Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Everyone’s a winner

    Carrie Kills A Man was nominated for the British Book Awards this year, and while I didn’t win an award or expect to at the ceremony on Monday night (every other book in my category was a heavyweight, critically acclaimed book by an excellent author), I’m still really delighted to have been shortlisted: with an estimated 200,000 new books published in the UK every year, being shortlisted for such a prestigious award is a testament to how hard my publisher works. And how brilliant I am, heh.

    I did feel like a fish out of water, but I expected that too: these awards are like The Brits music awards in that they’re primarily about the business, not the art; it was telling that every author was limited to an acceptance speech of 30 seconds but there were no such limits on speeches by the sales teams, PR departments or rights managers. I did have St Vincent in my head a little bit: “I’m so glad I came but I can’t wait to leave”: it was an honour to be invited but it’s not a world I’m part of, or ever likely to be.

    The day before the awards, I travelled down to the Boswell Book Festival where I got to read to and chat with a really nice group of people. I know that’s part of the business side of books too, but it doesn’t feel like it: it’s an opportunity for a conversation with like-minded souls, and it’s become my very favourite thing about being an author. As nice as it is to be nominated for an award, it’s nothing compared to the feeling you get when you’re making a connection with people.

  • Not breaking news

    You’d think that the UN publishing a damning criticism of the UK government might make the news, but as expected yesterday’s statement about LGBT+ rights in the UK and the associated fall of the UK in the Rainbow Rankings has barely been covered at all: one short piece in the Metro and one (anti-trans, of course) piece in moonhowler pamphlet The Critic.

    Today’s Daily Express did, however, find plenty of space to complain that a trans woman had been allowed to row a boat.

    In 2015.

  • A damning verdict

    The UN Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, Victor Madrigal-Borloz, has released a damning statement about the increasingly abusive treatment of LGBT+ people by the UK press and government. So you can expect him to be demonised in our fair and balanced press, assuming this is reported at all; if a trans person gets a parking ticket or accidentally treads on a ladybird that will of course be considered more newsworthy.

    The key summary:

    Abusive rhetoric by politicians, the media and social commentators has trickled down to produce increasingly abusive and hateful speech against LGBT persons in the United Kingdom (UK).

    It’s particularly damning in its assessment of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which has been stuffed with anti-trans stooges by the Tory government.

    …the objective of the EHRC was to offer the Government a formula through which it could carry out discriminatory distinctions currently unlawful under UK law, and that will remain so under international human rights law. The Independent Expert is of the opinion that this action of the EHRC is wholly unbecoming of an institution created to “stand up for those in need of protection and hold governments to account for their human rights obligations”.

    The initial statement is here.

  • Toxic workplaces

    I’ve said many times that I live an unusually charmed life compared to many trans people, the majority of whom are not middle-aged, middle-class media freelancers. A new workplace survey of trans people by YouGov demonstrates that for those people, things aren’t great.

    The study found:

    • 65% of trans employees hide their trans status at work, up from 52% in 2016;
    • 56% of trans employees aren’t out to their colleagues;
    • 32% have experienced workplace bullying or insults from colleagues;
    • 50% say they’ve concealed their trans status when looking for jobs;
    • 25% have been socially excluded by colleagues;
    • 27% have experienced discrimination or abuse from colleagues outside work;
    • 6% have been physically abused or threatened in the workplace.

    There are some small indications of positive progress, though. Of those people who are out at work:

    • 51% said colleagues responded positively, up from 50% in 2016.
    • 5% experienced a negative reaction from colleagues, down from 10% in 2016.

  • A fall from great

    In 2015, the UK was number one in the ILGA Europe Rainbow Europe rankings. It’s an annual study of the LGBTQ-friendliness of European countries, and for a long time the UK was proud to lead the way.

    The latest rankings have just been published. The UK has fallen to 17th. And it’s doing its best to fall further.

    Stonewall’s Robbie de Santos, on Twitter:

    This is a story about stagnation in the UK and progress across Europe. Our score has stayed steady, while other countries modernise their legal protections for LGBTQ+ people. The UK now sits at the bottom of the middle & countries like Slovenia and Croatia will soon overtake us.

    The index covers issues such as gender recognition legislation, hate crime protections and so on – things that, since 2022, have become demonstrably worse as the UK government chips away at LGBT+ people’s legal protections and the media fuels ever rising anti-LGBT+ sentiment; what started as an anti-trans moral panic, sadly and predictably, is now targeting the LGBT+ community more widely as the UK seems hell-bent on becoming a rainy version of Florida.

    Stonewall CEO Nancy Kelley sums it up:

    Shameful.

    The UK used to be, could be and should be better than this.

  • The wedge

    It’s been obvious for many years that if you vote for an anti-trans politician you get an anti-abortion politician; the whole trans panic has been manufactured by an unholy alliance of political and religious conservatives who believe that they, not you, should decide what you can do with your body. But even by their low standards they’re not usually as blatant as the Republicans in Nebraska.

    As the Washington Post reports, Ben Hansen filed amendments to the anti-trans bill 574, already a dangerous and hateful piece of legislation designed to remove trans people’s healthcare, that would ban abortions after 12 weeks – effectively a ban on all abortions. Senator Merv Riepe blocked the amendments, for now at least. But the amendments, and the furious reaction to Rip’s blocking of them, should remove any doubt that the war on trans people’s bodily autonomy is part of a wider war against everybody’s bodily autonomy, or that the “gender critical” movement is at best a useful tool for the evangelical right.

  • The eyeball test

    Jude Doyle on typically superb form:

    Headlines like the WaPo one are the natural end result of a media framing that treats trans people as a “debate” or an “ideology” rather than human beings. We’ve been abstracted into ideas, and now, people think they get to weigh in on whether or not we deserve life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

    Trans lives are not ideas, and trans questions are not abstract questions. They’re often very specific, and bodily, and (above all) personal: What shape I want my chest to be, which medications I take in the morning, which bathroom stall I use. No-one else can make those decisions for me, and no vote can determine which decisions I should make, because I am the one who will have to live with the consequences.

    To make it simple: If nine out of ten Americans agreed that you should stick a pencil in your eye right now, you would still have the right to refuse, and to keep both eyeballs. No-one can force you to injure yourself based purely on their belief that you should be getting hurt.

  • Are you sitting comfortably?

    After a bit of a delay, Carrie Kills A Man is now available as an Audible audiobook read by yours truly. I had great fun recording it and I think you can hear that in the audio.

  • Don’t read The Times

    As Duncan Hothersall writes on Twitter, “calling out The Times and The Times Scotland whenever they use a lie of omission to mislead on a trans rights issue would be an endless daily task.” But there’s a particularly egregious omission in today’s paper, which features the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics – an organisation The Times is clearly a fan of, having published what appears to be rewritten versions of their press releases since at least 2019.

    What The Times consistently fails to tell its readers is that the official-sounding Council is in fact an evangelical anti-evolution, anti-abortion, anti-LGBT lobby group headed by a Free Church preacher. If The Times’ journalists don’t know that then they’re incompetent; if they do, then they’re malevolent.

     

     

  • Damn lies about statistics

    There was a very odd front page story in the Washington Post a few days ago: after months and months of polls showing that most people supported trans rights and were against anti-trans legislation, the WSJ ran with a story headlined “Most in US back GOP’s anti-trans policies.”

    The article goes on to say “Clear majorities of Americans support restrictions affecting transgender children”.

    But they don’t, as the WSJ’s own article details. Parker Molloy explains that in the only poll question asking specifically about trans policies:

    the overwhelming majority of people who responded said that they support laws protecting trans people from discrimination.

    It’s quite an achievement to take your own poll and misrepresent it to your readers. But unfortunately that’s where we are now, and where we’ve been for some time: for example the recent furore over a trans woman running in the London Marathon, a race that after a certain level becomes a charity fun run for most participants, is now consistently reported as a trans woman beating 14,000 women competitors rather than a trans woman coming in 6,160th and raising £37,000 for charities. And as a result, I think polls will start to show a move towards anti-trans sentiment among the public, due largely to constant lying in newspapers, online and broadcast media.

    We now have a human centipede of hate, where anti-trans politicians feed anti-trans news stories which feed anti-trans columns which feed anti-trans politicians which feed… and the result is an ever more dangerous climate for trans people of all ages. Because while everybody pretends that this is only about protecting children, it never was – and the legislation proposed on such grounds, whether it’s the Don’t Say Gay law or laws against gender-affirming healthcare, are soon expanded to include teenagers and then adults too. Because the goal of the anti-trans movement is our elimination.

    As ever this isn’t scaremongering or misinterpretation; it’s what US legislators and UK anti-trans activists say openly, and in the terrorism they inspire: yesterday’s US mass shooter claimed to be inspired by hateful anti-trans account Libs of TikTok and was deeply enmeshed in anti-trans, anti-women, anti-LGBT+ forums (Libs of TikTok quietly removed the “stochastic terrorist” description from her Twitter bio last night when it proved to be too accurate).

    Molloy:

    The authors of that Washington Post piece — a piece that gleefully described their own poll (which, again, found that the majority of adults support legal protections for trans people in all areas of life) as “offering political jet fuel for Republicans in state legislatures and Congress” — have blood on their hands. The same is true for the many people who saw this before it went to print and decided to slap it on the front page of the paper: blood on their hands. Their goal is clear: to increase anti-trans sentiment among the public and to advance anti-trans policies.

    Like Molloy, I’m sick of this; as I wrote yesterday, it’s been more than six years now of daily scaremongering and hate. But many people are still completely unaware of what’s happening on a legislative level both here and in the UK, and part of that is groupthink and slanted reporting; a new study of UK journalists reports that LGBT+ journalists are experiencing a hostile environment where online and sometimes real-world abuse affects their ability to do their jobs, and the editorial stance of almost all UK mainstream media is firmly and often viciously anti-trans. So if we don’t talk about it, who will?

    Molloy:

    Just leave us alone, you horrible people. We’re human beings.