Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Home is where the hate is

    One of the anti-trans groups favoured by health minister Wes Streeting is the Bayswater Support Group, some of whose members advocate child abuse in order to make children “accept biological reality”. And in a new, heartbreaking report by Trans Safety Network, some of those kids describe how the group radicalised their parents into increasingly cruel behavior and opened the door for far-right extremism.

    A very familiar pattern emerges: increasing alienation, paranoia, cruelty and conspiracism as people get drawn deeper into radicalisation and further from reality.

  • Somewhere: for me

    I’m in the new issue (issue 19) of Somewhere: For Us, Scotland’s LGBTQ+ magazine, talking about music and joy and the power of Pride. It’s a great magazine and I’d really recommend the print version: the ink it uses smells amazing.

  • A kick up the arts

    One of the very best things about writing books about music is that you then get to talk about music with people who are just as mad about it as you are. So it was an absolute joy to hang out with Nicola Meighan and Laura Jane Wilkie for Nicola’s excellently named podcast, A Kick Up The Arts. 

    Nicola and I will also be at the Edinburgh Book Festival next month along with Chitra Ramaswamy, Emma Pollock and Cora Bissett to talk about mid-90s music in an event that I think is going to be a lot of fun.

  • Ten years today

    Imagine an alternate timeline where the media and political anti-trans panic didn’t happen, Scotland passed its proposed gender recognition reforms, and the sky didn’t fall in: none of the problems predicted by genital-obsessed weirdos arose, and ten years after the legislation introduced gender recognition by self-ID it was crystal clear that the weirdos’ scaremongering about trans people’s documentation was entirely groundless and based on bigotry.

    That’s the timeline in Ireland, which today marks the tenth anniversary of self-ID. 

  • The end of the beginning

    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.

  • 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.

  • They’re coming for you too

    Amnesty International has published a new report on the anti-rights movement that wants to take us all back to the 1950s.

    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.   

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • A red flag alert

    The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security has published a red flag alert regarding trans and intersex people’s human rights in the UK.

    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.