Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Media

Journalism, radio and stuff like that

  • Not an innocent Spectator

    Another day, another bad article in The Spectator.

    The answer is no. The EDL founder was arrested for deliberately breaking the law on Contempt of Court.

    Whether Liddle or his editor Fraser Nelson actually believes his nonsense or is just trolling for money is irrelevant: by continually trying to paint racist clowns as free speech martyrs The Spectator is becoming the house rag for right-wing bigots of all stripes. It’s become a despicable publication by and for despicable people.

    Update, 28 May

    Liddle also writes a column in The Sunday Times. Axel Antoni takes his latest one apart in a series of 12 tweets.

  • Stop me if you’ve heard this one before

    30 years ago today, Section 28 (Section 2A in Scotland) was introduced to ban the “promotion” of gay and lesbian “lifestyles” in schools to protect children from the entirely invented dangers of gay and lesbian people. It wasn’t repealed until 2003 in England and Wales, although Scotland canned it in 2001.

    I was 15 when Section 28 was passed. It was an era of vicious anti-gay bullying, encouraged by vicious anti-gay propaganda in mainstream newspapers. AIDS was “the gay plague” and a book with two gay dads, “Jenny Lives With Eric and Martin” was denounced as “vile”, “perverted” and a threat to children by multiple newspapers.

    Piers Morgan monetised homophobia by writing about “The Poofs Of Pop”, and The Sun’s headline about the first gay kiss on the soap opera EastEnders was “EASTBENDERS”. The accompanying story described “a homosexual love scene between yuppie poofs… when millions of children were watching.”

    The barrage of bigotry had a terrible effect. Social Attitudes Surveys of the time saw anti-gay sentiment, already high, rise during this period: the percentage of people who believed same-sex activity was “always or mostly wrong” was nearly 80% in both the US and the UK.

    National newspapers frequently ran homophobic front page stories. The “Keep the clause” anti-repeal campaign was particularly vicious.

    The period leading up to the repeal of Section 28/Clause 2A was particularly unpleasant in Scotland, with billboards and newspaper articles urging us to keep the clause to protect our children.

    Won’t somebody think of the children?
    We’re not homophobic. We just have genuine concerns.

    History repeats.

    Where Richard Littlejohn used to write about “the government’s determination to lower the age at which schoolboys can be sodomised”; he now rails against the supposed evils of trans people.

    Many other columnists who once railed against gay people now battle “Transgenderism” and the “sinister transgender agenda”.

    Innocuous kids’ books such as “Can I Tell You About Gender Diversity?” have been slammed by the likes of the Mail on Sunday, Lord Tebbit and Sarah Vine (“We are threatening the sanity of – and yes I’m going to say it – normal children”).

    Piers Morgan monetises transphobia on TV.

    Social attitudes surveys show that after years of gradual improvements, anti-LGBT sentiment is on the rise.

    History is supposed to be a warning, not a how-to guide.

    Update:

    The ever-excellent Another Angry Woman is thinking what I’m thinking. And Stonewall’s Ruth Hunt draws parallels in The Independent.

  • “That’s not how it works”

    James Kirkup of The Spectator has written many articles that unquestionably parrot the propaganda of anti-trans bigots, but he reached a new low this week with the story of sniggering arsehole David Lewis.

    Lewis is – or rather, was; Labour suspended him for, well, being a sniggering arsehole – standing for election as a women’s officer in his local Labour Party. Hilariously, he says he identifies as a woman “on Wednesdays, between 6.50am when my alarm goes off and around midnight when I go to bed.”

    Lewis’s motive (other than look-at-me self-publicity) was to raise awareness of, you’ve guessed it, the sinister trans agenda. Unfortunately by setting out to prove how easy it is to abuse the system, he ended up demonstrating that it isn’t easy to abuse the system. This is what the internet calls a self-own.

    In The Guardian, James Morton wrote a thoughtful response to the stunt.

    Self-declaration is not a frivolous process. Making a false statutory declaration is a serious crime of perjury. Evidence of malicious intent, whether it be to invade women’s safe spaces or to try to make a mockery of the very real struggles that trans people face to live their lives as who they are, could rightfully lead to severe penalties including up to two years in prison.

    Anti-trans campaigners who treat this process as if they can just wake up one morning and say they are a woman or a man and change nothing else about their lives are mocking not only trans people but the concept of identity itself. Identity is not some random feeling we have just on Wednesdays or Fridays, but our deeply held sense of ourselves and how we fit into the world.

    …Puerile stunts, deliberate misgendering and hateful comparisons to parasites and paedophiles is not constructive discussion.

    The good news is that, like shouting “penis” during televised debates, these stunts tend to backfire terribly. The vocal activism of anti-trans activists within Labour (many of whom are currently being suspended from Twitter for repeated acts of hateful and harassing conduct) has led Labour to double down on its support for trans people. On the left, some of the most radical voices are standing alongside trans people and arguing that it’s the anti-trans crowd who are hateful and dangerous. On the right, Theresa May has reaffirmed her support for Gender Recognition Act reform: “being trans is not an illness and it shouldn’t be treated as such.”

    And it isn’t a lifestyle choice, either. I didn’t choose to be trans, but you can choose whether you want to treat trans people with basic human dignity or be like Kirkup and Lewis. One day even they’ll see sense:

  • We can’t afford to be complacent as Ireland’s big decision arrives

    My friends at Fashion Fix Daily asked me to write a piece on something I’ve touched on a few times in this blog: the US money that’s attempting to influence laws in other countries, most notably the campaign to repeal the anti-abortion Eighth Amendment in Ireland. Ireland votes this Friday.

    What used to be an American problem has become a global one: the culture wars that have long divided the US are being exported in yet another example of the internet turning out to be a terrible idea.

    We shouldn’t be surprised. After all, fashion is global now: what a celeb posts on Instagram in America soon appears in the fast fashion chains across the Atlantic. Style, music, entertainment and even politics have become global, so why wouldn’t intolerance go global too?

    There are very strong links between Irish women’s groups and LGBT groups, who rightly recognise the many things they have in common and the power they have when they unite. One of the things they have in common is their battle against religious conservatives who would deny them bodily autonomy and basic human dignity.

    My own take on the referendum is that whatever way Ireland votes, women will continue to need, seek and have abortions. The only difference between a Yes and a No vote is the safety of those women and the trauma they’re forced to experience.

    This isn’t about pro-choice versus pro-life. This is about caring about women versus cruelty to women.

    I truly hope the referendum returns a yes verdict, but the issue of far-away organisations attempting to influence democratic processes in often underhand ways is not going to go away when the polls shut on Friday.

    Whether we’re waving Pride flags or supporting the women who want to repeal the eighth amendment, we need to remember that the enemies of equality can shout just as loud – and that many of them have deep pockets.

    They can afford to spend huge sums in their attempts to roll the clock backwards, and that means we can’t afford to be complacent.

  • “There is no conceivable way the use or misuse of pronouns can be construed as advocating genocide”

    A few weeks back I posted a link to a superb literary kicking of right-wing charlatan Jordan Peterson. Here’s another, this time via the writer Daniel Karasik. Karasik wrote a column defending Peterson’s views on trans people’s pronouns, which is what made Peterson infamous in the first place, and Alexander Offord has written a glorious demolition of it and of Peterson.

    If you read just one very long takedown of two Canadians today, make it this one.

    How you have managed to convince yourself that transpeople represent the “ruling class” and that the “bloody-toothed Leviathan of government” is somehow working to their benefit at the expense of Jordan Peterson’s right to be a colossal douchebag is well beyond my powers of intellection.

  • Words as weapons

    The Onion has had to publish its article again:

    This week’s school shooting is in Texas where – surprise! – the shooter is a straight white man who hates women.

    The Texas school shooter killed a girl who turned down his advances and rejected him in front of class before massacring seven more classmates and two teachers, it’s been revealed…

    Shana Fisher, who turned 16 just days before she died in the attack, had been fending off advances from Pagourtzis for months.

    It’s the same old story. Boy meets girl. Boy won’t take no for an answer. Boy murders girl, classmates and teachers with assault weapons.

    We’ll have the usual post-event analysis where various people try to blame everything other than violent men with easy access to military weaponry (although one post on Twitter really nailed it: in response to “What will it take to change the laws to prevent more killings like this?” he replied, “One shooting by a black student”).

    But this is really simple. Some men believe they are entitled to women’s bodies, and they become furious if they don’t get their way. In a culture where easy access to weaponry is seen by many as a basic human right, that results in mass shootings.

    The media is complicit in this. Not just in its gun fetishism, but in supposedly intelligent titles lauding the likes of Jordan Peterson – who this weekend was arguing in favour of “enforced monogamy” as the cure for male violence against women –  and debating whether men have a right to sex.

    Dimitrios Pagourtzis certainly thought he had a right to sex, and when the woman he wanted to have sex with said no – not just once, but repeatedly, over several months – he slaughtered nine people.

    All ideas are not equal. Some are dangerous. And media has a responsibility to consider that. And yet all too often we get pieces that read like “Hooray for the blackshirts”, the Daily Mail’s 1930s ode to the rise of fascism.

    Still, it wouldn’t happen now, would it?

    This is from yesterday’s Sunday Times on Twitter. The print piece was headed “Heil Hipsters”.

    The article itself may have been reasoned and rational, although as it was by noted fantasist Andrew Gilligan I doubt it. But as one Twitter user posted in response:

    What the fuck are you playing at?

    The Times’ original tweet has now been deleted, but it shouldn’t have been posted in the first place. As British Future director Sunder Katwala responded:

    While @thesundaytimes can report on the very fringe middle-class professional banker seeking to relegitimise racism for a better spoken far right, its perhaps best not to tweet it out like its some celebrity fashion shoot.

    As he points out, the “breathless national reporting about [the] rise of hipster racists” lacks context. These are extremists, a tiny minority, but their views are dangerous. And their mission is to normalise racism. Presenting them as normal people is exactly what they want.

  • Your da’s writing for The Herald again

    Brian Beacom caused online outrage recently when he wrote a column in the (Glasgow) Herald dismissing Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer win in the music category. To paraphrase: black people’s music isn’t proper music.

    Today, he’s marking mental health awareness week by saying that the cure for mental illness is to “grow a pair”. If you need further evidence for the prosecution, he warmly references right-wing dingbat Jordan Peterson.

    I’m not linking to it because that’s the whole point of the piece. It’s an attempt to monetise outrage, to say something horrible in the hope it’ll get traffic and therefore generate ad revenue. Beacom has previously claimed that alcoholism isn’t a disease; I can’t wait for next week’s piece when he explains that people in wheelchairs are lazy.

    It’s a business model that’s becoming much more common in our brave new ad-funded world. The online business world used to call its model “clicks and mortar”. Now, it seems, it’s adopted “pricks for clicks”.

    (“Your Da” is a Scottish social media meme; it’s our equivalent of “gammon”.)

    Update, later that day:

    The Spectator lives down to its reputation again. The headline has since been changed.

  • After the ‘quake

    I wrote about Channel 4’s Genderquake debate a few days ago, and it’s safe to say the programme has caused a lot of controversy.

    The people who refused to take part were proved right: Channel 4 was trying to start a fight.

    Here’s a piece by Pink News on how the audience were told to behave.

    Audience members at a controversial televised debate about gender claim they were “encouraged to heckle” panellists, including transgender activists Caitlyn Jenner and Munroe Bergdorf, by the programme’s producers.

    That’s an interesting contrast to the programme as it was pitched to potential panelists. CN Lester:

    I was one of the dozens approached from March onwards by Channel 4. An email from the production company explained that it would be: ”nuanced intelligent discussion around gender, identity and society. We aim to shed light on such complex issues and ask important questions in a safe environment.”

    Lester declined to take part, guessing – rightly – that the programme wouldn’t be remotely like that.

    This is what the so-called trans “debate” looks like: people shouting “you’re a man!” and “penis! penis! penis!” at people who thought they were there for a “nuanced intelligent discussion around gender.”

    These are the “mums”. The women with “legitimate concerns”. The ordinary people who just want to have a “respectful debate”.

    It’s not just the fact that they heckled. It’s that they were specifically invited so that they would. Channel 4 appears to have deliberately invited bigots – some of whom are currently under investigation for hate speech, some of whom have been suspended from their political parties – and given then prominent positions in the audience. When they did what they were asked to do and heckled the panelists, they were allowed to remain in place for the rest of the programme.

    Imagine for a moment the programme was about the experiences of an ethnic minority and Channel 4 sat members of Britain First and the EDL at the front, letting them shout racial epithets throughout the programme.

    Jenny Boylan, a writer I very much admire, in the New York Times:

    This is what happens when we act as if the humanity of vulnerable, marginalized people is up for debate.

    The people doing the shouting are the same people you read about in the Sunday Times and other papers. They say they aren’t bigots, that they want the chance to have a reasonable debate.

    And when you put them in a studio they shout “Penis! Penis! Penis!”

    Boylan again:

    At the end of the “Genderquake” program, Ms. Jenner said, by way of conclusion: “We have to create a more loving society. We have to celebrate the differences in people. Show love toward one another.”

    The audience booed.

    Not the whole audience. You can guess which section.

    I’ve been asked by a few people why I post about trans things here. That’s why. Every day we are libelled in print, slandered on social media, accused of unspeakable depravity and evil by people who question our right to exist and who repeat long-discredited bullshit.

    Here’s just one example, from the supposedly LGBT-friendly Guardian this week. Gaby Hinsliff linked the issue of trans women being able to change their birth certificates with the vile attacks by Canadian sex offender Christopher Hambrook in 2012.

    It was discrimination law, not the recognition process, that came under scrutiny in Canada after serial sex attacker Christopher Hambrook attacked two women in domestic violence shelters in Toronto, which he’d entered dressed as a woman. (The state of Ontario had previously passed a bill prohibiting discrimination against trans people.)

    The law Hinsliff mentions wasn’t passed until six months after Hambrook committed his crimes. The non-existent link between Hambrook and anti-discrimination legislation was invented by religious conservatives to try and prevent the so-called “Toby’s Law” from being passed. It’s a favourite of the “Penis! Penis! Penis!” shouters too.

    Hambrook wasn’t trans, incidentally. He was a serial sex offender who’d been incarcerated for child abuse and who was freed despite being an obvious danger to women: other inmates complained about the violent fantasies he made them listen to. Yes, he dressed as a woman to access a women’s refuge; had it been a disabled person’s shelter he’d have rolled up in a wheelchair. The judge who finally sentenced him to indefinite imprisonment said that nothing – “no other measure” but permanent incarceration – could protect women from such a dangerous man.

    The number of trans women who’ve sexually assaulted people in toilets or refuges, worldwide, is zero. That’s why people keep bringing Hambrook up: if they had actual examples of trans people being evil you can be sure they’d use them.

    The Hambrook case is about many things: lax sentencing of dangerous men, sexual assault against women not being taken seriously enough by police, and so on. But it had nothing to do with trans people whatsoever.

    But, you know, another day, another insinuation that if you see me in the bathroom I’m there to rape you.

    We are getting tired of this shit.

    Lester:

    The question I’m left with: how much longer can this script play out? Is this still enjoyable for anyone apart from the fanatics who want to spew hate at trans women?

    …I don’t have a choice about living in a culture shaped by such a regressive, dehumanising script.

    Boylan:

    …transgender people don’t need any more think pieces about the legitimacy of our lives. What we need, and what we deserve, is justice, and compassion, and love. What we need is freedom from violence, and protection from homelessness, and the right not to lose our jobs, or our children, or our lives.

    That’s the sinister transgender agenda right there.

  • Nothing to fear

    BBC Scotland in Glasgow

    For several years, I did a monthly technology surgery on BBC Radio Scotland. It was fun to do, but I was always scared that one day everyone would find out I was trans and the gig would be up.

    This morning, I did a technology surgery on BBC Radio Scotland. I wore a nice dress.

  • Just because you’re paranoid

    Image by @augeas on Twitter.

    Trans Media Watch’s submission to Parliament on the subject of hate crime and biased media reporting is pretty frightening.

    In 8 weeks from March 2018, TMW identified 445 pieces about trans/intersex/non-binary people in UK newspapers (the study excluded LGBT titles such as Gay Times, Diva etc and religious titles such as The Catholic Herald). The Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday alone accounted for more than 120.

    In the same period in 2012, there were 73.

    TMW’s analysis is fair: it covers a huge range of titles (the Hull Daily Mail and The Grocer as well as the Fleet Street titles) and as you can see from the included appendix and the graph I’ve embedded at the top of this post it includes positive stories as well as negative ones.

    Trans people have come to dread Sundays in particular, because the Mail on Sunday and Sunday Times run anti-trans pieces every week: between them they ran 23 pieces about trans people during the 8 week monitoring period.

    So I thought it’d be interesting to go with numbers rather than just gut feeling, to compare the number of positive stories about trans/intersex/NB people against the ones suggesting we’re involved in child sacrifice or the ones – particularly in the Sunday Times – that get retracted weeks later because they are complete bollocks.

    But I couldn’t.

    Neither paper had published any positive stories.