Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Bullshit

Pernicious nonsense and other irritants

  • 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.

  • How it happened

    Juliet Jaques has written a terrific feature detailing exactly how the anti-trans takeover of the press and politics happened in the UK. And it’s been going on longer than you might think: while it really kicked into gear in 2017, the foundations were laid long before.

    The article details how trans writers were pushed out of media, how trans people’s voices were excluded from stories about them, and how fake grassroots groups were able to do so much damage to established LGBTQ+ advocacy organisations. But while the piece is detailed and evidenced, the gist of it is this:

    Our enemies didn’t look at publications that were platforming trans people or parties that were supporting trans rights and then vacate the battlefield – they drove us out and made our sympathisers afraid to speak up.

  • Illegal, immoral, hateful

    At 10pm on Friday night the equality and human rights committee published an interim update – not guidance, let alone statutory guidance – about trans people’s access to services and facilities. The document is not law, makes no sense, and flies in the face of settled law. But the goal is to persuade people that the law has changed, and that they should act immediately to ban trans people from public facilities.

    It’s nonsense. It says that trans people should be excluded from the toilets that match their gender, but can also be excluded from the toilets that match their assigned sex at birth. It says that gay men’s choirs shouldn’t include trans men, and that lesbian book clubs shouldn’t include trans women.

    It’s a sadistic fantasy written by people put in place specifically to wage war on trans people and trans women in particular as part of the Tories’ “war on woke”. In a fairly short period of time the Tories changed the EHRC from an independent human rights watchdog to an arm of the government, with many senior officials quitting in disgust. It now works closely with anti-trans pressure groups for the removal of trans people’s legal protections.

    To illustrate just how ridiculous and hateful things have become: in 2016 the UK government issued a travel warning for North Carolina and Alabama over their newly implemented anti-trans bathroom bans. Today, the UK government is being urged to, and seems inclined to, implement even more regressive bans here.

    There’s incredible outrage over this among people who aren’t trans and who know bigotry when they see it, although inevitably it’s not being reflected in the UK press. But the Irish Examiner’s Séamas O’Reilly puts it very clearly.

    Let us speak as adults. Despite being around 0.5% of the population, trans people have spent the past decade being attacked in one of the most flagrant moral panics ever perpetrated on the British public.

    Spread in the name of a “feminism” centred on a small, committed group of active transphobes backed by the entire might of British politics and media, including every misogynist you can name; either because they share this gut-level hatred of trans folks, or simply because it serves their political interests to heap sadism on a vulnerable minority, instead of addressing the multiple overlapping crises that face the British public, and in which they are directly complicit.

    The only way any of the absurdities of this ruling make sense, is if its aims are exactly what they appear to be: A punitive attack on the rights and dignity of trans people divorced from any real-world concern about safety or women’s rights, designed to demoralise and punish them simply for the crime of existing.

    If this madness is signed off by Labour it guarantees a kicking in the EU courts, because it’s a clear breach of EU-wide human rights legislation. But it will really harm lots of people in the interim. Not just trans people, but anyone who attracts the wrong kind of attention from self-appointed bathroom bouncers.

    Few MPs and MSPs care about trans people’s human rights and safety. But they care about staying in power. And that means you can put pressure on them by making it clear that this horrific bullying of marginalised people needs to stop.

  • The self-pity party

    After the champagne celebrations, the hangover: the people who’ve spent the best part of a decade trying to remove trans people’s human rights and dignity have succeeded, and now they’re sad about it.

    Katelyn Burns, in the pithily titled You have no friends because you’re a transphobic asshole:

    The loudest TERFs are still not satisfied, and are still being shunned by their friends…

    In The Times of London, American writer turned British TERF Hadley Freeman lamented that none of her friends have come back to her to fete her and tell her how right she was all along about trans people. On socials, columnist Julie Bindel said she still feels lonely and unfulfilled in the wake of what should have been her best week ever.

    Famously unfunny prick Graham Linehan took to Twitter demanding apologies from all the family and friends that abandoned him as he lost his mind and became singularly obsessed with stalking trans women on women’s dating apps.

    All of these people are expecting vindication for their years long hate campaign against trans people, they want their old life back but also expect to wear their bigotry just a proudly on their sleeves. But there is no redemption arc here. You’ve made your deal with the devil and your soul is now his. Forever.

    These people haven’t lost friends and family members because of their beliefs. They’ve lost them because of their behaviour.

    Burns:

    I’ve watched from afar as TERFs bend every conversation back to their pet hatred, every online discussion thread has to tap into that dopamine reserve these people have in the backs of their minds where their hatred of trans people lives. Every online space that welcomes one TERF nearly always ends up as a completely TERF space because TERFs are incapable of having normal conversations with anyone.

    She’s right. If you look at non-obsessed people’s social media it’s a range of topics. With the anti-trans mob it’s anti-trans all the way down.

    Casey Explosion on Bluesky:

    Sorry you dedicated your lives to a fascist hate movement and cut everyone out of your lives that tried to get you to step back from that abyss and it’s making you miserable, but you did this to yourselves. Luckily for GCs, you can stop any time you want, a luxury you don’t afford your victims.

    Trans people though? We don’t get to opt out of this, we don’t get to walk away, but “Gender critical” hatemongers? You get to call it a day any time you want and move on with your lives. May I suggest getting a hobby that doesn’t involve advocating the extermination of other human beings?

    Burns:

    Whatever emptiness drove these people to TERFism will still be there even if trans people simply stop existing. The friends they drove away will not suddenly come back because they already saw the depths they were willing to plumb in order to kick out at one of the tiniest and most marginalized demographics in the world.

    Talia Bhatt, on Bluesky:

    The thing about the GCs is that they want to be hailed as great feminist heroes. They want to be petty and cruel and direct all their vicious bigotry and disgust at a tiny maligned demographic, with the backing of all the highest powers in the land, and be adored for it.

  • Violence

    In a full-page article in The Telegraph today, Sex Matters’ Maya Forstater claims that the tens of thousands of peaceful pro-trans protesters who took to the streets yesterday are a “violent mob” because one of the protesters scribbled on a statue with a bit of chalk.

    On Twitter today, Sex Matters supporter and washed-up former comedy writer Graham Linehan is urging his thousands of followers to physically attack any women they think may be trans.

  • Demons, daily

    Researcher Lee Hurley tracks anti-trans articles in the English press, and the totals are in: in the last year alone, just three English newspapers – The Guardian, The Daily Mail and The Telegraph – ran 1,075 articles about trans people, almost all of them anti-trans. So if you’re a reader of any of those papers, you’re being sold an anti-trans story every single day.

    It’s a horrendous statistic but if anything it underplays things: just yesterday The Sunday Telegraph ran five anti-trans articles in a single edition. And the Scots press is similarly obsessed.

  • Identify the author

    Stop me if you’ve read this before.

    Sadly, one of the most prevalent forms of child abuse facing our country today is the sinister threat of gender ideology. Proponents of the gender ideology movement are outrageously indoctrinating our children with the devastating lie that they are trapped in the wrong body – and that the only way they can be truly happy is to alter their sex with hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and sexual mutilation surgery. The evil and backwards lies of gender insanity are robbing our children of their happiness, health, and freedom, while imposing unimaginable heartbreak on parents and families.

    Was this in The Times? The Scotsman? The Daily Mail? The Telegraph? The Daily Express? The Herald? Spiked? The Courier? The Observer? The Guardian? The Spectator? Unherd?

    Nope. It’s the latest hateful, bigoted bullshit tirade from the misogynist sexual predator Donald Trump. The fact that it could have been lifted wholesale from one of hundreds of UK newspaper columns shows what monsters so many of our columnist class have become.

  • Another stitch-up

    Today’s papers are giving lots of space to The Sullivan Review, the latest anti-trans stitch-up initiated by the previous government under the banner of “kicking woke ideology out of science” and amplified by the current Health Minister. Transactual:

    Prof. Alice Sullivan is a prominent anti-trans activist and advisory group member of the leading anti-trans lobby group, Sex Matters, notable for her work on UK literacy. The report also contains legal advice written by the husband of the Chair of the Sex Matters’ Trustee Board, Naomi Cunningham, and research was commissioned for the review to an organisation led by fellow member of the Sex Matters’ advisory group Lucy Hunter Blackburn.

    Here’s data expert Kevin Guyan:

    The DSIT and UK Government, researchers, funders and public bodies need to recognise this Trumpian intervention for what it is: an attempt to erase trans and non-binary people from existing in data.

    It, the Cass Review and the forthcoming Levy Review of adult healthcare are all part of the same project: to drive trans people out of public life in the UK.

  • Nothing is erased

    One of the many bullshit stories pushed into the press by genital-obsessed weirdos and their pet minister Wes Streeting this week has been the idea that transgender doctors are hiding evidence of terrible misdeeds by changing their gender.

    Headlines such as “GMC erases records on doctors who change gender”, “Doctors who change gender have wrongdoing ‘erased’ from public record, GMC admits” and “Fury as it’s revealed medics’ disciplinary records are ERASED from public view when they change gender” might lead you to believe that when a doctor transitions, their disciplinary history is deleted.

    Nope. Writing to Streeting and the UK’s other health secretaries last week, the GMC explained that yes, transitioned doctors get a new GMC identification number in order to comply with the law and protect their privacy. But “their fitness to practise history and any risk they may still present to the public attaches to an individual and remains the same whether or not their gender identity changes… all fitness to practise history is accurately displayed on the records of all of those doctors and no fitness to practise history has been removed or suppressed.”

    What’s going on here isn’t just the press happily spouting whatever bullshit the hate groups come up with, although that’s a huge and ongoing part of it. It’s that the press is actively collaborating with hate groups to paint *existing while trans* as deviant and dangerous.

    The implication of “erasing” records – and of words such as “wrongdoing” – is that all trans doctors have something to hide. The reality is that trans doctors, like trans people more generally, are being targeted by bigots simply for being trans.

    The same thing is at the root of the current high-profile, celebrity endorsed NHS tribunals which, thanks to some appalling judicial decisions, have been turned into show trials against individual trans women who are being defamed and demonised not just on social media but in the pages of newspapers too. The goal is to enshrine in law the idea that the very presence of a trans woman at work is terrifying and traumatic, and that as a result banning trans women, or refusing to hire trans women, is both reasonable and proportionate.

    There’s been some really horrific persecution of trans people in the US in just the last week: a trans military ban, a de facto ban on trans people getting visas that attempts to define being trans as committing fraud, a ban on all trans healthcare in some states, mass sackings of LGBTQ+ government employees, and much more.

    All of these things are on the British bigots’ list of demands too. Which perhaps explains why so-called “gender critical” women journalists in the UK press have been filing columns about how in their eyes Donald Trump is a feminist hero.

    None of this is about “reasonable concerns” or protecting anybody from anything. It’s about eradicating people from society. Trans women are the first targets, but they won’t be the last.