My publisher, 404 Ink, will be closing their online shop on 30 June – and until then you can buy all their books for just £5. Naturally I’d recommend Carrie Kills A Man and Small Town Joy, but there are many more excellent books as well as the fantastic Inklings series. Fill your boots (with books)!
Author: Carrie
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Two lies
Helen Belcher for Byline Times on the two lies being pushed by the EHRC:
The position the UK now is in is driven by two big basic lies. The first is that the Equality Act was actually an act which excluded trans people from single-sex services and spaces aligned to their lived in gender but that the courts, Parliament or the EHRC, had somehow not noticed this until last year. The second lie is that trans people are always identifiable, and when they aren’t, they’re intentionally deceptive.
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Queerphoria starts today
I’m delighted to be one of the contributors to Queerphoria, a new anthology of queer writing from Verve Books. £1 from every copy sold goes to Switchboard LGBT+. The eBook is out worldwide from today and the UK print edition comes out on 25 June. It’s getting rave reviews from readers and from publications such as DIVA, and it’s a genuinely excellent anthology with a huge range of voices.
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This is what oppression looks like
Brynn Tannehill on fiery form in Public Notice:
One of the most popular and profitable grifts in the world of the religious right and MAGA is the production of propaganda to convince Christians that they are horribly discriminated against, or even oppressed, by the government and government funded entities.
…This victimhood narrative is central to their identity. But it also raises the question: would they recognize what actual oppression looks like?
Sadly the article is just as relevant in the UK.
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17,000 articles to make a moral panic
Seventeen thousand articles were published about so-called ‘trans issues’ by just four British newspapers in five years, according to new research from Amnesty International UK.
The four newspapers – The Sun, The Times, The Guardian and The Telegraph – mentioned JK Rowling 106 times in their coverage, with 202 mentions of a prime minister or political party leader.
Trans people themselves were mentioned by name just 24 times. Sixteen of those mentions were murdered teen Brianna Ghey, and eight were convicted rapist Isla Bryson.
Most of the media reports in the four newspapers, between 2020 and 2025, had a negative sentiment about trans people. When trans people were mentioned in reporting it was as criminals or murder victims, the research found.
The same report found that the number of anti-trans groups dedicated to attacking trans rights had increased from 3 in 2017, when gender recognition reform was first mooted and widely supported, to 51 today. Three of those groups have spent £3.6 million between 2019 and 2024.
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“The most aggressively anti-trans developed democracy in the world”
“A very small group of very well connected people, funded by international fascism, have decided that trans identity is, at best, a delusion that has been tolerated for far too long. In the space of a few years they have been able to reorder our society and politics to effectively segregate them.
…This is not a hypothetical. You are less free now. Your security, dignity, and safety is in the hands of nasty, petty, monumentally stupid bigots. They can take it from you at a whim.”
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Foxes in the hen house
TACC has answered an important question: how did the EHRC Scotland suddenly become hostile to the trans people it’s supposed to protect? The answer, at least in part, is that a high profile anti-trans activist became one of their commissioners. As with the English EHRC, the body has become captured by “gender-critical” activism.
TACC:
it is difficult not to draw the obvious conclusion: that the appointment of Mandy Rhodes – a political commentator by background, with absolutely no stated experience or expertise in the field of equality or human rights, but with a prolific, half-decade+ output of anti-trans articles in the mainstream media – was entirely designed to serve the ideological objectives of a captured EHRC.
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Excellent ebooks for even less cash
My publisher, 404 Ink, is running a promotion where you can get 50% off their ebooks – including Carrie Kills A Man, Small Town Joy and Fierce Salvage. They were all bargains at twice the price.
There are lots of really great books in this deal but you’ll need to move quickly, as 404 are closing down the ebook shop at the end of May.
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The Office for Students learns a lesson
The High Court has reversed the Office for Students’ (OfS) decision to fine Sussex University over half a million pounds for supposedly suppressing free speech (ie, not stopping people from criticising a vocally transphobic academic). The verdict is damning and makes it very clear that the OfS was operating from a position of blatant bias and a desire to set a chilling precedent: the OfS had a “closed mind” and a predetermined strategy.
As the University put it in a statement:
The Court’s judgement is a comprehensive vindication of that position. It is a devastating indictment of the impartiality and competence of the OfS, implicating its operations, leadership, governance, and strategy. It raises important and urgent questions for the government as it plans to grant ever more powers to the regulator.
The High Court found that the OfS erred in law in respect of its jurisdiction, in its interpretation of the law, and its understanding of freedom of speech and academic freedom, and that its process was fatally flawed by bias in the form of predetermination.
It’s important to understand that this is not a case of the OfS making a mistake. The OfS did exactly what the Conservative government wanted it to do, under the guidance of its head who was put in place specifically to wage a culture war on higher education. Exactly the same thing has happened in the BBC and EHRC and NHS, which is why those organisations have become the enemy of multiple marginalised groups. The Tories’ Kemi Badenoch boasted about doing this, but the current Labour government has done nothing to undo any of it. If anything, they’ve been even worse than the Tories.
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One death would be too many
This is a hard read: Trans people are dying of suicide more than the general UK population. And UK government policy, which is to deny trans kids healthcare, to underfund mental health provision and to push people into conversion therapy, is a key reason why that’s the case.
Data obtained by freedom of information request from the National Child Mortality Database (NCMD) shows that between 2019 and 2025, there were 647 child suicides in England and Wales. Of these, 107 children were LGBTQ+ and 47 of those were trans – meaning that trans children make up 43% of LGBTQ+ suicides of under 18s, and 7% of all child suicides over this time period.
…“Inquests into the deaths of young trans people have consistently exposed years-long waits for gender-affirming healthcare, and chronic under-resourcing of mental health and social services that leaves trans people without access to support they need,” says Deborah Coles, director at Inquest, a charity that campaigns on state-related deaths. “It is clear that too often, the deaths of trans people are preventable. We are at crisis point.”