Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Author: Carrie

  • A law that doesn’t exist

    The Times reports that the EHRC guidance on trans people, to be published later this year, is going to ignore the 50,000+ consultation responses and will tell organisations not to let trans people use the correct facilities for their gender. It’s not a surprise, but it’s important to understand that what the EHRC is attempting to do here is invent a law that does not exist.

    Until now, the Equality Act has said that trans people should only be excluded from facilities if doing so is a proportional means of achieving a legitimate aim. And when the EHRC guidance is published, that will remain the case. What’s changed is how the EHRC is trying to spin it.

    The bigots at the EHRC, and their friends at the anti-trans pressure group Sex Matters and in the press, are trying to muddy the waters and make organisations believe that they *must* exclude trans people. But that’s not the law. The law says that yes, they can, if it’s proportionate and absolutely necessary. But they don’t have to, and they are certainly not breaking the law if they choose to offer gender-neutral facilities.

    The proposed new guidance is in breach of multiple laws and breaches multiple human rights obligations the UK is signatory to; it also completely disregards the European Court of Human Rights judgements that made the UK grant trans people legal gender recognition in the 2000s. It’s heading once again to the EU courts, where it will be destroyed. But that will take time, and the anti-trans thugs hope to destroy as many human rights as possible before that happens.

  • Hire education

    As the genital-obsessed weirdos demand a boycott of M&S for having a trans employee in a shop – I think this is their fourth M&S boycott, or maybe the fifth; it’s hard to keep track – it’s worth revisiting this HR News report from seven years ago, before the anti-trans industry started to demand illegal anti-trans discrimination in the workplace though lawfare and co-ordinated online abuse.

    In a survey of 1,000 employers:

    • 47% of retailers said they were unlikely to hire a trans person
    • 45% of IT businesses said they were unlikely to hire a trans person
    • 35% of leisure and hospitality businesses said they were unlikely to hire a trans person
    • 34% of manufacturing businesses said they were unlikely to hire a trans person

    Not hiring someone because they’re trans was, and is, illegal. Given that, it’s safe to assume that many other respondents wouldn’t hire trans people either but wouldn’t admit it publicly or privately.

    The survey suggested that many firms were simply ignorant of the law, and at the time the EHRC was trying to fix that. In recent years, however, it’s set out to misrepresent and mislead instead: instead of educating employers it’s demanding more discrimination, not less.

  • An appalling apology

    From the Daily Telegraph: Marks & Spencer has apologised to a mother for causing her teenage daughter “distress” after she was asked if she needed help by an Asian employee in its bra section.

    The retailer said it was “truly sorry” after the mother complained that her 14-year-old daughter had felt uncomfortable when they were approached by an Asian shop assistant in the lingerie area of the shop, where they were hoping to have a bra fitting”.

    Awful, right?

    The original article says “transgender” and “trans” rather than Asian. But that shouldn’t make the story any less horrific, or M&S’s apology any less appalling.

    There is no suggestion that the employee said or did anything wrong. The complaint is simply that a trans person has a job. And that complaint is backed by the implicit threat of billionaire-funded legal action that would be very expensive to fight. This is lawfare, and it’s designed to make companies and organisations fearful about employing any trans people in any capacity anywhere.

  • The body for bigotry

    Marcus Daniel has written a damning summary of how the Equalities and Human Rights Commission has been poisoned: what was created to promote equality has been cynically and deliberately infested with people who are bigoted not just against trans people, but against all kinds of marginalised groups. The result? An equalities body that’s actively hostile to equality; an anti-discrimination body that pushes discrimination.

    The EHRC was set up in 2007 to ensure there is no discrimination based on nine protected characteristics of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation. It took over the responsibilities of existing separate commissions for for Racial Inequality, Equal Opportunities and Disability Rights. It’s fair to say it’s been downhill ever since.

  • Lying by omission

    Journalism pretends to be fair and independent, but much of it isn’t: you can easily shape a story by choosing to include some things and exclude others. And there’s an excellent example of that in today’s newspapers, or rather there isn’t an excellent example of that in today’s newspapers.

    The ongoing employment tribunal of the deeply unpleasant Fife nurse Sandie Peggie has been the subject of intense daily coverage in all of the UK and Scottish press. Peggie was abusive to a trans doctor, Beth Upton, and was disciplined for that. But most of the newspapers’ coverage attempts to paint Upton as an aggressor and Peggie as her victim. Peggie is being represented by a director of the papers’ favourite anti-trans hate group Sex Matters and the case is widely believed to be funded by a very famous millionaire.

    The judge has effectively allowed the tribunal to become a show trial of Peggie’s victim; in addition to allowing misgendering and deadnaming by Sex Matters’ lawyer, the tribunal refused to grant the doctor anonymity to protect her from exactly the co-ordinated media and social media abuse she’s been subjected to.

    The papers clearly believe that this story is so important that it justifies blanket coverage including live blogs from the tribunal. And yet there are no headlines in the major newspapers today of the most explosive testimony yet, which came from Peggie herself yesterday. During an absolutely astonishing session she revealed herself to be bigoted against all kinds of people. She used multiple racist slurs, admitted to Islamaphobia, and generally revealed herself to be bigoted against multiple marginalised groups. This follows on from other witnesses producing evidence of her posting sick, racist jokes about dead Pakistanis and saying that she wanted to post bacon through the doors of a mosque.

    This is very inconvenient for the newspapers that have lionised Peggie as a feminist Jesus; The Scotsman and The Herald have repeatedly hailed her as a pure, innocent victim of the evil trans mafia. And as a result, they have looked at the most newsworthy testimony from the entire tribunal and simply ignored it.

    It’s not just the Scots press. The Daily Mail and the Telegraph have been equally obsessed, and yet there’s nothing about the racist comments in either print edition today.

    This is what newspapers do when the truth gets in the way. They bury it. And if that means burying people too, so be it.

  • #OneMoreTune: a celebration

    I’m proud and honoured to be part of One More Tune, a celebration of and fundraiser for the legendary JD Twitch, aka Keith McIvor, of Optimo/Espacio. It’s a 41-track compilation album spanning all kinds of genres and featuring artists big and small, and all proceeds are going to JD’s healthcare and to his favourite good causes. JD has been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour and musicians and music fans have already rallied round to help. The crowdfunder to help with his immediate care smashed its target in hours.

    We’ve contributed an unreleased song, Don’t Know How To Human, and I wrote a little bit for the accompanying booklet about interviewing Keith for Small Town Joy, in which he played a really important part. Here’s a taster:

    I thought I loved music, but compared to JD I just have a bit of a crush. I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody so knowledgeable about music – all music, not just a particular genre of it – and so insightful and enthusiastic about such a huge variety of sounds. JD doesn’t just talk about music. He evangelises.

  • “40 years on, are we really doing this again?”

    Jessica Harriet writes about Labour’s new Section 28, which is designed to dehumanise and harm trans kids. 

    Clause 72 is an ambiguous mess, purposefully leaving headroom for the removal of LGBTQIA+ books should they include a representation of transgender people, family members, friends, or history. Granting schools and parents enough plausible justification to censor inclusive materials, whilst claiming it is for protection. And in doing so, they declare the acknowledgement of gender diversity as an inherent danger, restricting a minorities representation to age requirements and trigger warnings.

    …In stark parallel to Section 28, trans education is framed as a form of “indoctrination” or, as they politely put it, “encouragement.” Just as Thatcher’s government deemed queer identities a threat to ‘functioning’ society, the RSHE guidance implies trans visibility as a suggestive wrong, a political contagion.

  • The best laws money can buy

    We’ve been told repeatedly by the Labour government that the Supreme Court judgement that reversed decades of equality law, threatening trans people’s rights and safety, is final and must be respected: any Supreme Court judgement is carved in stone, permanent, impossible to change.

    Today, Labour chancellor Rachel Reeves “is considering overruling the Supreme Court over a £44bn car loan commission scandal after lobbying by some of the UK’s biggest lenders,” The Guardian reports.

  • Safety first

    There’s a good piece on the higher education site Wonkhe by Anna Bull: Safety must shape policy on single-sex spaces. And pushing trans and non-binary people into the wrong toilets and changing rooms is not the way to do that. The focus here is on educational institutions but the point is true more widely: we’re much more likely to be the victims of abuse than the perpetrators of it.

    Trans and non-binary people are much more likely than cis people, including cis women, to be subjected to sexual harassment and violence. This is a well-established fact, evidenced by national studies of 180,000 students in the US; 8000 students in Ireland; and 43,000 students in Australia, as well as studies focusing on staff-student sexual misconduct (p.277) or on specific disciplines; and studies across campuses and that compare different sexual and gender minority groups.

    …Taken as a whole, the Supreme Court judgement, and the EHRC’s interpretation of it, risks making trans and non-binary people even more unsafe by revealing their identities when it may not be safe to do so, and by creating a climate where targeting them for abuse on the basis of their identities is more acceptable. As a result, the figures given above on the prevalence of sexual violence and harassment against trans and non-binary people are likely to grow even larger.

  • A tsunami of scaremongering

    There’s a good piece in Assigned Media: “A Shameful Chapter”: How Anti-Trans Disinformation Drowned Out Science and Gripped the Mainstream. It’s about the US but relevant to the UK too: our media is just as captured, and their reporting is helping the right-wing attacks on trans people’s human rights and healthcare.

    It takes one pseudoscience peddler and uses their activities to show:

    “the reach and coordination of right-wing lobbying groups, their determination to spread medical disinformation to promote political goals, and their success in getting that message adopted in mainstream media — not simply in friendly outlets like Fox but in emerging power centers like the Free Press, and even traditional media like The New York Times.

    This pipeline of disinformation, which has elevated extremist views and undercut medical science, has had devastating effects on hundreds of thousands of trans Americans, most acutely young people, and their families.”