Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Bullshit

Pernicious nonsense and other irritants

  • A tax on women’s sports

    British athletes have been told they’ll have to pay £185 out of their own pockets for compulsory sex testing if they want to compete internationally, but only if they’re women: men don’t have to do the tests. The goal is to ensure that trans women and women with DSDs (disorders of sexual development, such as being intersex) aren’t allowed to compete.

    Blanket sex testing like this was scrapped in the 1990s because it was discriminatory, unscientific, humiliating, unethical and racist, but the bigots have brought it back and to add insult to injury they’re making women pay for it. This, apparently, is feminism.

  • “This is how the line gets crossed”

    There’s a piece in Politico urging the media to stop normalising the far right.

    The BBC’s reporting style, for example, is all too often shaped by internal guidelines and a collapsing vision of performative neutrality. This was clearly demonstrated in coverage of the death of 23-year-old Quentin Deranque in France two weeks ago, with a report that described Deranque as a “far-right feminist” — a phrase that invents a political category no serious politics course anywhere in the world would recognize. Far-right politics and feminism come from fundamentally different traditions and pursue fundamentally different aims.

    The testing ground for this was the anti-gender movement, which is an anti-feminist movement against women’s reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy that came from the Catholic church. It may use the language of feminism to attack LGBTQ+ people (trans women first, but the entire rainbow is in its sights), but it’s not about protecting women’s rights; it’s about women as property. And yet the media has mainstreamed it as feminism. This is how the far right gets in.

    Politico:

    Every uncritical mention of far-right rhetoric is an editorial decision with political consequences. Every headline, every clip, every click adds weight. This is how the line gets crossed. And how some media are no longer just covering the far right but helping it speak.

  • The trouble with Twitter

    A new paper in Nature (PDF document here) confirms what many of us already knew: it acts as a radicalisation engine, shifting people’s political views permanently to the right.

    By using an algorithmic feed – where X decides what you see rather than the chronological feed of Bluesky – and comparing it to people using a chronological feed for 7 weeks, the study found that the former “increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine.”

    We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects.

    This cesspool is where the UK’s entire political and media class spend their time.

  • The outrage factory

    Jessica Kant’s analysis of the anti-trans outrage factory is well worth your time.

    …any attempt at accuracy or veracity has gone completely out the window, with a chillingly familiar trend towards the bombastic that has led to pogroms at other times in history… why do conservatives believe that we’re everywhere, hiding in the bushes? Because powerful people won’t stop claiming it’s true, even if evidence to the contrary is everywhere.

  • “Shroud wavers”

    Hilary Cass, author of the disgraceful and damaging Cass Review into trans teens’ healthcare, told The Times in 2024 that “What is worrying is when people say that if children don’t get these drugs, they will die, because clearly that’s not true”; it was “irresponsible for people to shroud-wave in that way.”

    Thanks to a freedom of information request we know that removing gender-affirming care from trans teens in 2021, which NHS England did in the aftermath of the (very dodgy and later overturned) Keira Bell case, led to a surge in teen suicides.

    5 trans children killed themselves in England in 2019/20; 4 trans children killed themselves in 2020/21; and in 2021/22, when gender-affirming care was first shut down, 22 trans children killed themselves.

    Correlation does not necessarily imply causation, of course, and people kill themselves for all kinds of reasons. Maybe it was the healthcare. Maybe they were bullied. Maybe their families treated them terribly. Maybe it was some or all of those things combined in a climate that’s increasingly hateful towards trans people. But there is plenty of evidence that the anti-trans panic kills children and will continue to do so. The self-appointed “protectors of children” have blood on their hands.

  • Thousands of imaginary children

    In 2022, The Times reported that the Tavistock gender clinic was going to be sued by thousands of families whose children “claim they were rushed into taking life-altering puberty blockers”.

    The story, while widely circulated and repeated, was never true. It couldn’t be: that number would mean almost every young person referred to endocrinology at the Tavistock would be suing. In fact, the number of families suing the clinic through the law firm quoted in the story is zero, as a new freedom of information request reveals.

    This is just the latest in a very long list of stories that were clearly bullshit from the outset. I suspect the people who wrote those stories were well aware of that.

  • Defending women and girls, sometimes

    It’s very telling that the most vocal self-appointed “protectors of women and girls” have nothing to say about the absolutely horrific production of AI-generated sexual abuse images of real women and children that’s happening on X on an industrial scale.

    As they continue to post on X, in many cases paying for the privilege to do so, the anti-trans activists, columnists, politicians and publishers are making it very clear that while the existence of trans women in public is beyond the pale for them, widespread image-based sexual abuse of women and children is not.

  • What happened

    There has been a flood of despicable reporting around the Sandie Peggie employment tribunal, much of it by people who clearly didn’t let a minor matter such as reading the actual judgement get in the way of publishing their pre-written pieces. This, by Rivkah Brown, should make them ashamed of themselves. It won’t, because they’re too far gone. But what’s detailed in the tribunal evidence bears little or no relation to what the majority of the press wants you to believe.

  • 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.