Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • “Where did all the rainbows go?”

    Despite public demand, our new EP is available now on Bandcamp (for free, or name your price) and will be coming to streaming next week. I’m very proud of it.

    The EP is called The Nest That You Have Flown. The title track is probably the most straightforwardly rock song here, a blast of guitars and driving bass, and it’s followed by a firm live favourite: Opera, the song I can never remember the lyrics to because of some bizarre mental block. David’s guitar is particularly great on this one.

    Next up is Closer To The End Than The Beginning, a song about cowardly corporations abandoning their public support for LGBTQ+ folks in which you can really hear my love of Talk Talk’s records (and which we debuted live last year; the cowardice has become even worse in 2025), and last but not least there’s the shimmering guitar pop of Red Carpet Blue.

    More music soon.

  • A girl called “it”

    Platformer has obtained what it calls “the dehumanizing new guidelines moderating what people can now say about trans people on Facebook and Instagram.” Examples include “trans people aren’t real. They’re mentally ill”, “a trans woman isn’t a woman, it’s a pathetic confused man” and “a trans person isn’t a he or a she, it’s an it.”

    The report says that Meta’s chief marketing officer Alex Schultz, the firm’s highest-ranking gay employee, has suggested that for FB and Instagram users, “seeing their queer friends and family members abused on Facebook and Instagram could lead to increased support for LGBTQ rights.”

    It’s not just trans people. It’s pretty much anybody who isn’t MAGA. And it’s not really new, because marginalised people have been trying and failing to get Meta to moderate hate speech for a long time. But what’s different is that this is now policy, and the policy explicitly says that hate speech is fine when directed towards specific minorities.

  • Own your everything

    When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he didn’t just destroy the good parts of a thriving social network. He also did massive damage to many people’s livelihoods, including creative people for whom Twitter was a key part of their marketing and who saw their post engagement – how many people see and interact with them – effectively disappear. And now the same’s happening over at Facebook, Instagram and Threads thanks to their parent company Meta’s new policy, “it’s great when you hate”.

    Meta’s moves to emulate Twitter are bad for business – not Meta’s business, but yours.

    It’s not just the open embrace of online hate, with Meta happily saying it’ll allow the online abuse of women, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people and more. Meta’s various properties also already engage in significant censorship, such as hiding posts by LGBTQ+ people and content it deems “political”, while also suppressing links to anything that isn’t hosted on Facebook, Instagram or Threads.

    The very creative people that helped make Instagram so big now have to post “link in bio” because Meta won’t let them include links to their own creations in their own posts if those creations are on their own websites or other social networks. And that’s getting worse as Facebook, Instagram and Threads hide more posts by the people you choose to follow in favour of ads and shoddy AI.

    If you’re a creative type, doing nothing isn’t an option: unless you’re selling AI-generated crap to the bigot market or reinventing yourself as a troll account you’re going to see the reach of your posts diminish as some of your audience leaves and the people who still follow you see fewer and fewer of your posts.

    In the short term that means it’s wise to look at other social networks, if you haven’t already. Bluesky has the juice right now, but that comes with an important caveat: it could easily go to shit too. Many people quit Twitter and attempted to rebuild on Threads; many of them are now facing a repeat as they look for yet another new home.

    Sometimes clichés persist because they’re true, and that’s definitely the case when it comes to finding a basket to put your eggs into. Just because the eggs are electronic doesn’t change the underlying truth: having everything in one place means there’s a single point of failure.

    With any social network your access can be removed without warning and for no good reason, with few if any rights to appeal. And if it is, the things you’ve posted, the connections you’ve made, the audiences you’ve built… they go too.

    I know several people whose businesses and/or careers have really suffered because of social network policy changes, censorship or bad-faith reports by third parties, and what adds insult to injury is that there really isn’t anything you can do about it because third party networks don’t give a shit. As Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg famously said of early Facebook users, “They ‘trust me’. Stupid fucks.”

    It’s not just social media. Online spaces for creatives can disappear or remove entire archives overnight: art websites, digital magazines, blogging platforms. I don’t archive my consumer news stories because they’re ephemeral, but everything else I write I archive – and as a result I have copies of features that no longer exist anywhere else because they were never printed and the online versions are long gone.

    I’ve been online for over 30 years now, and in that time countless social networks have risen and fallen: USENET, CompuServe, AOL, MySpace, Friends Reunited, Friendster, Google Plus, Bebo, Vine, Flickr, Twitter, Orkut, Jaiku and many more. And that’s before you factor in the many thousands of user-created content websites and online publishers that have been and gone too.

    User-generated content is a scam, and part of what Cory Doctorow described when he coined the term “enshittification”:

    Each commercial social media service has two imperatives: first, to make it as easy as possible to switch to their service, and second, to make it as hard as possible to leave.

    The harder it is to leave – for example, because you’ve built your entire business on a specific social media platform, and going elsewhere would mean losing most or all of your audience – the more the social network can then exploit you. That potential loss is a “switching cost”. Doctorow:

    When switching costs are high, services can be changed in ways that you dislike without losing your business. The higher the switching costs, the more a company can abuse you, because it knows that as bad as they’ve made things for you, you’d have to endure worse if you left.

    Meta’s social networks aren’t dead, although their hyper-growth is ending. But it’s important to understand that abusing you, the user, isn’t something that happens by accident. It’s the entire strategy. And if you’re using social media for your livelihood, you need to have a strategy of your own for when the abuse becomes intolerable.

  • Zuck’s death cult

    Today, Mark Zuckerberg announced changes to Facebook, Threads and Meta, initially for the US because EU law won’t allow such changes. The short version: hate speech is back, baby!

    You’ll see the details elsewhere so I won’t repeat them here, but ultimately the goal is to remove safeguards and moderation from Meta’s platforms. That freedom for Facebook in particular is new for the US, but it’s not new for Facebook: we saw it in Myanmar, where Facebook was instrumental in genocide.

    That’s not just my opinion; it’s the opinion of UN investigators and of Amnesty International too. As Amnesty put it: “While the Myanmar military was committing crimes against humanity against the Rohingya, Meta was profiting from the echo chamber of hatred created by its hate-spiralling algorithms.”

    Amnesty:

    Internal studies dating back to 2012 indicated that Meta knew its algorithms could result in serious real-world harms. In 2016, Meta’s own research clearly acknowledged that “our recommendation systems grow the problem” of extremism…

    In one internal document dated August 2019, one Meta employee wrote: “We have evidence from a variety of sources that hate speech, divisive political speech, and misinformation on Facebook… are affecting societies around the world. We also have compelling evidence that our core product mechanics, such as virality, recommendations, and optimizing for engagement, are a significant part of why these types of speech flourish on the platform.”

    Hate speech is the oil of Meta’s business, and Zuckerberg doesn’t care about the human cost.

    As tech journalist and long-time Meta critic Ed Zitron writes on Bluesky:

    Meta will burn down everything in search of growth. They have been doing so in broad daylight for years. They will make people angry and sad and hateful (and have done so before) in search of growth in their dying platform. They will make everything worse to create growth. It’s a death cult

  • A broken system

    Abigail Thorn, actor and writer of Philosophy Tube, posted a video two years ago about her (awful) experiences of the NHS. The short version: she demonstrated how the NHS is institutionally discriminatory towards trans people. So I imagine she was quite surprised when a very senior NHS figure approached her about being the face of a new campaign about changes in NHS trans provision.

    Thorn said no, and has written an article explaining why. Thorn is the first to say that there are some very good people working in the NHS, and in trans care specifically. But the organisation itself is broken, and treats trans people appallingly. And it’s getting worse.

    I’m writing this in my sixth month of having my basic healthcare refused by my GP, healthcare that the GP happily provides to dozens of cisgender people but which is apparently too difficult to provide to me. I’m a few months away from finally getting surgery I first asked to be referred for six years ago, a referral that was never made because the gender clinic doctor simply didn’t bother doing it, a mistake or deliberate omission that I didn’t find out about for two years. My next referral was delayed because the gender clinic made an appointment for the mandatory second opinion, never told me about the appointment, and then concluded that I had changed my mind about wanting referred because I didn’t attend. Another year gone.

    So it’s fair to say I’m sympathetic to Thorn’s argument.

    There are many problems with NHS care for trans people, and they’re about to get worse with a Cass-style stitch-up labelled as a review of adult care. That review isn’t going to recommend that the NHS does something about the infiltration of conversion therapists, or the humiliating assessments we have to go through, or the woeful lack of staff, or the waiting lists that mean many trans people will die before even having a first assessment. And it’s not going to do anything about making trans people’s access to care any easier, because as Thorn points out:

    every single person I have spoken to in the NHS- from local GPs to the National bosses- told me they are powerless. There is nobody at any level of the organisation who takes responsibility for the state the service is in and the suffering it is causing. Every single person blames the person above them, even the man at the top.

    …I agree with others who study this field that consultations and “stakeholder meetings” have become a form of abuse by the NHS and the government: we’re included nonperformatively – given time to speak in order to legitimise the process of ignoring us.

    In years to come, this will rightly be viewed as a scandal. But it’s going to harm many more people before that happens.

  • Sadistic pencil-pushers

    There’s a superb piece in Dazed by Sasha Baker, who explains how a vocal minority of religious and social conservatives has managed to dismantle trans healthcare and human rights in the UK without a single law being passed or revoked.

    The British gender critical movement purports to represent a silent majority, but knows it does not command enough support to publicly shred the documents guaranteeing our rights. Instead it has adopted the methods of sadistic pencil-pushers – its true constituency – burying human rights laws in reams of secondary legislation, statutory and non-statutory guidance, grey literature, and fudged equality impact assessments.

    As the article notes, a key part of that is the Cass scandal: a supposedly clinical review that was created and staffed in order to achieve a pre-determined political outcome, and which – despite repeated claims to the contrary in the press – found no evidence whatsoever that puberty blockers are dangerous or that their use should be curtailed.

    You’ll read a lot about “evidence” in connection with the Cass scandal. Here’s one of the crucial bits of so-called evidence on which Cass leaned heavily.

    In February, Sallie Baxendale, a psychologist, published a terrible academic paper that claimed to look at existing studies on the negative effects of puberty blockers on trans children’s cognition. In reality, most studies surveyed were performed on animals, with only one case study showing that a single trans child scored lower on an IQ test after taking puberty blockers… it was rejected by three journals and met with scathing comments from peer reviewers [but] Dr Hilary Cass chose to cite it four times in her final report, and determined that puberty blockers should not be prescribed to trans kids outside of an upcoming clinical trial, in part because of “potential risks to neurocognitive development”.

    What we’re seeing on a frankly frightening scale is the very opposite of evidence-based policy; the policies are decided first, and the evidence cherry-picked, distorted or manufactured to support them. This will not end with us.

  • Don’t talk about the dead

    We know that more than a dozen trans teens have taken their lives since the puberty blocker ban was introduced in the UK, despite the government’s best efforts to cover that up: its small inquiry into trans suicides discounted documented trans suicides. So it’s particularly disgusting to see Hilary Cass, the author of the politically motivated and utterly discredited Cass scandal that’s being used to dismantle trans healthcare, to proclaim 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 is “irresponsible for people to shroud-wave in that way.”

    Not for the first time, Cass is parroting the stories of hateful, genital-obsessed weirdos. Morgan Page writes:

    The spectre of the trans death, particularly through suicide, hangs over all of the attacks on trans life. No one wants to admit that this is the desired end goal — that trans people simply cease to exist, whether that be through detransition or death seems to matter little. As Janice Raymond famously put it, the goal is for trans people to be “morally mandated out of existence.” Indeed, “shroud waving” threatens to stir up some empathy for the plight of this embattled minority, and we can’t be having that. Anti-trans actors have gone so far as to accuse trans people of acting like abusive husbands who threaten to kill themselves if their wives leave.

    It’s a useful strategy, this attack on the idea of trans death, because most cis people will never know a living trans person, let alone a dead one.

    It’s worth pointing out yet again that despite its very best efforts the Cass study found no evidence that puberty blockers harmed kids. It did, however, see plenty of evidence that limiting access to healthcare and support kills some of them.

  • Stacking the deck

    Yesterday, Wes Streeting made the UK ban on puberty blockers for trans kids permanent. The ban does not apply to cisgender children; puberty blockers are apparently magic medicine that are uniquely dangerous to trans and gender non-conforming kids.

    The decision was subject to a consultation, which – at the Government’s invitation – featured significant input from anti-trans, pro-conversion therapy organisations with no expertise in healthcare generally or trans healthcare specifically. And despite blatantly stacking the deck with those anti-trans groups, the consultation could still not produce evidence to justify the ban. It did, however, make it clear that the ban would have terrible effects on trans kids’ mental health. We’ve already seen more than a dozen children take their own lives as a result of the temporary ban.

    Streeting simply ignored the evidence and imposed the ideologically motivated ban on the UK, including Scotland. Pressure from the UK government ensured a similar ban was passed in Northern Ireland with the support of Sinn Fein. There’s bleak humour in seeing UK Labour and Sinn Fein finding common ground in killing children.

    I’ve long since given up on trying to get people to care about trans people. But an evangelical government minister banning medically necessary healthcare by prioritising the thinky thoughts of newspaper columnists and religious and social conservatives over evidence and international medical consensus is a terrifying precedent for everybody.

  • The strategy

    Infamous arsehole Matt Walsh has been saying the quiet bit out loud: speaking outside the US Supreme Court yesterday, the far-right clown vowed that “we are not gonna rest… until transgender ideology is entirely erased from the Earth.” He’s not the first to say that; last year Michael Knowles told the US Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.” There are many such examples from the US right, the Christian right and the UK anti-trans movement too.

    Helen Joyce, one of the key figures in the UK anti-trans movement, has spoken openly of her belief that the number of trans people should be reduced and that any trans person, even if “happily transitioned”, is a problem that society must solve: “the fewer of those people there are, the better”. All the key anti-trans groups and many of the key anti-trans activists in the UK have pledged their support for a campaign that calls for the elimination of “the practice of transgenderism”. The founding document of the anti-trans movement, Janice Raymond’s 1979 book The Transsexual Empire, says that “I contend that the problem of transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence.”

    By “transgender ideology”, Walsh means transgender people. By “transgenderism”, Knowles means transgender people. By “the practice of transgenderism” the campaign means transgender people. By “transsexualism”, Raymond meant transgender people.

    The only way to eliminate “transgender ideology” or “transgenderism” or “transsexualism” is to eliminate transgender people.

    And that’s the strategy.

    “The fewer of those people” there are, the better.

    When you understand that that is the goal, the connections between the different strands of the anti-trans strategy become chillingly clear.

    Removing life-saving healthcare for trans teens increases the suicide rate; the same applies with adults and ensures that there are “fewer of those people”.

    Removing legal protections from trans people unless they medically transition and then ensuring that nobody can access medical transition ensures that there are “fewer of those people”.

    Banning trans women from using women’s spaces or competing in women’s sports, part of the wider goal of pushing trans women out of society, means there are “fewer of those people” in that society.

    If that means that some trans women can be bullied back into the closet, well, that means “fewer of those people”.

    And if some of those bullied people are bullied into taking their own lives either suddenly or more slowly, well. That means “fewer of those people” too.

    The anti-trans movement is usually better at PR messaging than Walsh; he’s an extreme outlier in that his brand is built on saying the supposedly unspeakable. But he and the politer bigots of the UK anti-trans movement may not express it in the same way, but they share the same goal: they won’t rest until transgender people are “entirely erased from the Earth”.

  • LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back

    The writer Julia Serano has organised an online protest today: LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back. It’s a US protest but has worldwide support: the message to the Democrats, and to supposedly left-of-centre political parties elsewhere, is that human rights, healthcare and safety for LGBTQ+ folks are not and should never be negotiable.

    Serano has posted her own article, which will be updated to link to many others, and you’ll find it here.

    I’ll just post a few words from my book: we are not a fad or a phase, a lobby or an ideology, a cult or a conspiracy. We’re your sons and your daughters, your sisters and your brothers, your friends and your colleagues.