Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Illegal, immoral, hateful

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At 10pm on Friday night the equality and human rights committee published an interim update – not guidance, let alone statutory guidance – about trans people’s access to services and facilities. The document is not law, makes no sense, and flies in the face of settled law. But the goal is to persuade people that the law has changed, and that they should act immediately to ban trans people from public facilities.

It’s nonsense. It says that trans people should be excluded from the toilets that match their gender, but can also be excluded from the toilets that match their assigned sex at birth. It says that gay men’s choirs shouldn’t include trans men, and that lesbian book clubs shouldn’t include trans women.

It’s a sadistic fantasy written by people put in place specifically to wage war on trans people and trans women in particular as part of the Tories’ “war on woke”. In a fairly short period of time the Tories changed the EHRC from an independent human rights watchdog to an arm of the government, with many senior officials quitting in disgust. It now works closely with anti-trans pressure groups for the removal of trans people’s legal protections.

To illustrate just how ridiculous and hateful things have become: in 2016 the UK government issued a travel warning for North Carolina and Alabama over their newly implemented anti-trans bathroom bans. Today, the UK government is being urged to, and seems inclined to, implement even more regressive bans here.

There’s incredible outrage over this among people who aren’t trans and who know bigotry when they see it, although inevitably it’s not being reflected in the UK press. But the Irish Examiner’s Séamas O’Reilly puts it very clearly.

Let us speak as adults. Despite being around 0.5% of the population, trans people have spent the past decade being attacked in one of the most flagrant moral panics ever perpetrated on the British public.

Spread in the name of a “feminism” centred on a small, committed group of active transphobes backed by the entire might of British politics and media, including every misogynist you can name; either because they share this gut-level hatred of trans folks, or simply because it serves their political interests to heap sadism on a vulnerable minority, instead of addressing the multiple overlapping crises that face the British public, and in which they are directly complicit.

The only way any of the absurdities of this ruling make sense, is if its aims are exactly what they appear to be: A punitive attack on the rights and dignity of trans people divorced from any real-world concern about safety or women’s rights, designed to demoralise and punish them simply for the crime of existing.

If this madness is signed off by Labour it guarantees a kicking in the EU courts, because it’s a clear breach of EU-wide human rights legislation. But it will really harm lots of people in the interim. Not just trans people, but anyone who attracts the wrong kind of attention from self-appointed bathroom bouncers.

Few MPs and MSPs care about trans people’s human rights and safety. But they care about staying in power. And that means you can put pressure on them by making it clear that this horrific bullying of marginalised people needs to stop.

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