Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Bullshit

Pernicious nonsense and other irritants

  • 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.

  • 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.