Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • The body for bigotry

    Marcus Daniel has written a damning summary of how the Equalities and Human Rights Commission has been poisoned: what was created to promote equality has been cynically and deliberately infested with people who are bigoted not just against trans people, but against all kinds of marginalised groups. The result? An equalities body that’s actively hostile to equality; an anti-discrimination body that pushes discrimination.

    The EHRC was set up in 2007 to ensure there is no discrimination based on nine protected characteristics of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation. It took over the responsibilities of existing separate commissions for for Racial Inequality, Equal Opportunities and Disability Rights. It’s fair to say it’s been downhill ever since.

  • Lying by omission

    Journalism pretends to be fair and independent, but much of it isn’t: you can easily shape a story by choosing to include some things and exclude others. And there’s an excellent example of that in today’s newspapers, or rather there isn’t an excellent example of that in today’s newspapers.

    The ongoing employment tribunal of the deeply unpleasant Fife nurse Sandie Peggie has been the subject of intense daily coverage in all of the UK and Scottish press. Peggie was abusive to a trans doctor, Beth Upton, and was disciplined for that. But most of the newspapers’ coverage attempts to paint Upton as an aggressor and Peggie as her victim. Peggie is being represented by a director of the papers’ favourite anti-trans hate group Sex Matters and the case is widely believed to be funded by a very famous millionaire.

    The judge has effectively allowed the tribunal to become a show trial of Peggie’s victim; in addition to allowing misgendering and deadnaming by Sex Matters’ lawyer, the tribunal refused to grant the doctor anonymity to protect her from exactly the co-ordinated media and social media abuse she’s been subjected to.

    The papers clearly believe that this story is so important that it justifies blanket coverage including live blogs from the tribunal. And yet there are no headlines in the major newspapers today of the most explosive testimony yet, which came from Peggie herself yesterday. During an absolutely astonishing session she revealed herself to be bigoted against all kinds of people. She used multiple racist slurs, admitted to Islamaphobia, and generally revealed herself to be bigoted against multiple marginalised groups. This follows on from other witnesses producing evidence of her posting sick, racist jokes about dead Pakistanis and saying that she wanted to post bacon through the doors of a mosque.

    This is very inconvenient for the newspapers that have lionised Peggie as a feminist Jesus; The Scotsman and The Herald have repeatedly hailed her as a pure, innocent victim of the evil trans mafia. And as a result, they have looked at the most newsworthy testimony from the entire tribunal and simply ignored it.

    It’s not just the Scots press. The Daily Mail and the Telegraph have been equally obsessed, and yet there’s nothing about the racist comments in either print edition today.

    This is what newspapers do when the truth gets in the way. They bury it. And if that means burying people too, so be it.

  • “40 years on, are we really doing this again?”

    Jessica Harriet writes about Labour’s new Section 28, which is designed to dehumanise and harm trans kids. 

    Clause 72 is an ambiguous mess, purposefully leaving headroom for the removal of LGBTQIA+ books should they include a representation of transgender people, family members, friends, or history. Granting schools and parents enough plausible justification to censor inclusive materials, whilst claiming it is for protection. And in doing so, they declare the acknowledgement of gender diversity as an inherent danger, restricting a minorities representation to age requirements and trigger warnings.

    …In stark parallel to Section 28, trans education is framed as a form of “indoctrination” or, as they politely put it, “encouragement.” Just as Thatcher’s government deemed queer identities a threat to ‘functioning’ society, the RSHE guidance implies trans visibility as a suggestive wrong, a political contagion.

  • A tsunami of scaremongering

    There’s a good piece in Assigned Media: “A Shameful Chapter”: How Anti-Trans Disinformation Drowned Out Science and Gripped the Mainstream. It’s about the US but relevant to the UK too: our media is just as captured, and their reporting is helping the right-wing attacks on trans people’s human rights and healthcare.

    It takes one pseudoscience peddler and uses their activities to show:

    “the reach and coordination of right-wing lobbying groups, their determination to spread medical disinformation to promote political goals, and their success in getting that message adopted in mainstream media — not simply in friendly outlets like Fox but in emerging power centers like the Free Press, and even traditional media like The New York Times.

    This pipeline of disinformation, which has elevated extremist views and undercut medical science, has had devastating effects on hundreds of thousands of trans Americans, most acutely young people, and their families.”

  • Home is where the hate is

    One of the anti-trans groups favoured by health minister Wes Streeting is the Bayswater Support Group, some of whose members advocate child abuse in order to make children “accept biological reality”. And in a new, heartbreaking report by Trans Safety Network, some of those kids describe how the group radicalised their parents into increasingly cruel behavior and opened the door for far-right extremism.

    A very familiar pattern emerges: increasing alienation, paranoia, cruelty and conspiracism as people get drawn deeper into radicalisation and further from reality.

  • Doing the devils’ work

    During her appearance in front of the Women and Equalities Committee last month, EHRC head Baroness Falkner told MPs that the EHRC had an 81% approval rate; the implication, which Falkner did not correct or clarify, was that this figure represented public polling.

    Thanks to another freedom of information request, we now know that it doesn’t: the figure comes from the EHRC’s own “media sentiment analysis” which “measures the tone and favourability of media coverage about EHRC, not public polling”.

    In other words: the newspapers that hate trans people are pleased that the EHRC is actively helping their war on trans people.

    “Positive media sentiment has improved from 35.2% in 2021-22 to 80.6% in 2024-25”. When that media is waging war on a marginalised group that the EHRC is supposed to protect, that should be cause for resignation, not celebration.

  • They’re coming for you too

    Amnesty International has published a new report on the anti-rights movement that wants to take us all back to the 1950s.

    A powerful anti-rights movement is growing in the UK, threatening to roll back our hard-won freedoms and rewrite the rules on whose rights, bodies and lives deserve protection. 

    …These groups spent a staggering £106 million between 2019 and 2023, an increase of over 33%. All with the aim to undermine our freedoms, restrict access to essential healthcare and roll back the rights we’ve fought hard to win. 

    …The growing anti-rights movement in the UK, emboldened by what is happening in the US and increasingly well-funded, is targeting reproductive freedoms, access to abortion and the rights of LGBTI people. Their end goal is to roll back our hard-won rights, undermine equality protections and rewrite the rules on who deserves dignity and freedom.  

    We must name this threat for what it is: a deliberate and coordinated attack on human rights, led by actors who are weaponising misinformation, fabricating moral panic about abortion care and LGBTI people and exploiting existing prejudice to sow divisions and distract us from the real issues that matter.   

  • Captured

    Thanks to freedom of information requests, we can now see how the Equalities and Human Rights Commission has been captured by anti-trans lobby groups via its own anti-trans employees – including the Commission’s head. As TACC.org.uk reports:

    we obtained a trove of correspondence between EHRC senior leadership and the gender-critical lobbying group Sex Matters, with repeated appearances by Transgender Trend and its director, Stephanie Davies-Arai. These aren’t brief emails from junior staff. They include private meetings arranged with the EHRC Chair and CEO, backchannel lobbying, and full acceptance of policy proposals well beyond what would be expected in a public consultation.

    …This isn’t just about emails. This is about a public body entrusted with safeguarding the rights of all of us, especially the most marginalised. And it’s about that body allowing itself to be steered by one political faction, behind closed doors, while hiding behind procedural language and vague promises of balance.

    Sharing the article on Bluesky, TACC wrote:

    Sex Matters and Transgender Trend were given privileged access: private meetings, letter exchanges with the Chair, and the right to bypass consultation rules. Their language appears, almost verbatim, in EHRC policy… This is not independence. It’s regulatory capture. It’s bias in plain sight.

  • Now they’re banning the books

    BBC: “A council has removed all transgender-related books from the children’s sections of its libraries, its leader has announced.”

    It’s Reform, inevitably, and there’s lots of questions about this particular story: my gut feeling is that it’s social media posturing, because the only book I’ve seen cited wasn’t a children’s book and wouldn’t have been in the children’s section of any library. But there is still an important point here:

    Creating a moral panic around children’s books is how Section 28 started.

    As I wrote in Fierce Salvage, the anti-trans panic is bringing bigotry back to the mainstream:

    While hate crimes against the entire community continue to rise, the media and ministers tell the nation to fear the victims of hate, not the people purveying it. And when you listen to the callers and contributors to Scots radio shows or read the columnists and commenters on Scots newspaper websites, something becomes clear: if the Section 28 ballot were happening today, too many of our politicians, public figures and peers would be voting to keep it.

    Bringing bigotry back has been the goal of the genital-obsessed weirdos all along.

    We’ve been saying for years now that history is repeating: the anti-gay, anti-lesbian demonisation of the 1980s has simply been wrapped in “gender-critical” ribbons. And this is a very clear demonstration that book-banning by bigots, a key part of trying to eradicate LGBTQ+ people, is not just a US phenomenon.

  • A red flag alert

    The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security has published a red flag alert regarding trans and intersex people’s human rights in the UK.

    All of the actions described above fit neatly into the 9th Pattern of Genocide: “Denial and/or Prevention of Identity.” As we have repeatedly stated over the years, genocide does not only manifest in the killing of an entire group. In the case of trans and intersex people, genocide is often perpetrated by making it impossible for individuals to exist as their true selves. The erasure of a group from public life is a step towards an attempt to erase that group’s existence, which is the very definition of genocide.

    …No denial or omission in law can erase the concrete reality that trans and intersex people have always and will always exist. Attempts to erase them as a class constitutes an intent to commit genocide.

    The Lemkin Institute joins many other organisations including the British Medical Association, ILGA-Europe and Human Rights Watch as well as 18 independent UN HR experts in condemning the UK government, judiciary and media’s war on trans and intersex people.