Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Bullshit

Pernicious nonsense and other irritants

  • The ban that isn’t a ban

    Labour have published their draft bill on banning conversion therapy, and as expected it does nothing to protect trans people: there’s a huge carve-out for healthcare providers that’s so wide it means any quack can call themselves a provider and continue to torture kids. The “ban” is also worded in such a way that it could be used to attack gender-affirming organisations such as support groups, which means that it will be used to attack gender-affirming organisations such as support groups.

    The fact that it’s a draft bill means that any action could still be several years away, but it’s already served its purpose: it’s generated lots of headlines saying that Labour is banning conversion therapy, even though it isn’t.

    The reason it’s not a complete ban is because conversion therapy for trans people is now government policy, delivered on the NHS. It’s not the “abusive” therapy described in the draft bill, which doesn’t really exist any more: we’ve largely stopped giving trans people lobotomies, aversion therapy and electro-shock treatments. But a series of counselling sessions with a nicely spoken doctor trying to convince you that you’re not really trans is still conversion therapy.

    I saw it described well on social media earlier: imagine a smacking ban that said smacking was fine if the kid deserved it.

  • No harm done

    There’s a fascinating interview with Hilary Cass with the BBC that makes it very clear that her report, used to justify a ban on puberty blockers, was policy-based evidence making: she admits that “we genuinely don’t know if there are harms” from prescribing puberty blockers to trans kids. The medicine remains available to cisgender kids (ie, kids who aren’t trans and who get them to prevent precocious puberty) because there’s no evidence that their potential harm outweighs their measurable benefits.

    As Assigned Media notes:

    The Final Report of the Cass Review concluded that the evidence for gender-affirming treatments was insufficient and called for further research. Notably, it found no evidence of harm whatsoever, alongside weak evidence of some benefit. To justify restricting care, the report focused on the possibility that some young people who grow up to be trans adults might not have been trans if they were denied the ability to socially or medically transition. Buried in the appendices, the report found fewer than 10 trans youth in the entire country who had detransitioned… The lack of evidence was used to support a care ban, which activists have twisted into a claim that the treatments were found to be harmful, which in turn is fueling the effort to prevent them from even being studied. 

    One of the reasons puberty blockers were previously prescribed, and why they continue to be prescribed in less backwards countries, was to give kids breathing space to explore their gender and make informed decisions about their future before puberty made irreversible changes. Now they’re banned, Cass says, “we have young people turning up in the clinics on testosterone at 11”. Well, yes. Because puberty blocking is no longer an option and almost all of the kids previously prescribed puberty blockers went on to take the appropriate hormones they needed. Cass saw the blockers-to-hormones pipeline as a problem rather than proof that trans kids were who they said they were.

    It’s the next quote that really shows her true colours: for those kids “it may be that if they were prescribed puberty blockers instead, that would give more time for the therapist to work with them and perhaps come to a different solution than a long-term life on medication.”

    She’s describing conversion therapy.

    Most trans kids become trans adults – the “desistance” rate among trans kids prescribed puberty blockers is exceptionally low. Describing being trans as “a long-term life on medication” as if it’s a problem and making it clear it’s an undesirable outcome tells you exactly what Cass thinks, and why she’s the face of policy that causes incredible cruelty to children.

  • Two lies

    Helen Belcher for Byline Times on the two lies being pushed by the EHRC:

    The position the UK now is in is driven by two big basic lies. The first is that the Equality Act was actually an act which excluded trans people from single-sex services and spaces aligned to their lived in gender but that the courts, Parliament or the EHRC, had somehow not noticed this until last year. The second lie is that trans people are always identifiable, and when they aren’t, they’re intentionally deceptive.  

  • This is what oppression looks like

    Brynn Tannehill on fiery form in Public Notice:

    One of the most popular and profitable grifts in the world of the religious right and MAGA is the production of propaganda to convince Christians that they are horribly discriminated against, or even oppressed, by the government and government funded entities.

    …This victimhood narrative is central to their identity. But it also raises the question: would they recognize what actual oppression looks like?

    Sadly the article is just as relevant in the UK.

  • “The most aggressively anti-trans developed democracy in the world”

    Liberal Currents:

    “A very small group of very well connected people, funded by international fascism, have decided that trans identity is, at best, a delusion that has been tolerated for far too long. In the space of a few years they have been able to reorder our society and politics to effectively segregate them.

    …This is not a hypothetical. You are less free now. Your security, dignity, and safety is in the hands of nasty, petty, monumentally stupid bigots. They can take it from you at a whim.”

  • Yet another medical fraud

    NHS England has banned the prescription of hormones to 16 and 17 year olds, formalising a policy that already existed in practice, and as with the Cass Review they’ve committed medical fraud to justify a ban based on ideology rather than evidence. The review of evidence they undertook excluded almost 97% of studies from inclusion, because those studies demonstrated that hormone treatment is effective, necessary and sometimes life-saving care for trans people. The review then claimed that there wasn’t sufficient evidence that HRT was effective.

    Former Conservative equalities minister Kemi Badenoch has made it very clear that people were put in important positions to target trans people’s rights and healthcare: “gender-critical men and women in the UK government, holding the positions that mattered most in Equalities and Health.” The Labour government could and should have reversed this, but have chosen to double down on harming trans and non-binary people instead.

    Since the puberty blocker ban was introduced, at least 46 trans and non-binary children have taken their own lives.

    They will come for adult healthcare next.

  • 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.