Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Bullshit

Pernicious nonsense and other irritants

  • Whitewashing

    If it weren’t so horrific it’d be funny: to counter whistleblowers’ claims that since the puberty blocker ban more than 16 young people on waiting lists have taken their own lives, the new government hastily commissioned a report to disprove their claims by, er, discounting the deaths of people on waiting lists.

    The report’s author follows many anti-trans activists and anti-trans journalists on social media (but not, as far as I can tell, any trans-supportive voices) and, as Professor Stephen Whittle points out, “makes no count of those lives [lost by people] on waiting lists, or [of] coroner’s reports or deaths reported in the media. That is not academic, it is a whitewash.”

    It’s very clear that despite the change of government, there has been no change of policy: dead kids are just collateral damage in this lethal culture war.

  • Distraction

    A new study by researchers at Loughborough University has found that women’s issues have been largely ignored in this election campaign, with women rarely given a media platform to discuss women’s issues unless they’re demonising trans people.

    There was an example of this just this week, when BBC News published a front-page story asking what each party had to say about women’s rights. It didn’t discuss women’s rights at all; just what the parties had to say about trans women.

    And as ever, whether that’s malice or incompetence doesn’t really matter; by distracting people from the very real issues affecting women and girls, and the growing threat to their healthcare and rights from the political and religious right, it’s doing an excellent job of keeping women marginalised.

    There’s a good letter in today’s Herald newspaper by Gemma Clark, a dedicated campaigner for women’s rights.

    There are urgent women’s rights issues being completely ignored while the political discourse centres on the gutter politics of body parts and bathrooms. Neither the Labour nor Tory manifesto mentioned abortion, which is rather shocking given the uptick in women and girls being charged with so-called ‘illegal abortions’.

    Rape conviction rates remain so low that it is effectively decriminalised. Labour will not commit to undoing the two-child benefit cap (also known as the rape clause). People wait years for a diagnosis of endometriosis. Maternity care is in crisis. Schools are in crisis, particularly in Glasgow, where school communities face teacher staff cuts on a scale we have never seen before. Only yesterday I watched a checkout operator struggling to remove the security cap from a container… it was a container of baby formula. We are living in a country where people are having to steal to feed their children.

    And instead of talking about this, politicians and the press constantly distract from it with a completely manufactured panic over trans women. People are being silenced for sure, but they aren’t the highly privileged people cosplaying as victims on the front page of our national newspapers with the full support of the Prime Minister and Rupert Murdoch.

  • Dead children don’t matter

    If you were in any doubt that the trans “issue” is a moral panic and that trans lives don’t matter to almost all of the media, the UK newspapers have provided ample evidence over the last few days.

    Every single paper, not just the right-wing ones, has ignored the news that the puberty blocker ban has been implicated in the deaths of 16 children and that the NHS and Cass Review appear to have tried to cover that up; instead, they have devoted endless column inches to whether Labour can become hateful enough to trans people to satisfy JK Rowling.

  • Your mum’s a super spreader

    In news that won’t surprise anyone who’s been following the trans panic, a new study shows that some of the most prolific spreaders of fake news are middle-aged women. Just 0.3% of Twitter accounts were responsible for sharing 80% of links to fake news, and those accounts were more likely to be women (60%) than men (40%). The average age of the misinformation peddlers was 58 and the posters share many more links per day than normal social media posters. While a majority were right-wing some 20% of superspreaders were left-wing.

    the researchers estimate that the superspreaders account for roughly a quarter of the links to misinformation sites that their typical followers were exposed to. For over 10 percent of their followers, they were the only source of fake news.

    There is one important caveat here, which is that the study was on Twitter before it became X and began offering money to misinformation and hate speech spreaders. That’s likely to have changed the demographic by making misinformation a career opportunity rather than just a hobby.

  • Uniquely dangerous

    Just over two hours before Parliament closed for the election, the Tories rushed through an emergency statutory instrument to ban the private prescription of puberty blockers for under-18s. The reason for the ban, and for the rush? The health secretary says it is “essential to make the order with immediate effect to avoid serious danger to health”.

    This medicine is so dangerous that the government is not banning, and does not propose to ban, NHS or private prescriptions for cisgender kids.

     

  • Doctors speak out against Cass

    The ongoing wrecking spree by Hilary Cass continues, but it’s getting significant pushback from medical experts. As Erin Reed reports, “both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society have categorically rejected the review as a justification for bans on care and have challenged many of its alleged findings.”

    Every time Cass speaks to the press things get worse: she’s now suggesting that trans healthcare shouldn’t be measured in satisfaction or regret rates (which are exceptionally high and exceptionally low respectively compared to other forms of healthcare) but in factors such as “employment”, which suggests that she’s either completely unaware of or couldn’t care less about the discrimination that means one in three UK employers say that – despite it being illegal – they would refuse to hire trans people. And more details of the people in her review board are starting to emerge; many have links with pseudoscientific anti-trans organisations. Cass herself met with people from Ron DeSantis’s anti-trans administration and appears to have lied about it.

    As the Endocrine Society says in a strongly worded statement:

    “We stand firm in our support of gender-affirming care. Transgender and gender-diverse people deserve access to needed and often life-saving medical care. NHS England’s recent report, the Cass Review, does not contain any new research that would contradict the recommendations made in our Clinical Practice Guideline on gender-affirming care… Medical evidence, not politics, should inform treatment decisions.”

  • Balance

    Lee Hurley of Trans Writes has been tracking trans-related articles in the UK press: The Guardian, The Observer, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday and Private Eye.

    In the 23 days since 16 April there have been 126 articles about trans people in those publications.

    121 of them were negative.

    5 were neutral.

    0 were written by trans people.

  • Snitches

    In Utah this week, the Republican administration introduced a snitch line, an online form for bigots to report any cases of trans or non-binary people using the single-sex facilities appropriate to their gender.

    It’s easy to point at this as an example of US right-wing bigotry, but for anyone thinking such vicious idiocy couldn’t happen here: on the very same day the UK Equalities Minister, Kemi Badenoch, introduced a snitch line, an online form for bigots to report organisations offering “bad guidance” about letting trans people use the single-sex spaces appropriate to their gender.

  • Illegal and cruel

    I’ve been loath to post about the current cavalcade of cruelties the Tories are heaping on trans people right now, but I wanted to point out something about the proposed NHS guidance that would force trans women out of single-sex wards: it’s illegal under multiple laws, especially for trans women who have gender recognition certificates. Not for the first time, the party of law and order is attempting to undermine the law by issuing guidelines encouraging organisations to practice illegal discrimination.

  • Snakes in the Cass

    The Cass review is a lengthy document and it’ll take time for detailed criticisms to emerge, but there’s already plenty of evidence to indicate that the worst fears of trans people and allies were correct. The review team included people vocally opposed to trans healthcare, applied different standards of evidence to trans-supportive and trans-antagonistic studies, is happy to accept anecdote and hearsay provided it is not trans-supportive, and appears to advocate conversion therapy and demand that doctors be involved in social transition, which is not a medical matter.

    This, by Trans Safety Network, is an excellent overview of some of the most blatant problems with the report.

    the Cass Review final report seems to assume, as an unspoken starting point, that growing up to be a trans person is a bad thing, and the rest of the conclusions follow from that assumption.

    …We have previously identified a number of professionals involved in both the Cass Review and the NHS Gender Dysphoria Working Group which helped commission the review who are involved either in lobbying efforts against trans affirmative healthcare, or who have actively promoted conversion therapy.