Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • Vote

    There’s a pretty dispiriting article on the BBC news website today interviewing five people who won’t be voting in the general election. The reasons are pretty much what you’d expect: it doesn’t change anything, parties break their promises, there’s precious little clear blue water between them and so on. And these things are probably true, but the interviewees are missing a key point.

    Voting isn’t about you. It’s about us. All of us.

    The interviewees clearly feel that not voting is a neutral act. But it isn’t, because there are parties and candidates espousing policies that are genuinely dangerous to many people. That’s the case in any election, but it’s particularly true now with the far right rising once again. Their supporters, and the people they’ve won over on single issues, will vote. And that could be disastrous for all of us.

    In some constituencies, there’s a very real possibility that far right candidates could gain power. But even in relatively safe seats, not voting can have dangerous consequences. If extremist candidates can increase their share of the vote, that can help legitimise them and their views, increasing their visibility, their reach and their power. Just look at what Nigel Farage has wreaked in the UK despite seven unsuccessful attempts to get elected.

    I get it, I really do. I’m a trans woman in a UK where far too many candidates are quite comfortable with using us as culture war cannon fodder. But there is still a difference between different parties: Kier Starmer may be utterly spineless when it comes to defending trans people, but his party is not specifically promising to harm us. The Conservatives and Reform are promising exactly that.

    The same applies on a much bigger scale for issues such as how we deliver healthcare, how we care for our elderly, what opportunities we create for our children and what we do about a warming planet. The parties and the candidates are not “all the same” when some are hell-bent on making the world worse. If you can’t find it in yourself to vote for something, vote against that.

  • Destruction

    I genuinely don’t understand how anyone can read stories like this one and still believe that anti-trans activism or legislation is about protecting anybody from anything; the goal is to be as cruel as possible to trans people and their families.

    This latest example comes from Florida, whose exceptionally vicious anti-trans witch-hunt appears to have informed both the Cass Review and UK government policy:

    A Florida public school employee who faces firing because she allowed her transgender daughter to play girls high school volleyball assailed those who outed her child, saying Tuesday that the ensuing investigation destroyed the girl’s life.

    …Norton told the school board Tuesday that her daughter had been elected freshman and sophomore class president, was selected the student body’s director of philanthropy and was a homecoming princess. That all ended when the investigation began and the girl left Monarch.

    “They destroyed her high school career and her lifelong memories,” Norton said. “I saw the light in my daughter’s eyes gleam with future plans of organizing and attending prom, participating in and leading senior class traditions, speaking at graduation and going off to college with the confidence and joy that any student like her would after a successful and encouraging high school experience. And 203 days ago, I watched as that life was extinguished.”

    …When investigators interviewed the Monarch volleyball players, they said the team did not change clothes or shower together, so they were never disrobed with Norton’s daughter. All three said they knew or suspected Norton’s daughter is transgender, but it didn’t bother them that she was on the team. The Knights went 13-7 last season.

    “I didn’t really have a problem with it because I didn’t think she was a threat or anything to anyone else,” one girl told investigators.

  • The fix is in

    Equalities minister Kemi Badenoch has proudly confirmed what our fearless media preferred not to investigate and will most likely choose not to report: the Cass Review was an ideological project and the government has been stuffing key organisations with transphobes in order to roll back trans people’s rights and healthcare.

    Posting on X, quote-tweeting one of the most vicious and abusive anti-trans trolls on the platform, the minster proudly wrote that a key reason for the UK’s unwarranted and likely illegal ban on puberty blockers for trans kids was because of “gender-critical men and women in the UK government, holding the positions that mattered most in Equalities and Health. You only need to look at what the SNP did in Scotland to see what would have happened had we not intervened. The Cass Review would **never** have been commissioned under a Labour govt. Labour did not want to know. We had incredible opposition from the system on everything. It was when the ministers changed that
    everything changed.”

    It’d be funny if it weren’t so awful: the minister is acting like a cartoon villain, proudly boasting of their criminal genius, openly admitting to rigging the system in order to push a bigoted ideology and cause intentional harm to a marginalised minority.

  • Bad sports

    One of the key tactics of anti-trans obsessives is to push the narrative that trans people are an existential threat to women’s sports, and the narrative is working. In fact, it’s working so well that a cisgender mother of four was subject to hateful abuse when she won a half-marathon in Exeter at the weekend because she didn’t look cisgender enough for the bigots.

    “I am a mum of four, a GP and I run for fun. Being told I look just like a man and don’t conform to the ideals of being a female is upsetting enough but being called abusive names and threatened is awful. No need to do that to any individual, ever, no matter what you believe.”

    But as this powerful and sad Washington Post piece demonstrates, anti-trans bigots believe that they are perfectly entitled to abuse trans or suspected trans athletes; the cruelty is the point.

    Such extreme reactions represent more than overflowing passion. The topic of transgender sports inclusion is not isolated to fair play. Conservative politicians have used it as an emotional thruway to a sweeping anti-trans movement that seeks to erode fundamental human decency. The right to play is simply an opening act. The right to exist is the discriminating headliner.

    As I’ve pointed out many times before, the “save women’s sports” controversy was manufactured and openly workshopped by anti-feminist, anti-LGBTQ+ figures from the US evangelical right seven years ago as part of a “divide and conquer” strategy to weaken and destroy the LGBTQ+ community.

     

  • Your mum’s a super spreader

    In news that won’t surprise anyone who’s been following the trans panic, a new study shows that some of the most prolific spreaders of fake news are middle-aged women. Just 0.3% of Twitter accounts were responsible for sharing 80% of links to fake news, and those accounts were more likely to be women (60%) than men (40%). The average age of the misinformation peddlers was 58 and the posters share many more links per day than normal social media posters. While a majority were right-wing some 20% of superspreaders were left-wing.

    the researchers estimate that the superspreaders account for roughly a quarter of the links to misinformation sites that their typical followers were exposed to. For over 10 percent of their followers, they were the only source of fake news.

    There is one important caveat here, which is that the study was on Twitter before it became X and began offering money to misinformation and hate speech spreaders. That’s likely to have changed the demographic by making misinformation a career opportunity rather than just a hobby.

  • Snitches

    In Utah this week, the Republican administration introduced a snitch line, an online form for bigots to report any cases of trans or non-binary people using the single-sex facilities appropriate to their gender.

    It’s easy to point at this as an example of US right-wing bigotry, but for anyone thinking such vicious idiocy couldn’t happen here: on the very same day the UK Equalities Minister, Kemi Badenoch, introduced a snitch line, an online form for bigots to report organisations offering “bad guidance” about letting trans people use the single-sex spaces appropriate to their gender.

  • Illegal and cruel

    I’ve been loath to post about the current cavalcade of cruelties the Tories are heaping on trans people right now, but I wanted to point out something about the proposed NHS guidance that would force trans women out of single-sex wards: it’s illegal under multiple laws, especially for trans women who have gender recognition certificates. Not for the first time, the party of law and order is attempting to undermine the law by issuing guidelines encouraging organisations to practice illegal discrimination.

  • Complicity

    The Guardian has published a thoughtful article by playwright Jonathan Cash about the 1999 bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho, which he was injured in. The bomb was planted by a far-right sympathiser, a man who believed that gay men should be put to death. If you’re going to read the whole piece, which is very powerful, be aware that it contains some horrific details of victims’ injuries.

    Cash’s article includes some sections that The Guardian’s own writers, and their peers in other publications, should think about.

    The bombing campaign heralded a change in attitude from some of the UK’s most popular newspapers. Until then, the words “poofs” and “queers” were used in editorials, even in front-page headlines, especially since the advent of the HIV pandemic. Similarly hateful words were used to describe people from other minority groups. These words, in print, encouraged constant, casual discrimination and affected the way that LGBTQIA+ people and ethnic minorities were talked about and treated.

    As far as I am concerned, every single journalist, editor and newspaper proprietor who contributed to these attitudes in print is complicit in the deaths of three people who were standing just feet away from me, and the life-changing injuries of many others, both physical and psychological.

    …If you don’t call out derogatory words about people who are somehow regarded as different, hate is normalised and you’re complicit.

    In the UK we’ve already seen two trans girls stabbed, one fatally, and anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes – and anti-trans hate crimes specifically – are soaring. Too many writers’ words are contributing to an increasingly violent climate.

  • SLAPP happy

    One of the reasons that Jimmy Savile got away with his abuse for so long was the UK’s libel laws. Savile was highly litigious, and would send his very expensive lawyers after any publication that so much as considered reporting allegations about him.

    The fact that the allegations were true was irrelevant. Savile was rich, and that means he could use the law as a weapon. And he did, from the 1960s until his death in 2011. For five decades he used his money to stop people telling the truth about who and what he was.

    As Meirion Jones explained in The Guardian, The Sun wanted to expose him in 2008 and had multiple signed affidavits from his victims, but – yet again – did not publish. “They would be facing the best QCs money could buy, representing a man who could potentially call Prince Charles, Margaret Thatcher, the heads of charities, the head of the BBC and the pope as character witnesses. The best guess of the lawyers was that a libel action could cost a million pounds… this wasn’t the first or last time that Savile escaped because of our libel laws, which rewarded his deliberate targeting of vulnerable victims. Off the record, journalists have told me of multiple attempts to blow the whistle on Savile from the 1960s onwards that failed because newspapers could not afford the legal risks involved.”

    When even The Sun can’t afford to be taken to court, imagine the chilling effect on smaller publishers and individuals. In Britain, the rich can silence the truth by threatening legal action – action that, even if the defendant were successful, would financially ruin them. As a result, the truth about some famous people will not emerge until they die.

    This kind of bullying is known as a SLAPP – a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation – and the UK government describes SLAPP actions as “an abuse of the legal process, where the primary objective is to harass, intimidate and financially and psychologically exhaust one’s opponent via improper means”. The Law Society says that “Unlike genuine defamation claims – which typically arise out of an attempt to protect or repair the claimant’s damaged reputation – SLAPPs go further, aiming to prevent lawful investigations and discussions about matters of public interest.”

    SLAPPs are legal in the UK, and they – or the threat of them – remain one of the favourite bullying tactics of oligarchs, super-rich individuals who can afford to abuse the legal system. But they have limited reach, which is why you’ll typically find them used only against UK residents who can’t afford to go to court. The oligarchs who use SLAPPs and SLAPP threats rarely, if ever, go after people with money, and they can’t stop people in other countries from telling the truth about who or what they are.

    This post isn’t about Jimmy Savile.

  • Snakes in the Cass

    The Cass review is a lengthy document and it’ll take time for detailed criticisms to emerge, but there’s already plenty of evidence to indicate that the worst fears of trans people and allies were correct. The review team included people vocally opposed to trans healthcare, applied different standards of evidence to trans-supportive and trans-antagonistic studies, is happy to accept anecdote and hearsay provided it is not trans-supportive, and appears to advocate conversion therapy and demand that doctors be involved in social transition, which is not a medical matter.

    This, by Trans Safety Network, is an excellent overview of some of the most blatant problems with the report.

    the Cass Review final report seems to assume, as an unspoken starting point, that growing up to be a trans person is a bad thing, and the rest of the conclusions follow from that assumption.

    …We have previously identified a number of professionals involved in both the Cass Review and the NHS Gender Dysphoria Working Group which helped commission the review who are involved either in lobbying efforts against trans affirmative healthcare, or who have actively promoted conversion therapy.