Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Bullshit

Pernicious nonsense and other irritants

  • Whose voices matter

    You may have seen coverage of the Polari Prize protest, in which almost all of the first book prize nominees and many of the main prize nominees have withdrawn in protest at the inclusion of the anti-trans writer John Boyne.

    Boyne, a self-proclaimed “TERF” who just happened to sanitise his social media a few days before his inclusion was announced, is well known for being anti-trans (and anti-other parts of the LGBTQ+ community and their supporters). Just days ago in a newspaper interview he compared women supportive of trans rights to the character from The Handmaid’s Tale who is “ready to pin a handmaiden down as her husband rapes her.”

    This is the same Boyne who had a very public fight with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Holocaust memorial museum, which said that his book The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas “should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches the history of the Holocaust” because the book is based on “historical inaccuracies and stereotypical portrayals of major characters that help to perpetuate dangerous myths about the Holocaust”. He brought the same rigour to his more recent book about a trans child, a book whose message could best be described as “trans bad. Don’t be trans.” The criticism of that book sent him down the anti-trans rabbit hole he was already leaning into.

    Including him in a prize supposedly celebrating the entire LGBTQ+ community is rather like nominating Andrew Tate for a feminist award – and his response to the protest makes that clear. His response uses the tactic favoured by abusers, DARVO – deny, attack, reverse victim and offender – to try and paint himself as an innocent little boy besieged by sinister forces, and he doubles down by saying that if a minority’s human rights are perceived to conflict with those of the majority, the minority’s rights don’t matter. For anyone to say that is incredible. For a gay man to say it is indefensible.

    In all the coverage of the protests not one of the authors or judges who withdrew, or the hundreds of writers and publishing workers who have signed a letter protesting Boyne’s inclusion, has been given the opportunity to comment. Instead, Boyne and his beloved JK Rowling are getting all the column inches with lurid claims of what the Telegraph describes as being “cancelled” by “trans zealots”.

    The people who are protesting are doing so because they’re principled, and pulling out of the prize means sacrificing a potentially significant boost in sales. They are not bigots or bullies and they are not cancelling anyone. They are the ones whose voices are being silenced.

  • A law that doesn’t exist

    The Times reports that the EHRC guidance on trans people, to be published later this year, is going to ignore the 50,000+ consultation responses and will tell organisations not to let trans people use the correct facilities for their gender. It’s not a surprise, but it’s important to understand that what the EHRC is attempting to do here is invent a law that does not exist.

    Until now, the Equality Act has said that trans people should only be excluded from facilities if doing so is a proportional means of achieving a legitimate aim. And when the EHRC guidance is published, that will remain the case. What’s changed is how the EHRC is trying to spin it.

    The bigots at the EHRC, and their friends at the anti-trans pressure group Sex Matters and in the press, are trying to muddy the waters and make organisations believe that they *must* exclude trans people. But that’s not the law. The law says that yes, they can, if it’s proportionate and absolutely necessary. But they don’t have to, and they are certainly not breaking the law if they choose to offer gender-neutral facilities.

    The proposed new guidance is in breach of multiple laws and breaches multiple human rights obligations the UK is signatory to; it also completely disregards the European Court of Human Rights judgements that made the UK grant trans people legal gender recognition in the 2000s. It’s heading once again to the EU courts, where it will be destroyed. But that will take time, and the anti-trans thugs hope to destroy as many human rights as possible before that happens.

  • Hire education

    As the genital-obsessed weirdos demand a boycott of M&S for having a trans employee in a shop – I think this is their fourth M&S boycott, or maybe the fifth; it’s hard to keep track – it’s worth revisiting this HR News report from seven years ago, before the anti-trans industry started to demand illegal anti-trans discrimination in the workplace though lawfare and co-ordinated online abuse.

    In a survey of 1,000 employers:

    • 47% of retailers said they were unlikely to hire a trans person
    • 45% of IT businesses said they were unlikely to hire a trans person
    • 35% of leisure and hospitality businesses said they were unlikely to hire a trans person
    • 34% of manufacturing businesses said they were unlikely to hire a trans person

    Not hiring someone because they’re trans was, and is, illegal. Given that, it’s safe to assume that many other respondents wouldn’t hire trans people either but wouldn’t admit it publicly or privately.

    The survey suggested that many firms were simply ignorant of the law, and at the time the EHRC was trying to fix that. In recent years, however, it’s set out to misrepresent and mislead instead: instead of educating employers it’s demanding more discrimination, not less.

  • An appalling apology

    From the Daily Telegraph: Marks & Spencer has apologised to a mother for causing her teenage daughter “distress” after she was asked if she needed help by an Asian employee in its bra section.

    The retailer said it was “truly sorry” after the mother complained that her 14-year-old daughter had felt uncomfortable when they were approached by an Asian shop assistant in the lingerie area of the shop, where they were hoping to have a bra fitting”.

    Awful, right?

    The original article says “transgender” and “trans” rather than Asian. But that shouldn’t make the story any less horrific, or M&S’s apology any less appalling.

    There is no suggestion that the employee said or did anything wrong. The complaint is simply that a trans person has a job. And that complaint is backed by the implicit threat of billionaire-funded legal action that would be very expensive to fight. This is lawfare, and it’s designed to make companies and organisations fearful about employing any trans people in any capacity anywhere.

  • “40 years on, are we really doing this again?”

    Jessica Harriet writes about Labour’s new Section 28, which is designed to dehumanise and harm trans kids. 

    Clause 72 is an ambiguous mess, purposefully leaving headroom for the removal of LGBTQIA+ books should they include a representation of transgender people, family members, friends, or history. Granting schools and parents enough plausible justification to censor inclusive materials, whilst claiming it is for protection. And in doing so, they declare the acknowledgement of gender diversity as an inherent danger, restricting a minorities representation to age requirements and trigger warnings.

    …In stark parallel to Section 28, trans education is framed as a form of “indoctrination” or, as they politely put it, “encouragement.” Just as Thatcher’s government deemed queer identities a threat to ‘functioning’ society, the RSHE guidance implies trans visibility as a suggestive wrong, a political contagion.

  • The best laws money can buy

    We’ve been told repeatedly by the Labour government that the Supreme Court judgement that reversed decades of equality law, threatening trans people’s rights and safety, is final and must be respected: any Supreme Court judgement is carved in stone, permanent, impossible to change.

    Today, Labour chancellor Rachel Reeves “is considering overruling the Supreme Court over a £44bn car loan commission scandal after lobbying by some of the UK’s biggest lenders,” The Guardian reports.

  • A tsunami of scaremongering

    There’s a good piece in Assigned Media: “A Shameful Chapter”: How Anti-Trans Disinformation Drowned Out Science and Gripped the Mainstream. It’s about the US but relevant to the UK too: our media is just as captured, and their reporting is helping the right-wing attacks on trans people’s human rights and healthcare.

    It takes one pseudoscience peddler and uses their activities to show:

    “the reach and coordination of right-wing lobbying groups, their determination to spread medical disinformation to promote political goals, and their success in getting that message adopted in mainstream media — not simply in friendly outlets like Fox but in emerging power centers like the Free Press, and even traditional media like The New York Times.

    This pipeline of disinformation, which has elevated extremist views and undercut medical science, has had devastating effects on hundreds of thousands of trans Americans, most acutely young people, and their families.”

  • Doing the devils’ work

    During her appearance in front of the Women and Equalities Committee last month, EHRC head Baroness Falkner told MPs that the EHRC had an 81% approval rate; the implication, which Falkner did not correct or clarify, was that this figure represented public polling.

    Thanks to another freedom of information request, we now know that it doesn’t: the figure comes from the EHRC’s own “media sentiment analysis” which “measures the tone and favourability of media coverage about EHRC, not public polling”.

    In other words: the newspapers that hate trans people are pleased that the EHRC is actively helping their war on trans people.

    “Positive media sentiment has improved from 35.2% in 2021-22 to 80.6% in 2024-25”. When that media is waging war on a marginalised group that the EHRC is supposed to protect, that should be cause for resignation, not celebration.

  • 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”.