Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Monster trucks

    There’s a lovely piece by Jude Doyle in The Cut: What coming out as transgender taught me about parenting. I won’t spoil the main narrative but this bit really resonated with me.

    I came out as trans just before my daughter’s 3rd birthday. I did it because it was not possible for me to be an effective parent while constantly examining my own life for missed opportunities; in order to be fully there for my daughter, I had to stop projecting my unmet needs onto her. I did it because kids learn by example; I could tell her to love herself, but if I lived in shame and denial, then she would never actually know what self-acceptance looked like.

  • No surprises

    You’ll see a lot in the papers about the Cass review of NHS care for gender-questioning kids today, as the report is finally released. What you won’t see are any suggestions that it’s a political project, not a medical one. Its job was to undermine healthcare for trans people, and that’s exactly what it’s delivered.

    The review’s conclusion, that there isn’t enough evidence to support affirming treatment for trans teens, was arrived at by discounting nearly 100% of the available research into affirming care (101 out of 103 studies) for spurious reasons; it centred the views of people and organisations opposed to trans healthcare, some of which believe that trans people don’t exist, while refusing to consider evidence from trans-supportive people or organisations as they would be biased; it applied different standards of evidence to pro- and anti-trans studies; and its core analyst is a supporter of conversion therapy and has previously supported the anti-trans pressure group Genspect. And while the review’s scope does not extend to adult healthcare, it’s nevertheless being used to demand restrictions on healthcare for adults until they’re 25.

    The problems with the Cass review have been apparent for some time, and Trans Safety Network has been particularly good at highlighting them. This piece, from late March, is a good overview. It’s telling that freedom of information requests regarding conflicts of interest have been refused.

    The tories will be out of power soon, and rightly so. But the damage they have done will take years, and perhaps decades, to undo.

  • What’s coming

    AR Moxon has published another incisive piece about one thing that’s actual about another thing: The Thing That’s Coming.

    Cargo ship Dali lost power and from there it was only a matter of time before it destroyed the Francis Scott Key Bridge. We hadn’t maintained the bridge for collisions of this type, we’re learning. You’d think we would have, given that the bridge is a critical piece of infrastructure for the Chesapeake Bay area, but we’re often the sort of place that fails to maintain what it has built, mostly because maintenance costs eat into tax revenues, and revenues could be used for tax cuts, and tax cuts help profits, and profits are very important, so collapses are just a thing that is coming. An inevitability.

  • The wedge

    Today’s Observer reports:

    A rightwing Christian lobby group that wants abortion to be banned has forged ties with an adviser to the prime minister and is drawing up ­policy briefings for politicians.

    The UK branch of the US-based Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has more than doubled its spending since 2020 and been appointed a stakeholder in a parliamentary group on religious freedoms in a role that grants it direct access to MPs.

    The ADF isn’t just one of the prime movers in the global anti-abortion movement; it’s also one of the prime movers in the global anti-gender movement, of which trans people are the initial targets. As The Observer puts it, the organisation “also supports outlawing sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ+ adults and funds US fringe groups attacking gay, trans and abortion rights”. It is also believed to be a funder of fake grassroots groups pushing anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ activism: many LGBTQ+ and women’s rights supporters believe that organisations such as ADF use crowdfunding to disguise their investment in such astroturf groups.

    The ADF is already a regular voice in British and Scottish media, almost always without any context telling viewers, listeners or readers what the organisation does and what its goals are. It’s presented as an organisation that advocates for freedom and freedom of speech, not an organisation that works tirelessly to remove women’s reproductive rights, to remove LGBTQ+ people’s human rights, to censor education and to give religious people – but only Christian religious people – freedom from the laws that bind others.

    What we’re seeing here is the wedge that began with attacks on trans people and has since moved to wider anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-abortion moves. This is not a secret: the ADF is one of the supporters of Project 2025 by the Heritage Foundation (another evangelical group close to the UK government, and which for a short time had its own pet prime minister in the form of Liz Truss), which sets out the Christian Right’s plan for what they hope will be another Trump presidency.

    Here’s Nancy Kelley on the stated goals of Project 2025.

    It is almost unfathomably obsessed with ending access to reproductive healthcare, along with total state control of reproductive knowledge, health and choices. It is deeply hostile to migrants, including the most vulnerable migrants, and violently rejects any analysis of racial disparity, or engagement with the USA’s past, present or future as a multi racial democracy. It is shocking, it is scary, and it is specifically scary when it comes to LGBTQ+ people and our human rights.

    And as Kelley points out, these ideas – and the groups behind them – are already gaining significant traction in the UK.

    The UK anti-trans movement and aligned social conservative movements already use the same arguments as Project 2025 (social contagion, sexualisation of children, parental rights, faith and belief) to argue for the same goals here in the UK, and they are doing so with some success.

    With the anti-trans part of the wedge well established, the door is now open to similar attacks on the wider LGBTQ+ community and to women’s and non-binary people’s reproductive freedom. And very conveniently, the most high profile self-identified feminists and women’s rights defenders in the UK are too busy defaming and demonising trans people to pay attention, let alone fight back; in many cases they’re standing arm in arm with the ADF and its fellow travellers.

    It’s tiring to write yet again that once they’re done with us, they’re coming for you: the religious right has been openly promising that for years now. But we appear to be sleepwalking into a very dark place because of journalistic malpractice, useful idiots and British and Scottish exceptionalism: we’re too enlightened, too clever; it couldn’t happen here. But it can happen here. It’s already begun.

  • Complete fiction

    I’ve been away for a bit, and while I was out of the country we had yet another completely invented scandal around trans people. This time it was around the new Scottish hate crime legislation, which does not make it an offence to misgender trans people. Despite it not being an offence to misgender trans people, it has been widely reported that the law would make it an offence to misgender trans people.

    Here’s Assigned Media.

    Presenter Justin Webb began his interview with the member of Scottish Parliament by asking, “Is misgendering a crime under this act?” Brown’s answer? “No. Not misgendering. Not at all.”

    …During their back and forth, Brown explains that if a report of a hate crime is made it would be the police’s job to determine if a crime has taken place.

    The latter doesn’t contradict the former, but that didn’t stop pretty much the entire UK press from reporting that misgendering was now a hate crime despite – as I may have mentioned – misgendering not being a hate crime.

    Bad faith scaremongering about legislation is a favourite tactic of the evangelical right, and in Scotland we previously saw it over the smacking ban – which, child-whacking arseholes told us, would see the prisons full of parents wrongly convicted of assaulting their kids. It’s also been used to attack women’s and LGBTQ+ people’s rights in other countries, such as in Spain.

    As ever, it doesn’t matter if the press amplifies bullshit through malevolence or incompetence, because the result is the same: newspapers and broadcasters are misleading their readers, listeners and viewers and doing real damage in the process.

  • Immiseration

    I was talking to an acquaintance earlier who was saying that they’ve never seen Glaswegians look so miserable, that “everyone’s going around with their face tripping them”. This NY Review of Books piece by Gary Younge may help explain why.

    This is one of the bleakest sentences I’ve read for some time.

    After more than a decade of austerity, British five-year-olds are a full centimeter shorter now than they were in 2010, and they are becoming significantly shorter than children in other countries.

  • An announcement

    Bless my cotton socks, I’m in the news: the announcement of my new book is in today’s Bookseller. It’s been *so* hard to keep this quiet so I’m really delighted to say we’re putting the band back together for another 404ink book, this time celebrating Scots music of all kinds.

    The book is called Small Town Joy: From Glam Rock to Hyperpop, How Queer Music Changed The Sound of Scotland and it follows queer musicians and influences in Scots music from the 1970s to the present. I’m having tons of fun researching, interviewing for and writing it and I’m really looking forward to sharing it with you in March 2025.

    As I told the Bookseller:

    “I’m delighted to be getting the band back together again for my second 404 Ink book. Small Town Joy follows Scots musicians from bedrooms to the Barras and beyond, tracing the glittery threads that link punk and pop, folk and funk, rave and rock. It’s a provocation and a celebration, a mixtape dedicated to the tunes and talent that’s crossed genres, genders and generations to change the sound of Scotland.” 

  • How news lost its nerve

    There’s an interesting piece in Semafor about the ongoing cowardice crisis in journalism. It’s about the US but many of the problems it identifies are just as  prevalent in the UK.

    Of all the issues – fear of litigation in the form of SLAPP suits designed to silence legitimate criticism; fear of losing your job for not toeing the company line; fear of losing access to the rich and/or famous people whose names drive traffic; the lack of money in modern journalism; rich and powerful people wielding social media as a weapon – probably the biggest is the removal of the all-important line between news and money.

    At a moment of economic fragility in the media industry, there’s also simply less of an appetite for stories that could damage important business relationships. This has been a particularly challenging balance for glossy entertainment and lifestyle magazines, whose audiences long ago moved online and who now rely heavily on the businesses they cover.

    …The new priorities are reflected organizationally. Editors-in-chief at Hearst, Esquire’s parent company, now report up to general managers, whose singular focus is the bottom line. The general manager who oversees Esquire and other fashion publications, for example, came to the company from the marketing side of digital payment company Venmo.

    The reason for the long-standing line between editorial and a publication’s funding was to prevent conflicts of interest. A publication that’s financially dependent on the people it’s writing about, whether directly in the form of a business relationship or indirectly in the form of access for future stories, is a publication that is no longer independent; it becomes an arm of PR.

     

  • A shameful sham

    The news that NHS England is banning the prescription of puberty blockers to trans teens (but not cis teens) is surprising if you look at the results of the consultation into that very plan: the overwhelming majority of responses were against the ban, pointing out that it flew in the face of all available evidence and was contrary to international best practice. The PDF is here if you fancy a look; it’s pretty damning of the proposals.

    But the point of the consultation, like many other sham consultations, was not to change a decision that had already been made. The ban we’re reading about this week was previously decided on and announced in the summer of 2023, months before the consultation was opened.

    The purpose of the consultation was to enable the NHS, and the government, to say that there has been a consultation – secure in the knowledge that nobody is going to report that the consultation overwhelmingly demonstrated that the decision chose to ignore medical expertise in favour of scaremongering and moral panic.

  • The minister for the Heritage Foundation

    Like many incompetent, idiotic arseholes, former PM Liz Truss – who crashed the UK economy and was famously outperformed by a lettuce – has found new friends among the US far right and the right-wing press by parroting their bigotry. And to please them she’s introduced a private member’s bill that attempts to bring the most hateful anti-trans legislation from the US to the UK.

    If it passes, which thankfully it probably won’t, it would undo the Equality Act, force teachers to bully children and criminalise doctors who provide healthcare in line with international standards of best practice.

    It is a vicious, hateful bill proposed and supported by vicious, hateful people – people who have made it abundantly clear that the war they’re waging on trans people’s healthcare and human rights is a war they want to wage more widely against all women and the entire LGBTQ+ community too.