Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • Come out before you kiss

    There’s a good piece by Sasha Baker about how the UK has enshrined “trans panic” in law.

    Trans panic is a variation of the gay panic defence, which is a tactic used in murder and assault cases to blame the victim rather than the attacker. In the UK it’s sometimes known as the Portsmouth Defence. It argues that if a straight person experiences sexual advances from someone who is gay, or has sexual activity with someone they then discover is trans, any ordinary person would be so horrified, outraged and disgusted that they would lose control and beat, stab or shoot the gay or trans person. It’s been abolished as a legitimate defence tactic in courts in many countries, but in the UK it’s been enshrined in law.

    Baker:

    Watkin’s case is not – as it may first appear – an aberration. It is part of a long history where Trans+ people’s right to privacy has been trampled on to flatter cis people’s self-perception.

    The complainant’s assertion that he does not “swing that way” as he said in court, is one of the starkest examples of the legal system being wielded against a trans person to guard cis straight people’s sexualities. 

    …All we can really conclude from the available data is that if someone stabs you, the CPS is unlikely to prosecute you for being trans – but if you lie about your gender history to a sexual partner, even to protect your privacy, you could be facing jail.

  • The “social media addiction” verdicts are not good

    Two things can be true at the same time. Meta (and other platform providers such as X) is a wicked and dangerous organisation that does wicked and dangerous things. And Meta losing in court over supposed “social media addiction” is bad because it will have chilling effects.

    Writing in the New Statesman, Séamas O’Reilly explains the incoherence of claiming that because adults are using social media to do bad things, we must ban children from social media.

    How, precisely, are age limits meant to stop adults from sending pictures of children, without their consent, to other adults? Here in the UK, we may see an echo of this incoherence in technology secretary Peter Kyle claiming that adults using age verification are keeping children safe. To which the only reasonable response is: how, exactly? The ongoing rush to ban social media for kids following the murder of Brianna Ghey – a teen who found her community online, before being killed, in real life, at the hands of transphobic bullies – leaves out how such a ban would stop this happening to another trans teen. The only plausible link, that consistent use of social media makes one transphobic and thus a danger to trans kids, seems unlikely to be what they mean, since this would require a social media ban for 80 per cent of this country’s broadsheet journalists and the entirety of the government’s front bench.
    It’s worth noting here that one of the people pushing for more regulation of kids’ internet use is Brianna Ghey’s mother, who has been recruited as a useful idiot by the pro-censorship lobby and as a human shield by incredibly transphobic politicians who’d like to see more trans kids’ lives ruined. Rather than campaign against the bigotry that played a part in her child’s death, it seems that Brianna’s mother is campaigning to deprive other trans kids of the online community and support that helps them stay alive.
    The vast, vast majority of those negatively affected by this precedent will be smaller platforms and websites currently publishing the kinds of content already being targeted by far right movements: pro-LGBT content, especially that related to trans rights, websites related to anti-racism, feminism or political progressivism, and material related to, or documenting, what’s happening in Gaza. We know this because those celebrating this precedent are the very same groups who have lobbied, with less success, to ban exactly this material through other means. 

    Mike Maznick of Techdirt (who is also an investor in the Bluesky social media network) has been covering internet regulation since the very early days, and he explains why Meta losing in court isn’t cause for celebration.

    if you care about free speech online, about small platforms, about privacy, about the ability for anyone other than a handful of tech giants to operate a website where users can post things — these two verdicts should scare the hell out of you. Because the legal theories that were used to nail Meta this week don’t stay neatly confined to companies you don’t like. They will be weaponized against everyone.

  • And now, the switch

    Two of the highest-profile anti-trans extremists in the UK have done what we always knew they would do: they’re standing alongside the religious right to restrict women’s reproductive freedom.

    The Times reports that Sharron Davies and the former EHRC chair Kishwer Falkner are demanding a ban on “pills by post” as part of a wider push to restrict women’s reproductive rights. Other proposed amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill include a mandatory police investigation into any girl under 16 who accesses a legal abortion and the creation of the first new abortion offence in 100 years.

    Davies has previously spread anti-abortion misinformation, claiming that in the UK we have “made it legal for healthy babies to be terminated up to the day before they’re due.” Since 1967 the limit in the UK has been 24 weeks unless there are serious fetal issues or risks to the mother.

    Not all anti-trans activists are focusing on removing women’s reproductive freedom, however. Some of them are going after immigration instead. Again, just like we knew they would.

  • Yet another medical fraud

    NHS England has banned the prescription of hormones to 16 and 17 year olds, formalising a policy that already existed in practice, and as with the Cass Review they’ve committed medical fraud to justify a ban based on ideology rather than evidence. The review of evidence they undertook excluded almost 97% of studies from inclusion, because those studies demonstrated that hormone treatment is effective, necessary and sometimes life-saving care for trans people. The review then claimed that there wasn’t sufficient evidence that HRT was effective.

    Former Conservative equalities minister Kemi Badenoch has made it very clear that people were put in important positions to target trans people’s rights and healthcare: “gender-critical men and women in the UK government, holding the positions that mattered most in Equalities and Health.” The Labour government could and should have reversed this, but have chosen to double down on harming trans and non-binary people instead.

    Since the puberty blocker ban was introduced, at least 46 trans and non-binary children have taken their own lives.

    They will come for adult healthcare next.

  • A tax on women’s sports

    British athletes have been told they’ll have to pay £185 out of their own pockets for compulsory sex testing if they want to compete internationally, but only if they’re women: men don’t have to do the tests. The goal is to ensure that trans women and women with DSDs (disorders of sexual development, such as being intersex) aren’t allowed to compete.

    Blanket sex testing like this was scrapped in the 1990s because it was discriminatory, unscientific, humiliating, unethical and racist, but the bigots have brought it back and to add insult to injury they’re making women pay for it. This, apparently, is feminism.

  • “This is how the line gets crossed”

    There’s a piece in Politico urging the media to stop normalising the far right.

    The BBC’s reporting style, for example, is all too often shaped by internal guidelines and a collapsing vision of performative neutrality. This was clearly demonstrated in coverage of the death of 23-year-old Quentin Deranque in France two weeks ago, with a report that described Deranque as a “far-right feminist” — a phrase that invents a political category no serious politics course anywhere in the world would recognize. Far-right politics and feminism come from fundamentally different traditions and pursue fundamentally different aims.

    The testing ground for this was the anti-gender movement, which is an anti-feminist movement against women’s reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy that came from the Catholic church. It may use the language of feminism to attack LGBTQ+ people (trans women first, but the entire rainbow is in its sights), but it’s not about protecting women’s rights; it’s about women as property. And yet the media has mainstreamed it as feminism. This is how the far right gets in.

    Politico:

    Every uncritical mention of far-right rhetoric is an editorial decision with political consequences. Every headline, every clip, every click adds weight. This is how the line gets crossed. And how some media are no longer just covering the far right but helping it speak.

  • The trouble with Twitter

    A new paper in Nature (PDF document here) confirms what many of us already knew: it acts as a radicalisation engine, shifting people’s political views permanently to the right.

    By using an algorithmic feed – where X decides what you see rather than the chronological feed of Bluesky – and comparing it to people using a chronological feed for 7 weeks, the study found that the former “increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine.”

    We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects.

    This cesspool is where the UK’s entire political and media class spend their time.

  • The outrage factory

    Jessica Kant’s analysis of the anti-trans outrage factory is well worth your time.

    …any attempt at accuracy or veracity has gone completely out the window, with a chillingly familiar trend towards the bombastic that has led to pogroms at other times in history… why do conservatives believe that we’re everywhere, hiding in the bushes? Because powerful people won’t stop claiming it’s true, even if evidence to the contrary is everywhere.

  • The nasty party wears a red rosette now

    Dr Ruth Pearce has written a very good overview of Labour’s new Section 28, proposals that “seek to erase trans children: through extreme restrictions on social transition, toilet and sports bans, and censorship of the word “trans” itself. Like Section 28, they will most likely also create a wider chilling effect, reducing support for lesbian, gay, bi, and gender-nonconforming young people as well.”

  • “Shroud wavers”

    Hilary Cass, author of the disgraceful and damaging Cass Review into trans teens’ healthcare, told The Times in 2024 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 was “irresponsible for people to shroud-wave in that way.”

    Thanks to a freedom of information request we know that removing gender-affirming care from trans teens in 2021, which NHS England did in the aftermath of the (very dodgy and later overturned) Keira Bell case, led to a surge in teen suicides.

    5 trans children killed themselves in England in 2019/20; 4 trans children killed themselves in 2020/21; and in 2021/22, when gender-affirming care was first shut down, 22 trans children killed themselves.

    Correlation does not necessarily imply causation, of course, and people kill themselves for all kinds of reasons. Maybe it was the healthcare. Maybe they were bullied. Maybe their families treated them terribly. Maybe it was some or all of those things combined in a climate that’s increasingly hateful towards trans people. But there is plenty of evidence that the anti-trans panic kills children and will continue to do so. The self-appointed “protectors of children” have blood on their hands.