Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Bullshit

Pernicious nonsense and other irritants

  • A state-sanctioned witch hunt

    The EHRC, which hates trans people, has leaked its trans guidance to The Times, which hates trans people, in an attempt to bully the Equalities Minister into approving it. But no amount of positive spin can hide the fundamental point: the EHRC wants trans people’s rights to access spaces to be dependent on how they look, and enforced by the public.

    They’re demanding a permanent, state-sanctioned witch-hunt by sour-faced curtain twitchers and SAVE ARE KIDS roundabout painters for whom anyone tall, butch, unconventional, not pretty enough, not white enough is Goody Proctor dancing with the Devil.

    Séamas O’Reilly wrote about this in the Irish Examiner earlier this year. As he says today, “Trans people and their cis women allies have been sounding these alarms for years. It now seems clear that the UK government took all these dire warnings as policy proposals.”

    We might also consider what this means for the millions of cis women who do not fit the standard, sexist notion of “femininity” which logic dictates they must be checked against… Too tall, perhaps, too strong-jawed, or short-haired — anything that one patron, one witness, one supermarket or leisure centre security guard might consider cause to question their femininity.

    And how might they prove their “real” gender?…The only way any of the absurdities of this ruling make sense, is if its aims are exactly what they appear to be: A punitive attack on the rights and dignity of trans people divorced from any real-world concern about safety or women’s rights, designed to demoralise and punish them simply for the crime of existing.

    This, despite the abundant and obvious evidence that it will lead to more harm and distress for all British women, cis or trans, as a consequence. We must surmise that the pain and humiliation of all people is worth it, so long as trans people feel it most fiercely.

    This is the world view of the people popping champagne outside the courts, or cackling with glee on their superyachts, rejoicing as Keir Starmer says “trans women are men” while demanding he roll back trans rights even further, and apologise for ever advocating for them in the first place.

    The same people who’ve so thoroughly debased this debate that sensible moderates can profess nothing but mealy-mouthed agreement alongside quiet calls for “calm” and “dignity”, without realising this is offering us a choice between those who light cigars as they legislate trans people out of the public square, and those who say they’re awfully sorry while they do the same.

  • A fantasy of victimhood

    There are some fascinating reports in the latest edition of the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies, including a piece about the LGB Alliance’s Role in the UK Media’s Anti-Trans Moral Panic and this in-depth analysis of radicalisation on sites such as Mumsnet.

    It describes how posters attempt to reframe themselves as victims rather than victimisers, to depict themselves as brave, marginalised people silenced by assorted imagined oppressors rather than the vicious bullies they have so gleefully become.

    This isn’t a new observation, of course: we’re familiar with DARVO (deny, accuse, reverse victim and offender) as one of the most favoured tactics of the genital-obsessed weirdos and grifters. But this is much more in-depth.

    we encountered story after story of posters who—as they became further entrenched in GC [“gender critical”, aka transphobic] community practices—found themselves alienated from their families, friends, and coworkers.

    These heartwrenching narratives intentionally confuse the axes of oppression.

    The tragedy of GC members’ vacillation as victim-aggressor is that GCs claim that they are the ones being oppressed even as they publicly dramatize, with pride, their harassment of strangers and coworkers and the emotional abuse of children and partners.

  • Hearsay

    The BBC has been captured by the sinister trans lobby, a new report being pushed by the right-wing press claims. The report, by Michael Prescott, provides no convincing evidence of that – because of course it isn’t true. The BBC is one of the main vectors of anti-trans propaganda, taking its cue (and many of its contributors) from the right-wing press. And it’s been doing it for years, laundering the bigotry of genital-obsessed weirdos as “reasonable concerns”, publishing and then defending groundless stories such as claims by sexual predators and anti-trans activists that trans women are rapists, and adopting the language and dog-whistles of the genital-obsessed weirdo brigade, such as “biological women” and “sex-based rights”. The brief window when trans people could get a fair hearing or accurate, informed coverage from the BBC closed a long time ago.

    Prescott’s view of trans people and the wider LGBTQ+ community is clear from his report: he reports as fact unsubstantiated and frankly ridiculous claims that there’s a rogue unit of LGBTQ+ people censoring the BBC’s news output; a feature about a trans wrestler is described as “gushing”; he claims there are too many stories featuring drag queens; and he is irate that the BBC dared to include a trans woman in a discussion about the Cass Review. He says that “too many of its staff have never considered the idea of “gender identity” to be either spurious or offensive to many people.” Those “many people”, of course, are the genital-obsessed weirdos.

    It’s not a report, it’s a whinge by someone who believes the BBC simply isn’t vicious enough towards marginalised people. And it’s being used as part of a culture war campaign to push the BBC even further to the right.

  • Ammunition for your enemies

    Today’s “completely manufactured anti-trans bullshit” takes us to Dundee, where an anti-trans activist has taken great exception to a Hobbycraft shop assistant’s “no TERFs, no Tories” badge to create predictable media outrage. It’s yet another example of DARVO – the abuser’s creed of “deny, attack, reverse victim and offender”, where members of a movement that demands the oppression and elimination of others claim victimhood – and the fact it’s so predictable is why I’m more annoyed at the badge wearer than the bigot.

    The last thing you should be doing when you’re under attack is give ammunition to the people attacking you.

    I don’t think people shouldn’t wear political badges. My everyday bag and most of my guitar straps are covered in them. But what’s absolutely fine when you’re on a stage, off duty, or if you run your own business – your bar, your bookshop, your coffee shop – becomes something different if you’re an employee of someone else’s business. Especially a larger business with a fairly high profile and no doubt a detailed uniform policy. I can’t think of any retailer with a uniform policy that allows staff to wear badges telling specific kinds of customers to fuck off.

    There’s hypocrisy here, of course. There always is with the genital-obsessed weirdo brigade, who like their Christian Right pals want the freedom to abuse others in public and in the workplace without consequences. But it doesn’t matter, because this is not about anything other than the genital-obsessed weirdos looking for easy PR wins. And that’s exactly what they’ve been given here.

    This is going to play out like every other such case. We’ll get crybully op-eds slagging off Hobbycraft for being “woke”; we’ll get Hobbycraft issuing a grovelling apology; we’ll have more articles implying that trans people shouldn’t be hired by anyone; we’ll have increasingly emboldened genital-obsessed weirdos going to various customer-facing businesses looking for trans people to abuse. So things for trans people become just that little bit worse than they already were.

  • Different people, same panic

    A good piece in Salon noting the parallels between the “Satanic panic” of the 80s and the trans panic today:

    The trans panic currently gripping the Christian right is an extension of the Satanic panic that took hold in the 1980s — a worldview that owes little to reality or to the teachings of Jesus. Instead, it’s rooted in the visual and emotional language of horror films, especially the more reactionary tales of demonic possession, such as “The Exorcist” and “The Conjuring.” These followers unabashedly argue that “transgenderism” is a tool of Satan and that acceptance of gender non-conforming people is a form of demonic possession.

  • Crying out, not crying wolf

    UK newspapers are sounding the alarm: a US-based evangelical lobby group with deep pockets is trying to influence UK politics and take away marginalised people’s human rights. The group is the Alliance Defending Freedom; the marginalised group are women. The ADF wants to see the UK ban abortion, even though the UK is overwhelmingly against such a ban.

    The same UK newspapers have spent the last seven or eight years helping the same organisation influence UK politics and take away marginalised people’s human rights, even though the UK was overwhelmingly against those rights being removed. But those people were trans people, so the papers joined the war on the side of the bad guys.

    And when we repeatedly tried to warn that we were the thin end of a wedge strategy – a strategy openly published online detailing how the wedge would work – we were called hysterical, ignored, and demonised.

    Here’s me, posting in 2020.

    There is a co-ordinated attempt by the Christian Right to use trans people as a wedge issue for a wider attack on LGBT+ rights and on women’s reproductive freedom… the religious right is behind pretty much every anti-trans legal case and is funding a great deal of the supposed grass-roots anti-trans groups. And since this verdict [the Keira Bell puberty blocker case] they have been talking openly about using this case as a springboard to attack abortion and contraception, which was the game plan all along.

    Trans people have been raising the alarm for years.

    Very little of this is happening in secret, and yet the entire UK press and broadcast media chooses not to investigate or report on it. Instead, they are complicit. Shame on them.

  • They’re no longer pretending

    The anti-trans mob never had “reasonable concerns”; they’re a hate movement. And they’re now so emboldened that they’re not trying to hide that any more. Speaking at yesterday’s Conservative party conference, both Sex Matters and the LGB Alliance made it very clear what they believed, with the latter’s CEO saying that supporting any form of transition is “evil” and that the goal must be “to strip out the poisonous homophobia of gender identity ideology from public life wherever we can.” The only way to eradicate “gender identity ideology” from public life is to eradicate trans and non-binary people.

  • The Cass Review: still a scandal

    A new peer-reviewed study of the Cass Review, the UK project that was used to stop trans teens’ healthcare, has been published. And like all the other peer-reviewed studies of the Cass Review, it’s absolutely damning. It once again demonstrates that the review was skewed to deliver a pre-determined outcome that flies in the face of the evidence.

    The study describes the review’s “disregard of international expert consensus, methodological problems and conceptual errors” and says that its internal contradictions are striking:

    It acknowledged that some trans young people benefit from puberty suppression, but its recommendations have made this currently inaccessible to all.

    It found no evidence that psychological treatments improve gender dysphoria, yet recommended expanding their provision.

    It found that NHS provision of GAMT [Gender Affirming Medical Treatment] (GnRHa, oestrogen or testosterone) was already very restricted, and that young people were distressed by lack of access to treatment, yet it recommended increased barriers to oestrogen and testosterone for any trans adolescents aged under 18 years.

    It dismissed the evidence of benefit from GAMT as “weak”, but emphasised speculative harms based on weaker evidence.

    The harms of withholding GAMT were not evaluated.

    The Review disregarded studies observing that adolescents who requested but were unable to access GAMT had poorer mental health compared with those who could access GAMT.

    Despite finding that detransition and regret appear uncommon, the Review’s recommendations appear to have the goal of preventing regret at any cost.

    The Review, and the UK Government, have taken the position that GAMT, an established treatment with observational evidence of early and medium term benefits and acceptable safety, should be actively withheld from trans adolescents due to lack of high certainty evidence of very long term efficacy and safety. Few treatments for any condition meet this criterion, and it is difficult to name another field in which regulators impose such a benchmark.

    …The Cass Review, lacking expertise and compromised by implicit stigma and misinformation, does not give credible evidence-based guidance. We are gravely concerned about its impact on the wellbeing of trans and gender-diverse people.

  • It’s never enough

    The Scottish Government has published new guidance about segregating school toilets, which means trans kids will be prevented from using the toilets appropriate to their gender. Is that enough for the transphobes? Of course it isn’t. The Scotsman quotes Maya Forstater of anti-trans hate group Sex Matters, for whom segregating trans children doesn’t go far enough.

    The policy “still suggests that a pupil might be able to go through their school career pretending to be the opposite sex without ever being ‘outed’ – that is, recognised as the sex they actually are.” Allowing trans kids to use other toilets, or at different times from other children, “will only worsen the child’s dissociation from the unchangeable physical reality of their sex.”

    They’re not even trying to hide it any more: it was never about protecting women and girls. They want trans people eliminated from society, and intend to do so by making trans people’s lives unliveable.

  • Doing their sacred duty

    Yesterday, three UK newspapers said that the killer of hatemonger Charlie Kirk was pro-trans on their front pages. The Daily Telegraph had the headline “Charlie Kirk suspect ‘left gun with trans message’”. The Sun front page said that “Ammo ‘carried pro-trans message’”. The Times front page headline was “Trump ally’s killer left ‘transgender ammunition’”. Other papers carried the same story inside their print versions and online.

    None of those reports were true.

    There was no trans message, pro- or otherwise.

    And crucially, all of the newspapers knew that, because long before they had gone to print the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the wrong information, had started walking it back.

    The messages on the ammunition were memes from far-right internet culture and shitposting; the one supposedly relating to trans people was the code to call in a bomb in the video game Helldivers 2, which is a popular meme in the alleged killer’s online world.

    We know that many people don’t read beyond headlines, and on the rare occasions that newspapers retract stories they do so in very small boxes buried deep inside the papers. So three of the UK’s biggest papers told everyone passing newsstands yesterday that trans people were connected to a brutal murder. And that lie will now be repeated endlessly as yet another reason to fear and hate trans people.

    Trans people have no comeback for this, because the code of practice newspapers pretend to follow doesn’t allow groups of people to complain: you can only make an actionable complaint about hate if it names a specific person. So if The Times says that Trans Person X did a thing, and that isn’t true, Trans Person X can complain. But if The Times says trans *people* did a thing, and that’s a lie, there’s no comeback. And of course there’s no legal redress either.

    The Onion has a famous headline: It is journalism’s sacred duty to endanger the lives of as many trans people as possible. And that’s exactly what the press is doing here.