Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Health

Scare stories and newspaper nonsense

  • And now we wait

    My GP thinks it’s highly likely that I have ADHD, which I contracted by watching TikTok videos, having friends with blue hair and reading about Critical Race Theory. *sideways look*

    I’ll no doubt write more about it some other time, but the tl;dr version is that my winning personality may actually be a neurological condition. Fun times!

    I received confirmation of my referral today, along with a bunch of questionnaires and a letter explaining that the current waiting time for any assessment is “approximately 80+ weeks”.

    I know what you’re thinking. 80+ weeks? For an initial assessment?

    Me, I’m probably not thinking what you’re thinking, because I have experience of trans healthcare. I’m thinking:

    Woah! Slow down there, Speedy Gonzales! Round here we measure wait times in years!

  • The wedge

    It’s been obvious for many years that if you vote for an anti-trans politician you get an anti-abortion politician; the whole trans panic has been manufactured by an unholy alliance of political and religious conservatives who believe that they, not you, should decide what you can do with your body. But even by their low standards they’re not usually as blatant as the Republicans in Nebraska.

    As the Washington Post reports, Ben Hansen filed amendments to the anti-trans bill 574, already a dangerous and hateful piece of legislation designed to remove trans people’s healthcare, that would ban abortions after 12 weeks – effectively a ban on all abortions. Senator Merv Riepe blocked the amendments, for now at least. But the amendments, and the furious reaction to Rip’s blocking of them, should remove any doubt that the war on trans people’s bodily autonomy is part of a wider war against everybody’s bodily autonomy, or that the “gender critical” movement is at best a useful tool for the evangelical right.

  • If you believe nothing, you’ll believe anything

    This, from Vice, is very good: America’s Most Influential Conspiracy Theorists Are Going All-In On Transphobia. It’s about how people with various agendas, from Qanon conspiracists to self-promoters, are finding transphobia the perfect vehicle for making the world demonstrably worse. And this is not a US-only phenomenon.

    The fact that these once-fringe subcultures and the so-called mainstream have merged to such an extent means that when they all focus their attention on something, the effect is especially devastating. And right now, that shared focus is an all-pervading panic and hostility about drag queens, “groomers,” transgender identity as being somehow “contagious,” the supposed sexualization of children by LGBT people, and the false claim that gender-affirming care is a form of abuse or mutilation. 

    …The relationship between the anti-vaccine and anti-trans movements makes logical sense, in that they both farm a specific suspicion of science and mainstream medicine. More subtly, both the anti-vaccine and anti-trans worlds also try to weaponize regret, sowing fear that a medical choice might go irreparably wrong.

    …This sort of explicit instrumentalization of conspiratorial ideas is the direction, it would seem, in which things are heading. Demonizing trans people is proving popular because it has political and social utility for so many different people, from Substack to the hall of Congress, from increasingly popular podcasts and the guests they can’t seem to give enough time to to parents confused, as parents always are, by the way the world has changed since they were young.

  • Another smoking gun

    This, by Jude Doyle, is horrifying: more email evidence of how the Christian Right is pulling the strings of the anti-trans movement, this time in pushing the narrative of “detrans” people or “detransitioners”, people who undergo (or sometimes just propose to undergo) transition and then change their minds. The piece describes a huge and highly effective media machine that takes care of every detail, right down to writing the words it wants detransitioners to mime.

    At the beginning of her gender-critical career, Shupe’s public voice was more or less her own; that is, she actually gave the interviews and wrote the blog posts that appeared under her name. As Shupe entered the world of the Christian right, however, her voice was increasingly retooled or outright manufactured by her handlers.

    Sullivan quickly took over Shupe’s public image, instructing her to refer all requests for interviews or public appearances to him. In an email chain dated April 2019, he told her not to talk to a Washington Post reporter he deemed trans-friendly, and directed her to what he called “good Catholic media sources.” In another April 2019 email, Sullivan provided Shupe with what he called an “outline” for an op-ed, along with instructions for pitching: “You should shop it to the main liberal papers offering it to each one for 24 hours before offering it to a new one. After about four or five, you could then offer it to some more ‘conservative’ papers until you get one to bite.” The “outline” provided by Sullivan was a full essay of 1,609 words. One sentence was typed in red, indicating that Shupe should fill in the details herself. 

    This is clearly happening in the UK too.

    If you’re a reader of the (Glasgow) Herald, this bit might jump out at you:

    “ADF has some excellent writers familiar with the length and style that appeals to op-ed page editors, who could take even a very rough sketch or outline of thoughts from you—or just talk with you—and then create a draft that I think you will be very happy with.” 

    The ADF’s Lois McLatchie has popped up in The Herald’s pages several times recently as a columnist, and her columns are very good at what they do; unfortunately what they do is attempt to excuse the inexcusable and wage war on human rights. That The Herald publishes them without context is an indication not just of how effective the ADF’s machine is, but also how debased our journalistic institutions have become.

    The piece makes it clear, yet again, that none of this is about “protecting children” or “protecting women”. It’s a religious war.

    “I was gradually waking up to the fact that, you know, I was just a useful idiot, are the two words I would use,” Shupe tells me. “I got the vibe that they wanted me to help them, they wanted me to use them, but they wouldn’t trust somebody like me around their kids.” 

  • We don’t want to die

    I’m aware that I’ve written a few posts recently about the deaths of young trans women, largely from suicide. Let’s look into that a little bit.

    There’s a famous statistic that says 41% of trans people have attempted suicide at some point in their life. It’s from a US study of trans people, and the number is often used online by anti-trans bigots urging us to “join the 41%”. There’s quite a lot of literature on this subject now, and if you do a literature review you’ll find that the numbers are pretty consistent: globally, 32% to 50% of trans people say they’ve attempted suicide at least once. The number of people with ideation, which is when you make plans but don’t go through with them, is higher still.

    That’s much, much higher than in the wider population. Sticking with the US, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that 4.3% of Americans said they had had suicidal thoughts in the previous year.

    So. For the population as a whole, suicidal ideation affects 4.3%. For the trans population, more than 41%.

    What’s the difference? Here’s a clue. In the latest study of trans and non-binary youth in the US, the study found that people who underwent affirming healthcare – such as hormone therapy – had a lower rate of suicidal ideation than the wider population: just 3.5%.

    What’s the difference between 3.5% and 41%? Support. Many older trans people have encountered all kinds of issues around being trans: staying in the closet for years, difficulties in obtaining healthcare, societal disapproval, familial ostracism, loneliness, discrimination, hate speech, sexual assault… you know the kind of thing.

    But when trans people are supported, given the healthcare they need and the support they deserve, they get happier.

    From the study:

    During the study period, appearance congruence, positive affect, and life satisfaction increased, and depression and anxiety symptoms decreased. Increases in appearance congruence were associated with concurrent increases in positive affect and life satisfaction and decreases in depression and anxiety symptoms.

    Healthcare in “making people better” shocker.

    The problem isn’t who we are. It’s how so many of us are treated because of who we are. That isn’t an us problem. That’s a you problem (or if you’re one of the good people, a them problem). Trying to “eliminate transgenderism”, or just turning a blind eye to the destruction of our rights and healthcare by those who want to, has a body count.

  • A scandal at Sandyford

    The Sandyford clinic is where Glasgow’s gender clinic is based, alongside various sexual health and victim counselling services. I’ve been attending it since 2017, and I’ve been meaning to write a proper piece about it for some time: visiting in person, even before COVID, was like playing the abandoned-hospital level of a horror video game. Empty corridor after empty corridor, your footsteps echoing, sitting alone in a large waiting room wondering if the next person you see will be a psychiatrist or a serial killer.

    There were protests outside it yesterday by the loons and cowards of the Scottish Family Party, who said they were coming at 11am to brick up the entrance to protest its role in women’s reproductive freedom. In the end they arrived at 8am with cardboard boxes printed with bricks, took their photo and then hid at the Mitchell Library until the colourful and camp counter-protest – which attracted more than 100 people – was over, returning afterwards to take another photo at the wrong building.

    The moon howlers of the SFP weren’t there to protest its trans services, although I’m sure that was a bonus. But the Sandyford Clinic has been the subject of ridiculous scaremongering for years now, with anti-trans bigots and cynical Conservatives claiming yet again that the clinic is “experimenting on children” and fast-tracking them into surgery. The fact that children don’t get gender-affirming surgery and nobody is experimenting on anybody is an inconvenient truth they prefer not to address.

    This morning, The National newspaper printed a story about a scandal at the Sandyford. But it’s not the invented one of the bigots. It’s the real one anyone attending can tell you about.

    Just two psychiatrists, each working one day a week, cover adult services for the whole west of Scotland. The young person’s team is soon to consist of a single person, who will work half the week and cover all of the country

    I know both psychiatrists, and they appear to be good people. But they’re not magic people. They’re massively overworked in a department that’s desperately underfunded and understaffed. One position has been advertised for years now and nobody has applied, because who’d want to work in an environment like that?

    “There’s this massive waiting list and there’s going to be loads of scrutiny on you and people are going to be actively campaigning for your service to close down and there’s 1000 newspaper articles written about your client br every week. When you put it like that, nobody is going to want to do it.”

    When I self-referred to the Sandyford in 2016, it took 11 months before I was offered an initial assessment visit. Officially the adult waiting list is nearly five years long now. Anecdotally I’m hearing it’s even longer than that. And the lack of staff means the healthcare you do get is inadequate. Last May a really important appointment was made for me; nobody informed me about it and I didn’t discover it had been made until November. The earliest next appointment was in February.

    If this were any other branch of healthcare, the coverage would be deafening. But I think it’s a safe bet that the genuine scandal at the Sandyford, one that’s affecting the healthcare of a small but significant group of people, will get less coverage than any scaremongering. And that too should be a national scandal.

  • Say their names

    While the press continue to pretend that people who aren’t trans are being rushed into irreversible medical treatment, trans people continue to die from inadequate healthcare and disgracefully long waiting lists.

    The coroner’s report into the suicide of 21-year-old Northern Irish trans woman Sophie Williams, a report released this week, found that multiple failings by the NHS contributed to her death. This is from her family’s solicitor:

    “Two days before her death Sophie was informed by the Tavistock GIC that the four years that she had spent waiting for a first appointment at Belfast’s equivalent GIC service would not be recognised by the Tavistock, news that was devastating to Sophie. Sophie died on 20 May 2021 having taken an overdose of prescription medication.”

    This week would have been the 21st birthday of another young British trans woman, Alice Litman. She too took her own life after languishing for years on a waiting list. According to The Good Law Project:

    “Alice’s family believes her death was partly a result of not getting the care she needed, because she was transgender… at the time of her death, Alice had been on an NHS waitlist for nearly 3 years. Alice’s family feel that this long wait may have been too much for her to bear.”

    If Alice and Sophie weren’t trans, their deaths would be national scandals – as would the murder of 16-year-old Brianna Ghey just weeks ago. But it’s very clear that to much of our media and many politicians, trans lives simply don’t matter.

  • “The sign of a severely broken system”

    Longreads has an excellent article by Mailee Osten-Tan about the people who travel to Thailand for gender confirmation surgery. It’s great journalism, based on extensive research and interviewing (there’s a behind-the-story piece detailing it all here) and the story Osten-Tan tells is interesting, insightful and empathetic.

    Thailand is famous in trans circles, and the more broken the NHS’s trans healthcare becomes the more people will save or borrow the money to go there. The NHS was already woefully underfunded before COVID; now the waiting lists, already horrific, are many months and years longer.

    “The effect of the pandemic has been to exacerbate a problem which already existed,” said James Bellringer, an NHS and private GCS surgeon in the U.K. for over two decades, in an email. But even apart from the pandemic, he wrote, the U.K. lacks trained staff to meet the demand for surgeries. “It’s not just surgeons but the gender specialists working in the clinics. Gender has been chronically underfunded everywhere (not just the U.K.) for years, and the elastic has finally snapped.”

    One of the saddest parts of the article for me was this bit.

    For those who want but cannot afford surgery, the longer they are made to wait, the greater their chance of developing serious mental health ramifications. These often relate to the chronic high levels of stress experienced by trans people over the course of their lives — also known as minority stress — brought on by factors such as poor social support, discrimination, rejection, abuse, and/or violence.The majority of trans women I interviewed… wanted to remain anonymous out of fear of being doxxed, harassed, or targeted by hate speech.

    At the risk of sounding like a broken record here, these are the “transgender issues” we should be talking about. But trans people rarely get to speak: the only people speaking in the trans “debate” are the intolerant, the ill-informed and the ill-intentioned.

  • Not Safe To Be Me

    Did you hear about Safe To Be Me? If you’re not on LGBT+ social media, probably not. It was the Conservative government’s sole manifesto commitment to the LGBT+ community, the establishment of an international conference to promote LGBT+ rights.

    The problem with that is that right now, one of the worst offenders against LGBT+ rights in Europe is the Conservative government. The UK is no longer topping lists of the best countries for LGBT+ people to live; it’s more likely to be listed alongside Hungary, Russia and Poland as a place where LGBT+ people are the victims of demonisation in the name of right-wing populism.

    The final straw for the UK’s LGBT+ community was the government’s plan to abandon its commitment to banning dangerous and discredited conversion therapy.

    Conversion therapy is a misnomer. There’s nothing therapeutic about it: it’s a form of torture, physical or mental, designed to try and change someone’s innate sexuality or gender identity. We’ve known since the late 1960s that it doesn’t work and does lasting damage to its victims, and most civilised countries either have or are going to ban it. Such a ban doesn’t affect actual therapy, or informal forms of therapy such as exploring your feelings with a counsellor or religious figure. It just bans torture.

    A ban on CT was an easy PR win for the Tories, so long cast as the “nasty party” with regards to the LGBT+ community. But with one eye on the upcoming local elections, the Tories have clearly decided to follow the US Republican example and use culture war tactics to distract from their many failures: that whole “let the bodies pile high” thing, the corruption, the fact that Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis has gone from recommending energy deals to advising pensioners on how not to die from the cold this year.

    So the UK Government decided to kill the ban as a signal to the right-wing anti-LGBT+ mob. This was from the very top; the equalities minister wasn’t informed. After the inevitable and very vocal backlash, a backlash the government didn’t expect, it announced a partial U-turn:  it would ban conversion therapy, but only for gay and lesbian people. It would still be okay to torture trans people.

    The government clearly hoped that the LGBT+ community would accept the partial win and continue with its support for Safe To Be Me later this year. The government was wrong. The entire UK LGBT+ sector – more than 120 LGBT+ organisations – and all the major sponsors of the conference pulled their support in protest.

    It’s not just the LGBT+ organisations who want conversion therapy banned. The British Psychological society wants it banned. The Royal College of Psychiatrists too. The British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy. The British Medical Association. The mental health charity Mind. And many more. All these organisations want to see conversion therapy banned not just for gay and lesbian people, but for trans people too.

    Because torture is torture no matter who you do it to.

    Their message was simple and should be uncontroversial: trans people have human rights too. Article 3 of the Human Rights Convention (ECHR) declares that nobody shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment. There’s no caveat saying “unless they’re trans”. Conversion therapy is clearly in breach of Article 3, which is why the government was going to ban it.

    Instead, it messed up and mobilised the entire LGBT+ community. I can’t stress this enough: every single LGBT+ charity and advocacy group stands with trans people here. The only exception is the LGB Alliance, which of course is not a genuine LGBT+ organisation. That made Safe To Be Me untenable and potentially disastrous for the UK government; yesterday, they cancelled it.

    For years the right wing press, and shamefully some of the left-wing press too, has peddled the myth that the LGBT+ community is divided over trans rights. There are outliers, as there are in any group of people: there were gay men opposed to equal marriage, for example. But the supposed widespread division is not there. To say otherwise is to perpetuate right-wing culture war bullshit.

    But again, we’re getting false both-sidesism here. One one side we have decades of evidence, the testimony of victims, and the entire medical and psychological establishment. On the other, a handful of screeching bigots. These things are not equal, and shouldn’t be given equal airtime or column inches.

  • Everything is awful

    Trans Actual has published the results of its 2021 Trans Lives survey, in which around 700 UK trans adults shared their experiences. The results aren’t surprising but they are saddening.

    • 27% of trans people have been homelessness at some point in their lives. That rises to 36% for both trans BPOC and trans disabled people;

    • A staggering 98% of trans people responding do not think that NHS transition related care is completely adequate

    There are significant issues with primary care, too:

      • 45% of trans respondents said that their GP did not have a good understanding of their needs as a trans person, with 55% of non-binary people reporting similar issues.

      • 87% of those answering, overall said that this had impacted them to some extent. This rises, again, to 95% and 92% for BPOC and disabled individuals;

      • Issues with healthcare providers may also have serious consequences, in a time when illnesses such as COVID-19 illustrate graphically how individual decisions, when faced with a highly transmissible virus, can affect the rest of the population, as 57% of trans people reported that they avoided going to the GP when unwell – again, because of lack of understanding and more general discrimination;

      • Even more concerning, 14% of respondents (one in 7) reported that their GP had  refused to provide care or treatment on account of their trans status at least once.

    As Jane Fae, journalist and TransActual director, rightly says:

    The real scandal here is how comprehensively the media have conspired to ignore this situation, preferring, instead, to produce tens of thousands of words on the largely imagined consequences of reform to the Gender Recognition Act.