Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Media

Journalism, radio and stuff like that

  • Kitty litter

    The UK cat panic continues, with journalists who absolutely know better now offering cash for people to tell lies. This was posted, widely mocked and deleted earlier today.

    Offering money for stories is considered a bad thing in journalism, because as columnists’ drivel endlessly demonstrates, people will say any old shit for money. As a result cash for personal stories is usually the preserve of supermarket trash such as Love It! with their endless and invented tales of ghosts, murders and serial killers. But this request is for a supposedly reputable national newspaper.

    I almost feel sorry for Helen here, because she became today’s main character on Twitter. But I don’t, because what she’s doing is hoping to get paid for stirring up hatred against trans kids and their healthcare providers. The made-up story about kids identifying as cats is the right-wing’s infamous only joke, “I identify as…”, weaponised, and Carroll is offering cash for people willing to lie about it in print.

    The story is a hoax, and everybody reporting it knows it’s a hoax. Shame on them, and on the people who lap it up.

  • From despair to where?

    Earlier today I wrote a post about the newspapers claiming that trans kids are identifying as cats, horses and the moon, a classic piece of demonisation straight out of the classic text Folk Devils and Moral Panics.

    This morning, Elon Musk – whose trans daughter has cut all ties with him, and whose wife apparently left him for a trans woman – claimed that the word cis or cisgender, which is to transgender what heterosexual is to homosexual, is a slur that will get people who use it banned from Twitter. Twitter has no such concerns about actual slurs or threats of violence against trans people or their allies. While Musk was preening to his blue-tick sycophants, I received some Twitter report updates letting me know that actual death threats I’d reported on the service were not in breach of the Twitter rules.

    This afternoon, it leaked that the long-delayed UK ban on conversion therapy – aka torture – will have a consent clause, so if you’re coerced or bullied into being tortured then that will remain perfectly legal.

    The US evangelical right’s colonisation of our politicians and press is more evident than ever, and their strategies couldn’t be any more obvious.

    One of the bigot brigade’s favourite strategies is what far-right goon and Trump strategist Steve Bannon called “flooding the zone with shit”: you put out so much misinformation that your enemy simply can’t fight back against it. It takes much more effort to clean up bullshit than to spread it.

    Elon Musk knows “cis” isn’t a slur; he doesn’t care, either. He’s doing exactly what Sartre described 1940s anti-semites as doing.

    Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

    Toni Morrison famously wrote that the purpose of white racism was to wear Black people out.

    The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

    It’s the same with the demonisation of other minorities. Trans people (and the wider communities we’re being used as a wedge to attack) are under constant assault on multiple fronts: in the courts, in the infiltration of school and health boards, in the pages of the press, over the airwaves and on social media. Endless airtime is given to people asking “what is a woman?” and discussing the fever dreams of bigots, a constant discussion about us by people who know nothing about us – and who care even less.

    When the moral panic against folk devils like you is stripping trans kids and adults of their healthcare, when people feel emboldened to call you predators and paedophiles simply for existing, when hate crimes are rocketing and you’re more scared of the outside world than ever before, how do you feel anything other than despair?

    Writing in Slate, Evan Urquhart says what many of us think: “Just a few years ago, it felt as though the lives of queer Americans were steadily improving… it’s different now.”

    It’s a provocative piece, and deliberately so. And it’s very much where my head is too, because while I’m not directly affected by what’s happening in places such as Florida I can see the tide crossing the Atlantic, as it has been doing for the whole time since I came out as me. Interviewee Ryan Campbell puts it very well:

    “I try to hold on to the idea that hate burns hot, but it burns out,” Campbell said. “I think things will probably continue to get worse for a bit. This is a thing that will rise and fall, but in the meantime, people are getting hurt now.”

    There’s a lot here that resonates strongly with me.

    When I was a child, in the late ’80s, I remember first learning that being gay was something bad, and understanding what gay meant well afterward. “Transgender” didn’t exist in my world growing up as that type of human being, but I saw the crude stereotype of a man in a dress as something to laugh at and as something frightening, a predator. As a trans person, my understanding of myself was crippled, distorted by confusion, doubt, shame, and self-hatred. As I came to accept myself, first as a queer woman and then later as transgender, I came to hope that children wouldn’t need to grow up like I had.

    …The loss of that promise comes hard. 

    The shock for me wasn’t that some people hate us, or that some of the most hateful will incite violence against us and campaign against our rights. No. What shocked me was that nobody cares. We told our peers what was happening. We showed them the bad actors – the religious extremists, the fascists, the grifters – telegraphing their plans like movie villains. We predicted every step of the process, from the reasonable concerns to the refocusing on the wider LGBT+ community and women’s reproductive freedom. And the response was… nothing.

    We raised the alarm and nobody came.

    Urquhart:

    For many in the queer community, we’ve moved well past the point of fearing something might happen, and on to figuring out how we’re going live through this. Our despair is grounded in grim acceptance and practicality. We are learning that life goes on after you accept the fact that no help is coming, and you’ve been left alone to defy or defend or escape, or just bear witness.

  • Don’t have kittens

    We’ve been in the “making shit up” stage of the anti-trans culture war for a while now, but this story takes the biscuit: the completely invented tale of a school pupil identifying as a cat has moved from the Telegraph and the Independent into Radio 4, because our media is hopelessly broken.

    Imagine calling yourself a journalist or editor and writing or publishing this as a news story.

    The student in question is in Year 11, but began using the pronoun “catself” in Year 9 “when the whole thing with neo pronouns started”, the pupil said.

    She described how lessons could be completely derailed if a teacher attempted to get the child to reply to a question in English rather than meowing.

    It took three Telegraph writers to write that, presumably with crayons.

    What’s particularly bad about this is that there’s audio of the supposed event, and that audio demonstrates that all the reports about it are lying: it’s a recording of a child being bullied. And nobody seems to care, apart from Mic Wright. He writes:

    Now the Mail, along with The Times, and The Telegraph — the three central pillars of anti-trans coverage in the UK — are pretending the story is about a child identifying as a cat rather than two students picking on another student by comparing their gender identity to “[identifying] as a cat or something…”

    [writers and editors know] that there was no child “identifying as a cat” and the claim that the teacher reprimanded students for not accepting the other student’s feline identity is totally in bad faith.

    The cat-child is an urban legend beloved of anti-trans campaigners, and it’s made the press in various guises in the US, Australia and the UK. Every single time, it’s been complete bollocks. The origin is simple and sad: a few years ago it was revealed that in the aftermath of a school shooting, one US school started keeping cat litter as part of its terrorist kit: in the event of another shooting, the litter would be helpful because kids trapped in an ongoing attack would be able to go to the toilet.

    But that’s not all. Our schools are also packed with children identifying as horses, dinosaurs and the moon. Except, of course, they aren’t.

    The Daily Telegraph does not have extraordinary evidence, it has anonymous sources, obvious horseshit, and an ideological motivation to push this story.

    What we’re seeing here is a particularly clear example of how the bullshit pipeline works. I actually posted about it on Twitter, only to be proved right about ten minutes later:

    The danger of that Telegraph article, as ever, isn’t that its few readers will believe the made-up story. It’s that it launders hate group propaganda into the mainstream. It’s sitting on a BBC researcher’s desk right now as a possible phone-in discussion or news item.

    Ten minutes later, I discovered that they were talking about it as if it were a real news story on the Today programme.

    Here’s the pipeline in action.  First of all an anti-trans pressure group invents a story and passes it to a tame journalist in the right-wing press, who is perfectly happy to print absolute shite if it enrages the readers.

    That newspaper then makes its way to the BBC, where it becomes an item on the Today programme and gets the attention of politicians and other media outlets.

    That in turn circulates the made-up story more widely, encouraging the right-wing press to push the story more with a little bit of help from rent-a-gob MPs. And before you know it, the Prime Minister is promising to take action against something that didn’t happen, doesn’t happen and won’t ever happen – action that will likely cause very real harm to the very real people the anti-trans pressure group concocted the whole story to attack.

  • A flower in concrete

    On a morning where the Prime Minister of Great Britain is caught on video making shit jokes about trans women to chortling MPs, and the government publishes guidance for schools urging teachers to out trans kids to their parents, something that can’t possibly have any negative results, it’s important to take your wins where you can. So this piece in The Observer is a welcome corrective to that paper’s near-constant transphobia, not least because it’s been promoted online by some senior Guardian/Observer writers who haven’t drank the bigoted kool-aid.

    The piece itself, by Kathryn Bromwich, is perfectly sensible and reasonable. So naturally her name was soon trending on UK Twitter as the usual avalanche of abusive arseholes descended on her, as they do to any woman who dares to say publicly that trans women are not the enemy of cisgender women.

    Here’s a quick extract from the piece.

    Excluding anyone on the basis of biological difference demonstrates a spectacular failure of empathy; worse, it reduces women to their reproductive systems, which is surely something we should be trying to move on from.

    If women are united by anything – and there are 3.8 billion of us, so there is going to be little common ground – it is the risk of sexual violence, from which no woman is safe, especially not trans women. No rapist is going to stop to check whether you have fallopian tubes. The fact that we are all targets of this particular kind of violence should only increase cis women’s solidarity towards our trans sisters.

  • Panic! At the newspaper

    I wrote about moral panics in my book:

    When I was younger, there were moral panics over heavy metal records and the board game Dungeons & Dragons; the former allegedly contained backwards messages to worship Satan and/or kill yourself, and the latter was accused of pretty much everything. Similar panics occurred around video games, the Harry Potter books, the urban legend of Killer Clowns and so on.

    I’ve lived through other moral panics too, including the Satanic Panics of the 1980s and 1990s and the attempts by the Keep The Clause campaign and campaigners against equal marriage to persuade people that gay, lesbian and bi people were dangerous predators.

    The problem with moral panics is that while the subject is fictional, the damage the panic does is not. And it can spread far beyond the original subject of the panic too. Scientific American on the current anti-trans panic:

    The anti-trans laws send a message that nonreproductive sexuality, reproductive health and bodily autonomy are not acceptable. Ultimately this tells a story about who has power: if we can erase trans people then we can erase anyone; if we can remove gay books we can remove any book; if we can silence drag queens, we can silence you.

  • History revealed

    It’s well known – well, well known outside anti-trans circles – that trans people were targeted by the Nazis; the famous book-burning photograph that pretty much everybody in the world has seen was taken in 1933 when Nazi thugs looted the Institute of Sexology and burnt its research into trans and gender non-conforming people. However, like most people aware of this I thought that trans people were targeted not so much because they were trans, but because as far as the Nazis were concerned trans and gay were the same thing.

    That’s partly true, but not wholly true. It turns out that some trans people were indeed targeted, and murdered, simply because they were trans.

    This horrifying piece in The Conversation is about how scholars are uncovering more details about how trans people were treated by the Nazis. It isn’t a fun read.

    The author of a 1938 book on “the problem of transvestitism” wrote that before Hitler was in power, there was not much that could be done about transgender people, but that now, in Nazi Germany, they could be put in concentration camps or subjected to forced castration. That was good, he believed, because the “asocial mindset” of trans people and their supposedly frequent “criminal activity … justifies draconian measures by the state.”

    There are some very clear parallels with present-day anti-trans activism and politicians, and not just because Neo-Nazis keep turning up at anti-trans rallies. It’s because othering and oppressing marginalised groups is what fascism does: it tells you that group X is a conspiracy, that their very existence is a threat to your nation, your women and your children. It calls them a virus, a contagion, dehumanises them and demands their elimination.

    This is something the academic and writer Judith Butler tried to express in an interview with The Guardian in late 2021, only for the relevant sections to be deleted after publication.

    You can read the deleted sections in full here, but here’s an extract:

    It is very appalling and sometimes quite frightening to see how trans-exclusionary feminists have allied with rightwing attacks on gender… The anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times. So the Terfs will not be part of the contemporary struggle against fascism… we are living in anti-intellectual times, and neo-fascism is becoming more normalized.

  • Careless talk costs lives

    Casey Newton is one of the smartest people writing about technology, and this piece – the platforms give up on 2020 lies – is absolutely chilling. It’s about social networks’ reversal of their disinformation policies and their new unwillingness to censor dangerous content. As ever, Elon Musk is in the mix.

    One function Musk now serves in the tech ecosystem is to give cover to other companies seeking to make unpalatable decisions. Across a variety of dimensions, Musk has moved fast and loudest — and when others have followed, the response has been barely a whimper.

    Mass layoffs, stricter job performance requirements, a war on remote work, paid verification for social accounts — all of these served as a kind of aphrodisiac for other Silicon Valley CEOs, who proceeded to implement their own, slightly softer versions of Musk’s cultural reset.

    Most recently, Twitter’s decaying policy and enforcement systems have proven to be enticing for other social platforms.

    We’ve known for a very long time that unchecked, unregulated media can easily become a disinformation machine, a sewer full of the most poisonous propaganda. Here’s Jonathan Swift back in 1710.

    Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…

    And of course, the Big Lie was at the heart of Nazi strategy too. We know how this works: not so long ago Facebook was a key vector of hatred that lead to the Myanmar genocide. Social media is a powerful thing, and all too easily becomes a powerful weapon.

    Newton:

    We are in for an ugly time. And should the worst happen, I hope we remember this: the moment when tech platforms, having briefly banded together to do the right thing, looked each other in the eye and one by one all gave up.

    It’s no coincidence that just yesterday we saw violent thugs attacking parents outside a Pride Month school board meeting in California while social media influencers incite violence against LGBT+ people, their families, their supporters and their healthcare providers; I really hope I’m wrong, but I think this year’s Pride Month is going to have a body count – and social media will have played a huge part in making that happen.

  • Satanic

    According to Media Matters, in the last seven days Fox News has given airtime to two stories about protecting children.

    The first story was the false allegation that Target was selling “satanist kids’ clothes” as part of its Pride merchandise. Fox News gave that two hours and twelve minutes.

    The second story was the horrific revelation that in Illinois, between 1950 and 2019 nearly 2,000 children were sexually abused by Catholic priests. Some 450 priests were revealed as abusers.

    Fox gave that story 22 seconds.

  • Diamonds in the mud

    The UK edition of The Guardian and its Sunday sister The Observer is openly transphobic and effectively the house magazine of the “gender critical” mob; as Trans Writes reports, during its recent diversity and inclusion events a group of senior writers and editors discussed their plans to push anti-trans narratives “fearlessly” in front of an audience of around 120 employees. But despite their best efforts, sometimes The Guardian still manages to publish good journalism about trans people.

    Most of that journalism happens in the US edition, whose writers once wrote an open letter condemning the UK Guardian’s transphobia. Here are some examples:

    Republican attacks on trans people smack of fascism – Robert Reich

    Conservative attacks on US abortion and trans healthcare come from the same place– Moira Donegan

    But sometimes a lone voice manages to get something sensible published in the UK edition, and that lone voice is usually Zoe Williams. I’ve long admired Williams’ writing, and I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to be a lone voice of sanity in an increasingly deranged organisation.

    Her latest article, why are trans rights in prison so rarely defended?, is very good.

    I also thought the furore was in such obvious bad faith that it would fizzle out: anyone with a sincere interest in the welfare of women in prison would also be interested in a host of other things, from staffing levels to self-harm and suicide, from mental health to the fallout post-Covid. The same year that White committed some of her offences, 2016, saw the highest number of female deaths in custody on record. If your only documented interest in the female prison estate is in transgender prisoners, surely it would be obvious that your real beef was trans rights, and your campaign would gain no momentum? That turned out not to be true.

    One of the points that Williams makes in her piece is that the danger of trans prisoners has been massively and constantly exaggerated: of the 97 sexual assaults in women’s prisons between 2016 and 2020, just seven were perpetrated by trans prisoners. What her article also said, but didn’t make it into print, is that five of those assaults were perpetrated by the same person. So this entire panic, which is being used to suggest that all trans women are dangerous to all women, focuses on just three people and ignores the much wider problem of women’s safety in prisons. Not only that, but since those three attacks, the rules have been changed.

    Since the prison regulation on trans prisoners was reformed in 2019, (which made it more difficult for those convicted of any violent crime to switch between estates) there have been no assaults by trans prisoners on women in prison. It seems pretty obvious that if the majority of sexual assaults in the women’s estate are committed by prisoners who are not trans, then a relentless focus on trans prisoners is not going to keep women safe.

    But as with the rest of the anti-trans panic, none of this is about facts; it’s about scaremongering and othering trans people.

    it just didn’t occur to me that the behaviour of trans prisoners would be used to tarnish the characters of all trans people and call into question their legitimacy in any single-sex space. You simply can’t infer anything broader from the behaviour of inmates: they are an outlier population. That’s why they’re in prison.

  • Spoil the child

    The idea that parental love is unconditional is just that: an idea. The reality is often much more harsh, especially for LGBT+ kids: although by most estimates only around one in 10 people are LGBT+, nearly one-fifth of all young homeless people are LGBT+. 69% of those kids have experienced violence, abuse or rejection from the family home.

    Multiple studies report that attitudes to LGBT+ people are improving in the general population, but that’s not much consolation if your mum, dad, stepdad or stepmum is one of the dwindling number of homophobic parents. And it’s even less consolation if you’re trans or non-binary, because understanding and acceptance of trans and non-binary people still has much further to go. Rates of domestic abuse and violence from family members are significantly higher for trans and non-binary people.

    As trans researcher and author Julia Serano puts it:

    Almost without exception, parents never expect that their children are transgender. And that disbelief may persist for a very long time.

    I think that’s common. In a workshop with parents carried out by Healthtalk.org, parents described their feelings when their trans or non-binary kids came out to them; many parents say they were surprised and shocked, fearful for their kids’ futures; some didn’t believe it was even possible for a young person to be trans.

    There’s a whole bunch of stuff going on here. Fear’s the biggie, because to be trans, even now (and especially now in some parts of the US and UK) is to go through life on hard mode. There’s fear that they’re making a huge mistake, that they may be discriminated against or face violence, that they may undergo treatment they might later regret… all the obvious stuff. And for many parents this is both frightening and new, because the information most people have about trans people is sketchy at best and a pack of lies at worst.

    So there’s fear. But there’s also guilt; one of the big questions my mum asked when she’d got used to me being trans was whether she’d been the cause of it. I was able to reassure her that being trans doesn’t work like that, but I recognise the feeling: whenever my kids are unwell, I agonise over what I might have done to cause it or what I should have done to prevent it. And that’s just when they have a tummy bug, not gender incongruence.

    And there’s another horrible emotion: shame. Here’s Jonathan L. Tobkes, M.D, writing in Psychology Today.

    I remember that when I discovered that my son was gay, I felt shame. I was not ashamed of him, but I thought his orientation might cause outsiders or friends to criticize our family. I did not want our family to be seen as “different.” If we were regarded as having a child, who is a member of a minority group now, I thought that this new definition could be a source of shame.

    While the stigma around having a gay kid is lessening, once again understanding and acceptance of trans kids is far behind.

    So let’s imagine you’re a parent of a young boy or girl. One day, out of the blue, they tell you that they’re non-binary, or maybe trans. What do you do?

    Let’s assume that you’re not the kind of parent who’ll respond with violence, with abuse, or by throwing your kid out on the street. I think for a lot of parents, your initial reaction is going to be disbelief. This is a bombshell; there were no signs. And maybe all you know about trans kids is the shite that’s in your newspaper: trans people were invented on social media in 2017. It’s a phase, a fad, attention-seeking.

    So you go online, and you look for people to confirm what you believe: that your child is not non-binary; that your child is not trans; that no child of yours could be anything other than cisgender and heterosexual. And if you go online, you’ll find it.

    Welcome to the anti-trans parent movement.

    A huge amount of anti-trans stories are based on the testimony of or activism by parents who frequent a handful of websites, and who are absolutely convinced that their children are not non-binary or trans. Many of those parents swap tips on how to completely isolate your child from their friends and how to bully them into recanting. A handful will tell you it’s a conspiracy by paedophiles, Big Pharma and the Jews. Some, whose children are now adults, talk about how their child, and sometimes their friends and family too, no longer talks to them.

    The Julia Serano quote towards the top of this article is from her piece about those websites, and it’s typically well researched, interesting and frightening.

    Some parents come into these groups with strong pre-existing views on trans people (e.g., social conservative or GC/TERF), while many others are initially trans-unaware and simply seeking answers in the wake of their children coming out to them. Either way, because these online communities tell parents exactly what they want to hear (“your child isn’t really trans, they’ve just been influenced by an insidious outside force and we can help you dispel it”), many find these spaces and the misinformation they propagate to be quite compelling.

    The (made-up) theory of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria was invented on one of those sites, and the paper that attempted to legitimise it drew solely from users of the same website. The websites, as Serano puts it, are “steeped in science denialism and distrusting the medical establishment.” The most infamous were created as a backlash to older websites that helped parents learn how to understand and support their children; the anti-trans ones were created for the much smaller number of parents who don’t want to understand and don’t want to offer support.

    The menu available to you, a concerned parent, starts with misinformation and disinformation and ultimately leads to torture: some of the better known sites guide parents to practitioners of dangerous and discredited conversion therapies (described as “torture” by the UN) or offer advice on how to bully your kids without outside help.

    Serano’s article is an excellent guide to how the sites operate, how they recruit and radicalise parents and how those parents then spread their message through mainstream media. And I think a lot of what Julia writes about is pretty universal.

    I have never met a trans person whose parents weren’t surprised when they first came out. Trans people who were overtly gender nonconforming as children are told “we just thought you were gay.” I know trans people who insisted that they were really a boy or really a girl from a young age (only to be disaffirmed by their parents at the time) and who, upon coming out as trans as adults, their parents still acted shocked. I know trans parents who were surprised when their own children came out to them as trans.

    Given that surprise and disbelief, it’s not a shock that many parents are easy marks for the anti-trans obsessives and their associated crowdfunding grifts.

    Despite what you read online, most people who come out as trans or non-binary do so because they’re trans or non-binary. Kids who are experimenting with their gender expression are not necessarily trans (and are unlikely to do more than dress differently, change their haircut and try on a different name, all of which are of course easily undone), but kids who are insistent, consistent and persistent about being trans very rarely backtrack. Adults who undergo gender reassignment surgery – surgery that in the UK, only adults can access and which typically requires years spent languishing on ever-growing waiting lists – have a regret rate that’s incredibly low. The number of trans people who regret surgery/transition is vanishingly small – less than 2% – and of that number, most of the people who go back to their gender assigned at birth do so not because they aren’t trans or non-binary but because their world is incredibly shitty to trans and non-binary people. Most detransitioners will ultimately retransition and stay transitioned.

    That’s not to say that some kids don’t get it wrong. Of course some do. But very, very, very few. And if you start paying attention to media reports about detransitioners, you’ll soon notice that despite claims that there is an epidemic of detransition, that thousands upon thousands of people regret transition and have retraced their steps and will be suing their healthcare providers in huge numbers any day soon just you wait, you only ever hear about the same two or three people – people who, like the ex-gays of previous decades, just so happen to have strong links to social and religious conservative groups; Potemkin villages of gender.

    But the truth is not something that crusading journalists “just asking questions” about trans people want you to read. Serano:

    But when journalists only tell the parent’s side of the story, or when they pit a parent’s trans-skeptical account against that of their trans child — implying that the former likely “knows better” than the latter — that should be a giant red flag for audiences.

    And when articles and news stories mention trans-skeptical parents “seeking support” and finding “like-minded voices” online, that’s almost always a sign that said parents are involved in or interacting with the anti-trans parent movement.