I’m a big fan of Snack magazine, the independent Scots arts, entertainment and culture magazine, so I’m really delighted to be in its pages this month talking about Small Town Joy. You can read this month’s magazine online for free here.
Author: Carrie
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Basic biology
The bigots are furious with doctors who dare to challenge their primary school-level understanding of human biology. Resident doctors of the British Medical Association approved a motion yesterday that called the Supreme Court verdict – which repeatedly used the term “biological women” but seemed unable to say what that actually meant – “scientifically illiterate” and “biologically nonsensical”.
The anti-trans groups have of course lied about what the motion said, claiming that doctors said there was “no basis” for biological sex. But that’s not what the text said. It said:
We recognise as doctors that sex and gender are complex and multifaceted aspects of the human condition and attempting to impose a rigid binary has no basis in science or medicine while being actively harmful to transgender and gender diverse people.
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Illegal, immoral, hateful
At 10pm on Friday night the equality and human rights committee published an interim update – not guidance, let alone statutory guidance – about trans people’s access to services and facilities. The document is not law, makes no sense, and flies in the face of settled law. But the goal is to persuade people that the law has changed, and that they should act immediately to ban trans people from public facilities.
It’s nonsense. It says that trans people should be excluded from the toilets that match their gender, but can also be excluded from the toilets that match their assigned sex at birth. It says that gay men’s choirs shouldn’t include trans men, and that lesbian book clubs shouldn’t include trans women.
It’s a sadistic fantasy written by people put in place specifically to wage war on trans people and trans women in particular as part of the Tories’ “war on woke”. In a fairly short period of time the Tories changed the EHRC from an independent human rights watchdog to an arm of the government, with many senior officials quitting in disgust. It now works closely with anti-trans pressure groups for the removal of trans people’s legal protections.
To illustrate just how ridiculous and hateful things have become: in 2016 the UK government issued a travel warning for North Carolina and Alabama over their newly implemented anti-trans bathroom bans. Today, the UK government is being urged to, and seems inclined to, implement even more regressive bans here.
There’s incredible outrage over this among people who aren’t trans and who know bigotry when they see it, although inevitably it’s not being reflected in the UK press. But the Irish Examiner’s Séamas O’Reilly puts it very clearly.
If this madness is signed off by Labour it guarantees a kicking in the EU courts, because it’s a clear breach of EU-wide human rights legislation. But it will really harm lots of people in the interim. Not just trans people, but anyone who attracts the wrong kind of attention from self-appointed bathroom bouncers.
Few MPs and MSPs care about trans people’s human rights and safety. But they care about staying in power. And that means you can put pressure on them by making it clear that this horrific bullying of marginalised people needs to stop.
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Small Town Joy in Scots Whay Hae!
I was absolutely delighted to chat with Alistair Braidwood for the Scots Whay Hae! podcast about Small Town Joy. Here’s the video.
Our chat is also available as an audio podcast. More details and listening links are here.
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Here comes Joy
It’s publication day for Small Town Joy, my book about how queer musicians changed the sound of Scotland. It’s based on two years of interviews with musicians, music fans, grassroots groups and other fascinating folks, and I hope it’ll make you excited about the music it describes and the musicians who’ve been so generous with their time.
As my friend, the writer and crafter Karie Westermann, put it: “Queer people creating joy, crafting resilience, and finding community through music. It could not have been published at a better time.”
The book is available online from my publisher, from Bookshop.org and from good bookshops everywhere.
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“A defeat for all women”
Writing in The Nation, Sophie Lewis delivers clarity about the UK Supreme Court judgement.
The fact, already now, is this: If I am perceived not to be what I say I am, and I don’t have the relevant documents, I can be strip-searched by male transport police, and legally barred from single-sex spaces. Trans people will, of course, continue to live lives of authenticity, but make no mistake: Everyone’s bodily autonomy is curtailed (especially those of us who, cis or trans, are poor, undocumented, racialized, intersex, gender non-conforming) by the cisfeminist diktat against non-cis humanity’s existence in public.
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Hiding in plain sight
As of yesterday, Observer columnist and leader writer Sonia Sodha, LGB Alliance co-founder Malcolm Clarke, Rosie Duffield MP, For Women Scotland and many other very high-profile “Gender Critical” figures were still following Nicola Murray on X/Twitter.
Murray is one of Scotland’s best-known anti-trans activists; she was one of the key figures in the witch-hunt against Mridul Wadhwa, the trans woman driven out of her job at a rape crisis centre in Edinburgh.
And as Edinburgh Live reported last week, Murray was arrested in 2022 for, and has now been found guilty of, “a shocking campaign of physical and sexual abuse against four children” over a 20-year period, and placed on the sex offender’s register. The case was reported in other regional newspapers and in both The Sun and The Times, at least in Scotland. But the non-Scots who follow her on X will know about the case too, because she was posting about her trial while it was ongoing.
Imagine the immediate and ongoing outrage if Murray were a trans woman: the furious phone-ins, the condemnation in endless columns, the social media hashtags, the demands for the government to do something, the calls to place her in a male prison to protect women. But of course, she isn’t trans, so none of that is going to happen. The “gender-critical” movement wants you to hate imaginary monsters, not actual ones. And that makes it an excellent place for real monsters to hide.
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“A victory for uncertainty, division and harassment”
Helen Belcher on the Supreme Court verdict and its horrendous aftermath:
The UK has moved into a space where all women, trans or not, will now be legally judged on their appearance.
…I, and every other trans woman I know, will continue to use women’s facilities. I’ve done it without any problems for over 20 years. I’m not going to stop now. The risk I now run, which wasn’t the case before Wednesday, is that I now fear harassment and worse should I do so.
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The self-pity party
After the champagne celebrations, the hangover: the people who’ve spent the best part of a decade trying to remove trans people’s human rights and dignity have succeeded, and now they’re sad about it.
Katelyn Burns, in the pithily titled You have no friends because you’re a transphobic asshole:
The loudest TERFs are still not satisfied, and are still being shunned by their friends…
In The Times of London, American writer turned British TERF Hadley Freeman lamented that none of her friends have come back to her to fete her and tell her how right she was all along about trans people. On socials, columnist Julie Bindel said she still feels lonely and unfulfilled in the wake of what should have been her best week ever.
Famously unfunny prick Graham Linehan took to Twitter demanding apologies from all the family and friends that abandoned him as he lost his mind and became singularly obsessed with stalking trans women on women’s dating apps.
All of these people are expecting vindication for their years long hate campaign against trans people, they want their old life back but also expect to wear their bigotry just a proudly on their sleeves. But there is no redemption arc here. You’ve made your deal with the devil and your soul is now his. Forever.
These people haven’t lost friends and family members because of their beliefs. They’ve lost them because of their behaviour.
Burns:
I’ve watched from afar as TERFs bend every conversation back to their pet hatred, every online discussion thread has to tap into that dopamine reserve these people have in the backs of their minds where their hatred of trans people lives. Every online space that welcomes one TERF nearly always ends up as a completely TERF space because TERFs are incapable of having normal conversations with anyone.
She’s right. If you look at non-obsessed people’s social media it’s a range of topics. With the anti-trans mob it’s anti-trans all the way down.
Casey Explosion on Bluesky:
Sorry you dedicated your lives to a fascist hate movement and cut everyone out of your lives that tried to get you to step back from that abyss and it’s making you miserable, but you did this to yourselves. Luckily for GCs, you can stop any time you want, a luxury you don’t afford your victims.
Trans people though? We don’t get to opt out of this, we don’t get to walk away, but “Gender critical” hatemongers? You get to call it a day any time you want and move on with your lives. May I suggest getting a hobby that doesn’t involve advocating the extermination of other human beings?
Burns:
Whatever emptiness drove these people to TERFism will still be there even if trans people simply stop existing. The friends they drove away will not suddenly come back because they already saw the depths they were willing to plumb in order to kick out at one of the tiniest and most marginalized demographics in the world.
Talia Bhatt, on Bluesky:
The thing about the GCs is that they want to be hailed as great feminist heroes. They want to be petty and cruel and direct all their vicious bigotry and disgust at a tiny maligned demographic, with the backing of all the highest powers in the land, and be adored for it.
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Violence
In a full-page article in The Telegraph today, Sex Matters’ Maya Forstater claims that the tens of thousands of peaceful pro-trans protesters who took to the streets yesterday are a “violent mob” because one of the protesters scribbled on a statue with a bit of chalk.
On Twitter today, Sex Matters supporter and washed-up former comedy writer Graham Linehan is urging his thousands of followers to physically attack any women they think may be trans.