Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Bullshit

Pernicious nonsense and other irritants

  • 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.

  • 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.