Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • Illegal, immoral, hateful

    At 10pm on Friday night the equality and human rights committee published interim guidance about trans people’s access to services and facilities. The guidance is not law, makes no sense, and flies in the face of settled law. But the goal is to persuade people that the law has changed, and that they should act immediately to ban trans people from public facilities.

    It’s nonsense. It says that trans people should be excluded from the toilets that match their gender, but can also be excluded from the toilets that match their assigned sex at birth. It says that gay men’s choirs shouldn’t include trans men, and that lesbian book clubs shouldn’t include trans women.

    It’s a sadistic fantasy written by people put in place specifically to wage war on trans people and trans women in particular as part of the Tories’ “war on woke”. In a fairly short period of time the Tories changed the EHRC from an independent human rights watchdog to an arm of the government, with many senior officials quitting in disgust. It now works closely with anti-trans pressure groups for the removal of trans people’s legal protections.

    To illustrate just how ridiculous and hateful things have become: in 2016 the UK government issued a travel warning for North Carolina and Alabama over their newly implemented anti-trans bathroom bans. Today, the UK government is being urged to, and seems inclined to, implement even more regressive bans here.

    There’s incredible outrage over this among people who aren’t trans and who know bigotry when they see it, although inevitably it’s not being reflected in the UK press. But the Irish Examiner’s Séamas O’Reilly puts it very clearly.

    Let us speak as adults. Despite being around 0.5% of the population, trans people have spent the past decade being attacked in one of the most flagrant moral panics ever perpetrated on the British public.

    Spread in the name of a “feminism” centred on a small, committed group of active transphobes backed by the entire might of British politics and media, including every misogynist you can name; either because they share this gut-level hatred of trans folks, or simply because it serves their political interests to heap sadism on a vulnerable minority, instead of addressing the multiple overlapping crises that face the British public, and in which they are directly complicit.

    The only way any of the absurdities of this ruling make sense, is if its aims are exactly what they appear to be: A punitive attack on the rights and dignity of trans people divorced from any real-world concern about safety or women’s rights, designed to demoralise and punish them simply for the crime of existing.

    If this madness is signed off by Labour it guarantees a kicking in the EU courts, because it’s a clear breach of EU-wide human rights legislation. But it will really harm lots of people in the interim. Not just trans people, but anyone who attracts the wrong kind of attention from self-appointed bathroom bouncers.

    Few MPs and MSPs care about trans people’s human rights and safety. But they care about staying in power. And that means you can put pressure on them by making it clear that this horrific bullying of marginalised people needs to stop.

  • “A defeat for all women”

    Writing in The Nation, Sophie Lewis delivers clarity about the UK Supreme Court judgement.

    The fact, already now, is this: If I am perceived not to be what I say I am, and I don’t have the relevant documents, I can be strip-searched by male transport police, and legally barred from single-sex spaces. Trans people will, of course, continue to live lives of authenticity, but make no mistake: Everyone’s bodily autonomy is curtailed (especially those of us who, cis or trans, are poor, undocumented, racialized, intersex, gender non-conforming) by the cisfeminist diktat against non-cis humanity’s existence in public.

  • Hiding in plain sight

    As of yesterday, Observer columnist and leader writer Sonia Sodha, LGB Alliance co-founder Malcolm Clarke, Rosie Duffield MP, For Women Scotland and many other very high-profile “Gender Critical” figures were still following Nicola Murray on X/Twitter.

    Murray is one of Scotland’s best-known anti-trans activists; she was one of the key figures in the witch-hunt against Mridul Wadhwa, the trans woman driven out of her job at a rape crisis centre in Edinburgh.

    And as Edinburgh Live reported last week, Murray was arrested in 2022 for, and has now been found guilty of,  “a shocking campaign of physical and sexual abuse against four children” over a 20-year period, and placed on the sex offender’s register. The case was reported in other regional newspapers and in both The Sun and The Times, at least in Scotland. But the non-Scots who follow her on X will know about the case too, because she was posting about her trial while it was ongoing.

    Imagine the immediate and ongoing outrage if Murray were a trans woman: the furious phone-ins, the condemnation in endless columns, the social media hashtags, the demands for the government to do something, the calls to place her in a male prison to protect women. But of course, she isn’t trans, so none of that is going to happen. The “gender-critical” movement wants you to hate imaginary monsters, not actual ones. And that makes it an excellent place for real monsters to hide.

  • “A victory for uncertainty, division and harassment”

    Helen Belcher on the Supreme Court verdict and its horrendous aftermath:

    The UK has moved into a space where all women, trans or not, will now be legally judged on their appearance.

    …I, and every other trans woman I know, will continue to use women’s facilities. I’ve done it without any problems for over 20 years. I’m not going to stop now. The risk I now run, which wasn’t the case before Wednesday, is that I now fear harassment and worse should I do so. 

  • Clarity

    The Supreme Court decision to effectively destroy the Gender Recognition Act and reverse the Equality Act has been described in newspapers as bringing “clarity”, which is ironic: it’s created anything but, and the anti-trans groups and their pals in the press have used the judgement to spread lies.

    One of the biggest lies is that trans women are now banned from women-only services. While the Supreme Court verdict is incredibly anti-trans, it doesn’t go that far: it says that if a service provider chooses to exclude trans women, it can do so without breaking the Equality Act. But the Act still says that such exclusion must be a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim, and blanket exclusion is unlikely to satisfy that condition. And trans people are still protected under the characteristic of gender reassignment.

    That may well change, and the EHRC – whose head was given the job specifically because she’s a transphobe, whose own staff have accused her of deliberately setting out to undermine trans people’s rights, and who has made it very clear that she is using the equalities body to attack trans women – is certainly going to craft guidance to try and change that. But the guidance is currently unwritten and has to be approved by Parliament.

    It’s also important to note that the Supreme Court decision is only about the Equality Act. There are many other pieces of legislation that affect trans people’s rights.

    Just because bigots want something to be true doesn’t mean it’s true. Even if – especially if – it’s printed in the UK press.

    That doesn’t mean the Supreme Court verdict isn’t horrific, at odds with the intention of both the GRA and the EA, and introduces more confusion rather than clearing it up: its definition of “biological woman”, for example, is effectively “we know it when we see it”. But be very wary of newspapers with an agenda parroting bigots’ wish-lists and pretending they’re law.

    It’s still a very bleak day for trans people, and for cisgender people too: the British Transport Police have already announced that they will have male officers strip-searching trans women; under the Supreme Court ruling, that means an officer can now molest any woman and claim he did it because she looked trans. There will be many more such examples, and many more cisgender women singled out because they’re tall, or masculine-looking, or Black. And there will be more legal attacks not just on trans people’s rights, but on human rights more widely.

    Here’s long-term human rights campaigner Jane Fae on the decision:

    I think the strategy of the anti-trans all along has been to swamp the UK with money – dark money, far right money, evangelical money – to reverse what they see as the evil of “gender theory.” Which also includes gay marriage, and women’s rights: they’ll be back for those later.

    And this post is very good too: The UK Supreme Court destroys 20 years of legal rights for trans people in 20 minutes.

    The odious and gleeful head of the EHRC continued that a complete ban of trans women from women’s toilets and changing rooms in British society was on the way, hinting ominously also that a review of gender ID change per se was in the pipeline. To the question of where trans women are supposed to urinate now, she replied that ‘maybe trans activists should campaign for a third space?’  That’s the head of Britain’s Equality body removing a minority from society and sneering at us. It’s not even that she doesn’t care. She’s loving it.

    …there is no reasoning with the people who have driven it all, in our country and in others. 

  • ”All will eventually fall”

    A superb piece by Morgan M Page on the Supreme Court shitshow.

    How this ruling will play out in the everyday lives of trans people across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland isn’t yet understood, but what is expected is that this will open up revision of the Equality Act, an important goal of Britain’s far right and their happy collaborators in the Labour government. By opening the door to revision on one characteristic of our primary human rights legislation, all will eventually fall. Sex, disability, race, religion — all for the taking. The irony that this challenge was brought forward by a group ostensibly trying to protect sex based rights sure will surely sting when it eventually causes all women to lose their rights entirely.

  • Despicable, predictable

    I wasn’t surprised by yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling, as horrifying, incoherent and discriminatory as it is; the verdict was never in question after the court refused to hear from any trans people or trans organisations but rolled out the red carpet for multiple anti-trans hate groups. Much of the judgement appears to have been copied and pasted from those groups’ documents.

    I’m getting very tired of saying this, but: the goal of the genital-obsessed weirdos is to eliminate trans people from public life. And the people funding them and celebrating their ill-gotten win won’t stop with trans people.

  • Welfare for losers

    Ben Collins, owner of the satirical newspaper The Onion, summed up the anti-trans movement beautifully this week: it’s “welfare for losers”. He was talking about the latest example of the grift: amateur fencer Stephanie Turner, who ostentatiously refused to compete with a trans woman in a tournament. Taking a knee, Turner said: “I am refusing to fence you, because I am a woman and you are a man.”

    Just days before, Turner competed in, and beat multiple men in, a mixed tournament.

    Mixed tournaments are commonplace in fencing because it’s a sport of skill, not strength.

    “It will probably, at least for the moment, destroy my life,” Turner lied to Fox News after accepting her first grift payment, a $5,000 “courage award” from the anti-trans XX-XY Athletics.

    Turner is not an elite athlete; she’s a 31-year-old amateur competing in low-level events and her best days are probably already behind her. But as failed swimmer Riley Gaines demonstrates, it’s very easy to turn sporting mediocrity into a six-figure salary by demonising trans women on behalf of the evangelical right. As Ben Collins says, it’s welfare for losers – and it pays exceptionally well.

  • Identify the author

    Stop me if you’ve read this before.

    Sadly, one of the most prevalent forms of child abuse facing our country today is the sinister threat of gender ideology. Proponents of the gender ideology movement are outrageously indoctrinating our children with the devastating lie that they are trapped in the wrong body – and that the only way they can be truly happy is to alter their sex with hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and sexual mutilation surgery. The evil and backwards lies of gender insanity are robbing our children of their happiness, health, and freedom, while imposing unimaginable heartbreak on parents and families.

    Was this in The Times? The Scotsman? The Daily Mail? The Telegraph? The Daily Express? The Herald? Spiked? The Courier? The Observer? The Guardian? The Spectator? Unherd?

    Nope. It’s the latest hateful, bigoted bullshit tirade from the misogynist sexual predator Donald Trump. The fact that it could have been lifted wholesale from one of hundreds of UK newspaper columns shows what monsters so many of our columnist class have become.

  • Another stitch-up

    Today’s papers are giving lots of space to The Sullivan Review, the latest anti-trans stitch-up initiated by the previous government under the banner of “kicking woke ideology out of science” and amplified by the current Health Minister. Transactual:

    Prof. Alice Sullivan is a prominent anti-trans activist and advisory group member of the leading anti-trans lobby group, Sex Matters, notable for her work on UK literacy. The report also contains legal advice written by the husband of the Chair of the Sex Matters’ Trustee Board, Naomi Cunningham, and research was commissioned for the review to an organisation led by fellow member of the Sex Matters’ advisory group Lucy Hunter Blackburn.

    Here’s data expert Kevin Guyan:

    The DSIT and UK Government, researchers, funders and public bodies need to recognise this Trumpian intervention for what it is: an attempt to erase trans and non-binary people from existing in data.

    It, the Cass Review and the forthcoming Levy Review of adult healthcare are all part of the same project: to drive trans people out of public life in the UK.