Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Joy as an act of resistance

    The cover of the book Small Town Joy by Carrie Marshall

    I’m very pleased to reveal the cover of my new book, Small Town Joy, designed by Kara McHale. The book will be available in April and you can pre-order it from my publisher or local bookshop right now. Please do, pre-orders are a huge help for small publishing houses and indie bookshops alike.

    After writing and promoting Carrie Kills A Man I made a conscious decision to look for, and to write about, joy. And this book is the result: it’s a history of how queer music and musicians changed the sound of Scotland, and in its pages you’ll hear from some incredibly talented and interesting people.

    I’ll be talking much more about the book nearer the time but I had to share the cover. Isn’t it gorgeous?

  • The Brexit of healthcare

    Another day, another demonstration that the Cass report into puberty blockers was a political move, not a medical one.

    As the epidemiologist and writer known as Health Nerd posted to Bluesky, “The BMJ journal Archive of Disease in Childhood has just published the epidemiological study done by York university that was commissioned as part of the Cass review into gender clinics in the UK. It contains some startling (and yet, unsurprising) revelations… this report undermines most if not all of the Cass review recommendations regarding clinical care.”

    The study found that gender dysphoria diagnoses were incredibly uncommon; that a tiny proportion of those studied were prescribed any medication; and rates of prescribing were falling, not rising.

    Elsewhere, solid criticisms of the Cass report continue to be published. This piece in the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health describes it as the Brexit of health care and notes that “it is very unusual in the history of medicine that a time-honoured treatment, with a good safety record, even if based on non-randomised trials and experts’ opinion, is simply banned”.

    You can find a very comprehensive collection of links to Cass-related studies and commentary on Ruth Pearce’s website here.

  • Turkeys celebrate Christmas

    With depressing predictability, the leading lights of the UK anti-trans mob and their pet journalists are celebrating the inauguration of Trump and downplaying or making jokes about copying Elon Musk’s nazi salutes. In particular they’re celebrating the newly signed executive order designed to drive trans people out of society – an order that makes it very clear, once again, that they’re turkeys voting for Christmas.

    The executive order is a mess, of course, bigoted, and often horrendously unscientific. But it also contains something very important: a definition of men and women. And in the order, personhood begins not at birth, but at conception.

    It’s important to read that in context. The context is:

    “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female… the following definitions shall govern all Executive interpretation of and application of Federal law and administration policy”.

    All interpretation and application of law and policy. Not just the anti-trans bits.

    That’s not an accident. It’s because the people writing Trump’s policy are also coming for abortion and contraception and women’s rights, like they’ve been promising they would for the best part of a decade now, like we’ve been trying to tell you for the same period of time.

    Chase Strangio, writing in TIME:

    It might be easy for people to dismiss the impacts of sweeping anti-transgender policies since, despite this outsized fixation we provoke in our opponents, we only represent .6% of the U.S. population. However, none of these rhetorical, political, or legal attacks on transgender people will ultimately end with us. The anti-trans rhetoric that fueled the 2024 elections was accompanied by a larger message about how men and women are supposed to act, live, and raise families.

    Strangio quotes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who said of banning trans girls from sports:

    “What this also opens the door for is for women to try to perform a very specific kind of femininity for the very kind of men who are drafting this bill, and to open up questioning of who is a woman because of how we look, how we present ourselves, and yes, what we choose to do with our bodies.”

    The people celebrating the assault on trans women in the US have paved the way for an assault on all LGBTQ+ people and on cis women as well as trans women. And they’re trying to do the same in the UK.

    Update, 23/1/25

    Well, that didn’t take long: Trump’s wrecking ball has come for more of women’s protections. Trump has ordered the end of Lyndon B Johnson’s Executive Order 11246, which forbade federal contractors from discriminating on grounds of race, colour, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity. It’s part of the wider destruction of diversity programmes, the biggest beneficiaries of which – for decades – have been white women.

  • The other N word

    The press’s determination not to call Elon Musk’s Nazi salutes Nazi salutes is quite something. The Telegraph used the phrase “a hand gesture that some critics have likened to a fascist salute”; The Daily Mail “an ‘awkward hand gesture’ that some have likened to a Nazi salute”; The Times said that “commenters on social media suggested it looked like a fascist salute” and The Sun said that “some said he had made a stiff-armed Roman-style salute”.

    If you’re wondering why it’s so hard for newspapers to accurately report something for which there is photographic and video evidence, and which millions of people saw clearly with their own eyes, a big part of it is money: under UK libel laws, someone with Musk’s money can financially ruin any media organisation that he decides to target. It doesn’t matter if what they report is true; what matters is that he has the resources to ruin them.

  • A shameful fraud

    Yet another damning review of the Cass scandal has been published, this time in the New England Journal of Medicine. The publication is one of the world’s most respected peer-reviewed journals, and in a better world this article would be the final stake through the Cass review’s heart.

    The article says that Cass’s report “transgresses medical law, policy and practice… deviates from pharmaceutical regulatory standards in the United Kingdom. And if it had been published in the United States… it would have violated federal law.” The review misrepresented data to arrive at conclusions the data did not support, it did not follow established scientific methods, it did not follow international publication standards and is so clearly a stitch-up that “observers must speculate about who else participated in the manuscript’s drafting — and whether they held bias against LGBTQ+ people.”

    The review was a foregone conclusion, as Kemi Badenoch has already admitted; its job was to rubber-stamp transphobia, and anti-trans activists were deliberately placed in “the positions that mattered most in Equalities and Health.” It is as unscientific and as wicked as the anti-trans measures Donald Trump is expected to announce in the US later today, measures that will make the lives of trans and non-binary people immeasurably harder and will undoubtedly kill some and damage more for no reason other than bigotry and cruelty.

  • Panic

    The coverage of, and social media commentary on, a trans girl being stabbed in England is bringing back an old and poisonous trope: the gay panic defence.

    The gay panic defence, and its trans equivalent, asks people to agree that gay and trans people are so disgusting, so repellent, so predatory that their very existence sends straight and/or cis people into such a panic that they commit extreme violence. In this example, the line is that sure, a young woman was sexually humiliated, lured into a trap, beaten and stabbed. But she brought it on herself because she was trans.

    Even if the underlying bigotry were true, which of course it isn’t, this wasn’t a crime committed in the heat of the moment over an unwanted advance. A man received oral sex from a trans girl he wasn’t sure was trans, was embarrassed about it later, and conspired with his friends to get revenge. That’s not a panic.

    Again and again the gay/trans panic has been used to excuse violent men – and it’s usually men – who’ve committed terrible acts of violence against LGBTQ+ people. And that’s exactly what’s happening around this horrific attack.

    This matters more widely because there’s currently an issue – driven, inevitably, by the genital-obsessed weirdo brigade – over whether trans people are deceiving sexual partners if they don’t first disclose that they’re trans. New guidance from the CPS hasn’t really helped, as it suggests that in some cases the law might decide that it does.

    One of the key cases here wasn’t about trans people; Justine McNally was a teenage cisgender girl who pretended to be a teenage cisgender boy and had penetrative sex with another cisgender girl. The court found that McNally violated consent because she had lied about her sex and gone to great lengths to deceive her sexual partner even during penetrative sex. And in the minds of the genital-obsessed weirdos, all trans women do that all the time because to them, all trans women are and will always be men irrespective of hormones, surgery or anything else.

    It doesn’t matter who you are or what body parts you may or may not have or whether you’re one of the hottest women who ever walked the earth; what matters is what the hospital wrote down on the day you were born. And if you don’t disclose that to men, even if it’s just a one-night stand? Then you deserve anything bad that happens to you.

    And that’s where a lot of the horrific response to the stabbed girl is coming from. In the minds of the anti-trans mob, the girl is a predator; she obtained sex by deception, performing oral sex on a boy who she had tricked into believing she was female (because for the mob, no trans girl is or can ever be female). What he and his friends did was bad. But what she did was worse.

    This isn’t just incredibly bigoted. It’s incredibly dangerous, because when you combine it with the trans panic you give men a green light to be violent to any women who are trans.

    Which, of course, is what the bigots want.

  • Victim blaming

    The Mail, the Telegraph and the Times are all framing a horrifically violent attempted murder in the same way: they’re blaming the victim. Of course they are. She’s trans.

    [I don’t usually come back and edit posts but I’m going to fix this for clarity the day after posting it, because it was written in a hurry and got the timeline slightly wrong.]

    The attack was on a teenage girl who’d been flirting with a young man. He’d been told that she was trans, but when he asked her if that were true she said no; the girl had previously been attacked for being trans and seems to have been concerned for her safety if she’d said otherwise. They kissed, and the young man asked her to perform oral sex on him. He filmed the act without her knowledge or consent and shared it online on Snapchat.

    When the video circulated, the young man was told again that the girl was trans. He asked her again, but this time he told her that he’d stab her if she lied. So she said yes, she was trans. The young man and his friends then conspired to lure her into a trap.

    The girl was jumped in the street by the young man and several other people in a sustained attack during which she was stabbed multiple times, stamped upon, kicked and robbed. Their friends filmed the attack and shared it online; the most violent of the attackers, the one who brought a knife it to stab her, was a young woman who later posted a Snapchat story which included footage of the attack, an image of the victim on a ventilator and a number of transphobic slurs.

    The Mail describes this as being targeted “over her trans identity lie”; The Telegraph says she was stabbed “after lying about her gender”. The Times puts the last two words in quote marks but the headline is still “Transgender teenage stabbed 14 times by Snapchat gang ‘for lying’”.

    The Metropolitan Police rightly called it a “horrendous and violent assault on a young woman, motivated by the fact she is transgender”. But the response on social media and Mumsnet is to call the girl a rapist, say that the attempted murder was her own fault and demand her prosecution for not disclosing her gender history to the young man who filmed her performing oral sex without her knowledge or consent and who conspired to plan her attempted murder. His criminal behaviour doesn’t matter; she, the self-proclaimed defenders of women say, was asking for it. She had it coming. Although of course they don’t call her “she”.

    This is the world that “gender critical” journalism has created: a world where trans kids are beaten up if they tell people they’re trans and stabbed if they don’t. The UK press and the bigots they platform have blood on their hands.

  • “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.