Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • Cass, peer reviewed

    A new peer review of the Cass report yet again shows that it was a political exercise designed to rubber-stamp the government’s war on trans people and our healthcare. The report’s conclusion is damning:

    Our critical analysis reveals significant methodological problems in the commissioned systematic reviews and primary research that undermine the validity of the Cass report’s recommendations. During our review of the report and supplementary primary research, we found insufficient statistical rigor, unreliable datasets, claims presented without evidence, and misrepresentation of quotes from primary research participants.

    Cass should have been struck off for this. Instead, she was given a peerage.

  • Sturgeon speaks out

    In Carrie Kills A Man I wrote about meeting Nicola Sturgeon in 2019 as part of a group of trans and non-binary people; I said that my impression of her was of a genuine ally, but that many in her government were not. As The National reports, she’s spoken out about the Supreme Court verdict and the attempts to spin it into trans segregation.

    She told reporters on Tuesday: “The Supreme Court judgement by definition is the law of the land.

    “The question for me, and I think for a lot of people, is how that is now translated into practice. 

    “Can that be done in a way that protect women and also allows trans people to live their lives with dignity and in a safe and accepted way? I think that remains to be seen.

    “I think some of the early indications would raise concerns in my mind that we are at risk of making the lives of trans people almost unliveable and I don’t think the majority of people in the country would want to see that.

    “It certainly doesn’t make a single woman any safer to do that because the threat to women comes from predatory and abusive men.” 

  • The big reveal

    The anti-trans groups have taken what’s left of their masks off: in a joint letter to the head of NHS England and to trans-hating health minister Wes Streeting, Sex Matters, the LGB Alliance, Transgender Trend and Genspect claim that because they’ve achieved a legal victory that will make life much harder and more miserable for trans people, the justification for transition-related healthcare “has fallen away”.

    Or to put it another way: “it’s unethical to expose trans people to the hatred, misery and discrimination we’ve campaigned to inflict on them, so they shouldn’t be helped to transition.”

    This particular letter is about puberty blockers for trans kids, and demands that the NHS trial to assess their safety should be halted. But the same argument will be used to demand the end of all healthcare for all trans people. Other key figures in the “gender-critical” movement, people who have the government’s ear, are now arguing that trans people should be considered criminals committing “gender fraud”.

    It was never about protecting women, or protecting children.

    It’s about eliminating trans people.

    There’s a word for that.

    As the Lemkin Instutite for Genocide Prevention said of the “gender-critical” movement in 2022:

    The gender critical movement simultaneously denies that transgender identity is real and seeks to eradicate it completely from society…

    The ideological constructions of transgender women promoted by gender critical ideologues are particularly genocidal. They share many features in common with other, better known, genocidal ideologies.

    Transgender women are represented as stealth border crossers who seek to defile the purity of cisgender women, much as Tutsi women were viewed in Hutu Power ideology and Jewish men in Nazi antisemitism.

    Trans people in general are framed as figures that threaten the wholeness of the patriarchal nuclear family as well as the strength and vitality of national communities, much in the way that ethnic and national targets of genocide are viewed as cosmic enemies of the perpetrator group.

    Like the religious targets of genocidal violence, trans people are often described as somehow polluted, sinful, or against God. They are blamed for a host of social problems that have nothing to do with them or with the free expression of their identities.

    The Lemkin Institute reminds readers that one of the first libraries to be burned under the National Socialists in Germany was the library and archive of Magnus Hirshfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, a groundbreaking research organization studying human sexuality and gender. The Nazis, like other genocidal groups, believed that national strength and existential power could only be achieved through an imposition of a strict gender binary within the racially-pure “national community.” A fundamentalist gender binary was a key feature of Nazi racial politics and genocide.

    Don’t ever claim you didn’t know, or that nobody tried to raise the alarm.

  • How it happened

    Juliet Jaques has written a terrific feature detailing exactly how the anti-trans takeover of the press and politics happened in the UK. And it’s been going on longer than you might think: while it really kicked into gear in 2017, the foundations were laid long before.

    The article details how trans writers were pushed out of media, how trans people’s voices were excluded from stories about them, and how fake grassroots groups were able to do so much damage to established LGBTQ+ advocacy organisations. But while the piece is detailed and evidenced, the gist of it is this:

    Our enemies didn’t look at publications that were platforming trans people or parties that were supporting trans rights and then vacate the battlefield – they drove us out and made our sympathisers afraid to speak up.

  • Basic biology

    The bigots are furious with doctors who dare to challenge their primary school-level understanding of human biology. Resident doctors of the British Medical Association approved a motion yesterday that called the Supreme Court verdict – which repeatedly used the term “biological women” but seemed unable to say what that actually meant – “scientifically illiterate” and “biologically nonsensical”.

    The anti-trans groups have of course lied about what the motion said, claiming that doctors said there was “no basis” for biological sex. But that’s not what the text said. It said:

    We recognise as doctors that sex and gender are complex and multifaceted aspects of the human condition and attempting to impose a rigid binary has no basis in science or medicine while being actively harmful to transgender and gender diverse people.

  • Illegal, immoral, hateful

    At 10pm on Friday night the equality and human rights committee published an interim update – not guidance, let alone statutory guidance – about trans people’s access to services and facilities. The document is not law, makes no sense, and flies in the face of settled law. But the goal is to persuade people that the law has changed, and that they should act immediately to ban trans people from public facilities.

    It’s nonsense. It says that trans people should be excluded from the toilets that match their gender, but can also be excluded from the toilets that match their assigned sex at birth. It says that gay men’s choirs shouldn’t include trans men, and that lesbian book clubs shouldn’t include trans women.

    It’s a sadistic fantasy written by people put in place specifically to wage war on trans people and trans women in particular as part of the Tories’ “war on woke”. In a fairly short period of time the Tories changed the EHRC from an independent human rights watchdog to an arm of the government, with many senior officials quitting in disgust. It now works closely with anti-trans pressure groups for the removal of trans people’s legal protections.

    To illustrate just how ridiculous and hateful things have become: in 2016 the UK government issued a travel warning for North Carolina and Alabama over their newly implemented anti-trans bathroom bans. Today, the UK government is being urged to, and seems inclined to, implement even more regressive bans here.

    There’s incredible outrage over this among people who aren’t trans and who know bigotry when they see it, although inevitably it’s not being reflected in the UK press. But the Irish Examiner’s Séamas O’Reilly puts it very clearly.

    Let us speak as adults. Despite being around 0.5% of the population, trans people have spent the past decade being attacked in one of the most flagrant moral panics ever perpetrated on the British public.

    Spread in the name of a “feminism” centred on a small, committed group of active transphobes backed by the entire might of British politics and media, including every misogynist you can name; either because they share this gut-level hatred of trans folks, or simply because it serves their political interests to heap sadism on a vulnerable minority, instead of addressing the multiple overlapping crises that face the British public, and in which they are directly complicit.

    The only way any of the absurdities of this ruling make sense, is if its aims are exactly what they appear to be: A punitive attack on the rights and dignity of trans people divorced from any real-world concern about safety or women’s rights, designed to demoralise and punish them simply for the crime of existing.

    If this madness is signed off by Labour it guarantees a kicking in the EU courts, because it’s a clear breach of EU-wide human rights legislation. But it will really harm lots of people in the interim. Not just trans people, but anyone who attracts the wrong kind of attention from self-appointed bathroom bouncers.

    Few MPs and MSPs care about trans people’s human rights and safety. But they care about staying in power. And that means you can put pressure on them by making it clear that this horrific bullying of marginalised people needs to stop.

  • “A defeat for all women”

    Writing in The Nation, Sophie Lewis delivers clarity about the UK Supreme Court judgement.

    The fact, already now, is this: If I am perceived not to be what I say I am, and I don’t have the relevant documents, I can be strip-searched by male transport police, and legally barred from single-sex spaces. Trans people will, of course, continue to live lives of authenticity, but make no mistake: Everyone’s bodily autonomy is curtailed (especially those of us who, cis or trans, are poor, undocumented, racialized, intersex, gender non-conforming) by the cisfeminist diktat against non-cis humanity’s existence in public.

  • Hiding in plain sight

    As of yesterday, Observer columnist and leader writer Sonia Sodha, LGB Alliance co-founder Malcolm Clarke, Rosie Duffield MP, For Women Scotland and many other very high-profile “Gender Critical” figures were still following Nicola Murray on X/Twitter.

    Murray is one of Scotland’s best-known anti-trans activists; she was one of the key figures in the witch-hunt against Mridul Wadhwa, the trans woman driven out of her job at a rape crisis centre in Edinburgh.

    And as Edinburgh Live reported last week, Murray was arrested in 2022 for, and has now been found guilty of,  “a shocking campaign of physical and sexual abuse against four children” over a 20-year period, and placed on the sex offender’s register. The case was reported in other regional newspapers and in both The Sun and The Times, at least in Scotland. But the non-Scots who follow her on X will know about the case too, because she was posting about her trial while it was ongoing.

    Imagine the immediate and ongoing outrage if Murray were a trans woman: the furious phone-ins, the condemnation in endless columns, the social media hashtags, the demands for the government to do something, the calls to place her in a male prison to protect women. But of course, she isn’t trans, so none of that is going to happen. The “gender-critical” movement wants you to hate imaginary monsters, not actual ones. And that makes it an excellent place for real monsters to hide.

  • “A victory for uncertainty, division and harassment”

    Helen Belcher on the Supreme Court verdict and its horrendous aftermath:

    The UK has moved into a space where all women, trans or not, will now be legally judged on their appearance.

    …I, and every other trans woman I know, will continue to use women’s facilities. I’ve done it without any problems for over 20 years. I’m not going to stop now. The risk I now run, which wasn’t the case before Wednesday, is that I now fear harassment and worse should I do so. 

  • Clarity

    The Supreme Court decision to effectively destroy the Gender Recognition Act and reverse the Equality Act has been described in newspapers as bringing “clarity”, which is ironic: it’s created anything but, and the anti-trans groups and their pals in the press have used the judgement to spread lies.

    One of the biggest lies is that trans women are now banned from women-only services. While the Supreme Court verdict is incredibly anti-trans, it doesn’t go that far: it says that if a service provider chooses to exclude trans women, it can do so without breaking the Equality Act. But the Act still says that such exclusion must be a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim, and blanket exclusion is unlikely to satisfy that condition. And trans people are still protected under the characteristic of gender reassignment.

    That may well change, and the EHRC – whose head was given the job specifically because she’s a transphobe, whose own staff have accused her of deliberately setting out to undermine trans people’s rights, and who has made it very clear that she is using the equalities body to attack trans women – is certainly going to craft guidance to try and change that. But the guidance is currently unwritten and has to be approved by Parliament.

    It’s also important to note that the Supreme Court decision is only about the Equality Act. There are many other pieces of legislation that affect trans people’s rights.

    Just because bigots want something to be true doesn’t mean it’s true. Even if – especially if – it’s printed in the UK press.

    That doesn’t mean the Supreme Court verdict isn’t horrific, at odds with the intention of both the GRA and the EA, and introduces more confusion rather than clearing it up: its definition of “biological woman”, for example, is effectively “we know it when we see it”. But be very wary of newspapers with an agenda parroting bigots’ wish-lists and pretending they’re law.

    It’s still a very bleak day for trans people, and for cisgender people too: the British Transport Police have already announced that they will have male officers strip-searching trans women; under the Supreme Court ruling, that means an officer can now molest any woman and claim he did it because she looked trans. There will be many more such examples, and many more cisgender women singled out because they’re tall, or masculine-looking, or Black. And there will be more legal attacks not just on trans people’s rights, but on human rights more widely.

    Here’s long-term human rights campaigner Jane Fae on the decision:

    I think the strategy of the anti-trans all along has been to swamp the UK with money – dark money, far right money, evangelical money – to reverse what they see as the evil of “gender theory.” Which also includes gay marriage, and women’s rights: they’ll be back for those later.

    And this post is very good too: The UK Supreme Court destroys 20 years of legal rights for trans people in 20 minutes.

    The odious and gleeful head of the EHRC continued that a complete ban of trans women from women’s toilets and changing rooms in British society was on the way, hinting ominously also that a review of gender ID change per se was in the pipeline. To the question of where trans women are supposed to urinate now, she replied that ‘maybe trans activists should campaign for a third space?’  That’s the head of Britain’s Equality body removing a minority from society and sneering at us. It’s not even that she doesn’t care. She’s loving it.

    …there is no reasoning with the people who have driven it all, in our country and in others.