s baa baa bullshit.

  • Another smoking gun

    This, by Jude Doyle, is horrifying: more email evidence of how the Christian Right is pulling the strings of the anti-trans movement, this time in pushing the narrative of “detrans” people or “detransitioners”, people who undergo (or sometimes just propose to undergo) transition and then change their minds. The piece describes a huge and highly effective media machine that takes care of every detail, right down to writing the words it wants detransitioners to mime.

    At the beginning of her gender-critical career, Shupe’s public voice was more or less her own; that is, she actually gave the interviews and wrote the blog posts that appeared under her name. As Shupe entered the world of the Christian right, however, her voice was increasingly retooled or outright manufactured by her handlers.

    Sullivan quickly took over Shupe’s public image, instructing her to refer all requests for interviews or public appearances to him. In an email chain dated April 2019, he told her not to talk to a Washington Post reporter he deemed trans-friendly, and directed her to what he called “good Catholic media sources.” In another April 2019 email, Sullivan provided Shupe with what he called an “outline” for an op-ed, along with instructions for pitching: “You should shop it to the main liberal papers offering it to each one for 24 hours before offering it to a new one. After about four or five, you could then offer it to some more ‘conservative’ papers until you get one to bite.” The “outline” provided by Sullivan was a full essay of 1,609 words. One sentence was typed in red, indicating that Shupe should fill in the details herself. 

    This is clearly happening in the UK too.

    If you’re a reader of the (Glasgow) Herald, this bit might jump out at you:

    “ADF has some excellent writers familiar with the length and style that appeals to op-ed page editors, who could take even a very rough sketch or outline of thoughts from you—or just talk with you—and then create a draft that I think you will be very happy with.” 

    The ADF’s Lois McLatchie has popped up in The Herald’s pages several times recently as a columnist, and her columns are very good at what they do; unfortunately what they do is attempt to excuse the inexcusable and wage war on human rights. That The Herald publishes them without context is an indication not just of how effective the ADF’s machine is, but also how debased our journalistic institutions have become.

    The piece makes it clear, yet again, that none of this is about “protecting children” or “protecting women”. It’s a religious war.

    “I was gradually waking up to the fact that, you know, I was just a useful idiot, are the two words I would use,” Shupe tells me. “I got the vibe that they wanted me to help them, they wanted me to use them, but they wouldn’t trust somebody like me around their kids.” 

  • Incompetence and malevolence

    A superb piece by Parker Molloy on the awful people dominating the discourse around trans people.

    When you’re discussing a topic solely on the grounds of whether or not someone is allowed to talk about something, you’re able to completely sidestep ever having to address the actual content. If you want to have a “discussion” about something, then discuss it.

    But instead, these guys all stand around having a “discussion” about whether or not they’re even allowed to have discussions, despite regularly having this content-free meta-debate in front of massive audiences that critics can’t match.

    It allows them to avoid ever having to actually say anything. And they know it.

    It’s a typically good, well-researched and cited piece, and it goes to the heart of the problem over the so-called trans debate: it’s not a debate. One side publishes or broadcasts a constant flow of bullshit, and as soon as they’re criticised they retreat behind their cancel culture wagons.

    And that’s because all of these stories “just asking questions” aren’t about trying to figure out a world where we can all exist, but what society should do about us and tous. We are not included in this discussion, and our efforts to participate in it at our smaller blogs and newsletters, etc. never gain traction. Instead, it’s, “Hey, look, a trans person tweeted an insult at me, see how unreasonable they are?”

    We have a right to be a part of this conversation, and when we push back on things like publishing a glowing review of a book written by an anti-trans activist that’s filled with straight-up false information that demonstrates that the book hasn’t been fact-checked properly (see? there’s that word again, properly) and is written by someone who is friendly with the author, it’s not us saying, “OMG, you’re not allowed to write about this! OMG! Stoppppppp!” it’s us saying, “You’re not upholding even the tiniest, most minimal standards. You are letting your biases run wild and you are failing at the very concept of journalism.”

    Not to mention that a year later, the author of that book (that got the glowing NYT review) would call trans people “a huge problem to a sane world,” “damaged,” and then say she wanted “reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition.”

    As Sally Claire recalls her university journalism tutor saying: “If someone says it’s raining, and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the fucking window and find out which is true.” Too many journalists would rather brick the fucking windows up so nobody can call out their incompetence and malevolence.

  • A scandal at Sandyford

    The Sandyford clinic is where Glasgow’s gender clinic is based, alongside various sexual health and victim counselling services. I’ve been attending it since 2017, and I’ve been meaning to write a proper piece about it for some time: visiting in person, even before COVID, was like playing the abandoned-hospital level of a horror video game. Empty corridor after empty corridor, your footsteps echoing, sitting alone in a large waiting room wondering if the next person you see will be a psychiatrist or a serial killer.

    There were protests outside it yesterday by the loons and cowards of the Scottish Family Party, who said they were coming at 11am to brick up the entrance to protest its role in women’s reproductive freedom. In the end they arrived at 8am with cardboard boxes printed with bricks, took their photo and then hid at the Mitchell Library until the colourful and camp counter-protest – which attracted more than 100 people – was over, returning afterwards to take another photo at the wrong building.

    The moon howlers of the SFP weren’t there to protest its trans services, although I’m sure that was a bonus. But the Sandyford Clinic has been the subject of ridiculous scaremongering for years now, with anti-trans bigots and cynical Conservatives claiming yet again that the clinic is “experimenting on children” and fast-tracking them into surgery. The fact that children don’t get gender-affirming surgery and nobody is experimenting on anybody is an inconvenient truth they prefer not to address.

    This morning, The National newspaper printed a story about a scandal at the Sandyford. But it’s not the invented one of the bigots. It’s the real one anyone attending can tell you about.

    Just two psychiatrists, each working one day a week, cover adult services for the whole west of Scotland. The young person’s team is soon to consist of a single person, who will work half the week and cover all of the country

    I know both psychiatrists, and they appear to be good people. But they’re not magic people. They’re massively overworked in a department that’s desperately underfunded and understaffed. One position has been advertised for years now and nobody has applied, because who’d want to work in an environment like that?

    “There’s this massive waiting list and there’s going to be loads of scrutiny on you and people are going to be actively campaigning for your service to close down and there’s 1000 newspaper articles written about your client br every week. When you put it like that, nobody is going to want to do it.”

    When I self-referred to the Sandyford in 2016, it took 11 months before I was offered an initial assessment visit. Officially the adult waiting list is nearly five years long now. Anecdotally I’m hearing it’s even longer than that. And the lack of staff means the healthcare you do get is inadequate. Last May a really important appointment was made for me; nobody informed me about it and I didn’t discover it had been made until November. The earliest next appointment was in February.

    If this were any other branch of healthcare, the coverage would be deafening. But I think it’s a safe bet that the genuine scandal at the Sandyford, one that’s affecting the healthcare of a small but significant group of people, will get less coverage than any scaremongering. And that too should be a national scandal.

  • Murdoch’s minions want Section 28 back

    The Times has posted its latest culture war piece, in which parents are “shocked” by “graphic sex education in school”. Apparently “one mother says her son has ‘gone from finding out Santa Claus doesn’t exist to being told about anal sex’’, which is definitely a thing that actually happened.

    It’s a good piece to study if you’re interested in how culture wars are waged, though. The “graphic sex education” it talks about doesn’t exist, but the Times uses innuendo to suggest otherwise. The term “anal fun and frolics” that has The Times clutching its pearls is from a personal website written by an adult for other adults. The song about masturbation The Times refers to is from a different website, also by and for adults.

    What The Times is doing here, and not in a subtle way, is trying to make you scared of the queers again. The article opens with a 12-year-old apparently having a panic attack because someone told her trans people exist; the body copy’s deliberate focus on anal sex is code for The Gays. And telling people that the queers and the gays are coming for your kids is what brought us Section 28, which Murdoch’s minions clearly want to bring back.

    Update, 11 March

    The source of the story was The New Social Covenant Unit, an evangelical organisation co-chaired by Miriam Cates MP and Danny Kruger MP whose director Imogen Sinclair works for the Conservative Christian Fellowship. To describe them as social and religious conservatives would be an understatement.

    NSCU’s politics are stated in greater detail in their manifesto “12 propositions for a new social convenant”8. This manifesto is deeply socially conservative on the subject of marriage and family, claiming that marriage equality for same sex couples “removed [marriage’s] physical basis” and that the right of couples to end a marriage had “removed its emotional and practical basis, and voided the marriage vow itself”. The 12 propositions refer to the primary purpose of marriage as “regulation of baby-making”, implicitly valuing fertile, heterosexual couples over all other forms of families.

    The 12 propositions rail against immigration and “globalism”, promoting the antisemitic conspiracy theory9that “cultural Marxism”, purported to be an obscure school of political thought originating from largely Jewish academics in the 1950s, has infiltrated political and academic institutions with the aim of destroying the family and Western civilisation.

  • The smoking gun

    Today, The Telegraph and Radio 4 gave extensive coverage to a brand new anti-trans group supported by various famous transphobes. Meanwhile in America, Mother Jones reports on the smoking gun that proves collusion between evangelical Christians, right-wing politicians and supposedly grass-roots lobby groups. Many of the key players are also active in UK anti-trans activism.

    “The message was one in a trove of emails obtained by Mother Jones between Deutsch and representatives of a network of activists and organizations at the forefront of the anti-trans movement. They show the degree to which these activists shaped… repressive legislation, a version of which was signed into law in February, and the tactics, alliances, and goals of a movement that has sought to foist their agenda on a national scale.”

    Not just on a national scale. On a global scale.

    “The emails demonstrate close collaboration between groups working behind the scenes to push bills banning transgender health care, including ADF—which has defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people in Europe—and the ACPeds—which has opposed adoption by gay couples and supported conversion therapy for LGBTQ youth. In recent years, ADF has drafted legislation banning trans children from using school restrooms or playing on school sports teams that align with their gender identity. (Both groups are also staunchly anti-abortion; ADF, which drafted the Mississippi abortion ban at the heart of the case that overturned Roe v. Wade, is currently representing ACPeds in a closely-watched lawsuit to ban an abortion pill, mifepristone, nationally.)”

    Full details of the years of leaked emails are still emerging but from what I’ve seen already there’s plenty of really horrific stuff in there. Anyone who still believes that this is about protecting children or reasonable concerns about women’s safety is delusional.

  • All the things she said

    I’ve seen my name in print quite a lot recently, but it hasn’t all been book-related. I’ve been dragged into the culture war because of a BBC Radio Scotland item I contributed to, and as a result I ended up in publications ranging from PinkNews to The Independent and the LA Times. As a journalist, you rarely want to be the story. But as a journalist it’s interesting to see how the sausage is made from the other end of the process.

    The short version: the BBC publicly apologised to JK Rowling about a piece I contributed to.

    The long version: I didn’t say what PinkNews and The Independent claim I said.

    I suspect The Independent has just cribbed from Pink News, because the misrepresentation is the same.

    PinkNews in February:

    During the BBC broadcast, trans writer Carrie Marshall said she boycotted the game because she believed it to be funding “the anti-trans movement”.

    The Independent today:

    A week later, the BBC apologised again after a transgender woman appearing on BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland show said that the new PlayStation game Hogwarts Legacy was funding “the anti-trans movement”.

    Both of these reports are misrepresenting what I said, and I’ve asked both publications to correct them [Update, 9 Mar: The Independent has said “oops, sorry” and corrected their article] [13 Mar: PinkNews has also corrected its piece, and a second piece based on the first]. I didn’t say I was boycotting the game, and I definitely didn’t say it was funding the anti-trans movement.

    If you’re quick you can catch the whole item on BBC Sounds for a few more days; it expires this weekend. And if you do, you’ll hear me say that “This is money that people believe very strongly is going to fund the anti-trans movement”. I didn’t share my own views on that, or say whether or not the belief is correct. Asked to come on air as a trusted journalist to explain what some people were saying about the game, I came on air and explained what some people were saying about the game.

    Here’s the full extract, which only the LA Times included any of for context; it’s no coincidence that US newspapers are famed for their fact-checkers, a role that’s largely absent in UK media.

    “Quite a lot of LGBT people are concerned about the Harry Potter franchise, because JK Rowling has been very proud of her association with the so-called Gender Critical movement and some of its leading figures, and has also strongly suggested that she considers her income as proof that people share her views. So this has become about much, much more than the video game. To some people, this is about a culture war issue. We’re now seeing quite a lot of people who are now harassing trans gamers saying ‘I’m buying ten copies of this. What are you going to do about it?’ and it’s become really quite horrible online.”

    “This is money that people believe very strongly is going to fund the anti-trans movement, which has over 300 anti-trans laws in front of US legislators and has become a real battleground in Britain as well. This is having a measurable effect on trans people’s lives and perhaps our safety too, so it’s not just an abstract issue about the ‘death of the author’. It’s about real people’s lives. And I think that’s why so many trans people are concerned about this game.”

    To add insult to incorrect quoting, PinkNews originally said I was a “trans activist” – it’s now been changed to “trans writer”.

    I’ll let you decide whether the apology was justified, but by comparison I’d like to share the BBC Complaints response when I was one of thousands of people who complained about a 2021 BBC article that defamed trans women as rapists. The article’s sources were a sex offender and an anti-trans hate group; the former’s name was removed from the article a few days later when she posted death threats targeting trans people. Here’s what the complaints department had to say.

    “The article was carefully considered before publication, went through a rigorous editorial review process and fully complies with the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards.”

    The article is still online. The complaints department remains unapologetic.