Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Author: Carrie

  • Clarity

    The Supreme Court decision to effectively destroy the Gender Recognition Act and reverse the Equality Act has been described in newspapers as bringing “clarity”, which is ironic: it’s created anything but, and the anti-trans groups and their pals in the press have used the judgement to spread lies.

    One of the biggest lies is that trans women are now banned from women-only services. While the Supreme Court verdict is incredibly anti-trans, it doesn’t go that far: it says that if a service provider chooses to exclude trans women, it can do so without breaking the Equality Act. But the Act still says that such exclusion must be a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim, and blanket exclusion is unlikely to satisfy that condition. And trans people are still protected under the characteristic of gender reassignment.

    That may well change, and the EHRC – whose head was given the job specifically because she’s a transphobe, whose own staff have accused her of deliberately setting out to undermine trans people’s rights, and who has made it very clear that she is using the equalities body to attack trans women – is certainly going to craft guidance to try and change that. But the guidance is currently unwritten and has to be approved by Parliament.

    It’s also important to note that the Supreme Court decision is only about the Equality Act. There are many other pieces of legislation that affect trans people’s rights.

    Just because bigots want something to be true doesn’t mean it’s true. Even if – especially if – it’s printed in the UK press.

    That doesn’t mean the Supreme Court verdict isn’t horrific, at odds with the intention of both the GRA and the EA, and introduces more confusion rather than clearing it up: its definition of “biological woman”, for example, is effectively “we know it when we see it”. But be very wary of newspapers with an agenda parroting bigots’ wish-lists and pretending they’re law.

    It’s still a very bleak day for trans people, and for cisgender people too: the British Transport Police have already announced that they will have male officers strip-searching trans women; under the Supreme Court ruling, that means an officer can now molest any woman and claim he did it because she looked trans. There will be many more such examples, and many more cisgender women singled out because they’re tall, or masculine-looking, or Black. And there will be more legal attacks not just on trans people’s rights, but on human rights more widely.

    Here’s long-term human rights campaigner Jane Fae on the decision:

    I think the strategy of the anti-trans all along has been to swamp the UK with money – dark money, far right money, evangelical money – to reverse what they see as the evil of “gender theory.” Which also includes gay marriage, and women’s rights: they’ll be back for those later.

    And this post is very good too: The UK Supreme Court destroys 20 years of legal rights for trans people in 20 minutes.

    The odious and gleeful head of the EHRC continued that a complete ban of trans women from women’s toilets and changing rooms in British society was on the way, hinting ominously also that a review of gender ID change per se was in the pipeline. To the question of where trans women are supposed to urinate now, she replied that ‘maybe trans activists should campaign for a third space?’  That’s the head of Britain’s Equality body removing a minority from society and sneering at us. It’s not even that she doesn’t care. She’s loving it.

    …there is no reasoning with the people who have driven it all, in our country and in others. 

  • ”All will eventually fall”

    A superb piece by Morgan M Page on the Supreme Court shitshow.

    How this ruling will play out in the everyday lives of trans people across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland isn’t yet understood, but what is expected is that this will open up revision of the Equality Act, an important goal of Britain’s far right and their happy collaborators in the Labour government. By opening the door to revision on one characteristic of our primary human rights legislation, all will eventually fall. Sex, disability, race, religion — all for the taking. The irony that this challenge was brought forward by a group ostensibly trying to protect sex based rights sure will surely sting when it eventually causes all women to lose their rights entirely.

  • Despicable, predictable

    I wasn’t surprised by yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling, as horrifying, incoherent and discriminatory as it is; the verdict was never in question after the court refused to hear from any trans people or trans organisations but rolled out the red carpet for multiple anti-trans hate groups. Much of the judgement appears to have been copied and pasted from those groups’ documents.

    I’m getting very tired of saying this, but: the goal of the genital-obsessed weirdos is to eliminate trans people from public life. And the people funding them and celebrating their ill-gotten win won’t stop with trans people.

  • Distress

    NHS England is starting to use a new term in regard to trans people, and particularly trans and non-binary teens who kill themselves over lack of treatment and NHS support: gender distress. That’s not the term used in existing medical literature – that’s gender dysphoria, and more recently gender incongruence. And the reason the new term has been coined is to muddy the waters and imply that these dead kids suffered from a pathological condition.

    As Sarah Clarke put it on Bluesky: “Young people who died with gender distress” just sounds so much nicer and cleaner than “Trans kids we drove into a state of suicidal despair”.

    There is such a thing as gender distress, as Talia Bhatt explains in this excellent thread. But it’s not something that exists within us. It’s something that’s imposed on us. Bhatt:

    Existing in a body that doesn’t feel like your own, whose contours and workings and machinery feel foreign to you no matter how long you’ve inhabited them, *is* distressing. Maddening, even. What’s worse is knowing who’s keeping you there.

    What’s worse is friends and family and loved ones letting you exactly what the limits of their love are, that you could be the same person, but will be treated as dead or alien if you choose to change the things about yourself you like the least. What’s worse is this being normalized.

    What’s worse is having to confront, day after day, the powerlessness of your position as doctors, legislators, parents, anyone in a position of authority over you bars you from doing the one thing you need to do the most. Making it clear that you don’t own your own body. It isn’t yours to claim.

    …People have the gall to locate the resulting distress entirely within trans people ourselves, as though we are ticking time bombs of hysteria rather than utterly dehumanized, unpersoned, abject PEOPLE, who are doing our best to keep it together in a world that wants to own our most intimate aspects.

  • Demons, daily

    Researcher Lee Hurley tracks anti-trans articles in the English press, and the totals are in: in the last year alone, just three English newspapers – The Guardian, The Daily Mail and The Telegraph – ran 1,075 articles about trans people, almost all of them anti-trans. So if you’re a reader of any of those papers, you’re being sold an anti-trans story every single day.

    It’s a horrendous statistic but if anything it underplays things: just yesterday The Sunday Telegraph ran five anti-trans articles in a single edition. And the Scots press is similarly obsessed.

  • A tale of two ERs

    The Pitt has become one of my very favourite shows. It’s a hospital-set drama with a huge heart, originally conceived as a follow-up to the 1990s series ER in which Noah Wyle played a young doctor. Unfortunately – or fortunately, given the result – ER writer Michael Crichton’s estate nixed that so Wyle created a stand-alone series instead. This time around Wyle plays a grizzled veteran who’s trying very hard to keep it together while under incredible pressure. He’s fantastic, as are the rest of the ensemble cast.

    There’s a minor story in The Pitt featuring a transgender woman, and it’s really interesting to compare that with the trans storylines in ER. Because ER’s portrayal of trans and intersex people was vicious.

    [Content warning: slurs]

    Writing on Tumblr, Brin (aka Brinconvenient) describes multiple episodes of ER featuring trans, intersex and gender non-conforming people. The first, ER Confidential, was broadcast in November 1994. Brin goes into detail for that episode but to summarise: the trans woman is played by a cisgender man, she’s treated with disgust and hostility by the show’s stars, and she’s called a slur by one of the nurses. Her story arc ends with her jumping off the roof of the hospital because she’s too old and too mannish to be a believable woman.

    Brin was 16 at the time.

    Just think of the message this episode sends. Are you a young trans kid? Better transition while you’re young or not at all, because you’re on a clock – you have an expiration date. If you transition later, you’re just going to look like a man in a dress, everyone will clock you, everyone will find you disgusting, and they’re right too. You’ll get called names, you’ll get the barest modicum of tolerance, if you’re lucky, and even then, you’ll be kept at arm’s length.

    And hey, if you get old? Or older, really, because you don’t even have to be THAT old, then your life is over. It’s best just to kill yourself instead of not passing.

    I was an ER watcher too. So I got that message loud and clear – not just in that episode, but several times.

    There were plenty more examples.

    over 15 seasons, 331 episodes, ER had a total of 5 explicitly trans women and one explicitly intersex women (and zero trans or intersex men).

    None of them have a happy ending.

    As Brin says, “the general cis idea of trans people is informed by all of these Sad, Angst, Tragic Trannies ™”, and while things have got better we’ve had decades of this stuff in popular culture (I go into a lot of examples of that in both of my books). Other shows were just as careless/callous: for example NYPD Blue, another show I watched religiously, consistently showed trans people as sex workers, dead sex workers or ludicrous caricatures, had the star characters insult and misgender those characters, and titled a 2003 episode about the murder of a trans sex worker “Tranny Get Your Gun“. This was considered completely normal and entirely acceptable.

    I don’t know if Noah Wyle set out to try and do better now than his character did in ER. But The Pitt gets right what ER consistently got wrong.

    First of all, the trans woman is played by a trans woman (the luminous Eva Everett Irving). Tasha is a glamorous, likeable and fun character, a sommelier to the rich and famous. She’s not in the ER because she’s trans; she’s in the ER because she’s got a nasty cut on her hand. The hand is fixed, the deadname on her file is quietly corrected by one of the medical students, and she’s off again to her glamorous life. She’s not there to make the main characters sad, or to be a tragic figure. She’s just another patient.

    That shouldn’t be remarkable. But sadly, it is.

  • Welfare for losers

    Ben Collins, owner of the satirical newspaper The Onion, summed up the anti-trans movement beautifully this week: it’s “welfare for losers”. He was talking about the latest example of the grift: amateur fencer Stephanie Turner, who ostentatiously refused to compete with a trans woman in a tournament. Taking a knee, Turner said: “I am refusing to fence you, because I am a woman and you are a man.”

    Just days before, Turner competed in, and beat multiple men in, a mixed tournament.

    Mixed tournaments are commonplace in fencing because it’s a sport of skill, not strength.

    “It will probably, at least for the moment, destroy my life,” Turner lied to Fox News after accepting her first grift payment, a $5,000 “courage award” from the anti-trans XX-XY Athletics.

    Turner is not an elite athlete; she’s a 31-year-old amateur competing in low-level events and her best days are probably already behind her. But as failed swimmer Riley Gaines demonstrates, it’s very easy to turn sporting mediocrity into a six-figure salary by demonising trans women on behalf of the evangelical right. As Ben Collins says, it’s welfare for losers – and it pays exceptionally well.

  • Bring the noise

    I don’t consider myself a pushy parent; I’m quite keen on finding out who my kids are rather than telling them who I expect them to be. But I think we all have ambitions for our kids, such as wanting them to be happy, and kind to others, and kind to themselves – and if they can also share some of our taste in music and books and comedy, that’s a bonus. So for example I love that both of my kids love The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, and R.E.M., and the same sort of stupid humour that cracks me up too.

    I was also really pleased that both of my kids are interested in making music as well as listening to it. And that lasted right up until they started making music noisily and frequently in my house: guitar for my eldest and drums for my youngest. They’re getting very good, but it’s loud – and it’s loud in a house that’s usually silent, because I can’t work when there’s music playing or speech radio in the background.

    The noise is karma, cosmic payback for all the years I spent making a bleeding racket in my own family’s home, a racket so bad that I could make my mum wince three decades later by referencing one of the songs. I think mum would find that funny.

  • Identify the author

    Stop me if you’ve read this before.

    Sadly, one of the most prevalent forms of child abuse facing our country today is the sinister threat of gender ideology. Proponents of the gender ideology movement are outrageously indoctrinating our children with the devastating lie that they are trapped in the wrong body – and that the only way they can be truly happy is to alter their sex with hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and sexual mutilation surgery. The evil and backwards lies of gender insanity are robbing our children of their happiness, health, and freedom, while imposing unimaginable heartbreak on parents and families.

    Was this in The Times? The Scotsman? The Daily Mail? The Telegraph? The Daily Express? The Herald? Spiked? The Courier? The Observer? The Guardian? The Spectator? Unherd?

    Nope. It’s the latest hateful, bigoted bullshit tirade from the misogynist sexual predator Donald Trump. The fact that it could have been lifted wholesale from one of hundreds of UK newspaper columns shows what monsters so many of our columnist class have become.

  • A troubled Adolescence

    (Contains spoilers for the TV drama Adolescence).

    Like many people I was gripped by the Netflix drama Adolescence, which tells the story of a teen murder victim. Except as Jude Doyle points out, it doesn’t tell you very much about the victim at all.

    While it’s beautifully shot and features some incredible performances, it’s a story that wants you to feel sorry not for the murdered girl, but for the family of her murderer – and to some extent, for the murderer. And as soon as you realise that that’s what it’s doing, it becomes a very different and much less successful piece of television.

    Doyle makes a good argument that the drama is ultimately superficial (which perhaps explains why the Labour government is so keen on having it shown in schools, despite the show itself pointing out the uselessness of showing videos to bored and fractious teenage boys).

    It’s uninterested in engaging with the darkness it purports to be exploring to any significant degree: it throws in a few signifiers about the “manosphere” of online misogyny, but it doesn’t engage with the reality of it or the fact that misogyny is not something that was invented by social media, a “a weird Ringu-style Internet curse that happens if your son gets too much screen time”. Male violence of the kind portrayed in Adolescence is what you get when your society tells men that they are entitled to control women and their bodies. And god knows, that’s not a message that men are only just encountering.

    With one key exception – which Doyle praises, and writes about in detail – there are hardly any female characters, and the ones that do appear are woefully underwritten; the teenage girl whose murder is at the centre of the drama is barely a cipher.

    Doyle:

    “making a miniseries about Toxic Masculinity and only focusing on male characters is like making a miniseries about Hitler and only focusing on his painting. It’s not until you see who’s getting hurt, and how badly they’re hurting, that you get the point.”