Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Author: Carrie

  • 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.

  • Uniquely dangerous

    Just over two hours before Parliament closed for the election, the Tories rushed through an emergency statutory instrument to ban the private prescription of puberty blockers for under-18s. The reason for the ban, and for the rush? The health secretary says it is “essential to make the order with immediate effect to avoid serious danger to health”.

    This medicine is so dangerous that the government is not banning, and does not propose to ban, NHS or private prescriptions for cisgender kids.

     

  • Get ready

    One of the ways in which the Tories have tried to rig the electoral system is by introducing mandatory voter ID. Without it, you can’t vote. Here’s how to get ID if you don’t already have any.

  • Doctors speak out against Cass

    The ongoing wrecking spree by Hilary Cass continues, but it’s getting significant pushback from medical experts. As Erin Reed reports, “both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society have categorically rejected the review as a justification for bans on care and have challenged many of its alleged findings.”

    Every time Cass speaks to the press things get worse: she’s now suggesting that trans healthcare shouldn’t be measured in satisfaction or regret rates (which are exceptionally high and exceptionally low respectively compared to other forms of healthcare) but in factors such as “employment”, which suggests that she’s either completely unaware of or couldn’t care less about the discrimination that means one in three UK employers say that – despite it being illegal – they would refuse to hire trans people. And more details of the people in her review board are starting to emerge; many have links with pseudoscientific anti-trans organisations. Cass herself met with people from Ron DeSantis’s anti-trans administration and appears to have lied about it.

    As the Endocrine Society says in a strongly worded statement:

    “We stand firm in our support of gender-affirming care. Transgender and gender-diverse people deserve access to needed and often life-saving medical care. NHS England’s recent report, the Cass Review, does not contain any new research that would contradict the recommendations made in our Clinical Practice Guideline on gender-affirming care… Medical evidence, not politics, should inform treatment decisions.”

  • Balance

    Lee Hurley of Trans Writes has been tracking trans-related articles in the UK press: The Guardian, The Observer, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday and Private Eye.

    In the 23 days since 16 April there have been 126 articles about trans people in those publications.

    121 of them were negative.

    5 were neutral.

    0 were written by trans people.

  • Snitches

    In Utah this week, the Republican administration introduced a snitch line, an online form for bigots to report any cases of trans or non-binary people using the single-sex facilities appropriate to their gender.

    It’s easy to point at this as an example of US right-wing bigotry, but for anyone thinking such vicious idiocy couldn’t happen here: on the very same day the UK Equalities Minister, Kemi Badenoch, introduced a snitch line, an online form for bigots to report organisations offering “bad guidance” about letting trans people use the single-sex spaces appropriate to their gender.

  • Illegal and cruel

    I’ve been loath to post about the current cavalcade of cruelties the Tories are heaping on trans people right now, but I wanted to point out something about the proposed NHS guidance that would force trans women out of single-sex wards: it’s illegal under multiple laws, especially for trans women who have gender recognition certificates. Not for the first time, the party of law and order is attempting to undermine the law by issuing guidelines encouraging organisations to practice illegal discrimination.