Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Bullshit

Pernicious nonsense and other irritants

  • A shameful fraud

    Yet another damning review of the Cass scandal has been published, this time in the New England Journal of Medicine. The publication is one of the world’s most respected peer-reviewed journals, and in a better world this article would be the final stake through the Cass review’s heart.

    The article says that Cass’s report “transgresses medical law, policy and practice… deviates from pharmaceutical regulatory standards in the United Kingdom. And if it had been published in the United States… it would have violated federal law.” The review misrepresented data to arrive at conclusions the data did not support, it did not follow established scientific methods, it did not follow international publication standards and is so clearly a stitch-up that “observers must speculate about who else participated in the manuscript’s drafting — and whether they held bias against LGBTQ+ people.”

    The review was a foregone conclusion, as Kemi Badenoch has already admitted; its job was to rubber-stamp transphobia, and anti-trans activists were deliberately placed in “the positions that mattered most in Equalities and Health.” It is as unscientific and as wicked as the anti-trans measures Donald Trump is expected to announce in the US later today, measures that will make the lives of trans and non-binary people immeasurably harder and will undoubtedly kill some and damage more for no reason other than bigotry and cruelty.

  • Sadistic pencil-pushers

    There’s a superb piece in Dazed by Sasha Baker, who explains how a vocal minority of religious and social conservatives has managed to dismantle trans healthcare and human rights in the UK without a single law being passed or revoked.

    The British gender critical movement purports to represent a silent majority, but knows it does not command enough support to publicly shred the documents guaranteeing our rights. Instead it has adopted the methods of sadistic pencil-pushers – its true constituency – burying human rights laws in reams of secondary legislation, statutory and non-statutory guidance, grey literature, and fudged equality impact assessments.

    As the article notes, a key part of that is the Cass scandal: a supposedly clinical review that was created and staffed in order to achieve a pre-determined political outcome, and which – despite repeated claims to the contrary in the press – found no evidence whatsoever that puberty blockers are dangerous or that their use should be curtailed.

    You’ll read a lot about “evidence” in connection with the Cass scandal. Here’s one of the crucial bits of so-called evidence on which Cass leaned heavily.

    In February, Sallie Baxendale, a psychologist, published a terrible academic paper that claimed to look at existing studies on the negative effects of puberty blockers on trans children’s cognition. In reality, most studies surveyed were performed on animals, with only one case study showing that a single trans child scored lower on an IQ test after taking puberty blockers… it was rejected by three journals and met with scathing comments from peer reviewers [but] Dr Hilary Cass chose to cite it four times in her final report, and determined that puberty blockers should not be prescribed to trans kids outside of an upcoming clinical trial, in part because of “potential risks to neurocognitive development”.

    What we’re seeing on a frankly frightening scale is the very opposite of evidence-based policy; the policies are decided first, and the evidence cherry-picked, distorted or manufactured to support them. This will not end with us.

  • Don’t talk about the dead

    We know that more than a dozen trans teens have taken their lives since the puberty blocker ban was introduced in the UK, despite the government’s best efforts to cover that up: its small inquiry into trans suicides discounted documented trans suicides. So it’s particularly disgusting to see Hilary Cass, the author of the politically motivated and utterly discredited Cass scandal that’s being used to dismantle trans healthcare, to proclaim that “What is worrying is when people say that if children don’t get these drugs, they will die, because clearly that’s not true.” It is “irresponsible for people to shroud-wave in that way.”

    Not for the first time, Cass is parroting the stories of hateful, genital-obsessed weirdos. Morgan Page writes:

    The spectre of the trans death, particularly through suicide, hangs over all of the attacks on trans life. No one wants to admit that this is the desired end goal — that trans people simply cease to exist, whether that be through detransition or death seems to matter little. As Janice Raymond famously put it, the goal is for trans people to be “morally mandated out of existence.” Indeed, “shroud waving” threatens to stir up some empathy for the plight of this embattled minority, and we can’t be having that. Anti-trans actors have gone so far as to accuse trans people of acting like abusive husbands who threaten to kill themselves if their wives leave.

    It’s a useful strategy, this attack on the idea of trans death, because most cis people will never know a living trans person, let alone a dead one.

    It’s worth pointing out yet again that despite its very best efforts the Cass study found no evidence that puberty blockers harmed kids. It did, however, see plenty of evidence that limiting access to healthcare and support kills some of them.

  • Stacking the deck

    Yesterday, Wes Streeting made the UK ban on puberty blockers for trans kids permanent. The ban does not apply to cisgender children; puberty blockers are apparently magic medicine that are uniquely dangerous to trans and gender non-conforming kids.

    The decision was subject to a consultation, which – at the Government’s invitation – featured significant input from anti-trans, pro-conversion therapy organisations with no expertise in healthcare generally or trans healthcare specifically. And despite blatantly stacking the deck with those anti-trans groups, the consultation could still not produce evidence to justify the ban. It did, however, make it clear that the ban would have terrible effects on trans kids’ mental health. We’ve already seen more than a dozen children take their own lives as a result of the temporary ban.

    Streeting simply ignored the evidence and imposed the ideologically motivated ban on the UK, including Scotland. Pressure from the UK government ensured a similar ban was passed in Northern Ireland with the support of Sinn Fein. There’s bleak humour in seeing UK Labour and Sinn Fein finding common ground in killing children.

    I’ve long since given up on trying to get people to care about trans people. But an evangelical government minister banning medically necessary healthcare by prioritising the thinky thoughts of newspaper columnists and religious and social conservatives over evidence and international medical consensus is a terrifying precedent for everybody.

  • Enemies within

    The evangelical movement has spent a very long time practicing institutional capture, where it inserts its people into positions where they can enact its policies. And the same appears to be happening with the anti-trans movement here in the UK, with “gender-critical” people who reject the scientific and medical evidence increasingly inhaibiting positions where they can influence healthcare and health policy.

    The latest example, as reported by Novara Media:

    Six leading gender clinicians associated with a controversial NHS review of transgender healthcare spoke at the conference of a designated anti-trans hate group that shares funding with key pro-Trump outfits

    They weren’t there to defend trans healthcare.

    Two of those people were involved in the ideologically motivated and widely discredited Cass Review, which has been used to stop healthcare for trans teens and which is being widely cited by people who want to stop trans adults’ healthcare too. A third is cited in that review and also sits on the board of the anti-trans pressure group SEGM, known as one of the “key hubs of anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience”.

    SEGM, for example, takes money (via the Edward Charles Foundation) from the Charles Koch Institute, a conservative political network that also funds the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation is the group behind Project 2025, a 900-page “wish list” to centralise presidential power and normalise religious conservatism, including by tightly restricting abortion access and expanding political appointees.

  • Masks off, hoods on

    Maslow’s Hammer says that “it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” And if you’re an anti-trans obsessive, everything can and should be blamed on trans people, including the US election result.

    The narrative already emerging from the anti-trans commentariat on both sides of the Atlantic is that the Kamala Harris campaign failed because of The Transes. And as always with the anti-trans mob, that’s nonsense. The Harris campaign conceded The Trans Issue – how I hate that phrase – completely: it didn’t feature trans people in its campaigning, it didn’t stand up for trans people, and even when given the opportunity to refute the Republicans’ anti-trans scaremongering in direct questioning – by some estimates, as much as 40% of the Republicans’ ad spending was spent on demonising trans women – Kamala Harris flatly refused to do so, calculatedly throwing trans people under the bus in the hope of winning a few bigots’ votes.

    But the problem with offering far right lite is that nobody’s buying it. Time and again, given the choice between full-on evil and slightly less evil, people choose the full-fat version. The supposed good guys concede territory to the bad, and having done that the bad guys demand they concede more.

    What far-right lite does do, however, is alienate some of your own voting base – without bringing any of the other side across. When the Democrats weren’t throwing trans people under the bus, they persuaded 6% of registered Republicans to vote Democrat. In this election, that figure didn’t increase. It dropped, to 5%, with the Republicans’ total vote numbers remaining roughly the same as in the last election. This wasn’t an anti-trans swing to Trump.

    You cannot meet bigots halfway because they lie about where halfway is. You can see that here in the UK: the supposed “reasonable concerns” (which were never reasonable) over trans people were only supposed to be over changes to the Gender Recognition Act; when they destroyed those changes, the bigots then decided they wanted rid of the Gender Recognition Act, the Equality Act and all other protections for trans people. Supposed concerns over healthcare for under-18s – again, never reasonable – have now expanded to demands for an end to all healthcare for trans adults – demands that as I and many other trans women can attest, are already being met by some GPs and health boards.

    The panic is such that organisations are now being attacked for doing things that only the deeply deranged could see through an anti-trans lens; for example this week, Marks & Spencer has been under sustained online and media attack for referring to teenage girls as “bright young things”, a decades-old phrase that the genital-obsessed weirdo brigade have decided is proof of pro-trans pandering.

    What we have now is a full-on, mask-off, hoods-on witch-hunt dedicated to erasing every aspect of trans people’s rights and safety until the goal of eliminating trans people completely is achieved – a witch-hunt in which the press is gleefully, hatefully complicit.

  • Misreporting

    Let’s do this again, shall we?

    There have been a spate of important trans-related stories in the press this week, and predictably they have all been misreported.

    First up, after a long inquiry into the trans charity Mermaids, the Charity Commission found no evidence of the wrongdoing alleged by anti-trans activists and their pals in the press. Complaints that the charity did not have effective safeguarding policies or that it had inappropriate ties to gender identity clinics were unfounded. The commission tried very hard to find evidence of those things because it really, really wanted to – during the inquiry one member of its staff, clearly an anti-trans activist, forgot to use their own personal account and was caught retweeting an unfounded allegation against the charity on the Commission’s own social media – but failed.

    That’s not to say Mermaids is perfect. It isn’t, and there were failings identified in its management. But the core allegations that have been in the press for two years now were bullshit.

    It’s also worth noting that yet again, the BBC reporting of this is using anti-trans activists’ dog-whistles: we’ve previously had “gender ideology” used to describe trans people existing, and now we have “trans-identified” to describe trans kids. The use of “trans-identified male” and “trans-identified female” are common in bigot circles; the terms are intended to delegitimise trans people and suggest they’re not trans.

    Next up: another bigot fucked around and found out. In yet another case reported widely as a nice teacher losing their job just for saying “sex is real” or misgendering a student, Camilla Hannan has been barred from teaching. And if you look at what the tribunal found rather than what the press is telling you it found, you’ll see that Hannan outed one of her LGBTQ+ students online – a massive safeguarding breach as well as horrific behaviour for any teacher – and that her remorse appeared to be “self-serving”: the judge suggested that “Miss Hannan’s remorse stemmed from being caught, rather than from reflections on her own behaviour.”

    Over in The Atlantic, Helen Lewis claimed that when Donald Trump said this week that “Your child goes to school, and they take your child. It was a he, comes back as  a she. And they do it, often without parental consent”, “lines like this would not succeed without containing at least a kernel of truth.” It does not contain a kernel of truth.

    Lastly, we have the inquest into the murder of trans teen Brianna Ghey. In a report that went out of its way never to describe Brianna as “she”, a girl or a young woman, The Times focused on the real victim here: her killer. He was “set for Oxbridge” and was “a good child with good morals”. That’s good morals as in spending “weeks plotting Brianna’s murder after drawing up a ‘kill list’” and then stabbing her 28 times. The good-morals bit is from a statement by the boy’s mother, who of course is going to come to her child’s defence. But the tone of the reporting here and elsewhere strongly suggests that the real tragedy as far as the press is concerned is not that a young trans girl is dead, but that two cisgender people are in prison for killing her.

  • Spot the difference

    The UK isn’t the only place where “reasonable concerns” over trans healthcare have sparked official reviews. It’s happened in Queensland too, sparking a review very similar to NHS England’s Cass Review. But despite reviewing very similar evidence, this review resulted in a doubling of funding for trans healthcare. Here in the UK, the Cass Review has been used to stop trans healthcare for teens, and it’s increasingly being used to demand the end of healthcare for trans adults.

    The difference? The Queensland review didn’t prioritise quacks and bigots over healthcare experts. As one doctor explains:

    “If you were reviewing a neurosurgical service, you’d need to have some neurosurgeons on the review panel,” she said.  

    “You don’t put faith healers on it.  

    “You have to have people who understand how it works.” 

    The UK seems to be the only country where expertise in healthcare is simply dismissed in favour of ignorance and ideology.

  • Perverse incentives

    One of the “keyboard warriors” who fuelled the recent English racist riots, Twitter user WayneGb88, appeared in court yesterday and was jailed for three years. During the trial, he told the court that he earns approximately £1,400 per month from posting hate speech on the former Twitter.

    This is why hate speech is everywhere: it pays very well. US “detransitioner” Chloe Cole recently revealed that she earns roughly $200,000 a year flying around as a guest of the Christian Right trying to get trans people’s healthcare banned; other anti-trans grifters are raking it in too.

    Being hateful is no longer a hobby; it’s a career, and a lucrative one.

  • Anatomy of a scandal

    This, by Lydia Polgreen, is superb: The Strange Report Fueling the War on Trans Kids. It’s about the Cass Review.

    As much as Cass’s report insists that all lives — trans lives, cis lives, nonbinary lives — have equal value, taken in full it seems to have a clear, paramount goal: making living life in the sex you are assigned at birth as attractive and likely as possible. Whether Cass wants to acknowledge it or not, that is a value judgment: It is better to learn to live with your assigned sex than try to change it. If this is what Cass personally believes is right, fair enough. It can charitably be called a cultural, political or religious belief. But it is not a medical or scientific judgment.