Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • Losers

    This has been one of the most dispiriting elections I can remember; rather than voting for anything, a lot of people were voting against the Tories. And it was particularly dispiriting for LGBTQ+ people like me: of the seven candidates on my ballot paper, five of them were from parties who are a danger to trans people’s rights and healthcare – whether ideologically in the case of Alba and the tories, or cynically in the case of Labour. In the closing stages of the campaign, Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting both enthusiastically embraced transphobia in a very obvious attempt to woo the genital-obsessed weirdo vote.

    What’s particularly saddening about it isn’t the betrayal, as bad as that is. It’s that it was completely unnecessary.

    As in other countries where transphobia has been on the ballot, it proved last night to be a vote loser. Most elected transphobes are currently looking for new jobs; the few that remain saw a massive collapse in their share of the vote and their majorities.

    Single-issue anti-trans extremists lost their deposits in every single constituency they stood in, with few even achieving the same share of the vote as Phin “Barmy Brunch” Adams of the Monster Raving Loony Party, a man with a baked beans mask on his head who promised to Make Brunch Great Again.

    The extremists claim to be the voice of the majority. But the polls, and the votes, say otherwise. I really hope that of the lessons Labour will have learnt from last night, that is one of them.

  • Facts checked

    The US advocacy group GLAAD just published an absolutely blistering fact-check of a very biased New York Times article that was yet again scaremongering about trans healthcare for teens, part of an ongoing panic that the paper has been fuelling for 16 consecutive months.

    Among the key points is a staggering statistic. The number of trans teens getting gender-affirming surgery in the US, the subject of the endless why-oh-why articles in the NYT, is around 514 per year. The number of cisgender teens getting gender-affirming surgery, which includes operations such as breast reduction or breast enhancement, is 229,000 per year. And yet the NYT is not running any articles about that.

    That’s not the only detail in the GLAAD response. It points out, using much more temperate language than I’d manage, that the supposed expert quoted by the NYT is a shill for the Alliance Defending Freedom whose testimony has previously been thrown out of court because he has no expertise whatsoever in trans-related healthcare. And the writer of the piece has been called out again and again for sloppy journalism that appears to be driven by an anti-trans agenda.

    We don’t have GLAAD in the UK, but a post doing the rounds on social media currently names the key anti-trans writers who’ve been pushing the moral panic here – a panic that’s been implicated in the deaths of at least 16 people. And when you see them listed it’s notable how many of them are friends with one another; it’s saddening to see how few people it’s taken to wage war on trans people and open the door for the extreme right.

    As someone put it on social media, you could pretty much end the UK media trans panic by poisoning the cocaine at just one dinner party.

  • Dead children don’t matter

    If you were in any doubt that the trans “issue” is a moral panic and that trans lives don’t matter to almost all of the media, the UK newspapers have provided ample evidence over the last few days.

    Every single paper, not just the right-wing ones, has ignored the news that the puberty blocker ban has been implicated in the deaths of 16 children and that the NHS and Cass Review appear to have tried to cover that up; instead, they have devoted endless column inches to whether Labour can become hateful enough to trans people to satisfy JK Rowling.

  • “Protecting children”

    Content warning: this is very, very bleak.

    Jolyon Maugham of the Good Law Project has posted a lengthy thread about what appears to be a national scandal: the deaths of multiple young trans people since the NHS began restricting their healthcare, and the NHS’s ongoing attempts at a cover-up.

    I have now seen further evidence that, since the Bell decision in the High Court (1 December 2020), there has been a huge increase in deaths of young trans people on the NHS waiting list – and that NHS management has sought to suppress that evidence.

  • 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.