Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Where’s the rush?

    The London Gender Identity Clinic has just updated its waiting list information: as of July 2023 it was making first appointments for people first referred in July/August 2018, five years ago. With 324 new referrals each month and 55 first appointments offered per month, it’s clear that that five year figure is only going to increase.

    Maths isn’t my strong point. But a service that’s only seeing 20% of new referrals each month is a service that’s adding 80% of new referrals to a waiting list that’s already five years long. So if you’re referred today, your waiting time won’t be measured in months, weeks or even years; it’ll be decades.

    In Scotland, where the population is smaller and we have a different NHS, things are marginally better: the Edinburgh gender service is currently making first appointments for people referred two years ago. However in Glasgow, which covers a much bigger area (and oversees all surgery-related care for Lothian, Tayside and Grampian NHS areas too) and is the largest such clinic in Scotland, the waiting list for adults is around five years, up from four years in late 2022.

    Gender services are not bound by the same Referral To Treatment (RTT) and Treatment Time Guarantees (TTG), which mandate that patients should not have to wait more than 18 weeks between referral and the beginning of treatment. Rather, the care for trans people is best illustrated by a small but telling detail: if you believe that the wait for an appointment is affecting your mental health, NHS Scotland will direct you to a page of mental health resources on the Sandyford website. When you visit the page you’ll see a short, simple message: “The page you requested was removed.”

    One of the reasons that waiting lists are growing (other than the fact that trans healthcare is centralised when most of it could easily be handled by GPs) is because where there are vacancies, as there are in Sandyford, the current viciously anti-trans climate makes vacancies hard to fill: in the case of the Sandyford you don’t just have to brave online abuse but run a gauntlet of bodycam-wearing Christian extremists to get in the front door on some days. And while the wider faults in trans healthcare have been glaringly apparent for many years now, no politician is going to demand the improvements that are so desperately needed when you know exactly how the press and pressure groups would spin it.

    I’d love to live in the fantasy world the bigots describe, where you simply refer yourself to a clinic and have hormones and surgery the same day. It’s much nicer than the reality, in which our healthcare is little more than a link to a web page that doesn’t even exist.

  • Temporarily inaudible

    If you’re looking for Carrie Kills A Man on Audible right now, you won’t find it. I’m tempted to pretend that it’s because I’ve been silenced and get myself a few weeks of national newspaper and broadcasting publicity, but I’m too honest to do that. It’s an admin thing and it’ll be back on the service in a couple of weeks.

  • An evil plan

    In bad movies, villains like to explain in advance what they’re going to do. And in the bad movie we currently appear to be living in, the Christian Right does that too. Often, the most hateful plans and strategies are discussed openly at their conferences or published in their strategy documents.

    A good example of that was the 2017 Values Voter Summit in Washington DC, where the strategy to attack trans people was set out in full: by using a divide and conquer strategy to try and separate the T from the LGB, the Christian Right believed they could use trans people as a wedge against human rights more widely. They would do that in two ways: first of all, by portraying their attempts to remove trans people’s rights as trans people demanding more rights; and secondly, by pushing the message that those rights would remove the rights of others, such as lesbian women and female athletes. As you know, it’s a strategy that so far has been highly successful both in the US and the UK, partly through the Hands Across The Aisle initiative to team up Christian evangelicals with supposedly left-wing feminists and feminist journalists.

    If you thought that one was bad, you should see what they’re working on now.

    As Brynn Tannehill reports, Project 2025 – a coalition of despicable organisations including our old friends the Heritage Foundation (a key influence on the UK government and the main driver of this project), the Alliance Defending Freedom (a key player in anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and rhetoric on both sides of the Atlantic) and many others – has published a 900-page strategy document that’s truly terrifying and that it hopes will inform the next US presidential term. I’m looking at it here from a trans perspective but it’s also horrifying for Black people, for women, for disabled people and civilisation generally.

    “The Mandate for Leadership” is a 920-page document that details how the next Republican administration will implement radical and sweeping changes to the entirety of government… The business wish list calls for eliminating federal agencies, stripping those that remain of regulatory power, and deregulating industries. The president would directly manage and influence Department of Justice and FBI cases, which would allow him to pursue criminal cases against political enemies. Environmental law would be gutted, and states would be prevented from enforcing their own environmental laws.

    As Tannehill says, it’s effectively a wish-list for the evangelical right. And their wishes regarding LGBTQ+ people are frightening.

    “The Mandate for Leadership” makes eradicating LGBTQ people from public life its top priority.

    It’s important to consider the document in its wider context, because at the moment in the US many states are passing laws to restrict people’s access to pornographic content. But the Right’s definition of pornography probably isn’t your definition, because it includes the simple existence of LGBTQ+ people.

    So when you read this:

    Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.

    You need to understand that “it” includes my book, this blog, The Advocate, Autostraddle, the Trevor Project’s suicide hotline and anything else that provides any information whatsoever about LGBTQ+ people. We know this because they’re already trial-running it in the form of laws such as Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation.

    And that’s just the beginning. Tannehill:

    It could be argued as well that people who are visibly trans in public are pornographic or obscene, because they might be seen by a minor. This understanding of intent is in line with the call to “eradicate transgenderism from public life.”

    That eradication is real.

    The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule 

    The document decries “the toxic normalisation of transgenderism” that it claims is “invading” school libraries and says that its very top priority is to:

    Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.

    That’s not a dog whistle. That’s a five-alarm wake-up call in a document that sets out very clearly how the Christian Right intends to turn the US into a theocracy.

    Tannehill:

    The question remains: Will they be able to get all of this past the Supreme Court? Perhaps not in the short run. But over time, if given the power, they will replace current justices with those they hand-pick to give them the decisions they want, just as they did to end Roe v. Wade. Conservatives at the Claremont Institute have stated that they intend to seize power for generations and remake the U.S. entirely in their image. The “Mandate for Leadership” is an announcement of their goals, and the roadmap to achieving them.

  • Taliban fans

    Last year, trans people wryly joked that it was just a matter of time before some anti-trans dolt praised the Taliban because “at least they know what a woman is”. That dolt turned out to be Julia Hartley-Brewer, who tweeted on 29 August: “At least the Taliban know what a woman is” in response to a tweet noting that the Taliban “beheads and murders women and gay people”. Hartley-Brewer’s tweet appears to have been liked by JK Rowling, whose people told the press earlier this year that she’d helped people trying to escape the same regime.

    Praising the profoundly, viciously misogynist, homophobic and transphobic Taliban is very much on brand for so-called gender criticals, and many of them display a level of ignorance and idiocy that’s truly impressive. Such as today’s post by “Joanna”, who told a trans woman that “you, as a man, would not be subjected to what women in Afghanistan are. Why? Because you are a MAN.”

    As the woman in question, Katy Montgomerie, pointed out, there are only two possible fates for trans women under the Taliban. If they pass – ie they’re perceived to be cisgender women – then they will be oppressed just like any other woman. And if they don’t, they will be treated like other LGBTQ+ people, many of whom are attacked or sexually assaulted because of their orientation or gender identity: abused, attacked, sometimes even tortured or executed.

    Human Rights Watch has an excellent and horrifying article about life for queer people under the Taliban.

    Despite making repeated pledges to respect human rights, the Taliban have engaged in widespread rights abuses since retaking control of the country, including revenge killings, systematic discrimination against women and girls, severe restrictions on freedom of expression and the media, and land grabbing. The danger now facing LGBT people in Afghanistan—in an environment devoid of legal protections, under authorities that have explicitly pledged not to tolerate LGBT people—is grave.

    As Foreign Policy reports:

    Since the Taliban takeover last August, members of the Afghan LGBTQ community have faced electrocution, torture, killings, and fear.

    Here’s DW talking about Danish, a trans person.

    Danish has been living in semidarkness for weeks. Since the Taliban’s takeover in mid-August, he has been hiding in the windowless back room of a friend’s now-closed shop in Kabul. He no longer dares go outside. Under the Islamist Taliban, he and many like him face the death penalty… Everyday discrimination against LGBTQ individuals is ubiquitous, as is violence against them.

    But at least the Taliban know what a woman is, right?

  • Flickring out

    I joined the photo sharing site Flickr in the early 2000s and closed my account this week, nearly two decades later. I’d have closed it a couple of years ago but I’d forgotten all about it: the only reason I still had an account was to share photos with my mum, who at the time could still use a tablet computer, and to easily share byline photos with publishers and publicists. What used to be a social network had become little more than file storage and I’ve long since moved to better options.

    If you’re as old as I am you’ll remember the days when Flickr was talked about in the same sentences as MySpace and Blogger: it was part of the Web 2.0 boom when what became known as user generated content began to populate the online world. We’d been sharing stuff before, of course: my first experiences online were on USENET and CompuServe, which relied on content provided by service users. But Web 2.0 felt different, because the sites that enabled sharing (and hoped to profit from it by selling ads around it) made it incredibly easy and friction-free. Posting a photo to Twitter or a blog to Blogger was the beginning of a conversation. These were the days when Friends Reunited was a UK phenomenon and nobody had heard of Facebook.

    What went wrong at Flickr is pretty much what went wrong with many social media hits: owner Yahoo!, which acquired the service in 2007, neglected it and took its users for granted. It either didn’t see Facebook and Instagram coming or just suffered from Not Invented Here Syndrome, which is when a firm refuses to see the iceberg that’s about to sink it. Blackberry famously had Not Invented Here Syndrome when Apple showed off the very first iPhone.

    Where the original Flickr led the pack, the Yahoo-owned version lagged behind. It didn’t even have an app until 2009, by which point Facebook wasn’t so much eating its lunch as sneaking into its kitchen and clearing out the fridge. The app was terrible, and remained so through 2010 when Instagram turned photo sharing into an extremely big hit. Yahoo took another two years to make a similarly decent app but updates to the service were few and far between; it increasingly felt abandoned by its owners, its forums full of complaints from unhappy early adopters.

    Eventually Yahoo, which itself had been bought by Verizon, sold Flickr to SmugMug, who clearly didn’t have a clue what made the site work in the first place and didn’t have much money to throw at it either. Without Yahoo’s deep pockets the new Flickr removed the unlimited storage for free users and hiked the price of Pro accounts. Users fled in their millions.

    Of course the whole story is a bit bigger than that, and includes Meta (formerly Facebook) being very aggressive in its “if it’s a competitor, buy it or bury it” strategy; it bought Instagram and chucked serious money at it, and it’s doing the same with its Instagram spin-off Threads now. But many – most – of Flickr’s wounds were self-inflicted.

    Today, like Blogger, Flickr is still going – but it’s limping rather than sprinting. It still has its loyal users, mostly the keen photographers who loved it from the start. But most of us share on Google Photos, or iCloud Photos, or Instagram, or Facebook. At its peak Flickr had around 90 million monthly users; it’s believed to have around 7.6 million now, of which roughly 30% are in the US – so just over 2 million, with a further 87,000 in Europe according to Flickr’s own EU reporting. By comparison, Instagram has 2.35 billion.

    It’s interesting to compare Flickr to Twitter, or X as only Elon Musk and his sycophants call it. Because what we’re seeing with Flickr, and what I think we’re seeing with Twitter, is very much like Mike The Chicken of Fruita, Colorado. Mike became famous in the late 1940s because he managed to run around quite happily despite having been decapitated. The killer blow happened in late 1945, but Mike didn’t actually keel over until early 1947 – and he might have lived even longer if he hadn’t suffered the accident that finally killed him. I think the fatal blow for Flickr was the Yahoo takeover, and the Twitter one was the Musk purchase. Both networks are dying, but they’ve still got a little bit of running around to do.

  • Not fair. Not reasonable

    In the last few weeks, two stories have stood out to me among the usual avalanche of anti-trans content. The first story is the introduction of a new open category in the swimming World Cup for “all sex and gender identities”. And the second is the story of a trans woman who was turned away from a beauty salon and set up her own inclusive salon, marketed primarily towards trans and non-binary people.

    What they have in common is that both are examples of what anti-trans bigots claim would satisfy their “reasonable concerns”: they’re about trans and non-binary people being segregated from cisgender women.

    And yet both stories have been met with howls of protest and the usual online abuse.

    It doesn’t make sense. Or at least, it doesn’t if you think that anti-trans people have been telling the truth about their so-called reasonable concerns or their desire for so-called fairness.

    The thing about bigots, though, is that like the fascists they like to pal around with, they lie. They lie, and they lie, and they lie some more. They lie about statistics, about science, about the medical consensus. And most of all, they lie about what they want.

    It’s exactly the same playbook as the anti-abortion activists, who will claim that of course they don’t want to ban all abortion. They just want X, Y or Z. But they *do* want to ban all abortion. They’re just wise enough to know that the vast majority of people don’t want that, so they pretend to be more reasonable than they actually are. Given the reins of power, the mask falls off – as you can see in the US where there are serious attempts being made not just to ban all abortion, but to ban contraception and sex education too.

    It’s the same with anti-trans activists. Their goal is the complete elimination of trans people from the world, but again they realise that genocide doesn’t tend to go down well with most people. So they change the language to dehumanise – we’re never people; we’re a cult, an ideology, an agenda – and they pretend the multiple fronts aren’t connected.

    But when you look at the wider picture – attempts to ban trans people from sports, attempts to remove trans people’s legal gender recognition, attempts to ban trans people’s healthcare, attempts to remove trans people’s legal protections from discrimination, attempts to remove any references to trans people in schools, attempts to remove any books about trans people from libraries, attempts to censor the internet to prevent people from reading about trans people, attempts to incite violence against trans people by claiming they’re a danger to your women and children… you’d need to be a very particular kind of stupid to still believe that any of this is about “fairness” or “reasonable concerns”.

    To steal the old joke: how do you know when an anti-trans activist is lying? Their lips are moving.

     

  • The Sun sinks lower

    If you thought The Sun newspaper had changed its spots since the days of demonising AIDS sufferers and pissing on the Hillsborough dead, it would like to show you otherwise. Here’s its Sun Says column:

    Yes, it’s using dead babies as cannon fodder in its war on LGBTQ people. Those babies were not murdered by someone who was LGBTQ, and the lack of action was nothing to do with “wokeness”; quite the opposite, as it appears that racism played a significant part in the difficulty whistleblowers had in getting management to listen to them.

    Even by the Sun’s terribly low standards, to blame a murder committed by a straight, cisgender white woman and covered up by straight, cisgender white people on the LGBTQ community is utterly disgusting – and no different from the internet bigots calling LGBTQ people child abusers to try and incite violence against them. If you buy or work for any Murdoch property, you’re helping to pay for this.

     

  • Talking books

    Photo: Laura Jones-Rivera

    Thank you so much to Alex Hyde, Kirsty Logan, Szilvia Molnar and everybody who helped make our chat at the Edinburgh International Book Festival so much fun. This was my first time at the festival and if you haven’t been, I’d really recommend you go next year. It’s a huge event featuring lots of amazing people, but it doesn’t feel massive and there’s a really lovely atmosphere to it all.

  • We are trickster gods

    This superb piece by Niko Stratis is a must-read about the no-point-in-reading news stories telling you that some old rich guy or other thinks trans women are icky and probably murderous.

    We are trickster gods, barbed and poisonous, waiting to rip the seams of the tender fabric of this gentle world. But we are never the interviewer, never the storyteller, rarely the writer and seldom real.

    …After the run of Cooper news, it was announced that legendary guitar player and songwriter Carlos Santana went on a baffling on-stage tirade about trans people. This wasn’t the result of a poorly planned question, by all accounts this was unprompted. When I saw the news first, it was in Billboard, and it was in their “Pride” section.

    I ask you, what “Pride” do we take away from this knowledge? There is no value gained here certainly, and I am not surprised that Santana doesn’t like trans people because I am rarely surprised by such facts anymore. There is no easier path to a headline than making baseless comments about trans people into whatever microphone will have you.

    Stratis’s piece makes the well-worn but still important point that right now, trans people are among the most talked about and least listened to group in society: publication after publication uses us for outrage marketing by asking famous people whether they hate trans people and love JK Rowling, or the famous people do it themselves because they have a product to push. But the voices you never hear over the shouts of the supposedly silenced are those of trans people. Far too much media is about us, without us.

  • Years and years

    One of the more irritating barks of the anti-trans sealions is “what rights don’t trans people have, exactly?” It’s irritating because it’s deliberately obtuse: many of the rights we have on paper are rights that are not enforced, which means they might as well not exist. And the sealions know that but pretend not to.

    A good example of that is the right to NHS treatment that most UK nationals take for granted. But Cumbria, Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust has just announced that for the foreseeable future, it will not be accepting any referrals to the Northern Region Gender Dysphoria Service (NRGDS). You cannot get trans-related treatment through the NHS via any other avenue, so the NHS has effectively just scrapped trans healthcare in the region. We know that this healthcare is life-saving for many people, and yet in that part of England it simply isn’t available to anybody who isn’t already on the years-long waiting list.

    This isn’t the first time this has happened. In 2021, it emerged that Northern Ireland’s only gender identity clinic hadn’t accepted a single new patient since 2018. The Sandyford in Glasgow stopped taking new patients for its youth services for a while last year too.

    Even where new patients are being accepted, the backlog isn’t being cleared quickly enough. According to a freedom of information request earlier this month, trans people in Yorkshire can expect to wait thirty-five years for a first appointment at current clearance rates.

    The reason for this awful state of affairs is because there aren’t enough staff or resources to cope with demand for healthcare that remains part of the desperately underfunded and short-staffed mental health division of the desperately underfunded and short-staffed NHS. Despite years of warnings – including in the Theresa May government’s own LGBT action plan – trans healthcare has been starved of resources; rather than follow its own committee’s advice on reforming our healthcare, the May government decided instead to go for the much cheaper and largely un-requested reform of the gender recognition act. Which as I’m sure you know has been a great success.

    And to make things worse, the online bullying and press demonisation of trans healthcare providers in a style very reminiscent of the Christian Right’s attacks on abortion providers has made it very hard to fill vacancies. Until recently the Sandyford Clinic in Glasgow had just two psychiatrists, each of whom only attended one day per week, to cover the whole of the catchment area.

    The problem with trans healthcare is very simple. Healthcare that could easily be provided by our GPs – the HRT I take is the same HRT cisgender women take; the occasional blood tests I need are the same blood tests cisgender women need; the process for referring trans people to surgery doesn’t need to be any different than the process for knee surgery or back surgery, and so on – is all forced through the gender clinics, where psychiatrists do exactly the same job as your local GP surgery does. But there are far fewer psychiatrists than there are general practitioners, so the waiting lists get longer and longer and longer until healthcare is stopped altogether because the service can no longer cope.

    There was outcry in the newspapers a few weeks ago over the news that some 7.6 million people in England were waiting for NHS treatment, and two out of five had been waiting for more than 18 weeks. But that 18-week target doesn’t apply to mental health services, so there’s no outcry when ADHD and autism waiting lists exceed two years (many trans people are neurodiverse) or when trans waiting lists run into the decades, or when all trans healthcare is simply stopped. Officially, we have the same right to NHS treatment as anybody else. But in reality, we really don’t.