Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • “This is how the line gets crossed”

    There’s a piece in Politico urging the media to stop normalising the far right.

    The BBC’s reporting style, for example, is all too often shaped by internal guidelines and a collapsing vision of performative neutrality. This was clearly demonstrated in coverage of the death of 23-year-old Quentin Deranque in France two weeks ago, with a report that described Deranque as a “far-right feminist” — a phrase that invents a political category no serious politics course anywhere in the world would recognize. Far-right politics and feminism come from fundamentally different traditions and pursue fundamentally different aims.

    The testing ground for this was the anti-gender movement, which is an anti-feminist movement against women’s reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy that came from the Catholic church. It may use the language of feminism to attack LGBTQ+ people (trans women first, but the entire rainbow is in its sights), but it’s not about protecting women’s rights; it’s about women as property. And yet the media has mainstreamed it as feminism. This is how the far right gets in.

    Politico:

    Every uncritical mention of far-right rhetoric is an editorial decision with political consequences. Every headline, every clip, every click adds weight. This is how the line gets crossed. And how some media are no longer just covering the far right but helping it speak.

  • The biggest loser

    There are lots of entertaining things about the Greens winning the Gordon and Denton by-election, but perhaps the funniest is the disastrous performance of the vocally transphobic Conservative candidate. Cadden, a trustee of the anti-trans lobbyist/lawfare group Sex Matters who co-founded and chaired the anti-trans police group Police SEEN UK, got just 1.9% of the vote and lost her deposit. It’s the worst Conservative by-election result in history.

    The bigots may seem popular because they have hundreds of obsessively posting Twitter accounts, god knows how many bots and the entire media amplifying them. But despite all that noise, Cadden got just 706 votes. The proudly trans-supportive Hannah Spencer got 14,980.

    Twitter bots and sock accounts don’t vote.

  • The trouble with Twitter

    A new paper in Nature (PDF document here) confirms what many of us already knew: it acts as a radicalisation engine, shifting people’s political views permanently to the right.

    By using an algorithmic feed – where X decides what you see rather than the chronological feed of Bluesky – and comparing it to people using a chronological feed for 7 weeks, the study found that the former “increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine.”

    We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects.

    This cesspool is where the UK’s entire political and media class spend their time.

  • The outrage factory

    Jessica Kant’s analysis of the anti-trans outrage factory is well worth your time.

    …any attempt at accuracy or veracity has gone completely out the window, with a chillingly familiar trend towards the bombastic that has led to pogroms at other times in history… why do conservatives believe that we’re everywhere, hiding in the bushes? Because powerful people won’t stop claiming it’s true, even if evidence to the contrary is everywhere.

  • The nasty party wears a red rosette now

    Dr Ruth Pearce has written a very good overview of Labour’s new Section 28, proposals that “seek to erase trans children: through extreme restrictions on social transition, toilet and sports bans, and censorship of the word “trans” itself. Like Section 28, they will most likely also create a wider chilling effect, reducing support for lesbian, gay, bi, and gender-nonconforming young people as well.”

  • “Shroud wavers”

    Hilary Cass, author of the disgraceful and damaging Cass Review into trans teens’ healthcare, told The Times in 2024 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 was “irresponsible for people to shroud-wave in that way.”

    Thanks to a freedom of information request we know that removing gender-affirming care from trans teens in 2021, which NHS England did in the aftermath of the (very dodgy and later overturned) Keira Bell case, led to a surge in teen suicides.

    5 trans children killed themselves in England in 2019/20; 4 trans children killed themselves in 2020/21; and in 2021/22, when gender-affirming care was first shut down, 22 trans children killed themselves.

    Correlation does not necessarily imply causation, of course, and people kill themselves for all kinds of reasons. Maybe it was the healthcare. Maybe they were bullied. Maybe their families treated them terribly. Maybe it was some or all of those things combined in a climate that’s increasingly hateful towards trans people. But there is plenty of evidence that the anti-trans panic kills children and will continue to do so. The self-appointed “protectors of children” have blood on their hands.

  • Thousands of imaginary children

    In 2022, The Times reported that the Tavistock gender clinic was going to be sued by thousands of families whose children “claim they were rushed into taking life-altering puberty blockers”.

    The story, while widely circulated and repeated, was never true. It couldn’t be: that number would mean almost every young person referred to endocrinology at the Tavistock would be suing. In fact, the number of families suing the clinic through the law firm quoted in the story is zero, as a new freedom of information request reveals.

    This is just the latest in a very long list of stories that were clearly bullshit from the outset. I suspect the people who wrote those stories were well aware of that.

  • Defending women and girls, sometimes

    It’s very telling that the most vocal self-appointed “protectors of women and girls” have nothing to say about the absolutely horrific production of AI-generated sexual abuse images of real women and children that’s happening on X on an industrial scale.

    As they continue to post on X, in many cases paying for the privilege to do so, the anti-trans activists, columnists, politicians and publishers are making it very clear that while the existence of trans women in public is beyond the pale for them, widespread image-based sexual abuse of women and children is not.

  • It’s good to talk (about books)

    The Kirkcudbright Book Festival line-up for March 2026 has been announced, and it’s a typically eclectic and interesting selection. I’ll be appearing on the Saturday morning to chat about Small Town Joy and the liberating power of music.

  • Whay hae!

    The lovely Alistair Braidwood of Scots Whay Hae! has picked Small Town Joy as one of his ten best non-fiction books of 2025. “If you love music, this is a book for you.”