Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Media

Journalism, radio and stuff like that

  • Crocodile tears

    Content warning: child murder, transphobia, slurs

    When primary school children were massacred in Dunblane in 1996, the UK responded with severe restrictions on gun ownership – and when twenty children and six adults were massacred in Sandy Hook elementary school in 2012, most people expected the US to do the same. No sane person can accept the murder of children.

    It turns out that many people can.

    Like the people who expected Sandy Hook to be the moment when the US said “no more”, I expected the same with the brutal murder of Brianna Ghey, whose killers were sentenced this week. Surely the murder of a young trans woman would make the UK’s anti-trans madness stop.

    But I underestimated our politicians and our press. Faced with the murder of a young girl who was chosen in part because she was trans and whose killers used similar dehumanising language to them, they decided to circle the wagons instead.

    From the outset, papers such as The Guardian – which has arguably done more than any other publication to promote transphobic groups in the UK and present them as reasonable rather than the dubiously funded religious and social conservatives they are – seized on initial comments by the police that transphobia wasn’t the motive for the murder. But as the court case continued, it became very clear that that wasn’t true. Transphobia wasn’t the sole motive, but it was still a key motive – a fact so apparent that this week the Daily Mail – the Daily Mail! – ran a headline saying that Ghey was murdered because she was trans.

    The evidence presented by the prosecution left no room for doubt. One of the murderers hated Brianna because she was trans, and he used dehumanising and transphobic language during the planning of her murder. Her isolation, the killers agreed, made her an easier target. One of the murderers wanted to know whether she would scream like a boy or a girl when they stabbed her, and wanted to see her genitals.

    The murderers’ sentencing took that into account; it was a hate crime, fuelled in part by transphobia.

    The response to this has been predictably awful. One of the most prominent famous-author-approved “gender critical” figures turned to Twitter to blame Brianna’s mother, misgendering the girl, sexualising her and calling her mother “evil”. That post was liked by prominent anti-trans authors and journalists.

    Rishi Sunak took time out from making anti-trans jokes in cabinet, overseeing the Tories’ ongoing assault on trans healthcare and human rights and answering Prime Minister’s questions with “but he doesn’t know what a woman is!” to cry some crocodile tears.

    The Telegraph, among other papers, gave one of the murderers the attention she craved by posting not her mugshot but a glamour shot of her on its front page. After all, what’s sexier than a young woman who murders a tranny?

    There have been some lone voices of sanity. Zoe Williams wrote a compelling piece in The Guardian arguing that “Trans people have been used instrumentally as a muster point for the right, and the far right, in media and in politics, and this has concrete, foreseeable results.” But that piece is an outlier from a paper whose own contributors were happily liking that tweet calling Ghey’s mother “evil”.

    The response to the transphobic murder of a young woman has largely been a single, chilling fact: as far as the “gender critical” movement is concerned, the murder of Brianna Ghey is nothing more than inconvenient PR. In some circles – the circles that urge trans kids on social media to “KYS”; the circles that demand the removal of trans kids’ healthcare; the circles that demand schools out trans students, misgender them and isolate them; the circles that speak politely but genocidally about how trans people are “a huge problem for a sane world” and that their numbers should be “reduced” – this is a win.

    For a few days, some of the papers will take it easy on trans people. Brianna’s murder will sell papers; having helped promote the intolerance that got Brianna killed, they’ll spend some time now profiting from it. But in a few days, when the horror has begun to fade, they’ll go back on the attack. Trans lives only matter to them if they can be monetised – and the cash is in calling us demons or crying crocodile tears over our coffins.

    Update: Mic Wright’s piece on the coverage is well worth your time.

  • Faking the news

    There’s an excellent example of how newspapers create and maintain moral panics in the Sunday Times today, when Camilla Long notes with horror that:

    One school in Wales has written to parents saying it will not be providing “litter trays” for children “who identify as cats”.

    The reason for the letter was to debunk the idea that any children were identifying as cats, an anti-trans internet fiction enthusiastically spread by, er, The Times and The Sunday Times on multiple occasions.

    For example: “reports last week of a girl identifying as a cat”, 24 June 2023; “a litter of teenagers who self-identify as cats have begun stalking [a] town”, July 10 2023; “A friend of mine who runs a nice little café was surprised one day to see an adolescent girl enter his establishment, dressed from whiskers to tail as a cat… the girl identifies as a cat, Mum and Dad [explained]”, 24 December 2023. And so on.

    As I’ve written before, there is a horrific grain of truth to the story: some schools do indeed have litter trays in classrooms. Those schools are in America, where litter trays are provided in case a child needs to go to the toilet during an active shooter drill or active shooting.

    Like most anti-LGBTQ+ bullshit, the “kids are identifying as cats” story was fabricated by the right-wing press – in this case Fox News, before being amplified by Turning Point UK (a hard right pressure group) and GB News. It then spread via The Telegraph, the Daily Mail, LBC and, inevitably, The Times and Sunday Times. It was then picked up by beleaguered PM Rishi Sunak who condemned “schools [that] are allowing children to identify as cats, horses and dinosaurs.” None of those things happened.

  • Death should be the end

    There’s a joke I like about technology companies, first posted by Alex Blechman:

    Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

    Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus

    Like the best jokes it’s funny because it’s true: all too often, tech firms care about whether they could do something rather than whether they should. Which is how a supposedly AI-generated comedy routine by George Carlin, who died in 2008, came to be made.

    I say “supposedly” because the whole thing seems awfully fishy. But what’s definitely true is that some people have created a Carlin sound-a-like, and it’s awful. Ed Zitron:

    AI-Carlin’s jokes feel like they were generated by feeding transcripts of his real work into a generative AI, with the resulting CarlinGPT bot prompted by Sasso and Kultgen and its outputs heavily edited. 

    If this was entirely written by humans, it is even more shameful, both in how terribly unfunny it is and how little they understand Carlin’s work.

    Finding bad examples of AI isn’t difficult: significant parts of the internet seem to be using it to create overly bright images of improbably breasted young women with waists so tiny that if they were real women, they’d snap. But I think there’s one example that is so bad you’d think I’d invented it, and it’s about this painting by Keith Haring.

    The painting is called Unfinished because, as you can see, it’s unfinished. That’s deliberate, because it was the final painting of Haring’s life: the unpainted section represents the many lives lost to AIDS. He died the following year.

    A few days ago, an AI user finished it.

    I thought it was a joke, but it doesn’t appear to be. Somebody has used generative AI to complete the painting, to fill in the space and to remove  the very thing that makes it so meaningful and so powerful. The fact that the AI has produced shoddy work is almost irrelevant, because of course it did. The whole exercise is a classic example of someone who could do something, but who should not do it.

    In electronic publishing, a plague of crap AI-generated content is an unintentionally ironic echo of Orwell’s 1984, in which a key character works “in the Fiction Department [in] some mechanical job on one of the fiction-writing machines.”

    She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor… She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the final product. She “didn’t much care for reading,” she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.

    And it’s not just art. Serious people are spending serious money to create AI versions of people, so that in the not too distant future you’ll be able to converse with an AI chatbot that mimics the voice and the speaking mannerisms of your favourite dead loved ones so that you can attempt to cheat the Grim Reaper – something we’ve seen described many times over in literature, rarely with a happy ending attached.

    Rather than building machines to simulate storytellers, tech evangelists might be better off reading some of them. They might want to start with W W Jacobs’ story The Monkey’s Paw.

  • A terrible echo

    In 2016, every major political party in Scotland stood on a platform that included gender recognition reform. The Scottish Government then threw the issue open to public consultation in 2017 (and again in 2019), during which social and mainstream media – with significant input from genital-obsessed weirdos – repeatedly lied about the proposed legislation, demonised trans people and defamed them as dangerous to children. Gender recognition reform has still not happened.

    In 2021, every major political party in Scotland stood on a platform that included banning conversion therapy. The Scottish Government then threw the issue open to public consultation in 2024, during which…

    If anything, the vitriol around this consultation is even worse. Although it’s largely coming from the same people as before there’s no pretence of “reasonable concerns” this time. Just constant abuse online and ridiculous evangelical claims of the “ordinary parents will be jailed for seven years” variety.

    Any time the rights of marginalised people are thrown open to the public, those consultations are flooded by bigots and misrepresented by the conservative press: whether the rights of trans and non-binary people in Scotland, women in Ireland or gay couples in Australia or Romania, consultations have repeatedly been used by the religious and far right to demand the that marginalised people receive worse treatment and have fewer human rights than they enjoy.

    If the majority wanted marginalised people to have equality, we wouldn’t need to legislate something so basic as protecting young people from treatment the UN defines as torture. We shouldn’t have to ask permission from the very people who deny us those basic rights.

  • Who pays

    The newsletter publishing platform Substack has a Nazi problem: specifically, it publishes, promotes and makes money from actual Nazi newsletters as well as the more media-trained faces of far right propaganda. As ever, trans people have been trying raise the alarm about the platform for years: it’s where some of the most vicious, abusive and hateful anti-trans bigotry is published, with Substack taking a hefty cut of all of it. In some cases, bigots’ Substacks are the primary source of their income, generating large sums from which Substack takes a 10% cut.

    As a high profile critic of the platform’s support for the world’s worst people, Jude Doyle’s writing attracted a response from the firm’s CEO – and the offer of a lucrative publishing deal if he were to stop pointing out the genuine harm Substack helps pay for. Doyle said no, telling the CEO:

    If you have money to invest in me, then you have money to create and enforce a content moderation policy, stating that you do not host or fund content that promotes hate speech and/or targets marginalized groups.

    But Substack has no interest in doing that. It’s making too much money from hatred.

    Substack’s response to accurate and measured criticism – effectively, “we don’t like Nazis but we like their money so fuck you” – has led a lot of people to demand creators stop using the service. And while I understand why – I won’t pay for a Substack for the same reasons – I also understand why many creators are loath to leave.

    The problem for many people who publish on Substack is a problem we’ve previously seen on other platforms, including Twitter. It’s enabled people to establish an audience and in some cases a career, and that means leaving could cause financial harm to people who abandon the platform. Even if other platforms were morally pure, and very few of them are, the people demanding moral purity from their newsletter creators are rarely the people who will be financially harmed by it.

    In addition, many of the people being urged to quit are marginalised people – the very people who can least afford the financial hit.

    I’ve experienced this myself. I quit writing for a particular publisher over its support for bigots, a decision that cost me about £1,000 in lost commissions a year. I left another media organisation for similar reasons, passing up something close to £4,000 a year. I’ve turned down work from other outlets because I don’t share their values. And I don’t have an active presence on Twitter any more, which has damaged my networking and no doubt cost me work too. And while I’m okay with those choices, it hasn’t made a damn difference to any of those platforms because I’m completely insignificant to them.

    Writing on her Substack, Cathrynne Valente explains it very well.

    It is exhausting just trying to exist with any level of moral consistency online nowadays. And the people who keep being handed the keys to several kingdoms don’t ever bother to worry about it. They just let us tear ourselves apart trying to do the right thing while they feast. It’s all a game to them. It’s not remotely a game to us. So there’s no equivalence.

    Take social media for example. If you leave Twitter for a smaller social network, abandoning the network you may have spent more than a decade building, where do you go? Threads? Its current moderation is just as bad as Twitter’s, enabling nazis and transphobes to abuse people without consequence. Bluesky? It doesn’t have a Nazi problem purely because it’s too small so far, and it’s very clear that the platform creators aren’t very interested in protecting their users from bad actors. And so on.

    So for many creators, it’s far more complicated than “this place is bad and you should quit”: if almost everything is a bad choice, then by removing your voice from a particular platform you’re letting the bigots win. The bigots thrive, the platform continues. The only person who suffers anything negative is you.

    Valente:

    I don’t want to support the Badness by being here. And yet, if I go, does that not just abandon another space because bad people are also here, handing them control of yet another hugely-recognized platform, control they could never achieve on their own just on numbers and popularity, while the people who have any moral compass whatsoever have to continually start over from scratch?

    Which one helps the goblin horde more, staying or going?

    There’s a famous cartoon in which a man says “we should improve society somewhat” and another man pops up to say “Yet you participate in society! Curious! I am very intelligent.” And that’s a pretty good description of the discourse around some of this stuff.

    There are lots of things that are very wrong with tech platforms. Facebook has been complicit in genocide; Instagram (owned by the same company) in the rise of the anti-vax movement. Twitter, pre-Musk, was instrumental in the rise of the far right and in stirring up racial and anti-LGBTQ+ hatred. And that’s just off the top of my head. It’s not impossible to work only on ethically pure platforms. But it’s close to impossible if you want to be where most people – your friends, your colleagues, your readers, your listeners – are and communicate with those people.

    Like Valente, I don’t know what the answer is on an individual level: in the absence of group action, we’re powerless. For now I’m comfortable with the choices I’ve made, because I’m in the fortunate position of not having to choose between having a conscience and having a roof over my head. But I also realise that that’s a luxury that others don’t necessarily have. Many of us think we should improve social media somewhat, yet have to participate in social media.

    Update, 9 January: Substack now says it will remove some, but not all, Nazi newsletters. Reports on social media suggests the total number of removed newsletters is… five.

  • How we got here

    Jude Doyle is always worth reading, and his latest piece for Xtra Magazine is a good analysis of how a handful of powerful people have effectively destroyed US media’s ability or inclination to battle the far right. It’s written from the perspective of a trans person because, as is so often the case, trans people are the canaries in the coal mine.

    The impact of these platforms has not just been to spread bigotry, but to flood the field with junk, to make social media gossip and un-fact-checked blog posts the main vector for information—to make it harder to know what is real. In an emergency, you need to know where the exits are, but at least half of the signs you’ll read in 2024 are lying to you. 

    It is always in the best interests of the powerful not to have a robust press that can hold them accountable.

  • Papers please

    The right-wing press wasted no time in starting 2024’s Tory-fuelled attacks on trans people: on New Year’s Day both the Mail and the Telegraph ran scaremongering articles supporting Kemi Badenoch’s desire to roll back trans people’s rights by several decades.

    This time the target is our passports, which the Telegraph claims have a “loophole” that enables us to change our gender markers that is “self-ID by the back door”. Except it isn’t a loophole and it isn’t self-ID. We’ve been able to change our passports with a note from our GP since the late 1940s (anecdotally) and definitely since the 1960s: April Ashley changed her passport in this way in 1961. It’s standard procedure.

    What Badenoch and her acolytes are doing here is presenting something utterly ordinary and uncontroversial as a sudden sinister threat; in the 70-odd years that trans people have been changing their passports this has never been abused by either a trans person or a cisgender man pretending to be trans. But as ever, the intention here isn’t to protect anybody. It’s to stir up hatred and chip away at our legal protections and rights.

     

  • Rectal research

    A new report by Policy Exchange, the right-wing think tank whose job is to give the Telegraph and Daily Mail some scary headlines and rubber-stamp whatever hateful policies the Tories want to bring in, is a great demonstration of what I’ve seen described as “rectal research”: the report’s supposed facts have clearly been pulled out of the author’s arse.

    The report pretends to be an analysis of trans participation in sport, but it’s nothing of the sort: the figures it presents are complete fiction. For example, it claims that there are 527 trans women and 61 trans men participating in professional rugby; the correct figure is zero, as trans people are banned from the sport; before the ban there were fewer than 10 trans people taking part. It claims that there are nearly 9,000 trans people competing in professional swimming; again, the real number is zero. It claims nearly 500 trans competitors in athletics; the correct number is, again, zero.

    The best example of this rectal research is in cycling, where it claims that there are over 4 million men and over 2 million women taking part in the sport: not riding for fun, but competing professionally. That’s ludicrous, as is the claim that there are over 16,000 trans athletes competing in the sport.

    Update, 31/12: A number of people, including Vivian Wulf on Twitter, have investigated the source of the cycling numbers because they’re so clearly nonsense. The figures are taken from the Active Lives survey by Sport England, which wasn’t about elite sport: its cycling numbers tell you how many people used a bike at least twice in one month for more than ten minutes for the purpose of leisure, travel or sport. Policy Exchange took the number of positive respondents, multiplied it by the estimated proportion of trans people in the UK, and published it as supposed proof of a trans takeover in competitive cycling. 

    In total, the Policy Exchange report claims that tens of thousands of trans women are competing professionally in sport. Given that the UK census – which anti-trans groups say overestimates the number of trans people in the UK – reports that there are 166,000 trans women in the UK, that would mean somewhere between one-seventh and one-fifth of all trans women are professional athletes.

    It’s complete fiction, but it’s doing its job: it’s being reported in all the press as if it’s a credible document rather than the fever dream of anti-trans bigots, and those reports will be cited in future as proof of the entirely invented trans takeover of professional sports.

    Once again, the brave and fearless British press proves Humbert Wolfe correct:

    You cannot hope to bribe or twist
    thank God! The British journalist
    But seeing what the man will do
    unbribed, there’s no occasion to

  • Islands in the streams

    Most of my tech writing these days is news reporting, but from time to time I get to write something a little more reflective. Here’s a piece on how streaming services have persuaded me to get back into buying music I can touch.

    I think streaming is like a fast food drive-through, serving up cheeseburgers that are quick, cheap and convenient. And that’s great; it meets a need, satisfies a craving. It fills a hole. But food can be so much more than just fuel, and music can be so much more than Muzak. 

  • Just the facts

    Since around 2017, it’s been very clear that if you hate trans people you can make up any old shite and have it printed or broadcast without anybody fact-checking it before, during or afterwards – and as a result, many anti-trans activists have taken full advantage of that to spread absolute bullshit with impunity. So it’s refreshing, albeit years overdue, to see some fact checking finally take place.

    Irish newspaper The Journal did some fact checking of a claim made by anti-trans obsessive Graham Linehan on Newstalk radio. According to Linehan, if you search the crowdfunding site JustGiving and look for people crowdfunding top surgery, there are “nearly 38,000 girls” raising money for surgery.

    The actual number of fundraisers is 38.

    What the Journal has done here is not difficult, but despite fact-checking being fundamental to good journalism it’s incredibly rare: there continues to be an assumption that contributors are coming in good faith, an assumption that is widely abused by endless bad actors. Their success should shame the journalists, editors, presenters and producers who’ve let them get away with it so publicly for so long.