Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Author: Carrie

  • Cass: MMR all over again

    I think in years to come the Cass Review, and the media’s complicity, will be viewed in much the same way as Andrew Wakefield’s infamous MMR scare and its promotion by Private Eye and UK newspapers. Unfortunately like Wakefield, it will continue to harm people until and long after it’s been fully discredited and its author a pariah.

    One of the countries who provided supposedly expert guidance to Cass was Finland, whose Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala was on the Cass advisory board. Dr Kaltialia has testified in favour of banning trans-related care in Florida and a new report by Assigned Media reveals the horrific abuse and medical malpractice carried out by her gender clinics. The Cass Review has multiple other links to anti-trans activism.

    The British Medical Association has now announced it will review the Cass report and has made some mild criticisms of it already, and the bigots are furious – which makes you wonder what it is they’re so scared of. After all, if the Cass Review is so scientific, the BMA review will just confirm that. Right?

    There is already a very long list of Cass Review critiques, which have repeatedly demonstrated that this was an ideological project. Dr Ruth Pearce has been tracking them on her website and it’s already quite the collection. Even if you do as Cass did and ignore the voices of trans healthcare experts as biased, it’s hard to argue that the Endocrine Society or the American Academy of Pediatrics are trans activists. But then, this was never about listening to the experts.

  • A sperm donor, not a dad

    Update, 26/7: Vivian, Musk’s estranged daughter, has given an interview to NBC: “if you’re going to lie about me, like, blatantly to an audience of millions, I’m not just gonna let that slide.” 

    Elon Musk has given an appalling interview to the appalling Jordan Peterson in which he demonises and deadnames his trans daughter, claiming that she is the reason he’s become a far right nutcase. I’m paraphrasing, but only slightly. It’s nonsense, of course: Musk, who grew up the rich son of a racist family in apartheid-era South Africa, and whose factories are famously cesspools of racism, was right wing long before he had children.

    I didn’t catch the name of the author but a post I saw earlier today made me laugh because it was both funny and accurate: a significant part of right-wing ideology can be summarised by two phrases, “my wife left me” and “my kids don’t talk to me.” Musk ticks both boxes: not only is he estranged from his trans daughter, but his long-term partner dumped him for a trans woman.

    I don’t doubt that his daughter’s very public estrangement – she made it clear in her court documents that she did not want to be associated with him in any way whatsoever – and his equally public break-up made him angry towards trans people and trans women in particular; spending billions of dollars on Twitter to turn it into an anti-trans hate machine is not a choice made with a cool head.

    Musk’s ongoing, obsessive campaign of revenge – a campaign that threatens not just the safety of trans people but all marginalised people – is one of the most expensive and destructive temper tantrums in human history, and it is all about rage. It’s the rage of a parent whose child won’t do what they’re told, the fury of a patriarch denied the obedience they demand.

    By choosing to exercise her own independence and her own bodily autonomy, Musk’s daughter did the one thing he can’t abide, let alone forgive.

    She said no.

    No to the path Musk mapped out for her.

    No to the life Musk decided she should live.

    No to the body Musk wanted her to have.

    No to being property instead of a person.

    Like so many weak and furious men before him, Musk’s impotent rage has sent him straight into the arms of the far right. He no longer flirts with fascism; he’s in bed with it.

    Transphobia is often fascism’s nursery slope, its training wheels, the shallow end of its swimming pool. It’s the bigotry you begin with, the intolerance it’s generally okay to express – and when you get even the gentlest pushback for it, which of course you will, that’s when the real radicalisation begins. The far right does what it accuses its enemies of: it grooms you and builds an echo chamber around you and radicalises you ever further.

    The appeal of the far right to weak, angry men like Musk isn’t hard to understand: it tells you that nothing is ever your fault. It’s a fantasy of victimhood, of DARVO – deny, accuse, reverse victim and offender. It enables the most powerful people in the world to claim oppression by the least powerful and turns that power against the powerless, all the while chanting the abuser’s anthem: look what you made me do.

     

     

  • Hypocrisy

    The Daily Mail, as I’m sure you’re aware, has spent many years now demonising “cross-sex hormones” and the people who take them for reasons such as not wanting to die.

    This is from tomorrow’s front page.

  • Ignore the experts

    There’s a good piece about the puberty blocker ban in The Guardian by Aidan Kelly, a doctor, in which he explains how we’ve ended up in the farcical situation where fashion writers, bigoted journalists and arrogant celebrities are considered experts in trans healthcare but clinicians and prestigious medical organisations are not.

    In this area of healthcare, like no other I know of, the professionals with the requisite expertise are positioned by their critics as having been “captured by ideology” and therefore lacking in credibility. Meanwhile, those without the expertise are positioned as “independent”, which critics argue makes them better able to evaluate the evidence – despite having never worked in the field and having no understanding of its complexities.

    This simply wouldn’t happen in any other kind of healthcare, but in the UK the entire discussion has been given over to people who get their information from Twitter. Which perhaps explains why there’s been virtually no reporting on the international condemnation of the Cass Review from health professionals, or of the extensive analyses that demonstrate that the government is prioritising ideology over evidence in its healthcare policies.

    There’s a good overview here, from the US organisation FAIR:

    Though there is much more evidence now to support gender-affirming care than in 2008, there is also a much stronger anti-trans movement seeking to discredit and ban such care.

    British media coverage has given that movement a big boost in recent years, turning the spotlight away from the realities that trans kids and their families are facing, and pumping out stories nitpicking at the strength of the expanding evidence base for gender-affirming care. Its coverage of the Cass Review followed suit.

     

  • Whitewashing

    If it weren’t so horrific it’d be funny: to counter whistleblowers’ claims that since the puberty blocker ban more than 16 young people on waiting lists have taken their own lives, the new government hastily commissioned a report to disprove their claims by, er, discounting the deaths of people on waiting lists.

    The report’s author follows many anti-trans activists and anti-trans journalists on social media (but not, as far as I can tell, any trans-supportive voices) and, as Professor Stephen Whittle points out, “makes no count of those lives [lost by people] on waiting lists, or [of] coroner’s reports or deaths reported in the media. That is not academic, it is a whitewash.”

    It’s very clear that despite the change of government, there has been no change of policy: dead kids are just collateral damage in this lethal culture war.

  • Losers

    This has been one of the most dispiriting elections I can remember; rather than voting for anything, a lot of people were voting against the Tories. And it was particularly dispiriting for LGBTQ+ people like me: of the seven candidates on my ballot paper, five of them were from parties who are a danger to trans people’s rights and healthcare – whether ideologically in the case of Alba and the tories, or cynically in the case of Labour. In the closing stages of the campaign, Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting both enthusiastically embraced transphobia in a very obvious attempt to woo the genital-obsessed weirdo vote.

    What’s particularly saddening about it isn’t the betrayal, as bad as that is. It’s that it was completely unnecessary.

    As in other countries where transphobia has been on the ballot, it proved last night to be a vote loser. Most elected transphobes are currently looking for new jobs; the few that remain saw a massive collapse in their share of the vote and their majorities.

    Single-issue anti-trans extremists lost their deposits in every single constituency they stood in, with few even achieving the same share of the vote as Phin “Barmy Brunch” Adams of the Monster Raving Loony Party, a man with a baked beans mask on his head who promised to Make Brunch Great Again.

    The extremists claim to be the voice of the majority. But the polls, and the votes, say otherwise. I really hope that of the lessons Labour will have learnt from last night, that is one of them.

  • “Where are the commentators?”

    There’s a good piece in today’s National by Caitlin Logan on the issues that real feminist groups are campaigning on while faux-feminists have been scaremongering about trans people.

    Logan identifies key issues including inequality in the social security system – inequality that means by 2027 the average income of women will have dropped by 7% compared to 3% for men – and inadequate statutory maternity pay; inflexible working patterns; and the severe issues that affect immigrant women.

    Where is the Labour Party on these issues? Where are the commentators, anxiously debating the state of women’s rights because of this bleak picture? Where are the journalists, asking political leaders – again and again and again – what they plan to do about it?

    With crushing inevitability, the very first comment on the online article is a dismissive one from an anti-trans man, part of the same pattern that comes up again and again when women are being patronised or worse by genital-obsessed weirdos; the overwhelming majority of “gender critical” posters are straight men.

  • Distraction

    A new study by researchers at Loughborough University has found that women’s issues have been largely ignored in this election campaign, with women rarely given a media platform to discuss women’s issues unless they’re demonising trans people.

    There was an example of this just this week, when BBC News published a front-page story asking what each party had to say about women’s rights. It didn’t discuss women’s rights at all; just what the parties had to say about trans women.

    And as ever, whether that’s malice or incompetence doesn’t really matter; by distracting people from the very real issues affecting women and girls, and the growing threat to their healthcare and rights from the political and religious right, it’s doing an excellent job of keeping women marginalised.

    There’s a good letter in today’s Herald newspaper by Gemma Clark, a dedicated campaigner for women’s rights.

    There are urgent women’s rights issues being completely ignored while the political discourse centres on the gutter politics of body parts and bathrooms. Neither the Labour nor Tory manifesto mentioned abortion, which is rather shocking given the uptick in women and girls being charged with so-called ‘illegal abortions’.

    Rape conviction rates remain so low that it is effectively decriminalised. Labour will not commit to undoing the two-child benefit cap (also known as the rape clause). People wait years for a diagnosis of endometriosis. Maternity care is in crisis. Schools are in crisis, particularly in Glasgow, where school communities face teacher staff cuts on a scale we have never seen before. Only yesterday I watched a checkout operator struggling to remove the security cap from a container… it was a container of baby formula. We are living in a country where people are having to steal to feed their children.

    And instead of talking about this, politicians and the press constantly distract from it with a completely manufactured panic over trans women. People are being silenced for sure, but they aren’t the highly privileged people cosplaying as victims on the front page of our national newspapers with the full support of the Prime Minister and Rupert Murdoch.

  • Facts checked

    The US advocacy group GLAAD just published an absolutely blistering fact-check of a very biased New York Times article that was yet again scaremongering about trans healthcare for teens, part of an ongoing panic that the paper has been fuelling for 16 consecutive months.

    Among the key points is a staggering statistic. The number of trans teens getting gender-affirming surgery in the US, the subject of the endless why-oh-why articles in the NYT, is around 514 per year. The number of cisgender teens getting gender-affirming surgery, which includes operations such as breast reduction or breast enhancement, is 229,000 per year. And yet the NYT is not running any articles about that.

    That’s not the only detail in the GLAAD response. It points out, using much more temperate language than I’d manage, that the supposed expert quoted by the NYT is a shill for the Alliance Defending Freedom whose testimony has previously been thrown out of court because he has no expertise whatsoever in trans-related healthcare. And the writer of the piece has been called out again and again for sloppy journalism that appears to be driven by an anti-trans agenda.

    We don’t have GLAAD in the UK, but a post doing the rounds on social media currently names the key anti-trans writers who’ve been pushing the moral panic here – a panic that’s been implicated in the deaths of at least 16 people. And when you see them listed it’s notable how many of them are friends with one another; it’s saddening to see how few people it’s taken to wage war on trans people and open the door for the extreme right.

    As someone put it on social media, you could pretty much end the UK media trans panic by poisoning the cocaine at just one dinner party.

  • Not an experiment

    One of the lies genital-obsessed weirdos like to push is that trans-related healthcare is new and experimental, so much so that it must be heavily regulated or better still, banned altogether. But trans healthcare is old. Puberty blockers have been prescribed for four decades, and trans surgeries have been performed since the 1910s.

    This BBC report suggests it’s even older than that, going back thousands of years. But while that claim is a bit of a stretch the article does make the important point that while there is a real problem with trans healthcare, it’s not the one the weirdos claim: it’s that trans people have to battle to get even basic healthcare and in some cases are simply refused it. The article was written before the current anti-trans moral panic really kicked into gear and made trans healthcare even harder to access.

    This piece, by Julia Serano, is an excellent round-up of trans healthcare from over 100 years ago to the present day. It’s not an entirely happy history:

    Throughout the mid-twentieth century… skeptical doctors subjected trans people to all sorts of alternate treatments — from perpetual psychoanalysis, to aversion and electroshock therapies, to administering assigned-sex-consistent hormones (e.g., testosterone for trans female/feminine people), and so on — but none of them worked. The only treatment that reliably allowed trans people to live happy and healthy lives was allowing them to transition.

    Not only does transition work, but it works very effectively: the surgical regret rate for gender-affirming surgery is lower than 2%, a regret rate that’s much lower than the regret rate for pretty much every other form of surgery.

    Trans healthcare isn’t dangerous. But restricting or removing our access to it is harmful and for some of us, even fatal. The UK puberty blocker ban has been implicated in at least 16 deaths so far; we have no idea how many other people have taken their lives while languishing on waiting lists that in some parts of the UK are now decades long.

    The misinformation and disinformation around trans healthcare is harmful and just adds to the difficulties we experience in a system that is even more broken for trans people than it is for everyone else even once we get past the horrendous waiting lists. I’ve just experienced an exceptionally difficult and unpleasant few weeks due to a bureaucratic mess that has stopped my healthcare completely for more than a month. The problem still hasn’t been resolved – I’m now into the sixth week of trying to get my usual healthcare restored and I’ve had to pay for private care in the interim – but if I were cis, it’d have been sorted out in a single day.