Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: LGBTQ+

  • Defending women and girls, sometimes

    It’s very telling that the most vocal self-appointed “protectors of women and girls” have nothing to say about the absolutely horrific production of AI-generated sexual abuse images of real women and children that’s happening on X on an industrial scale.

    As they continue to post on X, in many cases paying for the privilege to do so, the anti-trans activists, columnists, politicians and publishers are making it very clear that while the existence of trans women in public is beyond the pale for them, widespread image-based sexual abuse of women and children is not.

  • Junk science junked

    The genital obsessed weirdos’ crusade against trans people is global, so there have attempts to bring in a UK-style “emergency” ban on puberty blockers for trans kids in New Zealand as part of the moral panic there. But unlike the UK, whose judiciary seems to be an easy mark for junk science peddled by dubiously funded hate groups, that country’s High Court is having none of it.

    In a newly published judgement, the court ruled that there was “no evidence of a particular need to act urgently to prevent new prescriptions because of some immediate risk to physical health if young people commence treatment.” It also noted that “Puberty blockers are reversible. There is no evidence that they affect fertility. If they did, they would hardly be prescribed for children with precocious puberty and they have been prescribed for that purpose for decades.”

    The judgement continued: “The evidence relating to mental health outcomes suggests negative outcomes from a ban are a far more immediate concern.”

    In the words of the High Court, a ban on puberty blockers purely for trans kids is “discriminatory” because the supposed safety concerns are not being used to demand a similar ban for kids who aren’t trans.

  • What happened

    There has been a flood of despicable reporting around the Sandie Peggie employment tribunal, much of it by people who clearly didn’t let a minor matter such as reading the actual judgement get in the way of publishing their pre-written pieces. This, by Rivkah Brown, should make them ashamed of themselves. It won’t, because they’re too far gone. But what’s detailed in the tribunal evidence bears little or no relation to what the majority of the press wants you to believe.

  • “You’re not allowed in here.”

    TransActual have published a document detailing people’s experiences of Britain’s EHRC-approved crotch cops. It makes grim reading, and demonstrates yet again that the piss police will be coming for anyone considered not sufficiently feminine enough.

  • Criminal reporting

    The BBC’s coverage of the criminal Graham Linehan, who was convicted yesterday of criminal damage to a trans woman’s phone (but not of his years-long campaign of harassment against her, despite abundant evidence of that harassment), shows the reality of the supposed “pro-trans bias” of the corporation.

    The BBC news article about the court case has been repeatedly edited and now describes the young victim as “a biological male who identifies as a woman”. That’s language straight out of Sex Matters’ anti-trans activists’ style guide, and it flouts the BBC’s own style guide. The latter says:

    Transgender, or trans, is an umbrella term for a person whose gender identity differs from their sex recorded at birth. A person born male who lives as a female, would typically be described as a “transgender woman” and would take the pronoun “she”. And vice versa. We generally use the term and pronoun preferred by the person in question, unless there are editorial reasons not to do so. If that’s unknown – apply that which fits with the way the person lives publicly.

    There’s definitely bias at the Beeb. But it’s not in favour of trans people.

  • A state-sanctioned witch hunt

    The EHRC, which hates trans people, has leaked its trans guidance to The Times, which hates trans people, in an attempt to bully the Equalities Minister into approving it. But no amount of positive spin can hide the fundamental point: the EHRC wants trans people’s rights to access spaces to be dependent on how they look, and enforced by the public.

    They’re demanding a permanent, state-sanctioned witch-hunt by sour-faced curtain twitchers and SAVE ARE KIDS roundabout painters for whom anyone tall, butch, unconventional, not pretty enough, not white enough is Goody Proctor dancing with the Devil.

    Séamas O’Reilly wrote about this in the Irish Examiner earlier this year. As he says today, “Trans people and their cis women allies have been sounding these alarms for years. It now seems clear that the UK government took all these dire warnings as policy proposals.”

    We might also consider what this means for the millions of cis women who do not fit the standard, sexist notion of “femininity” which logic dictates they must be checked against… Too tall, perhaps, too strong-jawed, or short-haired — anything that one patron, one witness, one supermarket or leisure centre security guard might consider cause to question their femininity.

    And how might they prove their “real” gender?…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.

    This, despite the abundant and obvious evidence that it will lead to more harm and distress for all British women, cis or trans, as a consequence. We must surmise that the pain and humiliation of all people is worth it, so long as trans people feel it most fiercely.

    This is the world view of the people popping champagne outside the courts, or cackling with glee on their superyachts, rejoicing as Keir Starmer says “trans women are men” while demanding he roll back trans rights even further, and apologise for ever advocating for them in the first place.

    The same people who’ve so thoroughly debased this debate that sensible moderates can profess nothing but mealy-mouthed agreement alongside quiet calls for “calm” and “dignity”, without realising this is offering us a choice between those who light cigars as they legislate trans people out of the public square, and those who say they’re awfully sorry while they do the same.

  • Twenty-eight

    Section 28, the law that prohibited the “promotion” of homosexuality in schools and libraries, was scrapped on this day in 2003 (three years after Scotland repealed the local version, Clause 2A). I’ve written about it a few times now, including in the anthology Twenty-Eight.

    Section 28 came into force just as I was leaving school, so it didn’t affect me directly. But the climate that created it – the viciously anti-LGBTQ+ newspapers, the viciously anti-LGBTQ+ politicians – damaged an entire generation of queer people. As I wrote in my contribution to Twenty-Eight:

    Section 28 was largely a creation of the right-wing press, and many of the people, publications and proprietors who contributed to the anti-gay panic back then are at the forefront of the anti-trans panic today…

    It’s all so horribly, sickeningly, wretchedly familiar. Once again we are told we need to “protect children” from a sinister “lobby”, an evil “ideology”. And once again that poisonous narrative is peddling hatred towards the entire LGBT+ community. Just look at how supposed “reasonable concerns” about trans kids’ healthcare have become death threats to Drag Queen Story Hours, at the widespread use of “groomer” against LGBT+ people and allies online, at the growing number of reported anti-LGBT hate crimes. What’s printed in tabloids and broadsheets is amplified on the streets. And as US Republicans are currently demonstrating in states such as Alabama and Arizona, Tennessee and Texas, worse is coming.

    Abolishing Section 28 didn’t abolish homophobia, transphobia or any other -phobia. It just told the people who had those views, that quarter of the population that voted to keep the clause, to be quiet about it. And now those people are being given permission to be loud all over again.

    I wrote that in 2022. There’s no joy in being able to say “I told you so”.

  • A fantasy of victimhood

    There are some fascinating reports in the latest edition of the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies, including a piece about the LGB Alliance’s Role in the UK Media’s Anti-Trans Moral Panic and this in-depth analysis of radicalisation on sites such as Mumsnet.

    It describes how posters attempt to reframe themselves as victims rather than victimisers, to depict themselves as brave, marginalised people silenced by assorted imagined oppressors rather than the vicious bullies they have so gleefully become.

    This isn’t a new observation, of course: we’re familiar with DARVO (deny, accuse, reverse victim and offender) as one of the most favoured tactics of the genital-obsessed weirdos and grifters. But this is much more in-depth.

    we encountered story after story of posters who—as they became further entrenched in GC [“gender critical”, aka transphobic] community practices—found themselves alienated from their families, friends, and coworkers.

    These heartwrenching narratives intentionally confuse the axes of oppression.

    The tragedy of GC members’ vacillation as victim-aggressor is that GCs claim that they are the ones being oppressed even as they publicly dramatize, with pride, their harassment of strangers and coworkers and the emotional abuse of children and partners.

  • Hearsay

    The BBC has been captured by the sinister trans lobby, a new report being pushed by the right-wing press claims. The report, by Michael Prescott, provides no convincing evidence of that – because of course it isn’t true. The BBC is one of the main vectors of anti-trans propaganda, taking its cue (and many of its contributors) from the right-wing press. And it’s been doing it for years, laundering the bigotry of genital-obsessed weirdos as “reasonable concerns”, publishing and then defending groundless stories such as claims by sexual predators and anti-trans activists that trans women are rapists, and adopting the language and dog-whistles of the genital-obsessed weirdo brigade, such as “biological women” and “sex-based rights”. The brief window when trans people could get a fair hearing or accurate, informed coverage from the BBC closed a long time ago.

    Prescott’s view of trans people and the wider LGBTQ+ community is clear from his report: he reports as fact unsubstantiated and frankly ridiculous claims that there’s a rogue unit of LGBTQ+ people censoring the BBC’s news output; a feature about a trans wrestler is described as “gushing”; he claims there are too many stories featuring drag queens; and he is irate that the BBC dared to include a trans woman in a discussion about the Cass Review. He says that “too many of its staff have never considered the idea of “gender identity” to be either spurious or offensive to many people.” Those “many people”, of course, are the genital-obsessed weirdos.

    It’s not a report, it’s a whinge by someone who believes the BBC simply isn’t vicious enough towards marginalised people. And it’s being used as part of a culture war campaign to push the BBC even further to the right.

  • Years and years

    Various newspapers report that Glasgow councillor Chris Cunningham has disputed the terrifying 200-years-plus predicted waiting times for Glasgow’s Sandyford clinic, claiming that the waiting time is six to seven years. And that means he’s either ignorant or deliberately misleading people, and so are the newspapers – because the evidence shows that if you’re referred to Sandyford today and the clinic’s desperate, years-long understaffing isn’t addressed, you’ll wait your whole life for an appointment that will never happen.

    Cunningham is quoting the text published on the Sandyford’s website, which says:

    We are currently allocating appointments to those referred during the following periods:
    Adult Gender Service Waiting list: November 2018
    Young Person Gender Service Waiting list: November 2019

    But the report that he’s disputing isn’t about the wait time for people who joined the waiting list six or seven years ago, some of whom – but not all of whom – are finally getting first appointments. It’s about the wait time for the people being added to the waiting list today.

    Thanks to freedom of information requests we know that the Sandyford clinic is barely seeing anybody. It saw fewer than 24 new patients in a year while over 500 new patients were added to a waiting list that now exceeds 4,000 people.

    What happens to waiting lists when more people are added than you’re seeing? They get longer.

    The core problem here, as with other gender clinics, is desperate understaffing, and that’s something we’ve known about since at least 2016: as The Guardian reported over nine years ago, gender clinics were already struggling to provide healthcare for what everybody knew was only a tiny but fast-growing proportion of the trans population because of a lack of capacity, and of suitably trained and qualified staff.

    The charity GIRES said at the time that the most conservative estimate of the trans population would mean around 130,000 people seeking medical assistance from a system already struggling to cater for just 15,000 people; the actual numbers could be much higher, with figures from other countries indicating that roughly 1% of people are trans.

    We could have fixed the roof when the sun was shining, but of course we didn’t. So what everybody said was going to happen happened.

    I referred myself to Sandyford in 2016 and had my first appointment in 2017, a wait of eleven months.

    Had I referred two years later, in 2018, the waiting time had grown from 11 months to seven years – so if I were one of the lucky few, I’d be getting a first appointment round about now.

    And if you’re being referred to the same service today?

    The 2016 Guardian report cites concerns that some trans people might have to wait 4 years for a first appointment. Today, the average UK wait time based on current clearance rates is 25 years. If you’re referred to Sandyford today and nothing changes, you can expect a first appointment in 224 years.

    The NHS waiting list target from referral to first appointment is 18 weeks.

    We know the solution to this, because it’s in effect in many other countries: basic healthcare like HRT is prescribed and monitored by ordinary GPs through an informed consent model, not through the bottleneck of overloaded and understaffed clinics. GPs have capacity issues too, I know, but not remotely on the same scale as the gender clinics.

    The only difference between the prescription and monitoring of my HRT and that of any other women is that my GP refuses to do it.