Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: Bullshit

Pernicious nonsense and other irritants

  • Attack of the crotch cops

    Last week, when the Women and Equalities Committee grilled the head of the EHRC over her unlawful and misleading interim guidance about trans people’s legal rights, two people followed a trans woman into the ladies’ toilet, yelled about there being a “biological male” in there and demanded security intervene.

    The two people were the co-founder of the LGB Alliance and a member of another anti-trans group, both of whom were in Parliament to pretend that they and the organisations they represent don’t want to bully trans women.

  • “This was the eradication of trans people from the country’s social fabric”

    If you only read one article about the UK human rights watchdog and its sham consultation over removing trans people’s human rights, make it this one by Ian Dunt.

    The consultation exercise is a joke. And the EHRC, far from trying to communicate the law, is attempting to rewrite it so that it is as punishing to trans people as possible. This is the story of how it is doing that.

    If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know a lot of the detail already, but to see it laid out in a timeline like this just emphasises how wickedly corrupt the EHRC has become – and how dangerous it has become not just to trans people, but to everybody.

    It’s really important to understand that the EHRC has pivoted from protecting human rights to destroying them. And if they get away with doing this to trans people, the whole house of cards protecting all marginalised people will follow. And that’s not an unintended consequence. It’s the entire goal.

    Falkner was made chair in December 2020. She was part of a pattern of appointments. Alasdair Henderson, who worked on a legal challenge against the NHS’ use of puberty blockers, was made a commissioner in 2018 and then reappointed in 2022. David Goodhart, who once argued that it is “common sense” to have a “preference for your own ethnic group”, was made a commissioner in 2020. None of these figures were beyond the pale – they were all firmly within the mainstream cultural right. But they were very odd appointments for an equality and human rights body. The EHRC had effectively been hollowed out and turned into the Spectator Online.

    …This is about as damning a failure of an equality body as you can imagine. Instead of protecting people’s rights they are actively trying to destroy them. But actually, there is another failure, of similar magnitude, which the EHRC is committing at the same time: it is failing to offer organisations reliable information about how to comply with legislation.

    …This is what happens when you take a public body with crucial responsibilities and turn it into a culture war campaign organisation. You betray a minority group which needs protection. But you also leave British businesses exposed to ruinous legal challenges.

    This situation is an affront to the rule of law, at a time when we urgently need to defend it.

  • Some people are more equal than others

    The Guardian reports* that Akua Reindorf, the Equalities Commissioner, has claimed that trans people “must accept a reduction in their rights” because we “have been lied to over many years” about what our human rights are. The Equality Act and the EHRC’s guidance on it, Reindorf essentially argues, were really a bathroom ban that nobody noticed for 15 years.

    At least she’s consistent: she represented an anti-trans activist (and LGB Alliance co-founder) who was suing the EHRC to try and reduce trans people’s rights in 2020; her interpretation of the law, which she argued meant service providers should exclude trans women, was dismissed by the judge. Reindorf’s interpretation was “wrong in law”.

    Reindorf was hired shortly afterwards to, er, interpret the law at the EHRC.

    Reindorf’s interpretation of the law is absolute bullshit, of course, and combined with her evident lack of understanding of the other key legislation, such as the Gender Recognition Act, and of case law such as Croft v Royal Mail 2003, it should result in her termination.

    But it won’t, because the EHRC is a transphobic organisation: an equalities watchdog now dedicated to creating inequality.

    The blatantly bigoted head of the EHRC, Kishner Falkner, reaches the end of her contract later this year; Labour could have ended her contract last year and started to undo the damage she’s done, but chose to renew her contract instead. And the replacement favoured by the Labour government is, like her, closely linked with anti-trans hate groups.

    Mary-Ann Stephenson, the preferred candidate, contributed to the LGB Alliance co-founder’s legal action against Stonewall, one of the organisations the EHRC is supposed to consult with, and has spoken at anti-trans organisations’ events. Her Bluesky following list – which I’m sure is about to be sanitised** now the news of her proposed appointment has been published – is a who’s who of UK anti-trans journalists, activists and pressure groups.

    This is what institutional capture looks like: a small number of people in positions of power dismantling decades of progress and taking a wrecking ball to human rights.

    The EHRC is dismantling the Equality Act. The previous Tory government started that; the current Labour government is happy to continue it.

    As ever, trans people are only the first targets. We won’t be the last.

    * Reindorf is now claiming that the article is defamatory and that “trans people’s rights haven’t been reduced”. The Guardian, pathetically, has now changed “reduction in their rights” to “perceived reduction in their rights” in its opening paragraph.
    ** It has now been sanitised.

  • A cautious response

    Multiple Scots LGBTQ+ organisations have published a joint statement about responding to the EHRC consultation regarding its Equality Act guidance, and having read the consultation documents in detail I think they’re right: the proposed guidance is focused exclusively on segregating trans people, makes no attempt to protect their human rights or dignity, provides no useful information to service providers who wish to remain inclusive, and runs counter to the spirit of the law, to other related legislation and to the EHRC’s public sector equality duties. That means engaging with it, while necessary, is not the be-all and end-all.

    The draft Code focuses entirely on how to exclude and segregate trans people from single-sex services and spaces. It provides no useful information for the many services who are currently running successful trans-inclusive services and who want to continue to welcome and include trans people… the content of the draft Code is so harmful to trans people in its current form that it’s hard to imagine the EHRC making the kinds of radical changes needed to make it work for our community.  

    …The EHRC cannot fix the law, only the UK Government can. That’s why we are asking our community to join us in writing directly to the Minister for Women and Equalities and your MP.

  • The bungle Telegraph

    It’s hard to imagine now, but the Daily Telegraph was once envied for its news reporting. Now it’s a comic for angry old people who want to be lied to – and it can’t even be bothered to do that very well.

    Today’s front page trails a big news report on the revelation that the NHS gives surgery to some trans people. Leaving aside the transparently bigoted framing (the implication, as ever, is that you can just walk in and get surgery; it took me seven years, and that was when waiting lists were a fraction of what they are now) and the involvement of the usual anti-trans activists, the article tells its readers that of the people getting surgery on the NHS, “a large proportion of those going under the knife are under 18.”

    No they aren’t.

    The proportion of under-18s going “under the knife” is exactly zero.

    The Telegraph’s reporter, “special correspondent” Hayley Dixon, would have known that if she’d read her own fucking article, as two paragraphs later it notes that the youngest surgical patient was 18.

  • Inconvenient truth

    One of the hallmarks of the genital-obsessed weirdo movement is to claim that there’s not enough research about trans healthcare, and to then ignore any research about trans healthcare because it doesn’t support their lurid claims. And there’s a great example of that in Utah where the Republicans commissioned a Cass-style report to justify their ban on trans healthcare but forgot to put a bigot in charge.

    The result? The evidence shows that trans healthcare is effective and safe and that bans cause great harm.

    It’s very detailed – much more so than the Cass Review – and as The Advocate reports:

    “The conventional wisdom among non-experts has long been that there are limited data on the use of [gender-affirming hormone therapy] in pediatric patients,” the researchers wrote. “However, results from our exhaustive literature searches have led us to the opposite conclusion.” The study found over 230 primary studies involving 28,056 trans youth — “far exceeding” the evidence that typically supports FDA approval for high-risk pediatric treatments, including gene therapy.

    “The body of evidence we have uncovered exceeds the amount of evidence that often serves as the basis of FDA approval for many high-risk, new drugs approved in pediatric populations in the U.S.,” the authors added.

    The report emphasized that such treatments are not given to prepubertal children, that puberty blockers and hormones are typically initiated only in early or mid-adolescence, and that surgeries — especially bottom surgeries — are not recommended for minors. The review also found no significant long-term safety concerns, and that “regret” associated with treatment is extremely rare. In fact, among the 32 studies examining regret, researchers found it was “virtually nonexistent” — and when present, it was “only a very minor proportion” of treatment discontinuation.

    The response, from politicians and national press alike, has been to ignore it.

    As I’ve written before, the problem isn’t that we don’t have evidence. It’s that the evidence doesn’t say what the genital-obsessed weirdos want it to say, so they discount it, distort it or ignore it. They’re not interested in the truth. They just want to hurt trans people.

  • Demand their papers, say the papers

    The EHRC draft guidance has been published and as expected, it’s an incoherent and in many places illegal shitshow that appears to have been written by the same anti-trans groups the EHRC chair and commissioner are close friends of. But it’s achieving its goal, which is to get the newspapers to tell their readers that trans women must be excluded from public spaces or gendered toilets, which is not what the Supreme Court ruled and is not what the law says.

    I’m not a lawyer, but even I can see that a lot of the guidance in the consultation document misrepresents the law and exposes companies to significant legal risk by falsely telling them that they should discriminate against service users. And the papers’ reporting of it is even worse, with the likes of The Telegraph saying that retailers must interrogate trans customers (or suspected trans customers) who want to use changing rooms and to demand birth certificates to prove customers’ sex.

    It’s a mess, it’ll harm people, and it’s going to get retailers and other service providers sued. The EHRC chair and commissioners are malevolent and incompetent, and should be replaced before they cause even more chaos.

  • Making tits of themselves

    Let’s talk about tits, shall we? Both literally, as in breasts, and metaphorically, as in bigoted men making complete tits of themselves.

    This weekend, a group of Scots trans women held a topless protest outside Holyrood over the Supreme Court verdict and its aftermath. With some irony, the very newspapers that love to call trans women men blurred their breasts so as not to fall foul of obscenity complaints.

    The photos of the event have caused some confusion among the genital-obsessed weirdos crowd, with figures such as disgraced former comedy writer Graham Linehan taking time out from court appearances (harassment and property damage here, defamation there) to opine that some of the women must have been cisgender women pretending to be trans.

    “OMG uncensored picture of the boob protest,” the man who used to write words for a living typed. “Eh, is it just me or is there an actual woman in here pretending to be a transwoman? Because the men are easy to spot.”

    So much for “we can always tell”.

    The woman in question is a trans woman – and like many young trans women, and many young women who aren’t trans, she’s very good-looking.

    Linehan’s rather grubby response – essentially “she can’t be trans, I like her tits” – does help prove the point the women were trying to make (as well as emphasise yet again how little the genital-obsessed weirdos know about trans people’s bodies): the anti-trans mob cannot, in fact, always tell.

    That’s important, because if the UK’s proposed bathroom ban is implemented then women of all shapes and sizes, almost all of whom won’t be trans, will be judged and in some cases punished by witless misogynists and other bullies based on a very arbitrary set of beauty standards.

    If you’d rather not have your access to spaces and public life conditional on whether lonely old men think you’re fuckable, you might want to write to your MP to demand an end to this idiotic campaign to segregate trans people and create a legion of self-appointed toilet cops.

  • A feeding frenzy

    The trans advocacy group TACC has been counting the (overwhelmingly anti-) trans stories published by many UK newspaper websites. Over the last 30 days the Times has run 38 stories; the Daily Express, 91; The Sun, 123; The Daily Telegraph, 147; and the Daily Mail, 228.

    In the case of the Mail that’s an average of over 7 anti-trans stories per day, but it’s even worse than that: on just one day, the day of the Supreme Court ruling, the Daily Mail published over 35 stories about trans people while The Telegraph and The Express published more than 25 each.

    That isn’t journalism. It’s a feeding frenzy.

  • Cass, peer reviewed

    A new peer review of the Cass report yet again shows that it was a political exercise designed to rubber-stamp the government’s war on trans people and our healthcare. The report’s conclusion is damning:

    Our critical analysis reveals significant methodological problems in the commissioned systematic reviews and primary research that undermine the validity of the Cass report’s recommendations. During our review of the report and supplementary primary research, we found insufficient statistical rigor, unreliable datasets, claims presented without evidence, and misrepresentation of quotes from primary research participants.

    Cass should have been struck off for this. Instead, she was given a peerage.