Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • Misreporting

    Let’s do this again, shall we?

    There have been a spate of important trans-related stories in the press this week, and predictably they have all been misreported.

    First up, after a long inquiry into the trans charity Mermaids, the Charity Commission found no evidence of the wrongdoing alleged by anti-trans activists and their pals in the press. Complaints that the charity did not have effective safeguarding policies or that it had inappropriate ties to gender identity clinics were unfounded. The commission tried very hard to find evidence of those things because it really, really wanted to – during the inquiry one member of its staff, clearly an anti-trans activist, forgot to use their own personal account and was caught retweeting an unfounded allegation against the charity on the Commission’s own social media – but failed.

    That’s not to say Mermaids is perfect. It isn’t, and there were failings identified in its management. But the core allegations that have been in the press for two years now were bullshit.

    It’s also worth noting that yet again, the BBC reporting of this is using anti-trans activists’ dog-whistles: we’ve previously had “gender ideology” used to describe trans people existing, and now we have “trans-identified” to describe trans kids. The use of “trans-identified male” and “trans-identified female” are common in bigot circles; the terms are intended to delegitimise trans people and suggest they’re not trans.

    Next up: another bigot fucked around and found out. In yet another case reported widely as a nice teacher losing their job just for saying “sex is real” or misgendering a student, Camilla Hannan has been barred from teaching. And if you look at what the tribunal found rather than what the press is telling you it found, you’ll see that Hannan outed one of her LGBTQ+ students online – a massive safeguarding breach as well as horrific behaviour for any teacher – and that her remorse appeared to be “self-serving”: the judge suggested that “Miss Hannan’s remorse stemmed from being caught, rather than from reflections on her own behaviour.”

    Over in The Atlantic, Helen Lewis claimed that when Donald Trump said this week that “Your child goes to school, and they take your child. It was a he, comes back as  a she. And they do it, often without parental consent”, “lines like this would not succeed without containing at least a kernel of truth.” It does not contain a kernel of truth.

    Lastly, we have the inquest into the murder of trans teen Brianna Ghey. In a report that went out of its way never to describe Brianna as “she”, a girl or a young woman, The Times focused on the real victim here: her killer. He was “set for Oxbridge” and was “a good child with good morals”. That’s good morals as in spending “weeks plotting Brianna’s murder after drawing up a ‘kill list’” and then stabbing her 28 times. The good-morals bit is from a statement by the boy’s mother, who of course is going to come to her child’s defence. But the tone of the reporting here and elsewhere strongly suggests that the real tragedy as far as the press is concerned is not that a young trans girl is dead, but that two cisgender people are in prison for killing her.

  • The real trans healthcare scandal

    More than 200 trans people (that we know of) in the UK have been refused basic healthcare by their GPs, in many cases after years of receiving that healthcare. A new report (PDF) by TransActual goes into detail: in most cases it’s not that new requests are being refused; it’s that existing healthcare is being stopped unilaterally by GPs. Almost half of the people who spoke to TransActual had been receiving the care for more than 5 years.

    I’m one of the people who’s been refused healthcare, and like many others I’ve been told it’s because of guidelines by the Royal College of General Practitioners, now clarified to make it clear that trans people’s healthcare should not be stopped. Others – adults – have been told that it’s because of the Cass Review, which was a (worthless, politicised) study of adolescent services and didn’t look at adult healthcare at all. Some have been told that their GP “doesn’t believe in” gender clinics.

    In Edinburgh, the gender clinic has stopped all surgical referrals for adults under 25 – again, citing the Cass Review. Meanwhile at current clearance rates the Glasgow gender clinic will see you for a first healthcare appointment seven years after you’re first referred, if indeed your GP will refer you; the reason we had self-referral, which has now been stopped, was because bigoted GPs were refusing to refer trans people.

    Stopping or refusing basic trans healthcare isn’t just dangerous and unethical. It is in defiance of the General Medical Council, which tells doctors that “you must not refuse to provide a patient with medical services because the patient is proposing to undergo, is undergoing, or has undergone gender reassignment.” And it’s the result of endless scaremongering and demonisation in the press and by politicians.

    You’d think that GPs deciding to stop treating hundreds of patients would be news. But of course, the papers who should be reporting this are the ones responsible for it.

    In the 1990s, the Labour government had to be dragged kicking and screaming through the European courts to give trans people basic human rights. It looks like history is repeating. And in the meantime, trans people will suffer.

    I try not to wish ill on people. But I hope that every so-called gender-critical columnist, celebrity and politician experiences all of the pain they want to inflict on trans people. May they never know peace.

  • Acting up

    On Friday, a group of trans kids disrupted the conference of everybody’s favourite pretendy-gay organisation, the LGB Alliance, by releasing thousands of crickets into the white-haired audience shortly after JK Rowling delivered a short speech from her luxury yacht.

    The LGB Alliance is, of course, the Tufton Street-based, dubiously funded anti-trans organisation who admitted in court that the overwhelming majority of its supporters and members are straight, who misled the Charity Commission that a venomous troll was no longer connected with the organisation when in fact he is their Director of Research, and whose Irish division has been classified as an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. As infamous anti-trans activist Kellie-Jay Keen noted on Twitter, at the event “most attendees and volunteers seem to be straight women.”

    The organisation and its supporters were quick to condemn the protest, with some claiming it was a “biohazard” and others doing the usual nonsense about violent transes silencing legitimate concerns. But if the LGB Alliance really were a gay rights organisation it’d be familiar with the tactics, which were used by organisations such as ACT UP! and the Lesbian Avengers against previous generations of bigots. The use of crickets to disrupt a meeting was a clear echo of the same tactic the Lesbian Avengers used in the early 1970s in a protest against conversion therapy.

    When it comes to queer activist groups such as The Lesbian Avengers, the LGB Alliance wouldn’t even need to Google to find out about them: they could just ask one of their earliest and most prominent members, JK Rowling’s charity partner Baroness Nicholson, who was at the event. Nicholson, who as an MP voted against equal age of consent, voted for Section 28 and denounced lesbian families as “neither normal nor natural” knows the Lesbian Avengers well: she was the subject of one of their protests, which they held on her front lawn in 1995.

  • 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”.