Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • Spot the difference

    The UK isn’t the only place where “reasonable concerns” over trans healthcare have sparked official reviews. It’s happened in Queensland too, sparking a review very similar to NHS England’s Cass Review. But despite reviewing very similar evidence, this review resulted in a doubling of funding for trans healthcare. Here in the UK, the Cass Review has been used to stop trans healthcare for teens, and it’s increasingly being used to demand the end of healthcare for trans adults.

    The difference? The Queensland review didn’t prioritise quacks and bigots over healthcare experts. As one doctor explains:

    “If you were reviewing a neurosurgical service, you’d need to have some neurosurgeons on the review panel,” she said.  

    “You don’t put faith healers on it.  

    “You have to have people who understand how it works.” 

    The UK seems to be the only country where expertise in healthcare is simply dismissed in favour of ignorance and ideology.

  • Librarians shushed over LGBTQ+ books

    Index on Censorship reports that 53% of school librarians have been asked to remove LGBTQ+ books from their shelves.

    In an Index survey of UK school librarians, 53% of respondents said they had been asked to remove books, with more than half of those requests coming from parents.

    Of those, 56% removed the book or books in question. Titles included This Book Is Gay, by Juno Dawson; Julián is a Mermaid, by Jessica Love; and the alphabet book ABC Pride, by Louie Stowell, Elly Barnes and Amy Phelps, as well as plenty of other titles featuring LGBT+ content.

    Manga comic books were removed in some schools because of the perceived sexualisation of characters, other books following complaints about explicit or violent content.

    Books challenged in several schools – but ultimately not removed – included various Heartstopper books by Alice Oseman, which were accused of homophobic language, swearing and self-harm discussions. Young adult fiction also came under fire in many schools, with librarians usually able to hold firm in keeping their collections.

    One was asked to remove a book for “racism against white people”. They did not comply with the request.

    It’s a relatively small sample but it does demonstrate that yet another hateful right-wing US culture war tactic is crossing the Atlantic. And it’s a chilling echo of the 1980s, when a right-wing moral panic over a queer book resulted in the hateful Section 28, an anti-LGBTQ+ law that stayed on the statute books until the 2000s.

  • Perverse incentives

    One of the “keyboard warriors” who fuelled the recent English racist riots, Twitter user WayneGb88, appeared in court yesterday and was jailed for three years. During the trial, he told the court that he earns approximately £1,400 per month from posting hate speech on the former Twitter.

    This is why hate speech is everywhere: it pays very well. US “detransitioner” Chloe Cole recently revealed that she earns roughly $200,000 a year flying around as a guest of the Christian Right trying to get trans people’s healthcare banned; other anti-trans grifters are raking it in too.

    Being hateful is no longer a hobby; it’s a career, and a lucrative one.

  • Anatomy of a scandal

    This, by Lydia Polgreen, is superb: The Strange Report Fueling the War on Trans Kids. It’s about the Cass Review.

    As much as Cass’s report insists that all lives — trans lives, cis lives, nonbinary lives — have equal value, taken in full it seems to have a clear, paramount goal: making living life in the sex you are assigned at birth as attractive and likely as possible. Whether Cass wants to acknowledge it or not, that is a value judgment: It is better to learn to live with your assigned sex than try to change it. If this is what Cass personally believes is right, fair enough. It can charitably be called a cultural, political or religious belief. But it is not a medical or scientific judgment.

  • Who goes Nazi?

    Via Benevolent Siren on Bluesky, here’s a piece written by Dorothy Thompson in 1941: Who goes Nazi?

    Mrs. E would go Nazi as sure as you are born. That statement surprises you? Mrs. E seems so sweet, so clinging, so cowed. She is. She is a masochist. She is married to a man who never ceases to humiliate her, to lord it over her, to treat her with less consideration than he does his dogs. He is a prominent scientist, and Mrs. E, who married him very young, has persuaded herself that he is a genius, and that there is something of superior womanliness in her utter lack of pride, in her doglike devotion. She speaks disapprovingly of other “masculine” or insufficiently devoted wives. Her husband, however, is bored to death with her. He neglects her completely and she is looking for someone else before whom to pour her ecstatic self-abasement. She will titillate with pleased excitement to the first popular hero who proclaims the basic subordination of women.

    …the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis.

    Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi.

     

  • Cowards

    My youngest is obsessed with skating right now, and that means I spend a lot of time taking them to skate parks, pump tracks and so on. For a bit of variety yesterday we went to one of the more far-away favourites, a track near the national football stadium in Glasgow’s south side, and that’s where I had to have a conversation with my ten-year-old when they showed me a particularly prominent and vicious sectarian sticker and asked what it meant.

    There’s no need to detail what the sticker said; it was a threat of violence towards Catholics. But it’s a conversation I’d really rather not have with my kid on a sunny Sunday morning.

    There’s something particularly repellent about bigots’ stickers, I think. They’re uniformly ugly, and they leave a mess behind – assuming you’re willing to risk taking them down, because since the days of the National Front there’s been the fear that there may be a razor blade underneath as a trap for would-be removers. They’re repellent because their vandalism is much more in-your-face than something sprayed on a wall.

    But I think what’s most repellent about them is the cowardice they demonstrate. At least spray painters risk being caught.

    What’s really sad about this sticker in particular is that when I saw it, my first reaction wasn’t horror but surprise: I’m used to removing a dozen or more bigoted stickers each and every week when I walk my dog near my home, but this wasn’t one I’ve seen before. That’s because the stickers I’m used to taking down aren’t anti-Catholic; they’re anti-trans. But the hatred and the cowardice are just the same.

  • Both-sidesing bigotry

    Stop me if you’ve heard this before: politicians, the BBC and the press are reporting outright bigotry as “concerns” and one side of a “controversy” or “debate”.

    Not genital-obsessed weirdos this time, at least not today, although I’m sure the Venn diagram of those people and today’s bunch has a lot of overlap: this time the “concerned” people are the English far-right rioters who over the weekend assaulted multiple people of colour, looted shops, burned down a library and attempted to burn asylum seekers out of a hotel.

    According to BBC news reporter Phillip Norton far right rioters in Manchester were a “pro-British march”; Home Office minister David Hanson told LBC Radio that some rioters “might be people who’ve got genuine concerns” and The Telegraph front page described people of all faiths and none being attacked by white racists as “far right and muslims clash in fresh riots”.

  • A sperm donor, not a dad

    Update, 26/7: Vivian, Musk’s estranged daughter, has given an interview to NBC: “if you’re going to lie about me, like, blatantly to an audience of millions, I’m not just gonna let that slide.” 

    Elon Musk has given an appalling interview to the appalling Jordan Peterson in which he demonises and deadnames his trans daughter, claiming that she is the reason he’s become a far right nutcase. I’m paraphrasing, but only slightly. It’s nonsense, of course: Musk, who grew up the rich son of a racist family in apartheid-era South Africa, and whose factories are famously cesspools of racism, was right wing long before he had children.

    I didn’t catch the name of the author but a post I saw earlier today made me laugh because it was both funny and accurate: a significant part of right-wing ideology can be summarised by two phrases, “my wife left me” and “my kids don’t talk to me.” Musk ticks both boxes: not only is he estranged from his trans daughter, but his long-term partner dumped him for a trans woman.

    I don’t doubt that his daughter’s very public estrangement – she made it clear in her court documents that she did not want to be associated with him in any way whatsoever – and his equally public break-up made him angry towards trans people and trans women in particular; spending billions of dollars on Twitter to turn it into an anti-trans hate machine is not a choice made with a cool head.

    Musk’s ongoing, obsessive campaign of revenge – a campaign that threatens not just the safety of trans people but all marginalised people – is one of the most expensive and destructive temper tantrums in human history, and it is all about rage. It’s the rage of a parent whose child won’t do what they’re told, the fury of a patriarch denied the obedience they demand.

    By choosing to exercise her own independence and her own bodily autonomy, Musk’s daughter did the one thing he can’t abide, let alone forgive.

    She said no.

    No to the path Musk mapped out for her.

    No to the life Musk decided she should live.

    No to the body Musk wanted her to have.

    No to being property instead of a person.

    Like so many weak and furious men before him, Musk’s impotent rage has sent him straight into the arms of the far right. He no longer flirts with fascism; he’s in bed with it.

    Transphobia is often fascism’s nursery slope, its training wheels, the shallow end of its swimming pool. It’s the bigotry you begin with, the intolerance it’s generally okay to express – and when you get even the gentlest pushback for it, which of course you will, that’s when the real radicalisation begins. The far right does what it accuses its enemies of: it grooms you and builds an echo chamber around you and radicalises you ever further.

    The appeal of the far right to weak, angry men like Musk isn’t hard to understand: it tells you that nothing is ever your fault. It’s a fantasy of victimhood, of DARVO – deny, accuse, reverse victim and offender. It enables the most powerful people in the world to claim oppression by the least powerful and turns that power against the powerless, all the while chanting the abuser’s anthem: look what you made me do.

     

     

  • Ignore the experts

    There’s a good piece about the puberty blocker ban in The Guardian by Aidan Kelly, a doctor, in which he explains how we’ve ended up in the farcical situation where fashion writers, bigoted journalists and arrogant celebrities are considered experts in trans healthcare but clinicians and prestigious medical organisations are not.

    In this area of healthcare, like no other I know of, the professionals with the requisite expertise are positioned by their critics as having been “captured by ideology” and therefore lacking in credibility. Meanwhile, those without the expertise are positioned as “independent”, which critics argue makes them better able to evaluate the evidence – despite having never worked in the field and having no understanding of its complexities.

    This simply wouldn’t happen in any other kind of healthcare, but in the UK the entire discussion has been given over to people who get their information from Twitter. Which perhaps explains why there’s been virtually no reporting on the international condemnation of the Cass Review from health professionals, or of the extensive analyses that demonstrate that the government is prioritising ideology over evidence in its healthcare policies.

    There’s a good overview here, from the US organisation FAIR:

    Though there is much more evidence now to support gender-affirming care than in 2008, there is also a much stronger anti-trans movement seeking to discredit and ban such care.

    British media coverage has given that movement a big boost in recent years, turning the spotlight away from the realities that trans kids and their families are facing, and pumping out stories nitpicking at the strength of the expanding evidence base for gender-affirming care. Its coverage of the Cass Review followed suit.

     

  • Whitewashing

    If it weren’t so horrific it’d be funny: to counter whistleblowers’ claims that since the puberty blocker ban more than 16 young people on waiting lists have taken their own lives, the new government hastily commissioned a report to disprove their claims by, er, discounting the deaths of people on waiting lists.

    The report’s author follows many anti-trans activists and anti-trans journalists on social media (but not, as far as I can tell, any trans-supportive voices) and, as Professor Stephen Whittle points out, “makes no count of those lives [lost by people] on waiting lists, or [of] coroner’s reports or deaths reported in the media. That is not academic, it is a whitewash.”

    It’s very clear that despite the change of government, there has been no change of policy: dead kids are just collateral damage in this lethal culture war.