Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • 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.

  • 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”.

  • 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”.

  • 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.

  • 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.

    Tickets are on sale now.

  • Attack of the crotch cops

    Last week, when the Women and Equalities Committee grilled the head of the EHRC over her unlawful and misleading interim guidance about trans people’s legal rights, two people followed a trans woman into the ladies’ toilet, yelled about there being a “biological male” in there and demanded security intervene.

    The two people were the co-founder of the LGB Alliance and a member of another anti-trans group, both of whom were in Parliament to pretend that they and the organisations they represent don’t want to bully trans women.

  • “This was the eradication of trans people from the country’s social fabric”

    If you only read one article about the UK human rights watchdog and its sham consultation over removing trans people’s human rights, make it this one by Ian Dunt.

    The consultation exercise is a joke. And the EHRC, far from trying to communicate the law, is attempting to rewrite it so that it is as punishing to trans people as possible. This is the story of how it is doing that.

    If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know a lot of the detail already, but to see it laid out in a timeline like this just emphasises how wickedly corrupt the EHRC has become – and how dangerous it has become not just to trans people, but to everybody.

    It’s really important to understand that the EHRC has pivoted from protecting human rights to destroying them. And if they get away with doing this to trans people, the whole house of cards protecting all marginalised people will follow. And that’s not an unintended consequence. It’s the entire goal.

    Falkner was made chair in December 2020. She was part of a pattern of appointments. Alasdair Henderson, who worked on a legal challenge against the NHS’ use of puberty blockers, was made a commissioner in 2018 and then reappointed in 2022. David Goodhart, who once argued that it is “common sense” to have a “preference for your own ethnic group”, was made a commissioner in 2020. None of these figures were beyond the pale – they were all firmly within the mainstream cultural right. But they were very odd appointments for an equality and human rights body. The EHRC had effectively been hollowed out and turned into the Spectator Online.

    …This is about as damning a failure of an equality body as you can imagine. Instead of protecting people’s rights they are actively trying to destroy them. But actually, there is another failure, of similar magnitude, which the EHRC is committing at the same time: it is failing to offer organisations reliable information about how to comply with legislation.

    …This is what happens when you take a public body with crucial responsibilities and turn it into a culture war campaign organisation. You betray a minority group which needs protection. But you also leave British businesses exposed to ruinous legal challenges.

    This situation is an affront to the rule of law, at a time when we urgently need to defend it.

  • Twice as nice

    I’ll be doing not one but two events at this year’s Edinburgh Book Festival on the 10th and 11th of August.

    First of all there’s 1995: Grrrls Aloud where I’ll be joining Emma Pollock, Cora Bissett and Chitra Ramaswamy, with a soundtrack by Hen Hoose’s Cariss Crosbie. We’re going to be talking about the other 1995: not the Oasis one, but the one where Garbage released their debut album and the Delgados and Chemikal Underground did amazing things.

    And the following day, I’ll be in conversation with Gary West as we celebrate Scots music in the brilliantly titled God Save The Scene. Gary’s book, Brave New World, is a biography of the late, great Martyn Bennett.

    I’m really looking forward to both events. I think they’ll be lots of fun.