I’m sad to share the news that my wonderful publisher, 404 Ink, will be closing in summer 2026, but I’m immensely proud to be part of the 404 team: I was a 404 fan long before I became a 404 author. Heather and Laura are amazing people and working with them, and with the wider 404 family, has been a real joy.
Author: Carrie
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Doing the devils’ work
During her appearance in front of the Women and Equalities Committee last month, EHRC head Baroness Falkner told MPs that the EHRC had an 81% approval rate; the implication, which Falkner did not correct or clarify, was that this figure represented public polling.
Thanks to another freedom of information request, we now know that it doesn’t: the figure comes from the EHRC’s own “media sentiment analysis” which “measures the tone and favourability of media coverage about EHRC, not public polling”.
In other words: the newspapers that hate trans people are pleased that the EHRC is actively helping their war on trans people.
“Positive media sentiment has improved from 35.2% in 2021-22 to 80.6% in 2024-25”. When that media is waging war on a marginalised group that the EHRC is supposed to protect, that should be cause for resignation, not celebration.
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They’re coming for you too
A powerful anti-rights movement is growing in the UK, threatening to roll back our hard-won freedoms and rewrite the rules on whose rights, bodies and lives deserve protection.
…These groups spent a staggering £106 million between 2019 and 2023, an increase of over 33%. All with the aim to undermine our freedoms, restrict access to essential healthcare and roll back the rights we’ve fought hard to win.
…The growing anti-rights movement in the UK, emboldened by what is happening in the US and increasingly well-funded, is targeting reproductive freedoms, access to abortion and the rights of LGBTI people. Their end goal is to roll back our hard-won rights, undermine equality protections and rewrite the rules on who deserves dignity and freedom.
We must name this threat for what it is: a deliberate and coordinated attack on human rights, led by actors who are weaponising misinformation, fabricating moral panic about abortion care and LGBTI people and exploiting existing prejudice to sow divisions and distract us from the real issues that matter.
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Captured
Thanks to freedom of information requests, we can now see how the Equalities and Human Rights Commission has been captured by anti-trans lobby groups via its own anti-trans employees – including the Commission’s head. As TACC.org.uk reports:
we obtained a trove of correspondence between EHRC senior leadership and the gender-critical lobbying group Sex Matters, with repeated appearances by Transgender Trend and its director, Stephanie Davies-Arai. These aren’t brief emails from junior staff. They include private meetings arranged with the EHRC Chair and CEO, backchannel lobbying, and full acceptance of policy proposals well beyond what would be expected in a public consultation.
…This isn’t just about emails. This is about a public body entrusted with safeguarding the rights of all of us, especially the most marginalised. And it’s about that body allowing itself to be steered by one political faction, behind closed doors, while hiding behind procedural language and vague promises of balance.
Sharing the article on Bluesky, TACC wrote:
Sex Matters and Transgender Trend were given privileged access: private meetings, letter exchanges with the Chair, and the right to bypass consultation rules. Their language appears, almost verbatim, in EHRC policy… This is not independence. It’s regulatory capture. It’s bias in plain sight.
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Now they’re banning the books
BBC: “A council has removed all transgender-related books from the children’s sections of its libraries, its leader has announced.”
It’s Reform, inevitably, and there’s lots of questions about this particular story: my gut feeling is that it’s social media posturing, because the only book I’ve seen cited wasn’t a children’s book and wouldn’t have been in the children’s section of any library. But there is still an important point here:
Creating a moral panic around children’s books is how Section 28 started.
As I wrote in Fierce Salvage, the anti-trans panic is bringing bigotry back to the mainstream:
While hate crimes against the entire community continue to rise, the media and ministers tell the nation to fear the victims of hate, not the people purveying it. And when you listen to the callers and contributors to Scots radio shows or read the columnists and commenters on Scots newspaper websites, something becomes clear: if the Section 28 ballot were happening today, too many of our politicians, public figures and peers would be voting to keep it.
Bringing bigotry back has been the goal of the genital-obsessed weirdos all along.
We’ve been saying for years now that history is repeating: the anti-gay, anti-lesbian demonisation of the 1980s has simply been wrapped in “gender-critical” ribbons. And this is a very clear demonstration that book-banning by bigots, a key part of trying to eradicate LGBTQ+ people, is not just a US phenomenon.
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A red flag alert
All of the actions described above fit neatly into the 9th Pattern of Genocide: “Denial and/or Prevention of Identity.” As we have repeatedly stated over the years, genocide does not only manifest in the killing of an entire group. In the case of trans and intersex people, genocide is often perpetrated by making it impossible for individuals to exist as their true selves. The erasure of a group from public life is a step towards an attempt to erase that group’s existence, which is the very definition of genocide.
…No denial or omission in law can erase the concrete reality that trans and intersex people have always and will always exist. Attempts to erase them as a class constitutes an intent to commit genocide.
The Lemkin Institute joins many other organisations including the British Medical Association, ILGA-Europe and Human Rights Watch as well as 18 independent UN HR experts in condemning the UK government, judiciary and media’s war on trans and intersex people.
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Who pays the piper
There’s a good piece in Yorkshire Bylines about Sex Matters, the dubiously funded lawfare and lobbying organisation created specifically to eradicate trans people from society. It describes their links with less camouflaged hate groups, the difference between their public statements and their more private conversations, their infiltration of UK institutions and how they intend to reduce the number of trans people existing.
When you understand this, you understand that ‘both sides’ of the trans debate is not trans people fighting for extra rights at the expense of others’. More and more, it is trans people fighting tooth and nail against well-funded, well-connected extremists, whose true agenda strikes at the heart of their dignity, rights and very existence.
In a related article, The Parliament magazine shows how in Europe the religion-based war on “gender ideology” – feminism, abortion and LGBTQ+ people; the term was primarily publicised by The Vatican as part of very specifically anti-feminist messaging – has become a billion-dollar business.
“From Moscow to Washington, Brussels to Budapest, money is doing the heavy lifting in reshaping laws, policies, and public norms around gender, sexuality, and reproductive rights”.
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They lied
Back in May, I wrote that the EHRC’s interim guidance regarding trans people and toilets was an “illegal shitshow” that “misrepresents the law and exposes companies to significant legal risk by falsely telling them that they should discriminate against service users.”
Today, with multiple legal actions looming, the EHRC amended its interim guidance to remove the lie that the law makes trans-excluding single-sex toilets “compulsory”.
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Not so little drummer boy
My youngest made his live performance debut yesterday, drumming at his Primary 7 end of year – and for him, end of primary school – show. He was very good and I was very proud.
Both of my kids were there with me and their mum. While my youngest aced his first ever on-stage appearance, my eldest was sitting next to me and carrying on the family tradition of getting uncontrollable giggles during school shows. As they vibrated with laughter, weeping silently, I felt pretty proud about that too.
The last day of school can be quite emotional for parents, and I definitely felt that yesterday: both my children attended that school, so it was a goodbye after 13 years of school shows and two-child school runs.
My youngest has finished primary school and will now go on to high school; my eldest has finished high school and will now go on to university. And I’m wondering how two people who I’m sure were babies just weeks ago have suddenly become the young people I am so proud of and love so fiercely.
I don’t know what either of them will do in the future, but I’m looking forward to finding out.
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Taking The Stand
The Stand comedy club is one of my very favourite places, and I’m going there again on the 9th of July – but this time I’m going to be one of the people on stage rather than one of the people in the audience. Don’t worry, I’m not becoming a stand-up comedian: I’ll be there to talk about music as part of Marginalia, a cultural show that promises to “massage your grey matter, tickle your funny bone and tug at your heart strings”. I’ll be appearing with comedian Christopher McArthur Boyd, the author Alan Bissett and poet Iona Lee. It’s fair to say I’m absolutely terrified and a little bit star-struck too.