Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: Media

Journalism, radio and stuff like that

  • Misreporting

    Let’s do this again, shall we?

    There have been a spate of important trans-related stories in the press this week, and predictably they have all been misreported.

    First up, after a long inquiry into the trans charity Mermaids, the Charity Commission found no evidence of the wrongdoing alleged by anti-trans activists and their pals in the press. Complaints that the charity did not have effective safeguarding policies or that it had inappropriate ties to gender identity clinics were unfounded. The commission tried very hard to find evidence of those things because it really, really wanted to – during the inquiry one member of its staff, clearly an anti-trans activist, forgot to use their own personal account and was caught retweeting an unfounded allegation against the charity on the Commission’s own social media – but failed.

    That’s not to say Mermaids is perfect. It isn’t, and there were failings identified in its management. But the core allegations that have been in the press for two years now were bullshit.

    It’s also worth noting that yet again, the BBC reporting of this is using anti-trans activists’ dog-whistles: we’ve previously had “gender ideology” used to describe trans people existing, and now we have “trans-identified” to describe trans kids. The use of “trans-identified male” and “trans-identified female” are common in bigot circles; the terms are intended to delegitimise trans people and suggest they’re not trans.

    Next up: another bigot fucked around and found out. In yet another case reported widely as a nice teacher losing their job just for saying “sex is real” or misgendering a student, Camilla Hannan has been barred from teaching. And if you look at what the tribunal found rather than what the press is telling you it found, you’ll see that Hannan outed one of her LGBTQ+ students online – a massive safeguarding breach as well as horrific behaviour for any teacher – and that her remorse appeared to be “self-serving”: the judge suggested that “Miss Hannan’s remorse stemmed from being caught, rather than from reflections on her own behaviour.”

    Over in The Atlantic, Helen Lewis claimed that when Donald Trump said this week that “Your child goes to school, and they take your child. It was a he, comes back as  a she. And they do it, often without parental consent”, “lines like this would not succeed without containing at least a kernel of truth.” It does not contain a kernel of truth.

    Lastly, we have the inquest into the murder of trans teen Brianna Ghey. In a report that went out of its way never to describe Brianna as “she”, a girl or a young woman, The Times focused on the real victim here: her killer. He was “set for Oxbridge” and was “a good child with good morals”. That’s good morals as in spending “weeks plotting Brianna’s murder after drawing up a ‘kill list’” and then stabbing her 28 times. The good-morals bit is from a statement by the boy’s mother, who of course is going to come to her child’s defence. But the tone of the reporting here and elsewhere strongly suggests that the real tragedy as far as the press is concerned is not that a young trans girl is dead, but that two cisgender people are in prison for killing her.

  • “Hopeful and broken”

    Juliette, who writes the Kierkegaard’s Lunch blog, has written a dual review of the Will and Harper road movie where Will Ferrell goes on a trip with his recently transitioned trans friend Harper Steele. The first half of the review is for cisgender people:

    Watch it all and pick a side. Because you can’t be neutral  – and one side is winning this fight. 

    It’s not the side that meets Harper with compassion and humanity…

    And the second half is for trans people.

    Above all, perhaps be ready to watch it and to feel both ‘I’m glad they made this movie’ and ‘I’m broken that they still felt they had to make this movie’.  I have been watching movies and reading books trying to explain to cisgender people that we are humans, with feelings, not monsters, rapists or freaks for over 40 years.

    I think Juliette is articulating something I’ve been feeling a lot lately: we’ve had decades of programmes and movies and books that have tried to say something very simple, which is that trans people are people. And yet we’re going backwards, not forwards.

    I had hoped that some of all this, and all the rest, might have moved the dial to a place of greater understanding and decency towards us. For a time I thought it was happening. These days, it often feels like faith in that progress was delusional.

    It’s something I think about in relation to this blog, because I’m so tired of writing about the same things over and over again: a group of anti-trans bigots will do something terrible, and nobody gives the slightest shit. Today it’s the news that those friends of JK Rowling, the Tufton Street anti-trans group Sex Matters and our own anti-LGBTQ+ weirdos For Women Scotland, intend to compile a database of every trans woman competing in sports in the entire UK. Given that there are no trans women competing in elite sport, it’s very clear that the role of this database – which seems illegal under multiple laws – is to find targets for harassment and abuse among people taking part in grassroots sport. You’d have to be very stupid to believe that it’s got anything to do with any kind of fairness, let alone protecting any participants.

    Yesterday, it was the news that multiple senior figures in NHS trans care have boycotted the WPATH conference, the international conference on transgender health, but attended a conference by the anti-trans, religion-based pseudoscientists of SEGM, an organisation opposed to all gender-affirming healthcare. The SPLC, which tracks hate groups, says that SEGM is the hub of the “anti-LGBT pseudoscience network”.

    Also yesterday, it emerged that Elon Musk has so far contributed $50m – that we know of – to fund anti-immigration and anti-trans propaganda.

    The day before it was the US school district whose genital-obsessed weirdos carved new windows in its mixed-gender toilets so that adults could watch children urinate, the presidential campaigns blasting anti-trans ads all over the TV, and the presidential candidate claiming that US schools are transgender surgery factories.

    And the day before, and the day before, and the day before.

    As I’ve written before, to be trans right now, to be talking about being trans right now, feels like the curse of Cassandra, fated to know the truth but never be believed. We’ve watched our healthcare, already wretched, be dismantled. We’ve watched our employment rights, already precarious, attacked on multiple fronts. We’ve watched our politicians embrace beliefs that just a few years previously were largely and rightly considered abhorrent. And through it all, instead of reporting on this the bulk of the press is supporting it.

    It’s hard to see a light at the end of this tunnel. I know there is one. But it seems very far away.

  • “I see myself in corners”

    Like pretty much every other trans person on the planet, I watched Will Ferrell’s Netflix documentary Will & Harper. It’s a road trip featuring the titular duo, the Hollywood actor and his recently transitioned friend. Niko Stratis, a writer who is also trans, posted an interesting review that doesn’t gloss over the film’s flaws but makes it clear why it’s worth watching.

    I think the experience of being trans on the road is different if you’re joined by a movie star, and a camera crew, and (probably) security. But I also don’t think all of those things negate how it feels to be sitting in a steakhouse in Texas while hundreds of people take photos of you to post insulting shit on Twitter with.

    …I see myself a lot in corners of this movie. Harper wants to feel at home in her life as a trans woman, wants to hold onto the shades of the past she holds as important truths to her. She wants to drink shit beer, go to dive bars and race tracks and mud pits. It’s only that now when she does, she would prefer to wear a dress and heels when she does this and this should all be afforded her, she deserves that same as anyone, but we know this is not always going to be true, and confronting the way that the world has shut doors to you is a hard truth in transition for a lot of us who lived with relative ease and privilege. 

  • Cass: MMR all over again

    I think in years to come the Cass Review, and the media’s complicity, will be viewed in much the same way as Andrew Wakefield’s infamous MMR scare and its promotion by Private Eye and UK newspapers. Unfortunately like Wakefield, it will continue to harm people until and long after it’s been fully discredited and its author a pariah.

    One of the countries who provided supposedly expert guidance to Cass was Finland, whose Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala was on the Cass advisory board. Dr Kaltialia has testified in favour of banning trans-related care in Florida and a new report by Assigned Media reveals the horrific abuse and medical malpractice carried out by her gender clinics. The Cass Review has multiple other links to anti-trans activism.

    The British Medical Association has now announced it will review the Cass report and has made some mild criticisms of it already, and the bigots are furious – which makes you wonder what it is they’re so scared of. After all, if the Cass Review is so scientific, the BMA review will just confirm that. Right?

    There is already a very long list of Cass Review critiques, which have repeatedly demonstrated that this was an ideological project. Dr Ruth Pearce has been tracking them on her website and it’s already quite the collection. Even if you do as Cass did and ignore the voices of trans healthcare experts as biased, it’s hard to argue that the Endocrine Society or the American Academy of Pediatrics are trans activists. But then, this was never about listening to the experts.

  • Hypocrisy

    The Daily Mail, as I’m sure you’re aware, has spent many years now demonising “cross-sex hormones” and the people who take them for reasons such as not wanting to die.

    This is from tomorrow’s front page.

  • Ignore the experts

    There’s a good piece about the puberty blocker ban in The Guardian by Aidan Kelly, a doctor, in which he explains how we’ve ended up in the farcical situation where fashion writers, bigoted journalists and arrogant celebrities are considered experts in trans healthcare but clinicians and prestigious medical organisations are not.

    In this area of healthcare, like no other I know of, the professionals with the requisite expertise are positioned by their critics as having been “captured by ideology” and therefore lacking in credibility. Meanwhile, those without the expertise are positioned as “independent”, which critics argue makes them better able to evaluate the evidence – despite having never worked in the field and having no understanding of its complexities.

    This simply wouldn’t happen in any other kind of healthcare, but in the UK the entire discussion has been given over to people who get their information from Twitter. Which perhaps explains why there’s been virtually no reporting on the international condemnation of the Cass Review from health professionals, or of the extensive analyses that demonstrate that the government is prioritising ideology over evidence in its healthcare policies.

    There’s a good overview here, from the US organisation FAIR:

    Though there is much more evidence now to support gender-affirming care than in 2008, there is also a much stronger anti-trans movement seeking to discredit and ban such care.

    British media coverage has given that movement a big boost in recent years, turning the spotlight away from the realities that trans kids and their families are facing, and pumping out stories nitpicking at the strength of the expanding evidence base for gender-affirming care. Its coverage of the Cass Review followed suit.

     

  • “Where are the commentators?”

    There’s a good piece in today’s National by Caitlin Logan on the issues that real feminist groups are campaigning on while faux-feminists have been scaremongering about trans people.

    Logan identifies key issues including inequality in the social security system – inequality that means by 2027 the average income of women will have dropped by 7% compared to 3% for men – and inadequate statutory maternity pay; inflexible working patterns; and the severe issues that affect immigrant women.

    Where is the Labour Party on these issues? Where are the commentators, anxiously debating the state of women’s rights because of this bleak picture? Where are the journalists, asking political leaders – again and again and again – what they plan to do about it?

    With crushing inevitability, the very first comment on the online article is a dismissive one from an anti-trans man, part of the same pattern that comes up again and again when women are being patronised or worse by genital-obsessed weirdos; the overwhelming majority of “gender critical” posters are straight men.

  • Distraction

    A new study by researchers at Loughborough University has found that women’s issues have been largely ignored in this election campaign, with women rarely given a media platform to discuss women’s issues unless they’re demonising trans people.

    There was an example of this just this week, when BBC News published a front-page story asking what each party had to say about women’s rights. It didn’t discuss women’s rights at all; just what the parties had to say about trans women.

    And as ever, whether that’s malice or incompetence doesn’t really matter; by distracting people from the very real issues affecting women and girls, and the growing threat to their healthcare and rights from the political and religious right, it’s doing an excellent job of keeping women marginalised.

    There’s a good letter in today’s Herald newspaper by Gemma Clark, a dedicated campaigner for women’s rights.

    There are urgent women’s rights issues being completely ignored while the political discourse centres on the gutter politics of body parts and bathrooms. Neither the Labour nor Tory manifesto mentioned abortion, which is rather shocking given the uptick in women and girls being charged with so-called ‘illegal abortions’.

    Rape conviction rates remain so low that it is effectively decriminalised. Labour will not commit to undoing the two-child benefit cap (also known as the rape clause). People wait years for a diagnosis of endometriosis. Maternity care is in crisis. Schools are in crisis, particularly in Glasgow, where school communities face teacher staff cuts on a scale we have never seen before. Only yesterday I watched a checkout operator struggling to remove the security cap from a container… it was a container of baby formula. We are living in a country where people are having to steal to feed their children.

    And instead of talking about this, politicians and the press constantly distract from it with a completely manufactured panic over trans women. People are being silenced for sure, but they aren’t the highly privileged people cosplaying as victims on the front page of our national newspapers with the full support of the Prime Minister and Rupert Murdoch.

  • Dead children don’t matter

    If you were in any doubt that the trans “issue” is a moral panic and that trans lives don’t matter to almost all of the media, the UK newspapers have provided ample evidence over the last few days.

    Every single paper, not just the right-wing ones, has ignored the news that the puberty blocker ban has been implicated in the deaths of 16 children and that the NHS and Cass Review appear to have tried to cover that up; instead, they have devoted endless column inches to whether Labour can become hateful enough to trans people to satisfy JK Rowling.

  • What changed

    Jude Doyle’s piece on “the transgender tipping point” spurred one of its quoted experts, Julia Serano, to expand on her comments. As ever with Serano, this is worth reading: Revisiting The “Transgender Tipping Point” Ten Years Later.

    I do believe there was a truly positive development for trans people taking place in the early 2010s that is potentially worthy of the moniker “tipping point.” For most of my life, the trans experience was typified by isolation and invisibility. Most of us grew up not knowing any other trans people and this sense of isolation was reinforced by how infrequently trans people and issues were covered in the media. Even as an adult, it was really hard to find trans community, especially if you weren’t living in a major city. Gender-affirming care was also extremely difficult to access, both because there were very few providers and most adhered to a strict gatekeeping system wherein only a select few “true transsexuals” (people who would be “passable” and heteronormative post-transition) were allowed to transition. This only added to the sense that very few trans people existed.

    What changed, as Serano goes on to explain, was twofold. One, the internet suddenly enabled us to find information and support that was previously hard or even impossible to find. And healthcare, previously very hostile, moved to a more informed and evidence-based model that understood transness wasn’t a disorder to be cured but just part of human nature.

    Those two changes were seismic; we got to see that we were not alone, and that we were not broken. And naturally that meant that more of us felt able to come out and be who we are.

    As Serano says, the tipping point in the media was a confection, and it mistook trans visibility for trans acceptance. But there was a very real tipping point for trans and non-binary people in “trans autonomy and agency, where gender-diverse people could finally speak for ourselves and choose our own trans trajectories.”

    Despite the best efforts of the media, and the UK media in particular, there has been a massive shift in trans visibility – and with that visibility comes understanding and acceptance. Serano points out that at the time of the “tipping point” article, just 9% of Americans said they knew somebody who was trans. By 2021 it was 42%. That means more trans and gender non-conforming people can see that they’re not alone, and that more people who aren’t trans can see that we’re no different from them.

    As I’ve written endlessly, hatred thrives on ignorance; it’s one of the reasons the bigots want to ban any form of trans representation, and prevent us from living normal lives. But that genie isn’t going back into its bottle.