Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Media

Journalism, radio and stuff like that

  • “Forbidden knowledge”

    One of the many frustrating things about the current anti-trans moral panic is that supposedly reputable journalists are fuelling it with bad faith “just asking questions”, the answers to which are easy to find.

    This damning piece about the New York Times is just as appropriate to many other publications, including most of the UK press.

    “The ordinary liberal reader may be squeamish about this or that aspect of abortion, but they are fundamentally committed to the idea that abortion patients and their doctors are the ones best equipped to figure out what to do with a pregnancy. It is not the job of some outside party or institution—a controlling parent or spouse, a church, a Republican legislative majority, a major national newspaper—to step in and second-guess what they do with their bodies. 

    For trans care, this liberal theory of autonomy and decision-making is cast aside. The theoretical Times reader is ready to consume 15,000 words about the risks, controversies, and downsides of contemporary gender treatment because, at bottom, they are assumed to be dismayed by it all. An abortion patient is really pregnant, but trans youth—children who “say they’re transgender,” as the Atlantic put it back in 2018—maybe aren’t really trans, or wouldn’t be, if they had more time and better information.”

  • “How come you never thought it before?”

    There’s an article in today’s (Glasgow) Herald claiming that a ban on conversion therapy will “criminalise parents”, throw psychotherapists in prison and have you arrested if you question your child’s gender or sexuality.

    It’s nonsense, and it’s based almost entirely on baseless claims by the Christian Institute – the same Christian Institute that the same newspaper described as anti-LGBT “Christian Fundamentalists” in 2017 when it had yet to join the anti-trans culture war.

    As The Herald reported back then:

    The charity has previously campaigned against gambling, abortion, euthanasia and homosexuality, opposing same sex marriages and seeking to raise the age of consent. The charity once produced an organ-donor style plastic card that read: “In the event of my death, I do not want my children to be adopted by homosexuals”.

    None of that context is in today’s piece, despite being extremely relevant. It’s almost as if that’s a calculated editorial decision.

    This column, from the Belfast Media Group, is doing the rounds today although it was published last summer.

    if you are indeed one of those suddenly convinced that the trans issue is desperately worrying, ask yourself this question: How come you never thought it  before?

    Is it a coincidence that you suddenly started thinking and fretting about it at exactly the same time as the Tory press started to fixate upon it at a time when the Conservative Party is in dire trouble?

    You never cared about trans women in toilets, even though they’ve been there for decades and never did you any harm. You never cared about trans women athletes because they’ve been competing in the Olympics for 20 years. You’re only worried about them now because the right-leaning media is telling you to. Last time it was migrants. Time before that teachers. Time before that junior doctors. Time before that judges. Time before that people on benefits. Time before that gay people and HIV. Time before that… 

    When we do ban conversion therapy, like so many other countries have done and will do, it’ll become very clear that the fundamentalists lied. But don’t forget who passed them the mic to spread those lies.

  • Flip your wig

    Here’s a photo from the GRR Bill debate in the Scottish Parliament yesterday.

    The response on Mumsnet, aka Prosecco Stormfront, was swift. “They can’t help themselves,” one poster wrote. “…it’s typical male pattern aggressive sexualised behaviour”.

    Others agreed, until they realised that the protester isn’t a trans woman; she’s an anti-trans woman, Elaine Miller of For Women Scotland. Miller decided that she’d flash her (fake) pubic hair in front of an audience including schoolchildren. If it weren’t for the fake pubes, that would have been an arrestable sexual offence.

    You’d think that effectively committing a sex crime in the Scottish Parliament – it wasn’t initially obvious that Miller was wearing a wig over tights and initial reports claimed she was flashing her genitals – would be newsworthy, and I have no doubt that had Miller been a trans or non-binary person she would be all over the front pages and leading the broadcasts today. The fact that she isn’t speaks volumes.

     

  • Hate Mail

    After writing a very honest and often horrific account of her teenage experiences online, a trans woman I know was approached by a sympathetic journalist who wanted to share her story: amid the “debate” over banning conversion therapy, the journalist wanted to make her readers aware of its horrors and lasting damage.

    My friend was wary, especially given the publication, but the journalist was very persuasive. Promises were made about photos, context and framing; the journalist offered to share the final piece for approval and to make any last-minute changes.

    You can probably guess what happened next.

    What was supposed to be an informative, sympathetic story became a hit piece. The photos that the writer promised not to use were used. The framing was changed, the context too. Online, the sole link to her social media wasn’t to the main account page or any of her conversion therapy posts; instead, the site linked to an old retweet of a joke post about the late Queen’s handbag colours that details the handkerchief code for various sex acts.

    In this case the paper was the Daily Mail, but these tactics are used across the media. In this case I think there are multiple breaches of the IPSO code, but even if the regulator found in her favour months from now the damage is already done. She’s been discussed by hundreds of people online in the most awful ways, and the paper could still twist the knife further if one of its rabid columnists decides to use her as a subject for yet another anti-trans screed.

    My friend was aware that this might happen but took a calculated risk, hoping that the article would help raise awareness of what conversion therapy and associated horrors entails. But the paper, and many like it, are waging a culture war in which marginalised people are only ever the enemy.

    Trans Media Watch has spent a very long time monitoring mainstream media’s coverage of trans people, and its guidance is very helpful. It’s important to have trans and non-binary people telling their stories, but all too often publications and broadcasters have already decided which stories they want to tell – and if your story doesn’t fit, they’ll change it until it does.

  • Things that are different are not the same

    A typically incisive piece by Parker Molloy on the censorious clowns who claim that legitimate criticism of what they say and write is the same as the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie.

    That is the problem people have with the “cancel culture” discourse. It’s selective, it flattens important distinctions between horrific acts (beheadings and physical attacks!) and free speech (dissent, boycotts, protests). The “cancel culture” brigade sure loves to claim that speech it doesn’t like (dissent, boycotts, protests) is a threat to speech, while sitting mostly silently on actual threats to free expression, like the Republican plan to use obscenity laws to make certain books on LGBTQ topics illegal to sell, the Republican-led purging of books from school and local libraries, and the Republican-led re-writing of textbook standards to remove “divisive” issues. Funny how none of that is “cancel culture,” and yet they think someone speaking out against J.K. Rowling’s factually incorrect rants about trans people (i.e. using their freedom of speech) represents a threat to the very concept of “free speech.” The reason is simple: one of these advances their own agenda, the other doesn’t.

  • T time

    I was delighted to be a small part of BBC Scotland’s new podcast, The Rise and Fall of T in the Park. It’s about more than just the festival itself; it’s about the impact it had on the Scottish music scene and on Scotland as a destination for touring bands. I’m in there talking about TiTP being my very first festival, and what it was like for a small town band to play one of the tents after winning a place in the T Break competition.

    The first four episodes are live now, and the remainder will go live on 18 July. I hope you enjoy it.

  • Leopards

    With crushing predictability, the faux-feminists in the UK press have decided that the real villain in the decades-long plot to overturn Roe vs Wade en route to establishing a Christian theocracy is… trans women.

    The argument, if you can call it that, is simple: trans men wanted to be included in discussions of reproductive healthcare; that somehow erased women; because there is no such thing as a woman any more the US Supreme Court banned abortion. So it’s all trans women’s fault.

    Better to concoct a ludicrous conspiracy theory than admit the truth: much of our media has spent years ignoring the Christian Right’s attacks on LGBT+ people and reproductive rights, preferring instead to publish a constant torrent of Christian Right anti-trans talking points and to platform Christian Right-funded anti-trans groups.

    As the internet cliche goes: I can’t believe leopards are eating my face, says woman who voted for the Leopards Eating Your Face Party.

    The simple fact is that the global anti-trans movement is part of the global anti-gender movement, whose target isn’t just trans people. It wants an end to same-sex marriage, to LGBT+ rights, to contraception, to abortion, to human rights for anybody who isn’t a socially conservative cisgender straight Christian.

    You couldn’t ask for a better example of how this is all connected than the anti-abortion goons intimidating and filming people outside the Sandyford Clinic in Glasgow. They’re there to target women seeking abortions, but – happily for the goons – the Sandyford’s other services mean they get to intimidate people going for sexual health services, for rape counselling and for transgender health care. Over the weekend they moved to the City Centre to harangue people going to Pride, because of course they did. The war on women’s reproductive freedom and the war on LGBT+ people are the same war.

    And this morning there was another example. On BBC Scotland, the discussion about whether we should have buffer zones around abortion clinics – zones that would separate the Sandyford clowns from vulnerable people – invited the ADF to contribute.

    The ADF isn’t just the organisation responsible for funding many anti-abortion groups around the world or the organisation involved heavily in anti-abortion legislation in the US, including the Mississippi case that led to the Supreme Court overturning Roe vs Wade; it’s also the organisation that provides “experts” in anti-trans legal cases in the UK, and which promotes intolerance and hatred towards LGBT+ people globally. And part of its job is to launder that hatred, by providing nice-seeming, media trained people who will absolutely come on air to discuss their ‘reasonable concerns’.

    Opendemocracy:

    Another US group that’s long tried to influence classic “culture war” cases in the UK is the anti-abortion “dark money”-funded legal army Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). openDemocracy revealed in 2019 that its international wing had spent nearly half a million pounds on lobbying in the UK over just two years. The group does not disclose who its donors are, and has even gone to the US Supreme Court to defend donor secrecy.

    ADF’s lawyers have previously said they are working to ensure ‘that bad European precedents don’t spread further in Europe, then across the sea to America’. It worked on the high-profile ‘gay cake’ cases in both the UK and US, defending Christian bakers using free speech arguments.

    ADF has also publicly opposed protest-free “buffer zones” around abortion clinics and supported calls for “freedom of conscience” provisions to enable medical staff to object to providing legal abortion services. And it claims the UK government adopted its recommendations on free speech and academic freedom at universities.

    Rather than platforming them, journalists should be investigating them.

  • Here, always

    There’s a really nice piece in National Geographic about historians documenting the lives of trans people, and in addition to being really interesting it’s a much-needed corrective to the oft-spoken belief that trans people were invented in 2015.

    There’s ample evidence of gender variance throughout human history. Among the earliest are accounts of galaand galli, priests assigned male at birth who crossed gender boundaries in their worship of a variety of goddesses in ancient Sumer, Akkadia, Greece, and Rome. Other cultures acknowledged a third gender, including two-spirit people within Indigenous communities and Hijra, nonbinary people who inhabit ritual roles in South Asia.

    I’m sure I’ve written about this before, but our current gender binaries (and persecution of LGBT+ people) are primarily a western Christian invention. In addition to the cultures mentioned above there are multiple genders in the Torah and many Islamic cultures are accepting of trans people (more so than they are of gay and lesbian people, in some cases; there’s a belief that being trans is something you’re born with but that homosexuality is a sin). But the spread of the British Empire and the colonisation of the US by European settlers meant that that belief was imposed on many other cultures, often with extreme violence. The modern social conservatives and religious extremists trying to eliminate LGBT+ people from society are as ignorant of history as they are of biology.

  • Oh lord, it’s hard to be humble

    I enjoyed this post by Max Rashbrooke on writer James Patterson and podcaster Joe Rogan, both of whom claim to be oppressed by woke activists.

    These are perilous days indeed for a near-billionaire author who outsells Stephen King and Dan Brown combined, and for his fellow victim, the host of a podcast downloaded 200 million times a month. But jibes like this, though satisfying, only get us so far.

    Rogan and Patterson are expressing a fear increasingly held by older males: that society no longer seeks their views. Indeed, they feel their opinions to be scorned and denigrated.

    As the cliché goes, when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. But Rashbrooke makes a more nuanced point, which is that what these highly privileged and successful figures describe as “silencing” is not what’s being asked of them.

    For the most part, though, what I hear is a request for something subtly different: humility. It’s not the speaking that’s the problem, it’s the dominating: the need of so many men to hold forth at length, to speak over others, to assume theirs is the most interesting and most important voice.

    As I wrote about Lizzo the other day, what is often described as cancel culture isn’t; it’s people asking high profile figures to try and be better people. But all too often the response of the person criticised, particularly if he’s a cisgender straight white man, is to throw his toys out of the pram. Heaven forfend anybody point out that he’s incorrect, or that the world is more complex than he understands it to be. As Rashbrooke puts it:

    for a certain class of highly educated men, the speaker’s authority is all – or most – of what they have. Strip that away, and they are left bare, exposed, even humiliated.

    Humiliation is a horrible feeling. But the reaction to it by highly privileged people demonstrates that for them, it’s also a rare feeling – whereas for the marginalised groups they complain about or in some cases even attack, it’s everyday reality.

    Rashbrooke:

    This frightens them deeply because they, like us all, are social beings, reliant on the regard of others; not to be heard is almost not to exist. (A point, of course, that traditionally marginalised groups have often made.)

  • Not cancelled

    Earlier this week, the singer Lizzo released a record containing a word she didn’t realise was a slur against disabled people. When disabled people told her on social media that it was derogatory, she effectively said “Oh my god! I’m so sorry!” and re-released the song with the word changed.

    If you believe the endless pieces about cancel culture in the press, you’d expect Lizzo to be on the receiving end of ongoing abuse. But that’s not what happened. The very same fans and disability advocates who had criticised her thanked her. This, by writer Hannah Diviney, is typical:

    Thank you so much for hearing us Lizzo and for understanding that this was only ever meant gently and being open to learning, it honestly means the world.

    Had Lizzo been a famous comedian or an opinion columnist, I suspect things would have been very different: they’d have used the slur deliberately and then rather than apologising, they’d have doubled down on the offence and planned their lucrative “I’ve been cancelled!” tour and media appearances. But Lizzo is a member of multiple marginalised groups, so she did what the comedians and columnists usually don’t: she listened, realised she’d made a mistake and apologised.

    In other words, she tried to be a decent human being.