Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Incompetence and malevolence

    A superb piece by Parker Molloy on the awful people dominating the discourse around trans people.

    When you’re discussing a topic solely on the grounds of whether or not someone is allowed to talk about something, you’re able to completely sidestep ever having to address the actual content. If you want to have a “discussion” about something, then discuss it.

    But instead, these guys all stand around having a “discussion” about whether or not they’re even allowed to have discussions, despite regularly having this content-free meta-debate in front of massive audiences that critics can’t match.

    It allows them to avoid ever having to actually say anything. And they know it.

    It’s a typically good, well-researched and cited piece, and it goes to the heart of the problem over the so-called trans debate: it’s not a debate. One side publishes or broadcasts a constant flow of bullshit, and as soon as they’re criticised they retreat behind their cancel culture wagons.

    And that’s because all of these stories “just asking questions” aren’t about trying to figure out a world where we can all exist, but what society should do about us and tous. We are not included in this discussion, and our efforts to participate in it at our smaller blogs and newsletters, etc. never gain traction. Instead, it’s, “Hey, look, a trans person tweeted an insult at me, see how unreasonable they are?”

    We have a right to be a part of this conversation, and when we push back on things like publishing a glowing review of a book written by an anti-trans activist that’s filled with straight-up false information that demonstrates that the book hasn’t been fact-checked properly (see? there’s that word again, properly) and is written by someone who is friendly with the author, it’s not us saying, “OMG, you’re not allowed to write about this! OMG! Stoppppppp!” it’s us saying, “You’re not upholding even the tiniest, most minimal standards. You are letting your biases run wild and you are failing at the very concept of journalism.”

    Not to mention that a year later, the author of that book (that got the glowing NYT review) would call trans people “a huge problem to a sane world,” “damaged,” and then say she wanted “reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition.”

    As Sally Claire recalls her university journalism tutor saying: “If someone says it’s raining, and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the fucking window and find out which is true.” Too many journalists would rather brick the fucking windows up so nobody can call out their incompetence and malevolence.

  • We don’t want to die

    I’m aware that I’ve written a few posts recently about the deaths of young trans women, largely from suicide. Let’s look into that a little bit.

    There’s a famous statistic that says 41% of trans people have attempted suicide at some point in their life. It’s from a US study of trans people, and the number is often used online by anti-trans bigots urging us to “join the 41%”. There’s quite a lot of literature on this subject now, and if you do a literature review you’ll find that the numbers are pretty consistent: globally, 32% to 50% of trans people say they’ve attempted suicide at least once. The number of people with ideation, which is when you make plans but don’t go through with them, is higher still.

    That’s much, much higher than in the wider population. Sticking with the US, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that 4.3% of Americans said they had had suicidal thoughts in the previous year.

    So. For the population as a whole, suicidal ideation affects 4.3%. For the trans population, more than 41%.

    What’s the difference? Here’s a clue. In the latest study of trans and non-binary youth in the US, the study found that people who underwent affirming healthcare – such as hormone therapy – had a lower rate of suicidal ideation than the wider population: just 3.5%.

    What’s the difference between 3.5% and 41%? Support. Many older trans people have encountered all kinds of issues around being trans: staying in the closet for years, difficulties in obtaining healthcare, societal disapproval, familial ostracism, loneliness, discrimination, hate speech, sexual assault… you know the kind of thing.

    But when trans people are supported, given the healthcare they need and the support they deserve, they get happier.

    From the study:

    During the study period, appearance congruence, positive affect, and life satisfaction increased, and depression and anxiety symptoms decreased. Increases in appearance congruence were associated with concurrent increases in positive affect and life satisfaction and decreases in depression and anxiety symptoms.

    Healthcare in “making people better” shocker.

    The problem isn’t who we are. It’s how so many of us are treated because of who we are. That isn’t an us problem. That’s a you problem (or if you’re one of the good people, a them problem). Trying to “eliminate transgenderism”, or just turning a blind eye to the destruction of our rights and healthcare by those who want to, has a body count.

  • Her name was Eden

    I don’t usually post content warnings but be aware that this story is really horrific. I’m writing it on the basis of information collated by Eden’s friends and by journalist Erin Reed. If more details emerge to confirm or contradict the details here, I’ll update the post.

    Her name was Eden Knight. “Eden was funny, sharp, well-read and concerned with making the world a better place,” her friends say. She lived in the US, where she appeared to be living her best life. Two days ago, she killed herself.

    Eden came from a rich Saudi family and was attending college in the US. She came out as trans during COVID. And in Summer 2022, she explained in her final note, she was approached by a friendly “fixer” hired by her family who said his goal was to find a way to rebuild the bridges burnt between her and her parents. The fixer also suggested he could solve her immigration status, as she was living in the US illegally.

    “I thought this was impossible,” she wrote. “I’m transgender and they are strict conservative Muslims, but I decided I would give it a shot because it can’t hurt right lmao?”

    According to Eden’s note, the fixer and his associate took her under his wing. After a “traumatic event” he encouraged her to move from Georgia, where she lived, to Virginia, where she would be looked after by one of the man’s associates. Eden was initially pampered, but the tone began to change and Eden appears to have been subject to a clumsy attempt at conversion therapy. “I did not realize fast enough what was happening because I’m fucking stupid,” she wrote.

    After a few months “I realised I was entirely dependent on [the associate] for food and shelter.” The fear of deportation kept her from running away. “I did everything he asked,” she wrote. “I cut my hair, I stopped taking estrogen, I changed my wardrobe, I met my dad… my mom kept telling me to repent or I was going to helm and I did, I repented.”

    The associate booked Eden on a flight to Saudi Arabia and she was returned to her parents. After a month of apparent normality, things changed. “I was subjected to daily searches of my belongings, my mom searched all of my electronics whenever she got the chance. I was berated for being a freak when my mom found my private photos, my dad called me a failure and an abomination.” Her parents found her HRT on multiple occasions and confiscated it.

    “They have found my HRT again, and I am done fighting,” Eden wrote two days ago. “This time I am done. I am tired.”

    She ended her message with a wish. “I hope that the world gets better for us. I hope our people get old.”

    Her suicide note was posted online yesterday morning. In the afternoon, her family posted the official notification of her death. She was deadnamed and misgendered throughout.

  • A scandal at Sandyford

    The Sandyford clinic is where Glasgow’s gender clinic is based, alongside various sexual health and victim counselling services. I’ve been attending it since 2017, and I’ve been meaning to write a proper piece about it for some time: visiting in person, even before COVID, was like playing the abandoned-hospital level of a horror video game. Empty corridor after empty corridor, your footsteps echoing, sitting alone in a large waiting room wondering if the next person you see will be a psychiatrist or a serial killer.

    There were protests outside it yesterday by the loons and cowards of the Scottish Family Party, who said they were coming at 11am to brick up the entrance to protest its role in women’s reproductive freedom. In the end they arrived at 8am with cardboard boxes printed with bricks, took their photo and then hid at the Mitchell Library until the colourful and camp counter-protest – which attracted more than 100 people – was over, returning afterwards to take another photo at the wrong building.

    The moon howlers of the SFP weren’t there to protest its trans services, although I’m sure that was a bonus. But the Sandyford Clinic has been the subject of ridiculous scaremongering for years now, with anti-trans bigots and cynical Conservatives claiming yet again that the clinic is “experimenting on children” and fast-tracking them into surgery. The fact that children don’t get gender-affirming surgery and nobody is experimenting on anybody is an inconvenient truth they prefer not to address.

    This morning, The National newspaper printed a story about a scandal at the Sandyford. But it’s not the invented one of the bigots. It’s the real one anyone attending can tell you about.

    Just two psychiatrists, each working one day a week, cover adult services for the whole west of Scotland. The young person’s team is soon to consist of a single person, who will work half the week and cover all of the country

    I know both psychiatrists, and they appear to be good people. But they’re not magic people. They’re massively overworked in a department that’s desperately underfunded and understaffed. One position has been advertised for years now and nobody has applied, because who’d want to work in an environment like that?

    “There’s this massive waiting list and there’s going to be loads of scrutiny on you and people are going to be actively campaigning for your service to close down and there’s 1000 newspaper articles written about your client br every week. When you put it like that, nobody is going to want to do it.”

    When I self-referred to the Sandyford in 2016, it took 11 months before I was offered an initial assessment visit. Officially the adult waiting list is nearly five years long now. Anecdotally I’m hearing it’s even longer than that. And the lack of staff means the healthcare you do get is inadequate. Last May a really important appointment was made for me; nobody informed me about it and I didn’t discover it had been made until November. The earliest next appointment was in February.

    If this were any other branch of healthcare, the coverage would be deafening. But I think it’s a safe bet that the genuine scandal at the Sandyford, one that’s affecting the healthcare of a small but significant group of people, will get less coverage than any scaremongering. And that too should be a national scandal.

  • Murdoch’s minions want Section 28 back

    The Times has posted its latest culture war piece, in which parents are “shocked” by “graphic sex education in school”. Apparently “one mother says her son has ‘gone from finding out Santa Claus doesn’t exist to being told about anal sex’’, which is definitely a thing that actually happened.

    It’s a good piece to study if you’re interested in how culture wars are waged, though. The “graphic sex education” it talks about doesn’t exist, but the Times uses innuendo to suggest otherwise. The term “anal fun and frolics” that has The Times clutching its pearls is from a personal website written by an adult for other adults. The song about masturbation The Times refers to is from a different website, also by and for adults.

    What The Times is doing here, and not in a subtle way, is trying to make you scared of the queers again. The article opens with a 12-year-old apparently having a panic attack because someone told her trans people exist; the body copy’s deliberate focus on anal sex is code for The Gays. And telling people that the queers and the gays are coming for your kids is what brought us Section 28, which Murdoch’s minions clearly want to bring back.

    Update, 11 March

    The source of the story was The New Social Covenant Unit, an evangelical organisation co-chaired by Miriam Cates MP and Danny Kruger MP whose director Imogen Sinclair works for the Conservative Christian Fellowship. To describe them as social and religious conservatives would be an understatement.

    NSCU’s politics are stated in greater detail in their manifesto “12 propositions for a new social convenant”8. This manifesto is deeply socially conservative on the subject of marriage and family, claiming that marriage equality for same sex couples “removed [marriage’s] physical basis” and that the right of couples to end a marriage had “removed its emotional and practical basis, and voided the marriage vow itself”. The 12 propositions refer to the primary purpose of marriage as “regulation of baby-making”, implicitly valuing fertile, heterosexual couples over all other forms of families.

    The 12 propositions rail against immigration and “globalism”, promoting the antisemitic conspiracy theory9that “cultural Marxism”, purported to be an obscure school of political thought originating from largely Jewish academics in the 1950s, has infiltrated political and academic institutions with the aim of destroying the family and Western civilisation.

  • Fight club

    One of the key attack strategies of the anti-trans movement is to attack the idea of trans women participating in sports. It’s quite clever, because elite athletes are very different from us “normal” people: people like Michael Phelps or Sharron Davies are basically freaks of nature. Davies has been (wrongly) tagged on the internet as trans, which is quite funny given her anti-trans views.

    So if you can find an example of a trans woman competing at an elite level, you can quite easily persuade people that trans women are incredibly athletic and powerful. Rather than, like me the other day, spending three minutes trying to open a jar of garlic, hurting my wrist and bursting into tears.

    That process of picking an outlier and pretending they’re everywhere is pretty much what happened with Laurel Hubbard, the first and only openly trans woman to compete in an individual Olympic event in the 18 years since the Olympics opened their arms to trans people in 2004. She placed last.

    If we’re taking over sports we’re doing a pretty shit job of it.

    But of course, we’re not. If you look at the stories about supposed trans domination of sports, there’s no such thing happening. In every case I’ve ever seen, the trans woman’s success was either an outlier or wasn’t even success: I’ve seen many stories featuring aggrieved athletes complaining about trans domination when they and the trans person they’ve gone to the papers about finished very far behind many other cisgender athletes. But “I lost because I’m shit” doesn’t make for quite the same clickbait as “I was robbed of my rightful win by a trans woman”.

    But of course, transphobes’ feelings don’t care about facts. And I couldn’t have come up with a better example of that than the video currently doing the rounds that shows a trans woman absolutely destroying a cisgender woman in an MMA wrestling match.

    Here are some of the comments. The second one is from an American politician.

    “When a guy isn’t good enough to compete with the guys, it’s easier to pretend to be a woman.”

    “Who is responsible when a real girl gets hurt? How is this fair for actual females? Why do we not see women posing as men and stepping on the field as a linebacker? If you support this you’re as mentally ill as they are. If you’re silent then you support it.”

    “this is totally unfair to real women IMO.”

    “This is so wrong on so many levels. Men do not belong in women’s sport”

    There’s just one problem.

    Nobody in the video is trans.

    The supposed trans woman in the video is Gaby Garcia, a very successful MMA fighter from Brazil. She’s one of the most successful competitors of all time, in fact. And she’s cisgender.

  • Hate never dies

    This week, MP Jess Phillips spent over five minutes in parliament reading the names of women and girls murdered, or believed to have been murdered, by men. One of those girls was trans teen Brianna Ghey, whose alleged killers are awaiting trial.

    The furious, hateful, inhuman response from the “reasonable concerns”, “protect women” crowd managed to shock me, and I thought I was pretty much unshockable by now.

    Part of the fury is because the list that Phillips uses is compiled by a very vocal anti-trans activist; Ghey’s name was (rightly) added by the MP.

    As Trans Safety Network’s Jess O’Thompson writes:

    “It is deeply concerning that transphobic rhetoric in this country is so prevalent and so vile that gender critical activists feel bold enough to jump on the grave of a dead child… This is not about single-sex spaces or safeguarding – there is no way to be trans which is not an affront to them. This pile on shows the entire movement for what it is – a vicious attack rooted in the hatred of trans people and our community, even our dead children.”

  • The smoking gun

    Today, The Telegraph and Radio 4 gave extensive coverage to a brand new anti-trans group supported by various famous transphobes. Meanwhile in America, Mother Jones reports on the smoking gun that proves collusion between evangelical Christians, right-wing politicians and supposedly grass-roots lobby groups. Many of the key players are also active in UK anti-trans activism.

    “The message was one in a trove of emails obtained by Mother Jones between Deutsch and representatives of a network of activists and organizations at the forefront of the anti-trans movement. They show the degree to which these activists shaped… repressive legislation, a version of which was signed into law in February, and the tactics, alliances, and goals of a movement that has sought to foist their agenda on a national scale.”

    Not just on a national scale. On a global scale.

    “The emails demonstrate close collaboration between groups working behind the scenes to push bills banning transgender health care, including ADF—which has defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people in Europe—and the ACPeds—which has opposed adoption by gay couples and supported conversion therapy for LGBTQ youth. In recent years, ADF has drafted legislation banning trans children from using school restrooms or playing on school sports teams that align with their gender identity. (Both groups are also staunchly anti-abortion; ADF, which drafted the Mississippi abortion ban at the heart of the case that overturned Roe v. Wade, is currently representing ACPeds in a closely-watched lawsuit to ban an abortion pill, mifepristone, nationally.)”

    Full details of the years of leaked emails are still emerging but from what I’ve seen already there’s plenty of really horrific stuff in there. Anyone who still believes that this is about protecting children or reasonable concerns about women’s safety is delusional.

  • All the things she said

    I’ve seen my name in print quite a lot recently, but it hasn’t all been book-related. I’ve been dragged into the culture war because of a BBC Radio Scotland item I contributed to, and as a result I ended up in publications ranging from PinkNews to The Independent and the LA Times. As a journalist, you rarely want to be the story. But as a journalist it’s interesting to see how the sausage is made from the other end of the process.

    The short version: the BBC publicly apologised to JK Rowling about a piece I contributed to.

    The long version: I didn’t say what PinkNews and The Independent claim I said.

    I suspect The Independent has just cribbed from Pink News, because the misrepresentation is the same.

    PinkNews in February:

    During the BBC broadcast, trans writer Carrie Marshall said she boycotted the game because she believed it to be funding “the anti-trans movement”.

    The Independent today:

    A week later, the BBC apologised again after a transgender woman appearing on BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland show said that the new PlayStation game Hogwarts Legacy was funding “the anti-trans movement”.

    Both of these reports are misrepresenting what I said, and I’ve asked both publications to correct them [Update, 9 Mar: The Independent has said “oops, sorry” and corrected their article] [13 Mar: PinkNews has also corrected its piece, and a second piece based on the first]. I didn’t say I was boycotting the game, and I definitely didn’t say it was funding the anti-trans movement.

    If you’re quick you can catch the whole item on BBC Sounds for a few more days; it expires this weekend. And if you do, you’ll hear me say that “This is money that people believe very strongly is going to fund the anti-trans movement”. I didn’t share my own views on that, or say whether or not the belief is correct. Asked to come on air as a trusted journalist to explain what some people were saying about the game, I came on air and explained what some people were saying about the game.

    Here’s the full extract, which only the LA Times included any of for context; it’s no coincidence that US newspapers are famed for their fact-checkers, a role that’s largely absent in UK media.

    “Quite a lot of LGBT people are concerned about the Harry Potter franchise, because JK Rowling has been very proud of her association with the so-called Gender Critical movement and some of its leading figures, and has also strongly suggested that she considers her income as proof that people share her views. So this has become about much, much more than the video game. To some people, this is about a culture war issue. We’re now seeing quite a lot of people who are now harassing trans gamers saying ‘I’m buying ten copies of this. What are you going to do about it?’ and it’s become really quite horrible online.”

    “This is money that people believe very strongly is going to fund the anti-trans movement, which has over 300 anti-trans laws in front of US legislators and has become a real battleground in Britain as well. This is having a measurable effect on trans people’s lives and perhaps our safety too, so it’s not just an abstract issue about the ‘death of the author’. It’s about real people’s lives. And I think that’s why so many trans people are concerned about this game.”

    To add insult to incorrect quoting, PinkNews originally said I was a “trans activist” – it’s now been changed to “trans writer”.

    I’ll let you decide whether the apology was justified, but by comparison I’d like to share the BBC Complaints response when I was one of thousands of people who complained about a 2021 BBC article that defamed trans women as rapists. The article’s sources were a sex offender and an anti-trans hate group; the former’s name was removed from the article a few days later when she posted death threats targeting trans people. Here’s what the complaints department had to say.

    “The article was carefully considered before publication, went through a rigorous editorial review process and fully complies with the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards.”

    The article is still online. The complaints department remains unapologetic.

  • Horse Child and Dinosaur Boy

    Writing in The Spectator, Mary Wakefield has a terrible tale to share.

    “A friend in the education world has told me he knows of several British schools in which children are identifying as animals. There’s a horse child who’s taken out by staff for gallops; a boy dinosaur who is fed on strips of meat.”

    The Onion already beat her to it.

    “We just made Quentin up, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean stories like his aren’t potentially happening everywhere, constantly. Good journalism is about finding those stories, even when they don’t exist. It’s about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like, then offering misleading evidence in service of preordained editorial conclusions.”