Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: Bullshit

Pernicious nonsense and other irritants

  • “Was it worth it?”

    A typically astute piece by Dr Ruth Pearce on trans lives and trans visibility in the past and present.

    For decades, the trans liberation movement has fought to change the world. We found new ways of being, and created language, art, and culture to name and explore these possibilities. We won new civil rights. We achieved incremental improvements in the provision of healthcare and education. We have made it a fair bit easier for many people to exist in the workplace, and to survive on benefits. We have built community: feeding each other, housing each other, and providing advocacy for each other, and partying together.

    As the UK enters a new era of state-mandated segregation, I find myself asking: was it all worth it?

    These are dark times for trans people; yesterday the government implemented the inconsistent and unlawful EHRC code of practice, a code so incoherent that the EHRC’s own head – appointed against the recommendations of multiple MPs, who judged her as utterly unsuitable for the role – couldn’t give any coherent advice to service providers when asked simple questions by Parliament’s equality committee recently and by Channel 4 News last night. Like all current anti-trans activism the code is based on the bigoted belief that there’s no such thing as a trans person, and that it’s therefore necessary to make trans people’s lives so difficult that we either detransition or kill ourselves.

    Dr Pearce:

    Today, the trans liberation movement faces off against vicious foes and their allies in the Labour government, who would see us eliminated altogether. Trans people of all ages and backgrounds are forced to navigate laws and policies designed to make our lives more difficult and more dangerous.

    It is all too easy to think that the trans activism of the past has failed, that every gain has been reversed in an orgy of hate and bigotry. Yet this is simply not true.

    As I wrote in Carrie Kills A Man:

    Trans and non-binary people are not a fad or a phase, a lobby or an ideology, a cult or a conspiracy. We’re your sons and your daughters, your sisters and your brothers, your friends and your colleagues.

    The genital-obsessed weirdos are correct about one thing: there really are people being infected by a social contagion that’s harming women and children. But it’s not us; it’s them.

  • The song they tried to ban

    I’ve spent a few frustrating weeks trying to distribute the new Unquiet Mind album to streaming services, and I’ve had to pull one of the tracks from the release (except on Bandcamp). The song, Unquiet Mind, has been falsely flagged by an AI as using uncleared samples. It doesn’t, because I don’t use uncleared samples or steal other people’s work.

    It’s all the more ironic because my own work has been stolen – by AI. Books I’ve written are in the stolen datasets of the big AI players.

    As things stand now, an AI on an unspecified streamer or download store somewhere in the world has decided that I’ve nicked something from a Middle Eastern band even more obscure than mine, a band whose track is geoblocked so it can’t be played in the UK. The decision is final, there’s no-one to appeal to and that one store’s mistake means I can’t submit the song to any streamers at all.

    Don’t you just love AI?

    It’s not the end of the world because there’s no money involved: my streaming numbers are insignificant. But it’s still annoying. If I were good at marketing I’d be plugging the song on social media as THE SONG THEY TRIED TO BAN, but I’m not so I’m not (other than in the headline, because I think it’s funny). If you’re interested, the song is available on our bandcamp.

  • Let’s speak ill of the dead

    The reaction in some (primarily media and political) circles to the death of professional arsehole Rod Liddle has been to invoke the old saw, don’t speak ill of the dead. But there’s a difference between keeping your mouth shut so a distant cousin doesn’t punch you at your gran’s funeral and reminding people of the many sins someone horrendous has committed.

    Rod Liddle was a mediocre writer, horrifically racist, bigoted against pretty much any marginalised group you can imagine and a woman-beater, cautioned by police for punching his 20-weeks-pregnant girlfriend in the stomach. He was a defender of child sexual abuse material, mused that he couldn’t be a teacher because he’d want to fuck the children, used his platform to demonise some of the world’s most vulnerable people, and the world is a better place without him.

    The Times, well aware of all the above but happy to employ him for many years, today called him a “playful genius”. And some of the UK’s highest-profile anti-trans “defenders of women and girls”, including Julie Bindel, Kathleen Stock and Rosie Duffield, have heaped praise on the paedophile-defending, woman-beating misogynist because of course, he was a transphobe too.

    Media critic Mic Wright pulls no punches:

    Subject yourself to Liddle’s body of work and you’ll find someone who never let go of the childish inclination to insult and degrade. He is so beloved of people on this side because he said all the unpleasant things they are too cowardly to say in public. He may have been delightful to his friends but he should be judged on what he put out into the world and that was bile by the bucketload.

    …He maintained columns in The Sun, The Spectator, and The Sunday Times precisely because he was a voice for the party line — the party of Murdoch that never needs to seek re-election. The tributes to Liddle illustrate just how much of their audience most of the British media hold in total contempt.

  • 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.