Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Some people are more equal than others

    The Guardian reports* that Akua Reindorf, the Equalities Commissioner, has claimed that trans people “must accept a reduction in their rights” because we “have been lied to over many years” about what our human rights are. The Equality Act and the EHRC’s guidance on it, Reindorf essentially argues, were really a bathroom ban that nobody noticed for 15 years.

    At least she’s consistent: she represented an anti-trans activist (and LGB Alliance co-founder) who was suing the EHRC to try and reduce trans people’s rights in 2020; her interpretation of the law, which she argued meant service providers should exclude trans women, was dismissed by the judge. Reindorf’s interpretation was “wrong in law”.

    Reindorf was hired shortly afterwards to, er, interpret the law at the EHRC.

    Reindorf’s interpretation of the law is absolute bullshit, of course, and combined with her evident lack of understanding of the other key legislation, such as the Gender Recognition Act, and of case law such as Croft v Royal Mail 2003, it should result in her termination.

    But it won’t, because the EHRC is a transphobic organisation: an equalities watchdog now dedicated to creating inequality.

    The blatantly bigoted head of the EHRC, Kishner Falkner, reaches the end of her contract later this year; Labour could have ended her contract last year and started to undo the damage she’s done, but chose to renew her contract instead. And the replacement favoured by the Labour government is, like her, closely linked with anti-trans hate groups.

    Mary-Ann Stephenson, the preferred candidate, contributed to the LGB Alliance co-founder’s legal action against Stonewall, one of the organisations the EHRC is supposed to consult with, and has spoken at anti-trans organisations’ events. Her Bluesky following list – which I’m sure is about to be sanitised** now the news of her proposed appointment has been published – is a who’s who of UK anti-trans journalists, activists and pressure groups.

    This is what institutional capture looks like: a small number of people in positions of power dismantling decades of progress and taking a wrecking ball to human rights.

    The EHRC is dismantling the Equality Act. The previous Tory government started that; the current Labour government is happy to continue it.

    As ever, trans people are only the first targets. We won’t be the last.

    * Reindorf is now claiming that the article is defamatory and that “trans people’s rights haven’t been reduced”. The Guardian, pathetically, has now changed “reduction in their rights” to “perceived reduction in their rights” in its opening paragraph.
    ** It has now been sanitised.

  • A cautious response

    Multiple Scots LGBTQ+ organisations have published a joint statement about responding to the EHRC consultation regarding its Equality Act guidance, and having read the consultation documents in detail I think they’re right: the proposed guidance is focused exclusively on segregating trans people, makes no attempt to protect their human rights or dignity, provides no useful information to service providers who wish to remain inclusive, and runs counter to the spirit of the law, to other related legislation and to the EHRC’s public sector equality duties. That means engaging with it, while necessary, is not the be-all and end-all.

    The draft Code focuses entirely on how to exclude and segregate trans people from single-sex services and spaces. It provides no useful information for the many services who are currently running successful trans-inclusive services and who want to continue to welcome and include trans people… the content of the draft Code is so harmful to trans people in its current form that it’s hard to imagine the EHRC making the kinds of radical changes needed to make it work for our community.  

    …The EHRC cannot fix the law, only the UK Government can. That’s why we are asking our community to join us in writing directly to the Minister for Women and Equalities and your MP.

  • A public health crisis

    A new report in the International Journal for Equity in Health says that transphobia in the UK is causing a public health crisis.

    The paper identifies multiple issues: limited or non-existent access to appropriate healthcare; social exclusion; policy-driven discrimination; and “minority stress”, which leads to adverse health outcomes including cardiovascular disease and risk behaviours such as alcohol use.

    The authors say that the health disparities faced by trans and gender-diverse people in the UK constitutes “a real-time public health crisis that demands urgent and sustained intervention.”

  • The bungle Telegraph

    It’s hard to imagine now, but the Daily Telegraph was once envied for its news reporting. Now it’s a comic for angry old people who want to be lied to – and it can’t even be bothered to do that very well.

    Today’s front page trails a big news report on the revelation that the NHS gives surgery to some trans people. Leaving aside the transparently bigoted framing (the implication, as ever, is that you can just walk in and get surgery; it took me seven years, and that was when waiting lists were a fraction of what they are now) and the involvement of the usual anti-trans activists, the article tells its readers that of the people getting surgery on the NHS, “a large proportion of those going under the knife are under 18.”

    No they aren’t.

    The proportion of under-18s going “under the knife” is exactly zero.

    The Telegraph’s reporter, “special correspondent” Hayley Dixon, would have known that if she’d read her own fucking article, as two paragraphs later it notes that the youngest surgical patient was 18.

  • Inconvenient truth

    One of the hallmarks of the genital-obsessed weirdo movement is to claim that there’s not enough research about trans healthcare, and to then ignore any research about trans healthcare because it doesn’t support their lurid claims. And there’s a great example of that in Utah where the Republicans commissioned a Cass-style report to justify their ban on trans healthcare but forgot to put a bigot in charge.

    The result? The evidence shows that trans healthcare is effective and safe and that bans cause great harm.

    It’s very detailed – much more so than the Cass Review – and as The Advocate reports:

    “The conventional wisdom among non-experts has long been that there are limited data on the use of [gender-affirming hormone therapy] in pediatric patients,” the researchers wrote. “However, results from our exhaustive literature searches have led us to the opposite conclusion.” The study found over 230 primary studies involving 28,056 trans youth — “far exceeding” the evidence that typically supports FDA approval for high-risk pediatric treatments, including gene therapy.

    “The body of evidence we have uncovered exceeds the amount of evidence that often serves as the basis of FDA approval for many high-risk, new drugs approved in pediatric populations in the U.S.,” the authors added.

    The report emphasized that such treatments are not given to prepubertal children, that puberty blockers and hormones are typically initiated only in early or mid-adolescence, and that surgeries — especially bottom surgeries — are not recommended for minors. The review also found no significant long-term safety concerns, and that “regret” associated with treatment is extremely rare. In fact, among the 32 studies examining regret, researchers found it was “virtually nonexistent” — and when present, it was “only a very minor proportion” of treatment discontinuation.

    The response, from politicians and national press alike, has been to ignore it.

    As I’ve written before, the problem isn’t that we don’t have evidence. It’s that the evidence doesn’t say what the genital-obsessed weirdos want it to say, so they discount it, distort it or ignore it. They’re not interested in the truth. They just want to hurt trans people.

  • A “grotesque obsession”

    I do like it when people get righteously angry, and Sean Morley is righteously angry about “Britain’s Grotesque Obsession” with trans people. 

    You will recall that the presence of trans people in the public eye was a non-issue until the mid-2010s, when suddenly it became the cause de jour for every entertainer, journalist or social media influencer gracelessly shattering into a million pieces when faced with the mildest career turbulence, only to re-emerge as a just-asking-questions reactionary transphobe.

    …Trans people, just like gay people and short people, are just one of the types of people any person can turn out to be. And just like the gays and the shorts, they cannot be legislated out of existence. The most you can do is fearmonger them into retreating from public life.

    That is what the supreme court decision is about. There is a small but relentless social movement calling for erasure of transness as a concept. They are tiny in number but wield immense social power due to coming from the same social class and swirling in the same WhatsApp groups as the people who make decisions.

  • Demand their papers, say the papers

    The EHRC draft guidance has been published and as expected, it’s an incoherent and in many places illegal shitshow that appears to have been written by the same anti-trans groups the EHRC chair and commissioner are close friends of. But it’s achieving its goal, which is to get the newspapers to tell their readers that trans women must be excluded from public spaces or gendered toilets, which is not what the Supreme Court ruled and is not what the law says.

    I’m not a lawyer, but even I can see that a lot of the guidance in the consultation document misrepresents the law and exposes companies to significant legal risk by falsely telling them that they should discriminate against service users. And the papers’ reporting of it is even worse, with the likes of The Telegraph saying that retailers must interrogate trans customers (or suspected trans customers) who want to use changing rooms and to demand birth certificates to prove customers’ sex.

    It’s a mess, it’ll harm people, and it’s going to get retailers and other service providers sued. The EHRC chair and commissioners are malevolent and incompetent, and should be replaced before they cause even more chaos.

  • Don’t get sick. Don’t get old

    One of the things that really scares me is getting old – not because I’m scared of ageing, but because unless I die first I’ll eventually need to enter the care system. The care system in the UK is horrific for most, and there are extra terrors for LGBTQ+ people – so much so that many UK care homes believe they have no LGBTQ+ residents, as those residents have chosen not to reveal their sexuality or gender history for fear of discrimination or worse.

    Writing in Yorkshire Bylines, Nell Stockton explains the additional fears caused by the anti-trans Supreme Court verdict and subsequent EHRC misinformation.

    The short version: it’s an absolute shitshow that could do serious damage to older trans people’s lives, their health and their safety.

    All of us will hopefully get to live to a ripe old age. Trans older adults deserve to enjoy their later years as much as anyone, without fear of being outed and shunned, and we should not be forced into becoming recluses.

  • Making tits of themselves

    Let’s talk about tits, shall we? Both literally, as in breasts, and metaphorically, as in bigoted men making complete tits of themselves.

    This weekend, a group of Scots trans women held a topless protest outside Holyrood over the Supreme Court verdict and its aftermath. With some irony, the very newspapers that love to call trans women men blurred their breasts so as not to fall foul of obscenity complaints.

    The photos of the event have caused some confusion among the genital-obsessed weirdos crowd, with figures such as disgraced former comedy writer Graham Linehan taking time out from court appearances (harassment and property damage here, defamation there) to opine that some of the women must have been cisgender women pretending to be trans.

    “OMG uncensored picture of the boob protest,” the man who used to write words for a living typed. “Eh, is it just me or is there an actual woman in here pretending to be a transwoman? Because the men are easy to spot.”

    So much for “we can always tell”.

    The woman in question is a trans woman – and like many young trans women, and many young women who aren’t trans, she’s very good-looking.

    Linehan’s rather grubby response – essentially “she can’t be trans, I like her tits” – does help prove the point the women were trying to make (as well as emphasise yet again how little the genital-obsessed weirdos know about trans people’s bodies): the anti-trans mob cannot, in fact, always tell.

    That’s important, because if the UK’s proposed bathroom ban is implemented then women of all shapes and sizes, almost all of whom won’t be trans, will be judged and in some cases punished by witless misogynists and other bullies based on a very arbitrary set of beauty standards.

    If you’d rather not have your access to spaces and public life conditional on whether lonely old men think you’re fuckable, you might want to write to your MP to demand an end to this idiotic campaign to segregate trans people and create a legion of self-appointed toilet cops.

  • It’s oh so Quietus

    I’m absolutely delighted to be featured in The Quietus, courtesy of excellent interviewer Claire Sawers.

    And so it was that Marshall embarked upon a two and a half year project to research queer music in Scotland. Small Town Joy: From glam rock to hyperpop: how queer music changed the sound of Scotland is her wonderful, trivia packed, often fascinating and fangirling look at the LGBTQ+ artists that have shaped Scotland’s cultural landscape. She’s deliberately not aiming solely for a nostalgic, retromania style read either. After tracing historic lines, the second half of the book is a rich collection of her interviews and essays exploring current queer scenes, sometimes ones thriving in places where she least expects. (See her interviews with queer Scots trad folk musicians for example, or conversely, a notable lack of interviews with gay male rappers.)