Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Author: Carrie

  • 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.

  • 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.