Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • “Was it worth it?”

    A typically astute piece by Dr Ruth Pearce on trans lives and trans visibility in the past and present.

    For decades, the trans liberation movement has fought to change the world. We found new ways of being, and created language, art, and culture to name and explore these possibilities. We won new civil rights. We achieved incremental improvements in the provision of healthcare and education. We have made it a fair bit easier for many people to exist in the workplace, and to survive on benefits. We have built community: feeding each other, housing each other, and providing advocacy for each other, and partying together.

    As the UK enters a new era of state-mandated segregation, I find myself asking: was it all worth it?

    These are dark times for trans people; yesterday the government implemented the inconsistent and unlawful EHRC code of practice, a code so incoherent that the EHRC’s own head – appointed against the recommendations of multiple MPs, who judged her as utterly unsuitable for the role – couldn’t give any coherent advice to service providers when asked simple questions by Parliament’s equality committee recently and by Channel 4 News last night. Like all current anti-trans activism the code is based on the bigoted belief that there’s no such thing as a trans person, and that it’s therefore necessary to make trans people’s lives so difficult that we either detransition or kill ourselves.

    Dr Pearce:

    Today, the trans liberation movement faces off against vicious foes and their allies in the Labour government, who would see us eliminated altogether. Trans people of all ages and backgrounds are forced to navigate laws and policies designed to make our lives more difficult and more dangerous.

    It is all too easy to think that the trans activism of the past has failed, that every gain has been reversed in an orgy of hate and bigotry. Yet this is simply not true.

    As I wrote in Carrie Kills A Man:

    Trans and non-binary people are not a fad or a phase, a lobby or an ideology, a cult or a conspiracy. We’re your sons and your daughters, your sisters and your brothers, your friends and your colleagues.

    The genital-obsessed weirdos are correct about one thing: there really are people being infected by a social contagion that’s harming women and children. But it’s not us; it’s them.

  • The tip of the spear

    This piece about attacks on human rights and the playbook being used is by Michael O’Flaherty, the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights. 

    The undermining of the rights of LGBTI people serves as the tip of the spear in a broader backlash against human rights protection overall.

    They are accompanied by rollbacks in women’s rights, restrictions on independent media and civic space, attacks on judicial independence and national human rights watchdogs, and hostility toward migrants and refugees.

    The playbook is familiar across borders: political actors and others with influence exploit economic hardship, war, climate breakdown, and technological disruption to manufacture fear and discontent.

    They scapegoat marginalised groups, present basic equality as a threat to traditional family values or children and dismiss international law as “ideology”.

    When democracy comes under pressure, LGBTI people are often the first targets.

    …LGBTI people are not asking for “special rights”. They demand only what international law promised every human being after the devastation of World War II: to be treated like everyone else – to have their basic human rights acknowledged, to be protected by international treaties just like everyone else, and to live with dignity as themselves, free and equal. Their rights are not an ideology, nor are they inherently in conflict with the legitimate rights and interests of others.

  • “They didn’t just make me worse. They made me like them.”

    There’s a powerful essay on Assigned Media by Magdalene Visaggio about the death of Lindsey Graham, a terrible, hateful man, and her reaction to it.

    Visaggio writes about trying to be a good person, the kind of person who doesn’t speak ill of the dead, the kind of person who tries to see the good in even the worst of us. But Visaggio is trans, the kind of person Graham and other evil people have spent years harming.

    Yet here I am. Cheering and joking and mocking, fruit flying from my hand, hating this man who, unlike those I once prayed for, has never to my knowledge actually murdered anyone. He died, and all I can say is I wish it had happened sooner, and been more humiliating. I gleefully entertain fantasies my editor has asked me to cut from this text. Ten years of public scorn and mockery for trans people as a category and for myself personally showed me how. Ten years of being told we are affronts to God, a danger to children, sick, deluded rapists have been my education. I have, at last, learned how to hate.

    Ten years after I transitioned, I am a better person in countless ways – but in this, the most important one, I am worse. Ten years of abuse at the hands of bigots and opportunists, ten years of eliminationism, ten years of my own father’s endorsement of these people; all of that has taught me to hate, to hate fiercely. To wish ill. To dream of the moment I can say, at last, these fuckers are dead, and it is better this way. Do you understand? They didn’t just make me worse. They made me like them.

    I’m nine years in rather than ten, but I feel that way too. I’ve been taught to hate, and I hate it.

  • The ban that isn’t a ban

    Labour have published their draft bill on banning conversion therapy, and as expected it does nothing to protect trans people: there’s a huge carve-out for healthcare providers that’s so wide it means any quack can call themselves a provider and continue to torture kids. The “ban” is also worded in such a way that it could be used to attack gender-affirming organisations such as support groups, which means that it will be used to attack gender-affirming organisations such as support groups.

    The fact that it’s a draft bill means that any action could still be several years away, but it’s already served its purpose: it’s generated lots of headlines saying that Labour is banning conversion therapy, even though it isn’t.

    The reason it’s not a complete ban is because conversion therapy for trans people is now government policy, delivered on the NHS. It’s not the “abusive” therapy described in the draft bill, which doesn’t really exist any more: we’ve largely stopped giving trans people lobotomies, aversion therapy and electro-shock treatments. But a series of counselling sessions with a nicely spoken doctor trying to convince you that you’re not really trans is still conversion therapy.

    I saw it described well on social media earlier: imagine a smacking ban that said smacking was fine if the kid deserved it.

  • No harm done

    There’s a fascinating interview with Hilary Cass with the BBC that makes it very clear that her report, used to justify a ban on puberty blockers, was policy-based evidence making: she admits that “we genuinely don’t know if there are harms” from prescribing puberty blockers to trans kids. The medicine remains available to cisgender kids (ie, kids who aren’t trans and who get them to prevent precocious puberty) because there’s no evidence that their potential harm outweighs their measurable benefits.

    As Assigned Media notes:

    The Final Report of the Cass Review concluded that the evidence for gender-affirming treatments was insufficient and called for further research. Notably, it found no evidence of harm whatsoever, alongside weak evidence of some benefit. To justify restricting care, the report focused on the possibility that some young people who grow up to be trans adults might not have been trans if they were denied the ability to socially or medically transition. Buried in the appendices, the report found fewer than 10 trans youth in the entire country who had detransitioned… The lack of evidence was used to support a care ban, which activists have twisted into a claim that the treatments were found to be harmful, which in turn is fueling the effort to prevent them from even being studied. 

    One of the reasons puberty blockers were previously prescribed, and why they continue to be prescribed in less backwards countries, was to give kids breathing space to explore their gender and make informed decisions about their future before puberty made irreversible changes. Now they’re banned, Cass says, “we have young people turning up in the clinics on testosterone at 11”. Well, yes. Because puberty blocking is no longer an option and almost all of the kids previously prescribed puberty blockers went on to take the appropriate hormones they needed. Cass saw the blockers-to-hormones pipeline as a problem rather than proof that trans kids were who they said they were.

    It’s the next quote that really shows her true colours: for those kids “it may be that if they were prescribed puberty blockers instead, that would give more time for the therapist to work with them and perhaps come to a different solution than a long-term life on medication.”

    She’s describing conversion therapy.

    Most trans kids become trans adults – the “desistance” rate among trans kids prescribed puberty blockers is exceptionally low. Describing being trans as “a long-term life on medication” as if it’s a problem and making it clear it’s an undesirable outcome tells you exactly what Cass thinks, and why she’s the face of policy that causes incredible cruelty to children.

  • Two lies

    Helen Belcher for Byline Times on the two lies being pushed by the EHRC:

    The position the UK now is in is driven by two big basic lies. The first is that the Equality Act was actually an act which excluded trans people from single-sex services and spaces aligned to their lived in gender but that the courts, Parliament or the EHRC, had somehow not noticed this until last year. The second lie is that trans people are always identifiable, and when they aren’t, they’re intentionally deceptive.  

  • This is what oppression looks like

    Brynn Tannehill on fiery form in Public Notice:

    One of the most popular and profitable grifts in the world of the religious right and MAGA is the production of propaganda to convince Christians that they are horribly discriminated against, or even oppressed, by the government and government funded entities.

    …This victimhood narrative is central to their identity. But it also raises the question: would they recognize what actual oppression looks like?

    Sadly the article is just as relevant in the UK.

  • 17,000 articles to make a moral panic

    QueerAF:

    Seventeen thousand articles were published about so-called ‘trans issues’ by just four British newspapers in five years, according to new research from Amnesty International UK.

    The four newspapers – The Sun, The Times, The Guardian and The Telegraph – mentioned JK Rowling 106 times in their coverage, with 202 mentions of a prime minister or political party leader.

    Trans people themselves were mentioned by name just 24 times. Sixteen of those mentions were murdered teen Brianna Ghey, and eight were convicted rapist Isla Bryson.

    Most of the media reports in the four newspapers, between 2020 and 2025, had a negative sentiment about trans people. When trans people were mentioned in reporting it was as criminals or murder victims, the research found.

    The same report found that the number of anti-trans groups dedicated to attacking trans rights had increased from 3 in 2017, when gender recognition reform was first mooted and widely supported, to 51 today. Three of those groups have spent £3.6 million between 2019 and 2024.

  • “The most aggressively anti-trans developed democracy in the world”

    Liberal Currents:

    “A very small group of very well connected people, funded by international fascism, have decided that trans identity is, at best, a delusion that has been tolerated for far too long. In the space of a few years they have been able to reorder our society and politics to effectively segregate them.

    …This is not a hypothetical. You are less free now. Your security, dignity, and safety is in the hands of nasty, petty, monumentally stupid bigots. They can take it from you at a whim.”

  • Foxes in the hen house

    TACC has answered an important question: how did the EHRC Scotland suddenly become hostile to the trans people it’s supposed to protect? The answer, at least in part, is that a high profile anti-trans activist became one of their commissioners. As with the English EHRC, the body has become captured by “gender-critical” activism.

    TACC:

    it is difficult not to draw the obvious conclusion: that the appointment of Mandy Rhodes – a political commentator by background, with absolutely no stated experience or expertise in the field of equality or human rights, but with a prolific, half-decade+ output of anti-trans articles in the mainstream media – was entirely designed to serve the ideological objectives of a captured EHRC.