Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Distress

    NHS England is starting to use a new term in regard to trans people, and particularly trans and non-binary teens who kill themselves over lack of treatment and NHS support: gender distress. That’s not the term used in existing medical literature – that’s gender dysphoria, and more recently gender incongruence. And the reason the new term has been coined is to muddy the waters and imply that these dead kids suffered from a pathological condition.

    As Sarah Clarke put it on Bluesky: “Young people who died with gender distress” just sounds so much nicer and cleaner than “Trans kids we drove into a state of suicidal despair”.

    There is such a thing as gender distress, as Talia Bhatt explains in this excellent thread. But it’s not something that exists within us. It’s something that’s imposed on us. Bhatt:

    Existing in a body that doesn’t feel like your own, whose contours and workings and machinery feel foreign to you no matter how long you’ve inhabited them, *is* distressing. Maddening, even. What’s worse is knowing who’s keeping you there.

    What’s worse is friends and family and loved ones letting you exactly what the limits of their love are, that you could be the same person, but will be treated as dead or alien if you choose to change the things about yourself you like the least. What’s worse is this being normalized.

    What’s worse is having to confront, day after day, the powerlessness of your position as doctors, legislators, parents, anyone in a position of authority over you bars you from doing the one thing you need to do the most. Making it clear that you don’t own your own body. It isn’t yours to claim.

    …People have the gall to locate the resulting distress entirely within trans people ourselves, as though we are ticking time bombs of hysteria rather than utterly dehumanized, unpersoned, abject PEOPLE, who are doing our best to keep it together in a world that wants to own our most intimate aspects.

  • Demons, daily

    Researcher Lee Hurley tracks anti-trans articles in the English press, and the totals are in: in the last year alone, just three English newspapers – The Guardian, The Daily Mail and The Telegraph – ran 1,075 articles about trans people, almost all of them anti-trans. So if you’re a reader of any of those papers, you’re being sold an anti-trans story every single day.

    It’s a horrendous statistic but if anything it underplays things: just yesterday The Sunday Telegraph ran five anti-trans articles in a single edition. And the Scots press is similarly obsessed.

  • A tale of two ERs

    The Pitt has become one of my very favourite shows. It’s a hospital-set drama with a huge heart, originally conceived as a follow-up to the 1990s series ER in which Noah Wyle played a young doctor. Unfortunately – or fortunately, given the result – ER writer Michael Crichton’s estate nixed that so Wyle created a stand-alone series instead. This time around Wyle plays a grizzled veteran who’s trying very hard to keep it together while under incredible pressure. He’s fantastic, as are the rest of the ensemble cast.

    There’s a minor story in The Pitt featuring a transgender woman, and it’s really interesting to compare that with the trans storylines in ER. Because ER’s portrayal of trans and intersex people was vicious.

    [Content warning: slurs]

    Writing on Tumblr, Brin (aka Brinconvenient) describes multiple episodes of ER featuring trans, intersex and gender non-conforming people. The first, ER Confidential, was broadcast in November 1994. Brin goes into detail for that episode but to summarise: the trans woman is played by a cisgender man, she’s treated with disgust and hostility by the show’s stars, and she’s called a slur by one of the nurses. Her story arc ends with her jumping off the roof of the hospital because she’s too old and too mannish to be a believable woman.

    Brin was 16 at the time.

    Just think of the message this episode sends. Are you a young trans kid? Better transition while you’re young or not at all, because you’re on a clock – you have an expiration date. If you transition later, you’re just going to look like a man in a dress, everyone will clock you, everyone will find you disgusting, and they’re right too. You’ll get called names, you’ll get the barest modicum of tolerance, if you’re lucky, and even then, you’ll be kept at arm’s length.

    And hey, if you get old? Or older, really, because you don’t even have to be THAT old, then your life is over. It’s best just to kill yourself instead of not passing.

    I was an ER watcher too. So I got that message loud and clear – not just in that episode, but several times.

    There were plenty more examples.

    over 15 seasons, 331 episodes, ER had a total of 5 explicitly trans women and one explicitly intersex women (and zero trans or intersex men).

    None of them have a happy ending.

    As Brin says, “the general cis idea of trans people is informed by all of these Sad, Angst, Tragic Trannies ™”, and while things have got better we’ve had decades of this stuff in popular culture (I go into a lot of examples of that in both of my books). Other shows were just as careless/callous: for example NYPD Blue, another show I watched religiously, consistently showed trans people as sex workers, dead sex workers or ludicrous caricatures, had the star characters insult and misgender those characters, and titled a 2003 episode about the murder of a trans sex worker “Tranny Get Your Gun“. This was considered completely normal and entirely acceptable.

    I don’t know if Noah Wyle set out to try and do better now than his character did in ER. But The Pitt gets right what ER consistently got wrong.

    First of all, the trans woman is played by a trans woman (the luminous Eva Everett Irving). Tasha is a glamorous, likeable and fun character, a sommelier to the rich and famous. She’s not in the ER because she’s trans; she’s in the ER because she’s got a nasty cut on her hand. The hand is fixed, the deadname on her file is quietly corrected by one of the medical students, and she’s off again to her glamorous life. She’s not there to make the main characters sad, or to be a tragic figure. She’s just another patient.

    That shouldn’t be remarkable. But sadly, it is.

  • Welfare for losers

    Ben Collins, owner of the satirical newspaper The Onion, summed up the anti-trans movement beautifully this week: it’s “welfare for losers”. He was talking about the latest example of the grift: amateur fencer Stephanie Turner, who ostentatiously refused to compete with a trans woman in a tournament. Taking a knee, Turner said: “I am refusing to fence you, because I am a woman and you are a man.”

    Just days before, Turner competed in, and beat multiple men in, a mixed tournament.

    Mixed tournaments are commonplace in fencing because it’s a sport of skill, not strength.

    “It will probably, at least for the moment, destroy my life,” Turner lied to Fox News after accepting her first grift payment, a $5,000 “courage award” from the anti-trans XX-XY Athletics.

    Turner is not an elite athlete; she’s a 31-year-old amateur competing in low-level events and her best days are probably already behind her. But as failed swimmer Riley Gaines demonstrates, it’s very easy to turn sporting mediocrity into a six-figure salary by demonising trans women on behalf of the evangelical right. As Ben Collins says, it’s welfare for losers – and it pays exceptionally well.

  • Bring the noise

    I don’t consider myself a pushy parent; I’m quite keen on finding out who my kids are rather than telling them who I expect them to be. But I think we all have ambitions for our kids, such as wanting them to be happy, and kind to others, and kind to themselves – and if they can also share some of our taste in music and books and comedy, that’s a bonus. So for example I love that both of my kids love The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, and R.E.M., and the same sort of stupid humour that cracks me up too.

    I was also really pleased that both of my kids are interested in making music as well as listening to it. And that lasted right up until they started making music noisily and frequently in my house: guitar for my eldest and drums for my youngest. They’re getting very good, but it’s loud – and it’s loud in a house that’s usually silent, because I can’t work when there’s music playing or speech radio in the background.

    The noise is karma, cosmic payback for all the years I spent making a bleeding racket in my own family’s home, a racket so bad that I could make my mum wince three decades later by referencing one of the songs. I think mum would find that funny.

  • Identify the author

    Stop me if you’ve read this before.

    Sadly, one of the most prevalent forms of child abuse facing our country today is the sinister threat of gender ideology. Proponents of the gender ideology movement are outrageously indoctrinating our children with the devastating lie that they are trapped in the wrong body – and that the only way they can be truly happy is to alter their sex with hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and sexual mutilation surgery. The evil and backwards lies of gender insanity are robbing our children of their happiness, health, and freedom, while imposing unimaginable heartbreak on parents and families.

    Was this in The Times? The Scotsman? The Daily Mail? The Telegraph? The Daily Express? The Herald? Spiked? The Courier? The Observer? The Guardian? The Spectator? Unherd?

    Nope. It’s the latest hateful, bigoted bullshit tirade from the misogynist sexual predator Donald Trump. The fact that it could have been lifted wholesale from one of hundreds of UK newspaper columns shows what monsters so many of our columnist class have become.

  • A troubled Adolescence

    (Contains spoilers for the TV drama Adolescence).

    Like many people I was gripped by the Netflix drama Adolescence, which tells the story of a teen murder victim. Except as Jude Doyle points out, it doesn’t tell you very much about the victim at all.

    While it’s beautifully shot and features some incredible performances, it’s a story that wants you to feel sorry not for the murdered girl, but for the family of her murderer – and to some extent, for the murderer. And as soon as you realise that that’s what it’s doing, it becomes a very different and much less successful piece of television.

    Doyle makes a good argument that the drama is ultimately superficial (which perhaps explains why the Labour government is so keen on having it shown in schools, despite the show itself pointing out the uselessness of showing videos to bored and fractious teenage boys).

    It’s uninterested in engaging with the darkness it purports to be exploring to any significant degree: it throws in a few signifiers about the “manosphere” of online misogyny, but it doesn’t engage with the reality of it or the fact that misogyny is not something that was invented by social media, a “a weird Ringu-style Internet curse that happens if your son gets too much screen time”. Male violence of the kind portrayed in Adolescence is what you get when your society tells men that they are entitled to control women and their bodies. And god knows, that’s not a message that men are only just encountering.

    With one key exception – which Doyle praises, and writes about in detail – there are hardly any female characters, and the ones that do appear are woefully underwritten; the teenage girl whose murder is at the centre of the drama is barely a cipher.

    Doyle:

    “making a miniseries about Toxic Masculinity and only focusing on male characters is like making a miniseries about Hitler and only focusing on his painting. It’s not until you see who’s getting hurt, and how badly they’re hurting, that you get the point.”

  • Another stitch-up

    Today’s papers are giving lots of space to The Sullivan Review, the latest anti-trans stitch-up initiated by the previous government under the banner of “kicking woke ideology out of science” and amplified by the current Health Minister. Transactual:

    Prof. Alice Sullivan is a prominent anti-trans activist and advisory group member of the leading anti-trans lobby group, Sex Matters, notable for her work on UK literacy. The report also contains legal advice written by the husband of the Chair of the Sex Matters’ Trustee Board, Naomi Cunningham, and research was commissioned for the review to an organisation led by fellow member of the Sex Matters’ advisory group Lucy Hunter Blackburn.

    Here’s data expert Kevin Guyan:

    The DSIT and UK Government, researchers, funders and public bodies need to recognise this Trumpian intervention for what it is: an attempt to erase trans and non-binary people from existing in data.

    It, the Cass Review and the forthcoming Levy Review of adult healthcare are all part of the same project: to drive trans people out of public life in the UK.

  • Stateless

    There’s a powerful piece in the New York Times by Massa Gessen: The Hidden Motive Behind Trump’s Attacks on Trans People. It argues that the Trump administration’s war on trans people has a goal, which is to “denationalise” trans people.

    The message, consistent and unrelenting, is that trans people are a threat to the nation. The subtext is that we are not of this nation.

    By making people “not of this nation”, you can remove all of the rights that apply to citizens of that nation.

    We’re seeing exactly the same playbook here in the UK, partly because it’s being orchestrated by the same people and seeded via the press in the same way: an attempt to make trans people a group who are excluded from society, undeserving of the rights, freedoms and protections others enjoy.

    Messe could make the familiar argument here – comparing the Trump administration to the Nazis and arguing that “if you don’t stand up for trans people or immigrants, there won’t be anyone left when they come for you” – but chooses not to:

    It is undoubtedly true that the Trump administration won’t stop at denationalizing trans people, but it is also true that a majority of Americans are safe from these kinds of attacks, just as a majority of Germans were. The reason you should care about this is not that it could happen to you but that it is already happening to others. It is happening to people who, we claim, have rights just because we are human. It is happening to me, personally.

  • I’m book of the month

    The excellent literary magazine Gutter has made Small Town Joy its book of the month for March 2025, and given it a really nice review.

    “An absolute treat to read… This whole book feels like a mixtape lovingly assembled by a friend’s cool, knowledgeable older sister.”