Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: LGBTQ+

  • This is what oppression looks like

    Brynn Tannehill on fiery form in Public Notice:

    One of the most popular and profitable grifts in the world of the religious right and MAGA is the production of propaganda to convince Christians that they are horribly discriminated against, or even oppressed, by the government and government funded entities.

    …This victimhood narrative is central to their identity. But it also raises the question: would they recognize what actual oppression looks like?

    Sadly the article is just as relevant in the UK.

  • 17,000 articles to make a moral panic

    QueerAF:

    Seventeen thousand articles were published about so-called ‘trans issues’ by just four British newspapers in five years, according to new research from Amnesty International UK.

    The four newspapers – The Sun, The Times, The Guardian and The Telegraph – mentioned JK Rowling 106 times in their coverage, with 202 mentions of a prime minister or political party leader.

    Trans people themselves were mentioned by name just 24 times. Sixteen of those mentions were murdered teen Brianna Ghey, and eight were convicted rapist Isla Bryson.

    Most of the media reports in the four newspapers, between 2020 and 2025, had a negative sentiment about trans people. When trans people were mentioned in reporting it was as criminals or murder victims, the research found.

    The same report found that the number of anti-trans groups dedicated to attacking trans rights had increased from 3 in 2017, when gender recognition reform was first mooted and widely supported, to 51 today. Three of those groups have spent £3.6 million between 2019 and 2024.

  • “The most aggressively anti-trans developed democracy in the world”

    Liberal Currents:

    “A very small group of very well connected people, funded by international fascism, have decided that trans identity is, at best, a delusion that has been tolerated for far too long. In the space of a few years they have been able to reorder our society and politics to effectively segregate them.

    …This is not a hypothetical. You are less free now. Your security, dignity, and safety is in the hands of nasty, petty, monumentally stupid bigots. They can take it from you at a whim.”

  • Foxes in the hen house

    TACC has answered an important question: how did the EHRC Scotland suddenly become hostile to the trans people it’s supposed to protect? The answer, at least in part, is that a high profile anti-trans activist became one of their commissioners. As with the English EHRC, the body has become captured by “gender-critical” activism.

    TACC:

    it is difficult not to draw the obvious conclusion: that the appointment of Mandy Rhodes – a political commentator by background, with absolutely no stated experience or expertise in the field of equality or human rights, but with a prolific, half-decade+ output of anti-trans articles in the mainstream media – was entirely designed to serve the ideological objectives of a captured EHRC. 

  • The Office for Students learns a lesson

    The High Court has reversed the Office for Students’ (OfS) decision to fine Sussex University over half a million pounds for supposedly suppressing free speech (ie, not stopping people from criticising a vocally transphobic academic). The verdict is damning and makes it very clear that the OfS was operating from a position of blatant bias and a desire to set a chilling precedent: the OfS had a “closed mind” and a predetermined strategy.

    As the University put it in a statement:

    The Court’s judgement is a comprehensive vindication of that position. It is a devastating indictment of the impartiality and competence of the OfS, implicating its operations, leadership, governance, and strategy. It raises important and urgent questions for the government as it plans to grant ever more powers to the regulator. 

    The High Court found that the OfS erred in law in respect of its jurisdiction, in its interpretation of the law, and its understanding of freedom of speech and academic freedom, and that its process was fatally flawed by bias in the form of predetermination. 

    It’s important to understand that this is not a case of the OfS making a mistake. The OfS did exactly what the Conservative government wanted it to do, under the guidance of its head who was put in place specifically to wage a culture war on higher education. Exactly the same thing has happened in the BBC and EHRC and NHS, which is why those organisations have become the enemy of multiple marginalised groups. The Tories’ Kemi Badenoch boasted about doing this, but the current Labour government has done nothing to undo any of it. If anything, they’ve been even worse than the Tories.

  • One death would be too many

    This is a hard read: Trans people are dying of suicide more than the general UK population. And UK government policy, which is to deny trans kids healthcare, to underfund mental health provision and to push people into conversion therapy, is a key reason why that’s the case.

    Data obtained by freedom of information request from the National Child Mortality Database (NCMD) shows that between 2019 and 2025, there were 647 child suicides in England and Wales. Of these, 107 children were LGBTQ+ and 47 of those were trans – meaning that trans children make up 43% of LGBTQ+ suicides of under 18s, and 7% of all child suicides over this time period.

    …“Inquests into the deaths of young trans people have consistently exposed years-long waits for gender-affirming healthcare, and chronic under-resourcing of mental health and social services that leaves trans people without access to support they need,” says Deborah Coles, director at Inquest, a charity that campaigns on state-related deaths. “It is clear that too often, the deaths of trans people are preventable. We are at crisis point.”

  • Come out before you kiss

    There’s a good piece by Sasha Baker about how the UK has enshrined “trans panic” in law.

    Trans panic is a variation of the gay panic defence, which is a tactic used in murder and assault cases to blame the victim rather than the attacker. In the UK it’s sometimes known as the Portsmouth Defence. It argues that if a straight person experiences sexual advances from someone who is gay, or has sexual activity with someone they then discover is trans, any ordinary person would be so horrified, outraged and disgusted that they would lose control and beat, stab or shoot the gay or trans person. It’s been abolished as a legitimate defence tactic in courts in many countries, but in the UK it’s been enshrined in law.

    Baker:

    Watkin’s case is not – as it may first appear – an aberration. It is part of a long history where Trans+ people’s right to privacy has been trampled on to flatter cis people’s self-perception.

    The complainant’s assertion that he does not “swing that way” as he said in court, is one of the starkest examples of the legal system being wielded against a trans person to guard cis straight people’s sexualities. 

    …All we can really conclude from the available data is that if someone stabs you, the CPS is unlikely to prosecute you for being trans – but if you lie about your gender history to a sexual partner, even to protect your privacy, you could be facing jail.

  • Invisible

    It’s Trans Day of Visibility today, a day to celebrate trans people’s lives and raise awareness of discrimination. And like any other day, it’s a day when trans people continue to be invisible and powerless.

    There are no trans people elected to any of the UK’s parliaments; no trans columnists with regular gigs on national newspapers; no trans newsreaders or TV presenters or radio hosts in mainstream media.

    There are no trans people involved in decisions about trans healthcare on the NHS; no trans representation in courts deciding on our human rights; no trans judges in courts or tribunals; no trans voices in the endless obsessive coverage that is always about us, without us.

  • The “social media addiction” verdicts are not good

    Two things can be true at the same time. Meta (and other platform providers such as X) is a wicked and dangerous organisation that does wicked and dangerous things. And Meta losing in court over supposed “social media addiction” is bad because it will have chilling effects.

    Writing in the New Statesman, Séamas O’Reilly explains the incoherence of claiming that because adults are using social media to do bad things, we must ban children from social media.

    How, precisely, are age limits meant to stop adults from sending pictures of children, without their consent, to other adults? Here in the UK, we may see an echo of this incoherence in technology secretary Peter Kyle claiming that adults using age verification are keeping children safe. To which the only reasonable response is: how, exactly? The ongoing rush to ban social media for kids following the murder of Brianna Ghey – a teen who found her community online, before being killed, in real life, at the hands of transphobic bullies – leaves out how such a ban would stop this happening to another trans teen. The only plausible link, that consistent use of social media makes one transphobic and thus a danger to trans kids, seems unlikely to be what they mean, since this would require a social media ban for 80 per cent of this country’s broadsheet journalists and the entirety of the government’s front bench.
    It’s worth noting here that one of the people pushing for more regulation of kids’ internet use is Brianna Ghey’s mother, who has been recruited as a useful idiot by the pro-censorship lobby and as a human shield by incredibly transphobic politicians who’d like to see more trans kids’ lives ruined. Rather than campaign against the bigotry that played a part in her child’s death, it seems that Brianna’s mother is campaigning to deprive other trans kids of the online community and support that helps them stay alive.
    The vast, vast majority of those negatively affected by this precedent will be smaller platforms and websites currently publishing the kinds of content already being targeted by far right movements: pro-LGBT content, especially that related to trans rights, websites related to anti-racism, feminism or political progressivism, and material related to, or documenting, what’s happening in Gaza. We know this because those celebrating this precedent are the very same groups who have lobbied, with less success, to ban exactly this material through other means. 

    Mike Maznick of Techdirt (who is also an investor in the Bluesky social media network) has been covering internet regulation since the very early days, and he explains why Meta losing in court isn’t cause for celebration.

    if you care about free speech online, about small platforms, about privacy, about the ability for anyone other than a handful of tech giants to operate a website where users can post things — these two verdicts should scare the hell out of you. Because the legal theories that were used to nail Meta this week don’t stay neatly confined to companies you don’t like. They will be weaponized against everyone.

  • And now, the switch

    Two of the highest-profile anti-trans extremists in the UK have done what we always knew they would do: they’re standing alongside the religious right to restrict women’s reproductive freedom.

    The Times reports that Sharron Davies and the former EHRC chair Kishwer Falkner are demanding a ban on “pills by post” as part of a wider push to restrict women’s reproductive rights. Other proposed amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill include a mandatory police investigation into any girl under 16 who accesses a legal abortion and the creation of the first new abortion offence in 100 years.

    Davies has previously spread anti-abortion misinformation, claiming that in the UK we have “made it legal for healthy babies to be terminated up to the day before they’re due.” Since 1967 the limit in the UK has been 24 weeks unless there are serious fetal issues or risks to the mother.

    Not all anti-trans activists are focusing on removing women’s reproductive freedom, however. Some of them are going after immigration instead. Again, just like we knew they would.