Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Author: Carrie

  • A system that harms instead of helping

    Writing for Queer AF, Ludovic Parsons has written an excellent history of the UK’s severely broken system of trans healthcare. It’s a tale of a system built to control people rather than help them, a system that even today considers trans people a problem to be solved rather than people who need healthcare. And it also demonstrates yet again that trans people are not a fad that began in 2015: the first UK gender clinic for the NHS was established in 1966, two decades after the first sex change surgeries and four decades after the development of synthetic hormones for trans people.

    While the most brutal part of the history of British Trans+ healthcare has passed, the intent to control transition remains. The NHS Trans+ healthcare system is built on rotten foundations, still excluding many people from its criteria for transness. Its existence overlooks the fact that transitioning is a personal decision and a matter of bodily autonomy – like using contraception or having an abortion. 

    There’s nothing complicated or special about our healthcare, but because it’s segregated from mainstream healthcare and stuck in a neglected corner of mental health services – a throwback to a less enlightened age when being trans, being gay or being a feminist was considered a mental health problem – it isn’t fit for purpose. Any service whose current clearance rates suggest a waiting list of 224 years, as is the case for Glasgow’s Sandyford clinic, is broken beyond repair. As Parsons says:

    The gender clinic system is structurally flawed, working not for Trans+ people’s health and wellbeing but against Trans+ existence itself.

  • Yet another medical fraud

    NHS England has banned the prescription of hormones to 16 and 17 year olds, formalising a policy that already existed in practice, and as with the Cass Review they’ve committed medical fraud to justify a ban based on ideology rather than evidence. The review of evidence they undertook excluded almost 97% of studies from inclusion, because those studies demonstrated that hormone treatment is effective, necessary and sometimes life-saving care for trans people. The review then claimed that there wasn’t sufficient evidence that HRT was effective.

    Former Conservative equalities minister Kemi Badenoch has made it very clear that people were put in important positions to target trans people’s rights and healthcare: “gender-critical men and women in the UK government, holding the positions that mattered most in Equalities and Health.” The Labour government could and should have reversed this, but have chosen to double down on harming trans and non-binary people instead.

    Since the puberty blocker ban was introduced, at least 46 trans and non-binary children have taken their own lives.

    They will come for adult healthcare next.

  • A tax on women’s sports

    British athletes have been told they’ll have to pay £185 out of their own pockets for compulsory sex testing if they want to compete internationally, but only if they’re women: men don’t have to do the tests. The goal is to ensure that trans women and women with DSDs (disorders of sexual development, such as being intersex) aren’t allowed to compete.

    Blanket sex testing like this was scrapped in the 1990s because it was discriminatory, unscientific, humiliating, unethical and racist, but the bigots have brought it back and to add insult to injury they’re making women pay for it. This, apparently, is feminism.

  • “This is how the line gets crossed”

    There’s a piece in Politico urging the media to stop normalising the far right.

    The BBC’s reporting style, for example, is all too often shaped by internal guidelines and a collapsing vision of performative neutrality. This was clearly demonstrated in coverage of the death of 23-year-old Quentin Deranque in France two weeks ago, with a report that described Deranque as a “far-right feminist” — a phrase that invents a political category no serious politics course anywhere in the world would recognize. Far-right politics and feminism come from fundamentally different traditions and pursue fundamentally different aims.

    The testing ground for this was the anti-gender movement, which is an anti-feminist movement against women’s reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy that came from the Catholic church. It may use the language of feminism to attack LGBTQ+ people (trans women first, but the entire rainbow is in its sights), but it’s not about protecting women’s rights; it’s about women as property. And yet the media has mainstreamed it as feminism. This is how the far right gets in.

    Politico:

    Every uncritical mention of far-right rhetoric is an editorial decision with political consequences. Every headline, every clip, every click adds weight. This is how the line gets crossed. And how some media are no longer just covering the far right but helping it speak.

  • The biggest loser

    There are lots of entertaining things about the Greens winning the Gordon and Denton by-election, but perhaps the funniest is the disastrous performance of the vocally transphobic Conservative candidate. Cadden, a trustee of the anti-trans lobbyist/lawfare group Sex Matters who co-founded and chaired the anti-trans police group Police SEEN UK, got just 1.9% of the vote and lost her deposit. It’s the worst Conservative by-election result in history.

    The bigots may seem popular because they have hundreds of obsessively posting Twitter accounts, god knows how many bots and the entire media amplifying them. But despite all that noise, Cadden got just 706 votes. The proudly trans-supportive Hannah Spencer got 14,980.

    Twitter bots and sock accounts don’t vote.

  • The trouble with Twitter

    A new paper in Nature (PDF document here) confirms what many of us already knew: it acts as a radicalisation engine, shifting people’s political views permanently to the right.

    By using an algorithmic feed – where X decides what you see rather than the chronological feed of Bluesky – and comparing it to people using a chronological feed for 7 weeks, the study found that the former “increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine.”

    We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects.

    This cesspool is where the UK’s entire political and media class spend their time.

  • The outrage factory

    Jessica Kant’s analysis of the anti-trans outrage factory is well worth your time.

    …any attempt at accuracy or veracity has gone completely out the window, with a chillingly familiar trend towards the bombastic that has led to pogroms at other times in history… why do conservatives believe that we’re everywhere, hiding in the bushes? Because powerful people won’t stop claiming it’s true, even if evidence to the contrary is everywhere.

  • The nasty party wears a red rosette now

    Dr Ruth Pearce has written a very good overview of Labour’s new Section 28, proposals that “seek to erase trans children: through extreme restrictions on social transition, toilet and sports bans, and censorship of the word “trans” itself. Like Section 28, they will most likely also create a wider chilling effect, reducing support for lesbian, gay, bi, and gender-nonconforming young people as well.”

  • “Shroud wavers”

    Hilary Cass, author of the disgraceful and damaging Cass Review into trans teens’ healthcare, told The Times in 2024 that “What is worrying is when people say that if children don’t get these drugs, they will die, because clearly that’s not true”; it was “irresponsible for people to shroud-wave in that way.”

    Thanks to a freedom of information request we know that removing gender-affirming care from trans teens in 2021, which NHS England did in the aftermath of the (very dodgy and later overturned) Keira Bell case, led to a surge in teen suicides.

    5 trans children killed themselves in England in 2019/20; 4 trans children killed themselves in 2020/21; and in 2021/22, when gender-affirming care was first shut down, 22 trans children killed themselves.

    Correlation does not necessarily imply causation, of course, and people kill themselves for all kinds of reasons. Maybe it was the healthcare. Maybe they were bullied. Maybe their families treated them terribly. Maybe it was some or all of those things combined in a climate that’s increasingly hateful towards trans people. But there is plenty of evidence that the anti-trans panic kills children and will continue to do so. The self-appointed “protectors of children” have blood on their hands.

  • Thousands of imaginary children

    In 2022, The Times reported that the Tavistock gender clinic was going to be sued by thousands of families whose children “claim they were rushed into taking life-altering puberty blockers”.

    The story, while widely circulated and repeated, was never true. It couldn’t be: that number would mean almost every young person referred to endocrinology at the Tavistock would be suing. In fact, the number of families suing the clinic through the law firm quoted in the story is zero, as a new freedom of information request reveals.

    This is just the latest in a very long list of stories that were clearly bullshit from the outset. I suspect the people who wrote those stories were well aware of that.