Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • Doing the devils’ work

    During her appearance in front of the Women and Equalities Committee last month, EHRC head Baroness Falkner told MPs that the EHRC had an 81% approval rate; the implication, which Falkner did not correct or clarify, was that this figure represented public polling.

    Thanks to another freedom of information request, we now know that it doesn’t: the figure comes from the EHRC’s own “media sentiment analysis” which “measures the tone and favourability of media coverage about EHRC, not public polling”.

    In other words: the newspapers that hate trans people are pleased that the EHRC is actively helping their war on trans people.

    “Positive media sentiment has improved from 35.2% in 2021-22 to 80.6% in 2024-25”. When that media is waging war on a marginalised group that the EHRC is supposed to protect, that should be cause for resignation, not celebration.

  • They’re coming for you too

    Amnesty International has published a new report on the anti-rights movement that wants to take us all back to the 1950s.

    A powerful anti-rights movement is growing in the UK, threatening to roll back our hard-won freedoms and rewrite the rules on whose rights, bodies and lives deserve protection. 

    …These groups spent a staggering £106 million between 2019 and 2023, an increase of over 33%. All with the aim to undermine our freedoms, restrict access to essential healthcare and roll back the rights we’ve fought hard to win. 

    …The growing anti-rights movement in the UK, emboldened by what is happening in the US and increasingly well-funded, is targeting reproductive freedoms, access to abortion and the rights of LGBTI people. Their end goal is to roll back our hard-won rights, undermine equality protections and rewrite the rules on who deserves dignity and freedom.  

    We must name this threat for what it is: a deliberate and coordinated attack on human rights, led by actors who are weaponising misinformation, fabricating moral panic about abortion care and LGBTI people and exploiting existing prejudice to sow divisions and distract us from the real issues that matter.   

  • Captured

    Thanks to freedom of information requests, we can now see how the Equalities and Human Rights Commission has been captured by anti-trans lobby groups via its own anti-trans employees – including the Commission’s head. As TACC.org.uk reports:

    we obtained a trove of correspondence between EHRC senior leadership and the gender-critical lobbying group Sex Matters, with repeated appearances by Transgender Trend and its director, Stephanie Davies-Arai. These aren’t brief emails from junior staff. They include private meetings arranged with the EHRC Chair and CEO, backchannel lobbying, and full acceptance of policy proposals well beyond what would be expected in a public consultation.

    …This isn’t just about emails. This is about a public body entrusted with safeguarding the rights of all of us, especially the most marginalised. And it’s about that body allowing itself to be steered by one political faction, behind closed doors, while hiding behind procedural language and vague promises of balance.

    Sharing the article on Bluesky, TACC wrote:

    Sex Matters and Transgender Trend were given privileged access: private meetings, letter exchanges with the Chair, and the right to bypass consultation rules. Their language appears, almost verbatim, in EHRC policy… This is not independence. It’s regulatory capture. It’s bias in plain sight.

  • Now they’re banning the books

    BBC: “A council has removed all transgender-related books from the children’s sections of its libraries, its leader has announced.”

    It’s Reform, inevitably, and there’s lots of questions about this particular story: my gut feeling is that it’s social media posturing, because the only book I’ve seen cited wasn’t a children’s book and wouldn’t have been in the children’s section of any library. But there is still an important point here:

    Creating a moral panic around children’s books is how Section 28 started.

    As I wrote in Fierce Salvage, the anti-trans panic is bringing bigotry back to the mainstream:

    While hate crimes against the entire community continue to rise, the media and ministers tell the nation to fear the victims of hate, not the people purveying it. And when you listen to the callers and contributors to Scots radio shows or read the columnists and commenters on Scots newspaper websites, something becomes clear: if the Section 28 ballot were happening today, too many of our politicians, public figures and peers would be voting to keep it.

    Bringing bigotry back has been the goal of the genital-obsessed weirdos all along.

    We’ve been saying for years now that history is repeating: the anti-gay, anti-lesbian demonisation of the 1980s has simply been wrapped in “gender-critical” ribbons. And this is a very clear demonstration that book-banning by bigots, a key part of trying to eradicate LGBTQ+ people, is not just a US phenomenon.

  • A red flag alert

    The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security has published a red flag alert regarding trans and intersex people’s human rights in the UK.

    All of the actions described above fit neatly into the 9th Pattern of Genocide: “Denial and/or Prevention of Identity.” As we have repeatedly stated over the years, genocide does not only manifest in the killing of an entire group. In the case of trans and intersex people, genocide is often perpetrated by making it impossible for individuals to exist as their true selves. The erasure of a group from public life is a step towards an attempt to erase that group’s existence, which is the very definition of genocide.

    …No denial or omission in law can erase the concrete reality that trans and intersex people have always and will always exist. Attempts to erase them as a class constitutes an intent to commit genocide.

    The Lemkin Institute joins many other organisations including the British Medical Association, ILGA-Europe and Human Rights Watch as well as 18 independent UN HR experts in condemning the UK government, judiciary and media’s war on trans and intersex people.

  • Who pays the piper

    There’s a good piece in Yorkshire Bylines about Sex Matters, the dubiously funded lawfare and lobbying organisation created specifically to eradicate trans people from society. It describes their links with less camouflaged hate groups, the difference between their public statements and their more private conversations, their infiltration of UK institutions and how they intend to reduce the number of trans people existing.

    When you understand this, you understand that ‘both sides’ of the trans debate is not trans people fighting for extra rights at the expense of others’. More and more, it is trans people fighting tooth and nail against well-funded, well-connected extremists, whose true agenda strikes at the heart of their dignity, rights and very existence.

    In a related article, The Parliament magazine shows how in Europe the religion-based war on “gender ideology” – feminism, abortion and LGBTQ+ people; the term was primarily publicised by The Vatican as part of very specifically anti-feminist messaging – has become a billion-dollar business.

    “From Moscow to Washington, Brussels to Budapest, money is doing the heavy lifting in reshaping laws, policies, and public norms around gender, sexuality, and reproductive rights”.

  • They lied

    Back in May, I wrote that the EHRC’s interim guidance regarding trans people and toilets was an “illegal shitshow” that “misrepresents the law and exposes companies to significant legal risk by falsely telling them that they should discriminate against service users.”

    Today, with multiple legal actions looming, the EHRC amended its interim guidance to remove the lie that the law makes trans-excluding single-sex toilets “compulsory”.

  • Attack of the crotch cops

    Last week, when the Women and Equalities Committee grilled the head of the EHRC over her unlawful and misleading interim guidance about trans people’s legal rights, two people followed a trans woman into the ladies’ toilet, yelled about there being a “biological male” in there and demanded security intervene.

    The two people were the co-founder of the LGB Alliance and a member of another anti-trans group, both of whom were in Parliament to pretend that they and the organisations they represent don’t want to bully trans women.

  • “This was the eradication of trans people from the country’s social fabric”

    If you only read one article about the UK human rights watchdog and its sham consultation over removing trans people’s human rights, make it this one by Ian Dunt.

    The consultation exercise is a joke. And the EHRC, far from trying to communicate the law, is attempting to rewrite it so that it is as punishing to trans people as possible. This is the story of how it is doing that.

    If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know a lot of the detail already, but to see it laid out in a timeline like this just emphasises how wickedly corrupt the EHRC has become – and how dangerous it has become not just to trans people, but to everybody.

    It’s really important to understand that the EHRC has pivoted from protecting human rights to destroying them. And if they get away with doing this to trans people, the whole house of cards protecting all marginalised people will follow. And that’s not an unintended consequence. It’s the entire goal.

    Falkner was made chair in December 2020. She was part of a pattern of appointments. Alasdair Henderson, who worked on a legal challenge against the NHS’ use of puberty blockers, was made a commissioner in 2018 and then reappointed in 2022. David Goodhart, who once argued that it is “common sense” to have a “preference for your own ethnic group”, was made a commissioner in 2020. None of these figures were beyond the pale – they were all firmly within the mainstream cultural right. But they were very odd appointments for an equality and human rights body. The EHRC had effectively been hollowed out and turned into the Spectator Online.

    …This is about as damning a failure of an equality body as you can imagine. Instead of protecting people’s rights they are actively trying to destroy them. But actually, there is another failure, of similar magnitude, which the EHRC is committing at the same time: it is failing to offer organisations reliable information about how to comply with legislation.

    …This is what happens when you take a public body with crucial responsibilities and turn it into a culture war campaign organisation. You betray a minority group which needs protection. But you also leave British businesses exposed to ruinous legal challenges.

    This situation is an affront to the rule of law, at a time when we urgently need to defend it.

  • Some people are more equal than others

    The Guardian reports* that Akua Reindorf, the Equalities Commissioner, has claimed that trans people “must accept a reduction in their rights” because we “have been lied to over many years” about what our human rights are. The Equality Act and the EHRC’s guidance on it, Reindorf essentially argues, were really a bathroom ban that nobody noticed for 15 years.

    At least she’s consistent: she represented an anti-trans activist (and LGB Alliance co-founder) who was suing the EHRC to try and reduce trans people’s rights in 2020; her interpretation of the law, which she argued meant service providers should exclude trans women, was dismissed by the judge. Reindorf’s interpretation was “wrong in law”.

    Reindorf was hired shortly afterwards to, er, interpret the law at the EHRC.

    Reindorf’s interpretation of the law is absolute bullshit, of course, and combined with her evident lack of understanding of the other key legislation, such as the Gender Recognition Act, and of case law such as Croft v Royal Mail 2003, it should result in her termination.

    But it won’t, because the EHRC is a transphobic organisation: an equalities watchdog now dedicated to creating inequality.

    The blatantly bigoted head of the EHRC, Kishner Falkner, reaches the end of her contract later this year; Labour could have ended her contract last year and started to undo the damage she’s done, but chose to renew her contract instead. And the replacement favoured by the Labour government is, like her, closely linked with anti-trans hate groups.

    Mary-Ann Stephenson, the preferred candidate, contributed to the LGB Alliance co-founder’s legal action against Stonewall, one of the organisations the EHRC is supposed to consult with, and has spoken at anti-trans organisations’ events. Her Bluesky following list – which I’m sure is about to be sanitised** now the news of her proposed appointment has been published – is a who’s who of UK anti-trans journalists, activists and pressure groups.

    This is what institutional capture looks like: a small number of people in positions of power dismantling decades of progress and taking a wrecking ball to human rights.

    The EHRC is dismantling the Equality Act. The previous Tory government started that; the current Labour government is happy to continue it.

    As ever, trans people are only the first targets. We won’t be the last.

    * Reindorf is now claiming that the article is defamatory and that “trans people’s rights haven’t been reduced”. The Guardian, pathetically, has now changed “reduction in their rights” to “perceived reduction in their rights” in its opening paragraph.
    ** It has now been sanitised.