Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: LGBTQ+

  • “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. 

  • The self-pity party

    After the champagne celebrations, the hangover: the people who’ve spent the best part of a decade trying to remove trans people’s human rights and dignity have succeeded, and now they’re sad about it.

    Katelyn Burns, in the pithily titled You have no friends because you’re a transphobic asshole:

    The loudest TERFs are still not satisfied, and are still being shunned by their friends…

    In The Times of London, American writer turned British TERF Hadley Freeman lamented that none of her friends have come back to her to fete her and tell her how right she was all along about trans people. On socials, columnist Julie Bindel said she still feels lonely and unfulfilled in the wake of what should have been her best week ever.

    Famously unfunny prick Graham Linehan took to Twitter demanding apologies from all the family and friends that abandoned him as he lost his mind and became singularly obsessed with stalking trans women on women’s dating apps.

    All of these people are expecting vindication for their years long hate campaign against trans people, they want their old life back but also expect to wear their bigotry just a proudly on their sleeves. But there is no redemption arc here. You’ve made your deal with the devil and your soul is now his. Forever.

    These people haven’t lost friends and family members because of their beliefs. They’ve lost them because of their behaviour.

    Burns:

    I’ve watched from afar as TERFs bend every conversation back to their pet hatred, every online discussion thread has to tap into that dopamine reserve these people have in the backs of their minds where their hatred of trans people lives. Every online space that welcomes one TERF nearly always ends up as a completely TERF space because TERFs are incapable of having normal conversations with anyone.

    She’s right. If you look at non-obsessed people’s social media it’s a range of topics. With the anti-trans mob it’s anti-trans all the way down.

    Casey Explosion on Bluesky:

    Sorry you dedicated your lives to a fascist hate movement and cut everyone out of your lives that tried to get you to step back from that abyss and it’s making you miserable, but you did this to yourselves. Luckily for GCs, you can stop any time you want, a luxury you don’t afford your victims.

    Trans people though? We don’t get to opt out of this, we don’t get to walk away, but “Gender critical” hatemongers? You get to call it a day any time you want and move on with your lives. May I suggest getting a hobby that doesn’t involve advocating the extermination of other human beings?

    Burns:

    Whatever emptiness drove these people to TERFism will still be there even if trans people simply stop existing. The friends they drove away will not suddenly come back because they already saw the depths they were willing to plumb in order to kick out at one of the tiniest and most marginalized demographics in the world.

    Talia Bhatt, on Bluesky:

    The thing about the GCs is that they want to be hailed as great feminist heroes. They want to be petty and cruel and direct all their vicious bigotry and disgust at a tiny maligned demographic, with the backing of all the highest powers in the land, and be adored for it.

  • Violence

    In a full-page article in The Telegraph today, Sex Matters’ Maya Forstater claims that the tens of thousands of peaceful pro-trans protesters who took to the streets yesterday are a “violent mob” because one of the protesters scribbled on a statue with a bit of chalk.

    On Twitter today, Sex Matters supporter and washed-up former comedy writer Graham Linehan is urging his thousands of followers to physically attack any women they think may be trans.

  • 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. 

  • ”All will eventually fall”

    A superb piece by Morgan M Page on the Supreme Court shitshow.

    How this ruling will play out in the everyday lives of trans people across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland isn’t yet understood, but what is expected is that this will open up revision of the Equality Act, an important goal of Britain’s far right and their happy collaborators in the Labour government. By opening the door to revision on one characteristic of our primary human rights legislation, all will eventually fall. Sex, disability, race, religion — all for the taking. The irony that this challenge was brought forward by a group ostensibly trying to protect sex based rights sure will surely sting when it eventually causes all women to lose their rights entirely.

  • Despicable, predictable

    I wasn’t surprised by yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling, as horrifying, incoherent and discriminatory as it is; the verdict was never in question after the court refused to hear from any trans people or trans organisations but rolled out the red carpet for multiple anti-trans hate groups. Much of the judgement appears to have been copied and pasted from those groups’ documents.

    I’m getting very tired of saying this, but: the goal of the genital-obsessed weirdos is to eliminate trans people from public life. And the people funding them and celebrating their ill-gotten win won’t stop with trans people.

  • Demons, daily

    Researcher Lee Hurley tracks anti-trans articles in the English press, and the totals are in: in the last year alone, just three English newspapers – The Guardian, The Daily Mail and The Telegraph – ran 1,075 articles about trans people, almost all of them anti-trans. So if you’re a reader of any of those papers, you’re being sold an anti-trans story every single day.

    It’s a horrendous statistic but if anything it underplays things: just yesterday The Sunday Telegraph ran five anti-trans articles in a single edition. And the Scots press is similarly obsessed.

  • A tale of two ERs

    The Pitt has become one of my very favourite shows. It’s a hospital-set drama with a huge heart, originally conceived as a follow-up to the 1990s series ER in which Noah Wyle played a young doctor. Unfortunately – or fortunately, given the result – ER writer Michael Crichton’s estate nixed that so Wyle created a stand-alone series instead. This time around Wyle plays a grizzled veteran who’s trying very hard to keep it together while under incredible pressure. He’s fantastic, as are the rest of the ensemble cast.

    There’s a minor story in The Pitt featuring a transgender woman, and it’s really interesting to compare that with the trans storylines in ER. Because ER’s portrayal of trans and intersex people was vicious.

    [Content warning: slurs]

    Writing on Tumblr, Brin (aka Brinconvenient) describes multiple episodes of ER featuring trans, intersex and gender non-conforming people. The first, ER Confidential, was broadcast in November 1994. Brin goes into detail for that episode but to summarise: the trans woman is played by a cisgender man, she’s treated with disgust and hostility by the show’s stars, and she’s called a slur by one of the nurses. Her story arc ends with her jumping off the roof of the hospital because she’s too old and too mannish to be a believable woman.

    Brin was 16 at the time.

    Just think of the message this episode sends. Are you a young trans kid? Better transition while you’re young or not at all, because you’re on a clock – you have an expiration date. If you transition later, you’re just going to look like a man in a dress, everyone will clock you, everyone will find you disgusting, and they’re right too. You’ll get called names, you’ll get the barest modicum of tolerance, if you’re lucky, and even then, you’ll be kept at arm’s length.

    And hey, if you get old? Or older, really, because you don’t even have to be THAT old, then your life is over. It’s best just to kill yourself instead of not passing.

    I was an ER watcher too. So I got that message loud and clear – not just in that episode, but several times.

    There were plenty more examples.

    over 15 seasons, 331 episodes, ER had a total of 5 explicitly trans women and one explicitly intersex women (and zero trans or intersex men).

    None of them have a happy ending.

    As Brin says, “the general cis idea of trans people is informed by all of these Sad, Angst, Tragic Trannies ™”, and while things have got better we’ve had decades of this stuff in popular culture (I go into a lot of examples of that in both of my books). Other shows were just as careless/callous: for example NYPD Blue, another show I watched religiously, consistently showed trans people as sex workers, dead sex workers or ludicrous caricatures, had the star characters insult and misgender those characters, and titled a 2003 episode about the murder of a trans sex worker “Tranny Get Your Gun“. This was considered completely normal and entirely acceptable.

    I don’t know if Noah Wyle set out to try and do better now than his character did in ER. But The Pitt gets right what ER consistently got wrong.

    First of all, the trans woman is played by a trans woman (the luminous Eva Everett Irving). Tasha is a glamorous, likeable and fun character, a sommelier to the rich and famous. She’s not in the ER because she’s trans; she’s in the ER because she’s got a nasty cut on her hand. The hand is fixed, the deadname on her file is quietly corrected by one of the medical students, and she’s off again to her glamorous life. She’s not there to make the main characters sad, or to be a tragic figure. She’s just another patient.

    That shouldn’t be remarkable. But sadly, it is.