Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: Bullshit

Pernicious nonsense and other irritants

  • 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”.

  • 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.