Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • Another stitch-up

    Today’s papers are giving lots of space to The Sullivan Review, the latest anti-trans stitch-up initiated by the previous government under the banner of “kicking woke ideology out of science” and amplified by the current Health Minister. Transactual:

    Prof. Alice Sullivan is a prominent anti-trans activist and advisory group member of the leading anti-trans lobby group, Sex Matters, notable for her work on UK literacy. The report also contains legal advice written by the husband of the Chair of the Sex Matters’ Trustee Board, Naomi Cunningham, and research was commissioned for the review to an organisation led by fellow member of the Sex Matters’ advisory group Lucy Hunter Blackburn.

    Here’s data expert Kevin Guyan:

    The DSIT and UK Government, researchers, funders and public bodies need to recognise this Trumpian intervention for what it is: an attempt to erase trans and non-binary people from existing in data.

    It, the Cass Review and the forthcoming Levy Review of adult healthcare are all part of the same project: to drive trans people out of public life in the UK.

  • Stateless

    There’s a powerful piece in the New York Times by Massa Gessen: The Hidden Motive Behind Trump’s Attacks on Trans People. It argues that the Trump administration’s war on trans people has a goal, which is to “denationalise” trans people.

    The message, consistent and unrelenting, is that trans people are a threat to the nation. The subtext is that we are not of this nation.

    By making people “not of this nation”, you can remove all of the rights that apply to citizens of that nation.

    We’re seeing exactly the same playbook here in the UK, partly because it’s being orchestrated by the same people and seeded via the press in the same way: an attempt to make trans people a group who are excluded from society, undeserving of the rights, freedoms and protections others enjoy.

    Messe could make the familiar argument here – comparing the Trump administration to the Nazis and arguing that “if you don’t stand up for trans people or immigrants, there won’t be anyone left when they come for you” – but chooses not to:

    It is undoubtedly true that the Trump administration won’t stop at denationalizing trans people, but it is also true that a majority of Americans are safe from these kinds of attacks, just as a majority of Germans were. The reason you should care about this is not that it could happen to you but that it is already happening to others. It is happening to people who, we claim, have rights just because we are human. It is happening to me, personally.

  • Nothing is erased

    One of the many bullshit stories pushed into the press by genital-obsessed weirdos and their pet minister Wes Streeting this week has been the idea that transgender doctors are hiding evidence of terrible misdeeds by changing their gender.

    Headlines such as “GMC erases records on doctors who change gender”, “Doctors who change gender have wrongdoing ‘erased’ from public record, GMC admits” and “Fury as it’s revealed medics’ disciplinary records are ERASED from public view when they change gender” might lead you to believe that when a doctor transitions, their disciplinary history is deleted.

    Nope. Writing to Streeting and the UK’s other health secretaries last week, the GMC explained that yes, transitioned doctors get a new GMC identification number in order to comply with the law and protect their privacy. But “their fitness to practise history and any risk they may still present to the public attaches to an individual and remains the same whether or not their gender identity changes… all fitness to practise history is accurately displayed on the records of all of those doctors and no fitness to practise history has been removed or suppressed.”

    What’s going on here isn’t just the press happily spouting whatever bullshit the hate groups come up with, although that’s a huge and ongoing part of it. It’s that the press is actively collaborating with hate groups to paint *existing while trans* as deviant and dangerous.

    The implication of “erasing” records – and of words such as “wrongdoing” – is that all trans doctors have something to hide. The reality is that trans doctors, like trans people more generally, are being targeted by bigots simply for being trans.

    The same thing is at the root of the current high-profile, celebrity endorsed NHS tribunals which, thanks to some appalling judicial decisions, have been turned into show trials against individual trans women who are being defamed and demonised not just on social media but in the pages of newspapers too. The goal is to enshrine in law the idea that the very presence of a trans woman at work is terrifying and traumatic, and that as a result banning trans women, or refusing to hire trans women, is both reasonable and proportionate.

    There’s been some really horrific persecution of trans people in the US in just the last week: a trans military ban, a de facto ban on trans people getting visas that attempts to define being trans as committing fraud, a ban on all trans healthcare in some states, mass sackings of LGBTQ+ government employees, and much more.

    All of these things are on the British bigots’ list of demands too. Which perhaps explains why so-called “gender critical” women journalists in the UK press have been filing columns about how in their eyes Donald Trump is a feminist hero.

    None of this is about “reasonable concerns” or protecting anybody from anything. It’s about eradicating people from society. Trans women are the first targets, but they won’t be the last.

  • Erasing history

    One of the key moments in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights was the Stonewall uprising, five nights of resistance in 1969 after the cops picked on patrons of the Stonewall Inn one time too many. Trans people and drag queens were among those targeted by the cops, who used anti-queer legislation – at the time, the law stated that people must wear at least three pieces of “appropriate” clothing according to their birth sex – to harass and humiliate them.

    If you think of Stonewall, you’ll probably think of trans women: two of the most iconic figures from the LGBTQ+ rights movement, Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.

    This week, the US National Park Service, the US government agency that looks after the Stonewall monument, has erased all mention of trans people from its website. It then returned and removed all references to queer people too.

    It’s ineptly done, leaving sentences such as “fighting for gay and rights”. But as symbolism goes, it’s hard to beat.

    Parker Molloy:

    This is just the latest and perhaps most symbolically potent step in the administration’s methodical campaign to eliminate trans people from public life entirely. Since January 20th, we’ve witnessed an unprecedented assault on trans existence: The State Department has frozen all transgender passport applications. The Social Security Administration has banned gender marker updates. The military ban on trans service members has been reinstated. Schools have been ordered to out trans students to their parents. Federally-funded hospitals have been banned from providing gender-affirming care to trans youth.

    The scale of this is staggering. Federal agencies across the board have been ordered to scrub their websites of any content related to gender diversity. The CDC’s LGBTQ health resources? Gone. The Department of Education’s guidance for supporting LGBTQ students? Vanished. Even Census.gov temporarily went dark as they purged references to gender identity from their systems…

    This matters because when you erase a group from the past, it becomes easier to erase them from the present.

  • Turkeys celebrate Christmas

    With depressing predictability, the leading lights of the UK anti-trans mob and their pet journalists are celebrating the inauguration of Trump and downplaying or making jokes about copying Elon Musk’s nazi salutes. In particular they’re celebrating the newly signed executive order designed to drive trans people out of society – an order that makes it very clear, once again, that they’re turkeys voting for Christmas.

    The executive order is a mess, of course, bigoted, and often horrendously unscientific. But it also contains something very important: a definition of men and women. And in the order, personhood begins not at birth, but at conception.

    It’s important to read that in context. The context is:

    “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female… the following definitions shall govern all Executive interpretation of and application of Federal law and administration policy”.

    All interpretation and application of law and policy. Not just the anti-trans bits.

    That’s not an accident. It’s because the people writing Trump’s policy are also coming for abortion and contraception and women’s rights, like they’ve been promising they would for the best part of a decade now, like we’ve been trying to tell you for the same period of time.

    Chase Strangio, writing in TIME:

    It might be easy for people to dismiss the impacts of sweeping anti-transgender policies since, despite this outsized fixation we provoke in our opponents, we only represent .6% of the U.S. population. However, none of these rhetorical, political, or legal attacks on transgender people will ultimately end with us. The anti-trans rhetoric that fueled the 2024 elections was accompanied by a larger message about how men and women are supposed to act, live, and raise families.

    Strangio quotes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who said of banning trans girls from sports:

    “What this also opens the door for is for women to try to perform a very specific kind of femininity for the very kind of men who are drafting this bill, and to open up questioning of who is a woman because of how we look, how we present ourselves, and yes, what we choose to do with our bodies.”

    The people celebrating the assault on trans women in the US have paved the way for an assault on all LGBTQ+ people and on cis women as well as trans women. And they’re trying to do the same in the UK.

    Update, 23/1/25

    Well, that didn’t take long: Trump’s wrecking ball has come for more of women’s protections. Trump has ordered the end of Lyndon B Johnson’s Executive Order 11246, which forbade federal contractors from discriminating on grounds of race, colour, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity. It’s part of the wider destruction of diversity programmes, the biggest beneficiaries of which – for decades – have been white women.

  • The other N word

    The press’s determination not to call Elon Musk’s Nazi salutes Nazi salutes is quite something. The Telegraph used the phrase “a hand gesture that some critics have likened to a fascist salute”; The Daily Mail “an ‘awkward hand gesture’ that some have likened to a Nazi salute”; The Times said that “commenters on social media suggested it looked like a fascist salute” and The Sun said that “some said he had made a stiff-armed Roman-style salute”.

    If you’re wondering why it’s so hard for newspapers to accurately report something for which there is photographic and video evidence, and which millions of people saw clearly with their own eyes, a big part of it is money: under UK libel laws, someone with Musk’s money can financially ruin any media organisation that he decides to target. It doesn’t matter if what they report is true; what matters is that he has the resources to ruin them.

  • A shameful fraud

    Yet another damning review of the Cass scandal has been published, this time in the New England Journal of Medicine. The publication is one of the world’s most respected peer-reviewed journals, and in a better world this article would be the final stake through the Cass review’s heart.

    The article says that Cass’s report “transgresses medical law, policy and practice… deviates from pharmaceutical regulatory standards in the United Kingdom. And if it had been published in the United States… it would have violated federal law.” The review misrepresented data to arrive at conclusions the data did not support, it did not follow established scientific methods, it did not follow international publication standards and is so clearly a stitch-up that “observers must speculate about who else participated in the manuscript’s drafting — and whether they held bias against LGBTQ+ people.”

    The review was a foregone conclusion, as Kemi Badenoch has already admitted; its job was to rubber-stamp transphobia, and anti-trans activists were deliberately placed in “the positions that mattered most in Equalities and Health.” It is as unscientific and as wicked as the anti-trans measures Donald Trump is expected to announce in the US later today, measures that will make the lives of trans and non-binary people immeasurably harder and will undoubtedly kill some and damage more for no reason other than bigotry and cruelty.

  • Panic

    The coverage of, and social media commentary on, a trans girl being stabbed in England is bringing back an old and poisonous trope: the gay panic defence.

    The gay panic defence, and its trans equivalent, asks people to agree that gay and trans people are so disgusting, so repellent, so predatory that their very existence sends straight and/or cis people into such a panic that they commit extreme violence. In this example, the line is that sure, a young woman was sexually humiliated, lured into a trap, beaten and stabbed. But she brought it on herself because she was trans.

    Even if the underlying bigotry were true, which of course it isn’t, this wasn’t a crime committed in the heat of the moment over an unwanted advance. A man received oral sex from a trans girl he wasn’t sure was trans, was embarrassed about it later, and conspired with his friends to get revenge. That’s not a panic.

    Again and again the gay/trans panic has been used to excuse violent men – and it’s usually men – who’ve committed terrible acts of violence against LGBTQ+ people. And that’s exactly what’s happening around this horrific attack.

    This matters more widely because there’s currently an issue – driven, inevitably, by the genital-obsessed weirdo brigade – over whether trans people are deceiving sexual partners if they don’t first disclose that they’re trans. New guidance from the CPS hasn’t really helped, as it suggests that in some cases the law might decide that it does.

    One of the key cases here wasn’t about trans people; Justine McNally was a teenage cisgender girl who pretended to be a teenage cisgender boy and had penetrative sex with another cisgender girl. The court found that McNally violated consent because she had lied about her sex and gone to great lengths to deceive her sexual partner even during penetrative sex. And in the minds of the genital-obsessed weirdos, all trans women do that all the time because to them, all trans women are and will always be men irrespective of hormones, surgery or anything else.

    It doesn’t matter who you are or what body parts you may or may not have or whether you’re one of the hottest women who ever walked the earth; what matters is what the hospital wrote down on the day you were born. And if you don’t disclose that to men, even if it’s just a one-night stand? Then you deserve anything bad that happens to you.

    And that’s where a lot of the horrific response to the stabbed girl is coming from. In the minds of the anti-trans mob, the girl is a predator; she obtained sex by deception, performing oral sex on a boy who she had tricked into believing she was female (because for the mob, no trans girl is or can ever be female). What he and his friends did was bad. But what she did was worse.

    This isn’t just incredibly bigoted. It’s incredibly dangerous, because when you combine it with the trans panic you give men a green light to be violent to any women who are trans.

    Which, of course, is what the bigots want.

  • Victim blaming

    The Mail, the Telegraph and the Times are all framing a horrifically violent attempted murder in the same way: they’re blaming the victim. Of course they are. She’s trans.

    [I don’t usually come back and edit posts but I’m going to fix this for clarity the day after posting it, because it was written in a hurry and got the timeline slightly wrong.]

    The attack was on a teenage girl who’d been flirting with a young man. He’d been told that she was trans, but when he asked her if that were true she said no; the girl had previously been attacked for being trans and seems to have been concerned for her safety if she’d said otherwise. They kissed, and the young man asked her to perform oral sex on him. He filmed the act without her knowledge or consent and shared it online on Snapchat.

    When the video circulated, the young man was told again that the girl was trans. He asked her again, but this time he told her that he’d stab her if she lied. So she said yes, she was trans. The young man and his friends then conspired to lure her into a trap.

    The girl was jumped in the street by the young man and several other people in a sustained attack during which she was stabbed multiple times, stamped upon, kicked and robbed. Their friends filmed the attack and shared it online; the most violent of the attackers, the one who brought a knife it to stab her, was a young woman who later posted a Snapchat story which included footage of the attack, an image of the victim on a ventilator and a number of transphobic slurs.

    The Mail describes this as being targeted “over her trans identity lie”; The Telegraph says she was stabbed “after lying about her gender”. The Times puts the last two words in quote marks but the headline is still “Transgender teenage stabbed 14 times by Snapchat gang ‘for lying’”.

    The Metropolitan Police rightly called it a “horrendous and violent assault on a young woman, motivated by the fact she is transgender”. But the response on social media and Mumsnet is to call the girl a rapist, say that the attempted murder was her own fault and demand her prosecution for not disclosing her gender history to the young man who filmed her performing oral sex without her knowledge or consent and who conspired to plan her attempted murder. His criminal behaviour doesn’t matter; she, the self-proclaimed defenders of women say, was asking for it. She had it coming. Although of course they don’t call her “she”.

    This is the world that “gender critical” journalism has created: a world where trans kids are beaten up if they tell people they’re trans and stabbed if they don’t. The UK press and the bigots they platform have blood on their hands.

  • A girl called “it”

    Platformer has obtained what it calls “the dehumanizing new guidelines moderating what people can now say about trans people on Facebook and Instagram.” Examples include “trans people aren’t real. They’re mentally ill”, “a trans woman isn’t a woman, it’s a pathetic confused man” and “a trans person isn’t a he or a she, it’s an it.”

    The report says that Meta’s chief marketing officer Alex Schultz, the firm’s highest-ranking gay employee, has suggested that for FB and Instagram users, “seeing their queer friends and family members abused on Facebook and Instagram could lead to increased support for LGBTQ rights.”

    It’s not just trans people. It’s pretty much anybody who isn’t MAGA. And it’s not really new, because marginalised people have been trying and failing to get Meta to moderate hate speech for a long time. But what’s different is that this is now policy, and the policy explicitly says that hate speech is fine when directed towards specific minorities.