Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • 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.

  • 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.”