Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • Hearsay

    The BBC has been captured by the sinister trans lobby, a new report being pushed by the right-wing press claims. The report, by Michael Prescott, provides no convincing evidence of that – because of course it isn’t true. The BBC is one of the main vectors of anti-trans propaganda, taking its cue (and many of its contributors) from the right-wing press. And it’s been doing it for years, laundering the bigotry of genital-obsessed weirdos as “reasonable concerns”, publishing and then defending groundless stories such as claims by sexual predators and anti-trans activists that trans women are rapists, and adopting the language and dog-whistles of the genital-obsessed weirdo brigade, such as “biological women” and “sex-based rights”. The brief window when trans people could get a fair hearing or accurate, informed coverage from the BBC closed a long time ago.

    Prescott’s view of trans people and the wider LGBTQ+ community is clear from his report: he reports as fact unsubstantiated and frankly ridiculous claims that there’s a rogue unit of LGBTQ+ people censoring the BBC’s news output; a feature about a trans wrestler is described as “gushing”; he claims there are too many stories featuring drag queens; and he is irate that the BBC dared to include a trans woman in a discussion about the Cass Review. He says that “too many of its staff have never considered the idea of “gender identity” to be either spurious or offensive to many people.” Those “many people”, of course, are the genital-obsessed weirdos.

    It’s not a report, it’s a whinge by someone who believes the BBC simply isn’t vicious enough towards marginalised people. And it’s being used as part of a culture war campaign to push the BBC even further to the right.

  • Years and years

    Various newspapers report that Glasgow councillor Chris Cunningham has disputed the terrifying 200-years-plus predicted waiting times for Glasgow’s Sandyford clinic, claiming that the waiting time is six to seven years. And that means he’s either ignorant or deliberately misleading people, and so are the newspapers – because the evidence shows that if you’re referred to Sandyford today and the clinic’s desperate, years-long understaffing isn’t addressed, you’ll wait your whole life for an appointment that will never happen.

    Cunningham is quoting the text published on the Sandyford’s website, which says:

    We are currently allocating appointments to those referred during the following periods:
    Adult Gender Service Waiting list: November 2018
    Young Person Gender Service Waiting list: November 2019

    But the report that he’s disputing isn’t about the wait time for people who joined the waiting list six or seven years ago, some of whom – but not all of whom – are finally getting first appointments. It’s about the wait time for the people being added to the waiting list today.

    Thanks to freedom of information requests we know that the Sandyford clinic is barely seeing anybody. It saw fewer than 24 new patients in a year while over 500 new patients were added to a waiting list that now exceeds 4,000 people.

    What happens to waiting lists when more people are added than you’re seeing? They get longer.

    The core problem here, as with other gender clinics, is desperate understaffing, and that’s something we’ve known about since at least 2016: as The Guardian reported over nine years ago, gender clinics were already struggling to provide healthcare for what everybody knew was only a tiny but fast-growing proportion of the trans population because of a lack of capacity, and of suitably trained and qualified staff.

    The charity GIRES said at the time that the most conservative estimate of the trans population would mean around 130,000 people seeking medical assistance from a system already struggling to cater for just 15,000 people; the actual numbers could be much higher, with figures from other countries indicating that roughly 1% of people are trans.

    We could have fixed the roof when the sun was shining, but of course we didn’t. So what everybody said was going to happen happened.

    I referred myself to Sandyford in 2016 and had my first appointment in 2017, a wait of eleven months.

    Had I referred two years later, in 2018, the waiting time had grown from 11 months to seven years – so if I were one of the lucky few, I’d be getting a first appointment round about now.

    And if you’re being referred to the same service today?

    The 2016 Guardian report cites concerns that some trans people might have to wait 4 years for a first appointment. Today, the average UK wait time based on current clearance rates is 25 years. If you’re referred to Sandyford today and nothing changes, you can expect a first appointment in 224 years.

    The NHS waiting list target from referral to first appointment is 18 weeks.

    We know the solution to this, because it’s in effect in many other countries: basic healthcare like HRT is prescribed and monitored by ordinary GPs through an informed consent model, not through the bottleneck of overloaded and understaffed clinics. GPs have capacity issues too, I know, but not remotely on the same scale as the gender clinics.

    The only difference between the prescription and monitoring of my HRT and that of any other women is that my GP refuses to do it.

  • Fill the page with rage

    I came out as trans nine years ago this week, and I think it’s interesting to look at the transition – not mine, but the transition in the Scots press’s reporting on LGBTQ+ issues and trans people during that time.

    Here’s a fairly typical piece from The Herald in the summer of 2016, which covers “culture war” issues but makes it very clear that the anti-LGBTQ+ voices are an unrepresentative minority; it gives more space to the people trying to make the world better than to the ones determined to make it worse.

    Today, The Herald (and The Scotsman, and most of the wider media) is editorially anti-LGBTQ+, its columnists rabid and its online comments cesspools.

    What’s changed? I’d argue that a big part of it is because the ad money and profit that used to keep newspapers publishing now goes almost entirely to Google and to Facebook’s parent, Meta. Online ad revenues are in freefall, with more and more outlets competing for less and less money. And many newspapers are now owned by companies that care little for journalism, companies that consolidate and cut until all that remains of once-great publications is their masthead.

    That has left newspapers, already experiencing plummeting circulations as print media dies, desperately trying to attract online page views by any means necessary.

    The Herald doesn’t publish ABC circulation numbers any more, but in 2023 its circulation was just 12,928 – down from 28,900 in 2016. The Scotsman is similarly reticent, but in 2022 its average circulation was under 9,000 people – only half of which were over-the-counter sales; many copies are given away for free in hotels and airports.

    Many newspapers have pivoted to a digital-first strategy based on turning journalists into “content providers” and “more closely mirroring social media” (in the words of the chairman of The Scotsman’s parent company) rather than traditional journalism.

    This is something I wrote about in Small Town Joy in the context of local papers not covering local music any more (with some exceptions): local newspapers in Scotland will barely or rarely cover local artists but will publish online articles about US pop star Taylor Swift in the hope of attracting rogue Google traffic.

    There was a particularly ghoulish example of that this week when the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald, a very small circulation newspaper only covering the north west coast of Ayrshire in Scotland, was publishing agency stories online about the terrifying hurricane in the Caribbean, which is quite some distance away from readers in Kilbirnie.

    As the gutter press has long demonstrated, one of the most reliable ways to make money from journalism is to make people angry and confirm people’s prejudices. That’s particularly true online. A nice article won’t have people battling in the comments section all day long and won’t be shared in furious Facebook posts or excerpts on X, but one demonising asylum seekers or trans people or the “woke” will. The newspapers know this, which is why they have embraced a business model I call The Three Cs: clicks and comments from… you can guess the third c-word.

    It’s an evolution of the old mantra, “if it bleeds it leads”: fill the page with rage.

    This is doing terrible damage.

    Those papers may not be bought by many people, but they are read religiously by the researchers and producers at the BBC, who scan them for stories to fuel that day’s phone-ins and magazine shows and who have their writers in the “usual suspect” database of rent-a-gobs (a database I was also on for over two decades: once you’re on it your phone rings regularly). And they are read religiously by politicians, and by the people who want to influence those politicians, and shared by the people on social media who want to make you furious and hateful. So they’re a central part of the outrage industry that gives disproportionate attention to some of the very worst people and helps push their agendas.

    The outrage industry is most damaging to the people being demonised, of course. But it also damages wider society.

    We are becoming an angrier, less tolerant, more selfish country. And our newspapers and broadcasters are playing a huge part in driving that change.

    If you want to worry about transitions, worry about that one.

  • Ammunition for your enemies

    Today’s “completely manufactured anti-trans bullshit” takes us to Dundee, where an anti-trans activist has taken great exception to a Hobbycraft shop assistant’s “no TERFs, no Tories” badge to create predictable media outrage. It’s yet another example of DARVO – the abuser’s creed of “deny, attack, reverse victim and offender”, where members of a movement that demands the oppression and elimination of others claim victimhood – and the fact it’s so predictable is why I’m more annoyed at the badge wearer than the bigot.

    The last thing you should be doing when you’re under attack is give ammunition to the people attacking you.

    I don’t think people shouldn’t wear political badges. My everyday bag and most of my guitar straps are covered in them. But what’s absolutely fine when you’re on a stage, off duty, or if you run your own business – your bar, your bookshop, your coffee shop – becomes something different if you’re an employee of someone else’s business. Especially a larger business with a fairly high profile and no doubt a detailed uniform policy. I can’t think of any retailer with a uniform policy that allows staff to wear badges telling specific kinds of customers to fuck off.

    There’s hypocrisy here, of course. There always is with the genital-obsessed weirdo brigade, who like their Christian Right pals want the freedom to abuse others in public and in the workplace without consequences. But it doesn’t matter, because this is not about anything other than the genital-obsessed weirdos looking for easy PR wins. And that’s exactly what they’ve been given here.

    This is going to play out like every other such case. We’ll get crybully op-eds slagging off Hobbycraft for being “woke”; we’ll get Hobbycraft issuing a grovelling apology; we’ll have more articles implying that trans people shouldn’t be hired by anyone; we’ll have increasingly emboldened genital-obsessed weirdos going to various customer-facing businesses looking for trans people to abuse. So things for trans people become just that little bit worse than they already were.

  • Different people, same panic

    A good piece in Salon noting the parallels between the “Satanic panic” of the 80s and the trans panic today:

    The trans panic currently gripping the Christian right is an extension of the Satanic panic that took hold in the 1980s — a worldview that owes little to reality or to the teachings of Jesus. Instead, it’s rooted in the visual and emotional language of horror films, especially the more reactionary tales of demonic possession, such as “The Exorcist” and “The Conjuring.” These followers unabashedly argue that “transgenderism” is a tool of Satan and that acceptance of gender non-conforming people is a form of demonic possession.

  • “Abject terror”

    A new YouGov survey reports that 84% of trans people in the UK feel unsafe. I’m surprised the figure is so low.

    24% of respondents said they’d experienced physical abuse in public; 65% have experienced verbal abuse in public.

    Here’s just one example from this weekend in Glasgow: friends of my eldest, teenagers, having a smoke outside a small rock gig were subjected to transphobic abuse by a man much older than them; when they told him where to go, he pulled out a large-bladed knife and threatened to kill them. Older gig-goers were alerted and chased him off.

    The teenagers have been sharing photos of the man and his knife on social media to try and identify him, because they don’t believe the police will expend any effort in trying to find him. I suspect that they’re right, and that even if they do identify him he probably won’t be charged, let alone face any consequences.

    The survey found that just 25% of trans people trust the police.

  • Crying out, not crying wolf

    UK newspapers are sounding the alarm: a US-based evangelical lobby group with deep pockets is trying to influence UK politics and take away marginalised people’s human rights. The group is the Alliance Defending Freedom; the marginalised group are women. The ADF wants to see the UK ban abortion, even though the UK is overwhelmingly against such a ban.

    The same UK newspapers have spent the last seven or eight years helping the same organisation influence UK politics and take away marginalised people’s human rights, even though the UK was overwhelmingly against those rights being removed. But those people were trans people, so the papers joined the war on the side of the bad guys.

    And when we repeatedly tried to warn that we were the thin end of a wedge strategy – a strategy openly published online detailing how the wedge would work – we were called hysterical, ignored, and demonised.

    Here’s me, posting in 2020.

    There is a co-ordinated attempt by the Christian Right to use trans people as a wedge issue for a wider attack on LGBT+ rights and on women’s reproductive freedom… the religious right is behind pretty much every anti-trans legal case and is funding a great deal of the supposed grass-roots anti-trans groups. And since this verdict [the Keira Bell puberty blocker case] they have been talking openly about using this case as a springboard to attack abortion and contraception, which was the game plan all along.

    Trans people have been raising the alarm for years.

    Very little of this is happening in secret, and yet the entire UK press and broadcast media chooses not to investigate or report on it. Instead, they are complicit. Shame on them.

  • Butterflies are not caterpillars

    One of the little joys of technology is that whenever I need to re-order my prescriptions, I can use the Patient Access app. It lists all my prescriptions and I simply tap the ones I need, and a few days later the pharmacy texts me to let me know they’re ready.

    If I weren’t trans, I’d be able to use the same app to renew my seven-years-running prescription for HRT patches. But I can’t, because my GP refuses to prescribe trans women’s healthcare. Signing off on the same patches, and the same strength of patches, that my GP routinely prescribes and monitors for women who are not trans is suddenly too complicated and risky and beyond their competence.

    So instead of tapping two or three buttons in Patient Access, every four months or so I have to get up, walk past my GP surgery, get on a train to the city, walk through the city centre, meet a pharmacist, walk back, get the train, walk past my GP surgery, wait a few days for the prescription to come through, walk down to the pharmacy just round the corner from my GP and get my perfectly ordinary medication.

    This is a pain in the arse, and discriminatory, and degrading. But at least it’s not a potentially fatal problem.

    A trans woman posted this on Bluesky while I was travelling back from my pharmacist meeting.

    Just got a call from a lovely but very nervous Dr, who advised I wouldn’t be routinely screened for breast cancer because I’m not indicated as being “biologically female” on the central NHS database and my biology wouldn’t indicate I’m at risk. My records have been altered, which is upsetting.

    Apparently they had discussions in the NHS recently and now I’m classified as biologically male. She didn’t even understand that I have been on HRT for 20 years and am biologically female in all important ways – I had to explain that to her.

    She’s based in England, so it’s a different part of the NHS. But it’s the same issue: parts of the NHS treating trans women differently from women who aren’t trans. And in this case, that’s very dangerous.

    I don’t want to dazzle you with my incredible in-depth medical knowledge here, but the thing that most increases your risk of breast cancer is… having breasts.

    Men can get breast cancer too, of course – hence why it’s sometimes referred to as chest cancer, so men won’t be too embarrassed to check themselves and seek help if they find anything concerning – but it’s comparatively very rare. Whereas if you have breasts rather than just a chest, your risk is much higher. Trans women’s risk isn’t as high as the risk for women who aren’t trans. But it’s still much higher than for men.

    And this is the problem when anti-trans rhetoric meets medical reality. “Biologically male” is a bullshit term pushed by anti-trans weirdos to yet again separate trans women, a term rejected by doctors because they know that what matters medically is the biology you have now, not the biology you were born with.

    But thanks to anti-trans activists’ billionaire-backed insistence that butterflies must always be classified as caterpillars, we’ve got this ludicrous situation where women with the two most important risk factors for breast cancer – breasts and estrogen – are being excluded from screening.

    Trans women’s bodies are not identical to the bodies of women who aren’t trans (which is why I opted out of cervical cancer screening invitations, as I don’t have a cervix). But they’re not identical to men’s bodies either, so in the case of my body I have zero risk of testicular cancer and an elevated risk of breast cancer. So by insisting that we ignore people’s bodily reality, the anti-trans idiocy genuinely puts trans women in danger – danger we had already addressed, danger that is clearly understood, danger that we have (or had) systems in place to minimise.

    Removing trans women from important health screening won’t do anything to improve a single woman or girl’s healthcare. But what it will do is put trans women’s lives at risk. For many in the anti-trans movement, I think that’s considered a bonus.

  • They’re no longer pretending

    The anti-trans mob never had “reasonable concerns”; they’re a hate movement. And they’re now so emboldened that they’re not trying to hide that any more. Speaking at yesterday’s Conservative party conference, both Sex Matters and the LGB Alliance made it very clear what they believed, with the latter’s CEO saying that supporting any form of transition is “evil” and that the goal must be “to strip out the poisonous homophobia of gender identity ideology from public life wherever we can.” The only way to eradicate “gender identity ideology” from public life is to eradicate trans and non-binary people.

  • The Cass Review: still a scandal

    A new peer-reviewed study of the Cass Review, the UK project that was used to stop trans teens’ healthcare, has been published. And like all the other peer-reviewed studies of the Cass Review, it’s absolutely damning. It once again demonstrates that the review was skewed to deliver a pre-determined outcome that flies in the face of the evidence.

    The study describes the review’s “disregard of international expert consensus, methodological problems and conceptual errors” and says that its internal contradictions are striking:

    It acknowledged that some trans young people benefit from puberty suppression, but its recommendations have made this currently inaccessible to all.

    It found no evidence that psychological treatments improve gender dysphoria, yet recommended expanding their provision.

    It found that NHS provision of GAMT [Gender Affirming Medical Treatment] (GnRHa, oestrogen or testosterone) was already very restricted, and that young people were distressed by lack of access to treatment, yet it recommended increased barriers to oestrogen and testosterone for any trans adolescents aged under 18 years.

    It dismissed the evidence of benefit from GAMT as “weak”, but emphasised speculative harms based on weaker evidence.

    The harms of withholding GAMT were not evaluated.

    The Review disregarded studies observing that adolescents who requested but were unable to access GAMT had poorer mental health compared with those who could access GAMT.

    Despite finding that detransition and regret appear uncommon, the Review’s recommendations appear to have the goal of preventing regret at any cost.

    The Review, and the UK Government, have taken the position that GAMT, an established treatment with observational evidence of early and medium term benefits and acceptable safety, should be actively withheld from trans adolescents due to lack of high certainty evidence of very long term efficacy and safety. Few treatments for any condition meet this criterion, and it is difficult to name another field in which regulators impose such a benchmark.

    …The Cass Review, lacking expertise and compromised by implicit stigma and misinformation, does not give credible evidence-based guidance. We are gravely concerned about its impact on the wellbeing of trans and gender-diverse people.