Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Bullshit

Pernicious nonsense and other irritants

  • A terrible echo

    In 2016, every major political party in Scotland stood on a platform that included gender recognition reform. The Scottish Government then threw the issue open to public consultation in 2017 (and again in 2019), during which social and mainstream media – with significant input from genital-obsessed weirdos – repeatedly lied about the proposed legislation, demonised trans people and defamed them as dangerous to children. Gender recognition reform has still not happened.

    In 2021, every major political party in Scotland stood on a platform that included banning conversion therapy. The Scottish Government then threw the issue open to public consultation in 2024, during which…

    If anything, the vitriol around this consultation is even worse. Although it’s largely coming from the same people as before there’s no pretence of “reasonable concerns” this time. Just constant abuse online and ridiculous evangelical claims of the “ordinary parents will be jailed for seven years” variety.

    Any time the rights of marginalised people are thrown open to the public, those consultations are flooded by bigots and misrepresented by the conservative press: whether the rights of trans and non-binary people in Scotland, women in Ireland or gay couples in Australia or Romania, consultations have repeatedly been used by the religious and far right to demand the that marginalised people receive worse treatment and have fewer human rights than they enjoy.

    If the majority wanted marginalised people to have equality, we wouldn’t need to legislate something so basic as protecting young people from treatment the UN defines as torture. We shouldn’t have to ask permission from the very people who deny us those basic rights.

  • Papers please

    The right-wing press wasted no time in starting 2024’s Tory-fuelled attacks on trans people: on New Year’s Day both the Mail and the Telegraph ran scaremongering articles supporting Kemi Badenoch’s desire to roll back trans people’s rights by several decades.

    This time the target is our passports, which the Telegraph claims have a “loophole” that enables us to change our gender markers that is “self-ID by the back door”. Except it isn’t a loophole and it isn’t self-ID. We’ve been able to change our passports with a note from our GP since the late 1940s (anecdotally) and definitely since the 1960s: April Ashley changed her passport in this way in 1961. It’s standard procedure.

    What Badenoch and her acolytes are doing here is presenting something utterly ordinary and uncontroversial as a sudden sinister threat; in the 70-odd years that trans people have been changing their passports this has never been abused by either a trans person or a cisgender man pretending to be trans. But as ever, the intention here isn’t to protect anybody. It’s to stir up hatred and chip away at our legal protections and rights.

     

  • Rectal research

    A new report by Policy Exchange, the right-wing think tank whose job is to give the Telegraph and Daily Mail some scary headlines and rubber-stamp whatever hateful policies the Tories want to bring in, is a great demonstration of what I’ve seen described as “rectal research”: the report’s supposed facts have clearly been pulled out of the author’s arse.

    The report pretends to be an analysis of trans participation in sport, but it’s nothing of the sort: the figures it presents are complete fiction. For example, it claims that there are 527 trans women and 61 trans men participating in professional rugby; the correct figure is zero, as trans people are banned from the sport; before the ban there were fewer than 10 trans people taking part. It claims that there are nearly 9,000 trans people competing in professional swimming; again, the real number is zero. It claims nearly 500 trans competitors in athletics; the correct number is, again, zero.

    The best example of this rectal research is in cycling, where it claims that there are over 4 million men and over 2 million women taking part in the sport: not riding for fun, but competing professionally. That’s ludicrous, as is the claim that there are over 16,000 trans athletes competing in the sport.

    Update, 31/12: A number of people, including Vivian Wulf on Twitter, have investigated the source of the cycling numbers because they’re so clearly nonsense. The figures are taken from the Active Lives survey by Sport England, which wasn’t about elite sport: its cycling numbers tell you how many people used a bike at least twice in one month for more than ten minutes for the purpose of leisure, travel or sport. Policy Exchange took the number of positive respondents, multiplied it by the estimated proportion of trans people in the UK, and published it as supposed proof of a trans takeover in competitive cycling. 

    In total, the Policy Exchange report claims that tens of thousands of trans women are competing professionally in sport. Given that the UK census – which anti-trans groups say overestimates the number of trans people in the UK – reports that there are 166,000 trans women in the UK, that would mean somewhere between one-seventh and one-fifth of all trans women are professional athletes.

    It’s complete fiction, but it’s doing its job: it’s being reported in all the press as if it’s a credible document rather than the fever dream of anti-trans bigots, and those reports will be cited in future as proof of the entirely invented trans takeover of professional sports.

    Once again, the brave and fearless British press proves Humbert Wolfe correct:

    You cannot hope to bribe or twist
    thank God! The British journalist
    But seeing what the man will do
    unbribed, there’s no occasion to

  • A hateful echo

    In the same week that we heard closing arguments in the trial of Brianna Ghey’s killers, two teenagers who brutally murdered the young girl in part because she was transgender, the Tory government has finally published its draft guidelines regarding trans and non-binary kids in schools. As expected it’s a bigoted shitshow.

    The Department of Education’s own legal team says it’s unlikely to survive any legal challenge. And the fact that no LGBTQ+ organisations were consulted, but every bunch of passing bigots was, makes it clear what the agenda is here. If it weren’t clear enough, the introduction doesn’t even manage to make it into its third paragraph before using the Christian Right dogwhistle “gender identity ideology.”

    Smarter people than me will publish detailed analysis in the coming days and weeks, but the short version is that the guidance acts as if the Equality Act does not exist and often tells schools to act in ways that are against the law. As equality lawyer Robin Moira White put it, it is “a cruel attack on a vulnerable minority by a nasty government focused on running a culture war”.

    The guidance encourages teachers and other school officials to treat trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming children – who remain a tiny minority of pupils – illegally and unethically, which will make it harder for those children to live their lives. It’s a bullies’ charter, a bigots’ wish list, a hateful echo of Section 28.

  • As seen on TV

    The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, has produced a new report detailing the 60-plus organisations set up by the Christian Right to spread mis- and disinformation about LGBTQ+ people, and about trans people in particular. It’s a damning report, as you’d expect, and it also features a lot of organisations that will be very familiar if you read the newspapers, listen to the radio or watch TV in the UK: many of them were set up specifically to launder hateful bullshit through the mainstream media, a goal that mainstream media has been happy to help with.

    According to the SPLC, these organisations are:

    …dedicated to changing who LGBTQ+ people are and limiting LGBTQ+ rights by promoting conversion therapy, de-transitioning, bans on gender-affirming health care, bans on transgender people playing sports, censorship of LGBTQ+ topics in public schools, bans on public expression of LGBTQ+ culture like drag performances, and other politically motivated attempts to erase LGBTQ+ identities.

    …Anti-LGBTQ+ organizations use pseudoscience to attack not only affirming medical practices, but almost any social, religious, commercial or governmental affirmation of LGBTQ+ identity and LGBTQ+ representation in popular culture. With the help of right-wing and extremist social media personalities, anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience is sold as “proof” that a conspiracy of “leftists” is infiltrating schools with “Marxist gender ideology,” indoctrinating kids and even turning them transgender and that transgender identity is spread through “social contagion” when schools accept and affirm LGBTQ+ children.

  • “Irish dancing has fallen”

    Is there any sport that trans women won’t dominate with their superhuman strength, laser vision and ability to fly without wings? Apparently not: the latest news out of Bigot Central is that, and this is a direct quote, “Irish dancing has fallen”. Which is astonishing language considering the news item the post is sharing: in next year’s Irish Dancing World Championships in Glasgow, one of approximately 5,000 contestants will be a 13-year-old trans girl.

    “Fallen” is being used deliberately: it’s language usually used in war reporting to describe when a place is captured by the enemy, and it’s a favourite of the far- and religious right in their attempts to portray oppression as victimisation.

    This, like the attempts to remove trans women from snooker, darts and chess, is saying the quiet part out loud: the bans on trans people have never been about protecting women or protecting women’s sports from some supposed biological advantage. The motivation is identical to the moves to ban any books by or about trans people from schools and libraries: these people do not want trans people to exist in society in any way, shape or form.

  • Ignorance is strength

    The Tory government have confirmed that they intend to ban conversion therapy but not for trans people: according to equalities minister Kemi Badenoch, providing a safe space for kids to explore their feelings about gender rather than mentally torturing them is the real conversion therapy.

    It’s egregious bullshit, of course, but it’s entirely in keeping with Badenoch’s war on trans people, a war she and Liz Truss have been waging for several years now.

    The idea that gender-affirming care is really conversation therapy is a fiction concocted by the evangelicals and parroted widely by their useful idiots. Once again, our politicians are happily dancing to the evangelical right’s tune.

  • An admission

    It’s yet another week in the ongoing demonisation of trans women; former prime minister Liz Truss wants to introduce a member’s bill that would ban healthcare for trans teens and make it illegal for trans women to use women’s spaces, and a bunch of bigoted right-wing shits have made a film mocking trans women in sports. The coverage of both has been dreadful – for example most reports of Truss’s bill use the sense-free dog-whistle “biological males” instead of trans women, while the bigots’ film has been described as a comedy – and in the case of the movie, the coverage has missed a crucial point.

    According to risible bigot Ben Shapiro, the film was not originally intended as a scripted movie. It was supposed to be a documentary. His intention was to get men to join women’s sports teams by claiming they were women, but when the men tried to do that they were told (politely, I assume) to fuck off – because you can’t just join women’s sports teams by claiming to be a woman. As Shapiro has admitted, the men “weren’t willing to go the full distance in terms of, you know, the actual hormone treatments and everything to play in some of the ladies’ leagues.”

    Right-wing bigots in “making shit up to demonise minorities” shocker? This is my surprised face.

    As is so often the case, writer and academic Julia Serano has been talking about this for years: as she wrote in her book Whipping Girl, if changing gender were that simple, that easy, far more people would do it. Actors would do it for roles, criminals would do it to go undercover, reality show contestants would do it for fame, women would do it to escape the glass ceiling and other discrimination, struggling gay or lesbian people would do it for an easier life. And right-wing assholes would do it to get on women’s sports teams.

    The reason they don’t is because deep down, they understand that gender transition is not something anybody does lightly, that hormones have a profound effect on your brain and on your body. To be blunt, they weren’t willing to risk feeling for even a few weeks what many trans people have to feel for years or even decades.

  • Selling sadness

    I was thinking some more about yesterday’s idiotic Washington Post editorial that attempted to blame women for men’s loneliness. Posting on Bluesky, writer Ian Boudreau made an excellent point:

    If guys are suddenly very lonely it’s probably worth asking what they expected by following the advice of influencers who tell them to be maximally selfish, and who sneer at thoughtfulness, kindness, generosity, and genuine courtesy as weakness and wokeness.

    He’s right. What these influencers offer – and it’s not just men’s rights activists but also various other anti-woke grifters preying on the unhappy – is isolation, because that’s what their business depends on. The lonelier you are, the sadder you are, the more isolated you become, the more of a hold they can have on you. It’s cult programming for profit, and it’s doing enormous damage to so many people.

  • Wedding hell

    There’s an astonishing editorial in the Washington Post today about a looming marriage crisis – its framing, not mine – in which it highlights an apparent problem: increasing numbers of single women don’t want to marry whiny fascist man-babies who get their life advice from misogynists such as Andrew Tate. And rather than come to the obvious conclusion, which is that said men should stop being whiny fascist man-babies who get their life advice from misogynists such as Andrew Tate, the editorial says:

    This mismatch means that someone will need to compromise.

    That someone does not, you’ll be amazed to discover, mean the men.

    The article is quite rightly being destroyed in its own comments section, but it’s yet another sign of a problem that newspapers don’t like to cover: the homogeneity of newsrooms and their reliance on content written by external sources with agendas, in this case a blog by the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. It’s yet another attempt to paint right-wing men as victims of a censorious society rather than victims of their own bad behaviour and poor choices, incel rhetoric made palatable by the columnist class.