Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Author: Carrie

  • Dead children don’t matter

    If you were in any doubt that the trans “issue” is a moral panic and that trans lives don’t matter to almost all of the media, the UK newspapers have provided ample evidence over the last few days.

    Every single paper, not just the right-wing ones, has ignored the news that the puberty blocker ban has been implicated in the deaths of 16 children and that the NHS and Cass Review appear to have tried to cover that up; instead, they have devoted endless column inches to whether Labour can become hateful enough to trans people to satisfy JK Rowling.

  • “Protecting children”

    Content warning: this is very, very bleak.

    Jolyon Maugham of the Good Law Project has posted a lengthy thread about what appears to be a national scandal: the deaths of multiple young trans people since the NHS began restricting their healthcare, and the NHS’s ongoing attempts at a cover-up.

    I have now seen further evidence that, since the Bell decision in the High Court (1 December 2020), there has been a huge increase in deaths of young trans people on the NHS waiting list – and that NHS management has sought to suppress that evidence.

  • Vote

    There’s a pretty dispiriting article on the BBC news website today interviewing five people who won’t be voting in the general election. The reasons are pretty much what you’d expect: it doesn’t change anything, parties break their promises, there’s precious little clear blue water between them and so on. And these things are probably true, but the interviewees are missing a key point.

    Voting isn’t about you. It’s about us. All of us.

    The interviewees clearly feel that not voting is a neutral act. But it isn’t, because there are parties and candidates espousing policies that are genuinely dangerous to many people. That’s the case in any election, but it’s particularly true now with the far right rising once again. Their supporters, and the people they’ve won over on single issues, will vote. And that could be disastrous for all of us.

    In some constituencies, there’s a very real possibility that far right candidates could gain power. But even in relatively safe seats, not voting can have dangerous consequences. If extremist candidates can increase their share of the vote, that can help legitimise them and their views, increasing their visibility, their reach and their power. Just look at what Nigel Farage has wreaked in the UK despite seven unsuccessful attempts to get elected.

    I get it, I really do. I’m a trans woman in a UK where far too many candidates are quite comfortable with using us as culture war cannon fodder. But there is still a difference between different parties: Kier Starmer may be utterly spineless when it comes to defending trans people, but his party is not specifically promising to harm us. The Conservatives and Reform are promising exactly that.

    The same applies on a much bigger scale for issues such as how we deliver healthcare, how we care for our elderly, what opportunities we create for our children and what we do about a warming planet. The parties and the candidates are not “all the same” when some are hell-bent on making the world worse. If you can’t find it in yourself to vote for something, vote against that.

  • Destruction

    I genuinely don’t understand how anyone can read stories like this one and still believe that anti-trans activism or legislation is about protecting anybody from anything; the goal is to be as cruel as possible to trans people and their families.

    This latest example comes from Florida, whose exceptionally vicious anti-trans witch-hunt appears to have informed both the Cass Review and UK government policy:

    A Florida public school employee who faces firing because she allowed her transgender daughter to play girls high school volleyball assailed those who outed her child, saying Tuesday that the ensuing investigation destroyed the girl’s life.

    …Norton told the school board Tuesday that her daughter had been elected freshman and sophomore class president, was selected the student body’s director of philanthropy and was a homecoming princess. That all ended when the investigation began and the girl left Monarch.

    “They destroyed her high school career and her lifelong memories,” Norton said. “I saw the light in my daughter’s eyes gleam with future plans of organizing and attending prom, participating in and leading senior class traditions, speaking at graduation and going off to college with the confidence and joy that any student like her would after a successful and encouraging high school experience. And 203 days ago, I watched as that life was extinguished.”

    …When investigators interviewed the Monarch volleyball players, they said the team did not change clothes or shower together, so they were never disrobed with Norton’s daughter. All three said they knew or suspected Norton’s daughter is transgender, but it didn’t bother them that she was on the team. The Knights went 13-7 last season.

    “I didn’t really have a problem with it because I didn’t think she was a threat or anything to anyone else,” one girl told investigators.

  • The goal

    No matter how you dress it up and how carefully they word their “reasonable concerns”, anti-trans groups and individuals are not trying to protect anybody; their goal is to make it impossible for trans people to exist. Which explains why the supposed protectors of women’s rights seem quite happy to pal around with people and groups who are actively hostile to women’s reproductive freedom and legal rights as long as they really hate trans people.

    Julia Serano’s newly published piece on the gender critical (GC) movement explains it very well.

    [They] have made their position quite clear: They are squarely on team “push trans people out of the public sphere.” They may dress it up in esoteric language (“gender ideology,” “sex-based rights,” “adult human female”) and hyperbolic statements (“the greatest assault of my lifetime on women’s rights”), but if you look at the entire body of what they are proposing, it’s a world that is utterly inhospitable for trans people…

    GC/TERFism is not just a flawed strand of feminism. It is an anti-trans discrimination movement first and foremost. And it should be recognized as such.

  • The fix is in

    Equalities minister Kemi Badenoch has proudly confirmed what our fearless media preferred not to investigate and will most likely choose not to report: the Cass Review was an ideological project and the government has been stuffing key organisations with transphobes in order to roll back trans people’s rights and healthcare.

    Posting on X, quote-tweeting one of the most vicious and abusive anti-trans trolls on the platform, the minster proudly wrote that a key reason for the UK’s unwarranted and likely illegal ban on puberty blockers for trans kids was because of “gender-critical men and women in the UK government, holding the positions that mattered most in Equalities and Health. You only need to look at what the SNP did in Scotland to see what would have happened had we not intervened. The Cass Review would **never** have been commissioned under a Labour govt. Labour did not want to know. We had incredible opposition from the system on everything. It was when the ministers changed that
    everything changed.”

    It’d be funny if it weren’t so awful: the minister is acting like a cartoon villain, proudly boasting of their criminal genius, openly admitting to rigging the system in order to push a bigoted ideology and cause intentional harm to a marginalised minority.

  • Bad sports

    One of the key tactics of anti-trans obsessives is to push the narrative that trans people are an existential threat to women’s sports, and the narrative is working. In fact, it’s working so well that a cisgender mother of four was subject to hateful abuse when she won a half-marathon in Exeter at the weekend because she didn’t look cisgender enough for the bigots.

    “I am a mum of four, a GP and I run for fun. Being told I look just like a man and don’t conform to the ideals of being a female is upsetting enough but being called abusive names and threatened is awful. No need to do that to any individual, ever, no matter what you believe.”

    But as this powerful and sad Washington Post piece demonstrates, anti-trans bigots believe that they are perfectly entitled to abuse trans or suspected trans athletes; the cruelty is the point.

    Such extreme reactions represent more than overflowing passion. The topic of transgender sports inclusion is not isolated to fair play. Conservative politicians have used it as an emotional thruway to a sweeping anti-trans movement that seeks to erode fundamental human decency. The right to play is simply an opening act. The right to exist is the discriminating headliner.

    As I’ve pointed out many times before, the “save women’s sports” controversy was manufactured and openly workshopped by anti-feminist, anti-LGBTQ+ figures from the US evangelical right seven years ago as part of a “divide and conquer” strategy to weaken and destroy the LGBTQ+ community.

     

  • What changed

    Jude Doyle’s piece on “the transgender tipping point” spurred one of its quoted experts, Julia Serano, to expand on her comments. As ever with Serano, this is worth reading: Revisiting The “Transgender Tipping Point” Ten Years Later.

    I do believe there was a truly positive development for trans people taking place in the early 2010s that is potentially worthy of the moniker “tipping point.” For most of my life, the trans experience was typified by isolation and invisibility. Most of us grew up not knowing any other trans people and this sense of isolation was reinforced by how infrequently trans people and issues were covered in the media. Even as an adult, it was really hard to find trans community, especially if you weren’t living in a major city. Gender-affirming care was also extremely difficult to access, both because there were very few providers and most adhered to a strict gatekeeping system wherein only a select few “true transsexuals” (people who would be “passable” and heteronormative post-transition) were allowed to transition. This only added to the sense that very few trans people existed.

    What changed, as Serano goes on to explain, was twofold. One, the internet suddenly enabled us to find information and support that was previously hard or even impossible to find. And healthcare, previously very hostile, moved to a more informed and evidence-based model that understood transness wasn’t a disorder to be cured but just part of human nature.

    Those two changes were seismic; we got to see that we were not alone, and that we were not broken. And naturally that meant that more of us felt able to come out and be who we are.

    As Serano says, the tipping point in the media was a confection, and it mistook trans visibility for trans acceptance. But there was a very real tipping point for trans and non-binary people in “trans autonomy and agency, where gender-diverse people could finally speak for ourselves and choose our own trans trajectories.”

    Despite the best efforts of the media, and the UK media in particular, there has been a massive shift in trans visibility – and with that visibility comes understanding and acceptance. Serano points out that at the time of the “tipping point” article, just 9% of Americans said they knew somebody who was trans. By 2021 it was 42%. That means more trans and gender non-conforming people can see that they’re not alone, and that more people who aren’t trans can see that we’re no different from them.

    As I’ve written endlessly, hatred thrives on ignorance; it’s one of the reasons the bigots want to ban any form of trans representation, and prevent us from living normal lives. But that genie isn’t going back into its bottle.

  • Your mum’s a super spreader

    In news that won’t surprise anyone who’s been following the trans panic, a new study shows that some of the most prolific spreaders of fake news are middle-aged women. Just 0.3% of Twitter accounts were responsible for sharing 80% of links to fake news, and those accounts were more likely to be women (60%) than men (40%). The average age of the misinformation peddlers was 58 and the posters share many more links per day than normal social media posters. While a majority were right-wing some 20% of superspreaders were left-wing.

    the researchers estimate that the superspreaders account for roughly a quarter of the links to misinformation sites that their typical followers were exposed to. For over 10 percent of their followers, they were the only source of fake news.

    There is one important caveat here, which is that the study was on Twitter before it became X and began offering money to misinformation and hate speech spreaders. That’s likely to have changed the demographic by making misinformation a career opportunity rather than just a hobby.

  • Ten years tipped

    Jude Doyle is on superb form in this piece looking back at the famous “Transgender Tipping Point” cover of TIME. As the piece says, it often feels like we’ve tipped vertiginously backwards with open bigotry against us running unchecked in the press, politics and social media. Who’d have thought ten years ago that in 2024, “transphobe” would not just be a career option but a very lucrative one?

    As one of the contributors, Katherine Cross, told Doyle, not all trans people were thrilled with the TIME cover. “there was a fear that this meant the Eye of Sauron was upon us, that whatever safety was afforded by the shadows of public ignorance was well and truly gone now.” Those fears proved to be well founded, and warnings by other marginalised people – people who knew very well that increased visibility often means little more than painting a target on people’s backs – were sadly prescient.

    Doyle interviews another excellent writer, Parker Molloy, and the two discuss the way in which mainstream media effectively threw trans people to the wolves.

    “The media, once eager to spotlight our stories for clicks and headlines, has largely abandoned us, leaving trans people to fend off a wave of hostility on our own. It feels bleak,” Molloy says. “It feels like we’re on our own, and I just have a hard time imagining things getting better in the near future.”

    Doyle somehow manages to remain optimistic, and there are positives: we have a much wider and better informed community than we did ten years ago, and despite the bigots’ best efforts trans and non-binary people are not going to return to the bad old days when the world could pretend we didn’t exist.