Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: LGBTQ+

  • “They didn’t just make me worse. They made me like them.”

    There’s a powerful essay on Assigned Media by Magdalene Visaggio about the death of Lindsey Graham, a terrible, hateful man, and her reaction to it.

    Visaggio writes about trying to be a good person, the kind of person who doesn’t speak ill of the dead, the kind of person who tries to see the good in even the worst of us. But Visaggio is trans, the kind of person Graham and other evil people have spent years harming.

    Yet here I am. Cheering and joking and mocking, fruit flying from my hand, hating this man who, unlike those I once prayed for, has never to my knowledge actually murdered anyone. He died, and all I can say is I wish it had happened sooner, and been more humiliating. I gleefully entertain fantasies my editor has asked me to cut from this text. Ten years of public scorn and mockery for trans people as a category and for myself personally showed me how. Ten years of being told we are affronts to God, a danger to children, sick, deluded rapists have been my education. I have, at last, learned how to hate.

    Ten years after I transitioned, I am a better person in countless ways – but in this, the most important one, I am worse. Ten years of abuse at the hands of bigots and opportunists, ten years of eliminationism, ten years of my own father’s endorsement of these people; all of that has taught me to hate, to hate fiercely. To wish ill. To dream of the moment I can say, at last, these fuckers are dead, and it is better this way. Do you understand? They didn’t just make me worse. They made me like them.

    I’m nine years in rather than ten, but I feel that way too. I’ve been taught to hate, and I hate it.

  • The ban that isn’t a ban

    Labour have published their draft bill on banning conversion therapy, and as expected it does nothing to protect trans people: there’s a huge carve-out for healthcare providers that’s so wide it means any quack can call themselves a provider and continue to torture kids. The “ban” is also worded in such a way that it could be used to attack gender-affirming organisations such as support groups, which means that it will be used to attack gender-affirming organisations such as support groups.

    The fact that it’s a draft bill means that any action could still be several years away, but it’s already served its purpose: it’s generated lots of headlines saying that Labour is banning conversion therapy, even though it isn’t.

    The reason it’s not a complete ban is because conversion therapy for trans people is now government policy, delivered on the NHS. It’s not the “abusive” therapy described in the draft bill, which doesn’t really exist any more: we’ve largely stopped giving trans people lobotomies, aversion therapy and electro-shock treatments. But a series of counselling sessions with a nicely spoken doctor trying to convince you that you’re not really trans is still conversion therapy.

    I saw it described well on social media earlier: imagine a smacking ban that said smacking was fine if the kid deserved it.

  • Queerphoria is out in paperback today

    On a hot day like today, what could be better than hiding from the sun in your local queer bookshop and picking up a copy of Queerphoria, which is out in paperback today? If you buy it online, I’d recommend Bookshop.org: it gives a cut to independent booksellers and you can nominate your preferred one.

  • No harm done

    There’s a fascinating interview with Hilary Cass with the BBC that makes it very clear that her report, used to justify a ban on puberty blockers, was policy-based evidence making: she admits that “we genuinely don’t know if there are harms” from prescribing puberty blockers to trans kids. The medicine remains available to cisgender kids (ie, kids who aren’t trans and who get them to prevent precocious puberty) because there’s no evidence that their potential harm outweighs their measurable benefits.

    As Assigned Media notes:

    The Final Report of the Cass Review concluded that the evidence for gender-affirming treatments was insufficient and called for further research. Notably, it found no evidence of harm whatsoever, alongside weak evidence of some benefit. To justify restricting care, the report focused on the possibility that some young people who grow up to be trans adults might not have been trans if they were denied the ability to socially or medically transition. Buried in the appendices, the report found fewer than 10 trans youth in the entire country who had detransitioned… The lack of evidence was used to support a care ban, which activists have twisted into a claim that the treatments were found to be harmful, which in turn is fueling the effort to prevent them from even being studied. 

    One of the reasons puberty blockers were previously prescribed, and why they continue to be prescribed in less backwards countries, was to give kids breathing space to explore their gender and make informed decisions about their future before puberty made irreversible changes. Now they’re banned, Cass says, “we have young people turning up in the clinics on testosterone at 11”. Well, yes. Because puberty blocking is no longer an option and almost all of the kids previously prescribed puberty blockers went on to take the appropriate hormones they needed. Cass saw the blockers-to-hormones pipeline as a problem rather than proof that trans kids were who they said they were.

    It’s the next quote that really shows her true colours: for those kids “it may be that if they were prescribed puberty blockers instead, that would give more time for the therapist to work with them and perhaps come to a different solution than a long-term life on medication.”

    She’s describing conversion therapy.

    Most trans kids become trans adults – the “desistance” rate among trans kids prescribed puberty blockers is exceptionally low. Describing being trans as “a long-term life on medication” as if it’s a problem and making it clear it’s an undesirable outcome tells you exactly what Cass thinks, and why she’s the face of policy that causes incredible cruelty to children.

  • A cosmic thing

    I went to see The B-52’s last night, a band I’ve long loved but never seen live. They were huge fun, but the show was also very emotional for me. The band’s fifth album, 1989’s Cosmic Thing, was very important to me when I was a lot younger, and was the soundtrack to a long summer mostly spent with my best friend, the two of us unsuccessfully trying to meet girls.

    There’s a real melancholy to the album – it was the band’s first after the death of their innovative guitarist, Ricky Wilson – and that melancholy is amplified for me because the friend who let teenage me play Cosmic Thing constantly on his car stereo died far too young a few years ago.

    There’s a strange feeling seeing The B-52’s live, partly because the band were already nostalgic when they began: their vibe is a stylised, almost mythical 1950s America of B-movies and jukeboxes and beach parties. So in a way, seeing them in 2026 is nostalgia for something that was already looking back decades.

    It’s complicated for me too because in 1989 I was still battling against being me, and for a long time I’ve considered Cosmic Thing not just the soundtrack to part of my old life, but also the soundtrack to the life I never got to lead, the hot girl summer I never got to inhabit. The “wild girls” of Deadbeat Club talking a mile a minute, dancing in torn sheets in the rain, crashing “that party down in normal town”; the same girls in Dry County sitting on the porch, swinging, to chase away blues that “whomp you up on the side of the head.” I heard myself in those songs, and felt pure joy in songs like Roam and Topaz. 

    I didn’t know the background to the album at the time; speaking in 2023, Cindy Wilson said that “It was very depressing days. It was a dark time. It was just so awful with what was going on with the AIDS epidemic and so many lost loved ones and friends. We were all so depressed and didn’t know what was going to happen.” AIDS took their friend and guitarist Ricky Wilson, as well as many of their friends in the wider world. 

    As Pete Crighton writes in his 33 and 1/3 book about the album, “dark times are when queer people find their strength. It’s the dark times, when we’re backed into a corner, that we come out swinging the hardest. Just ask Marsha P. Johnson, or any of the heroes of the Stonewall uprising. Instead of hiding their heads in the sand, or quietly fading out of the pop culture landscape and letting their catalogue languish in the remainder bins, the B-52s decided to go to work. Whether it was conscious or not, they resolved to fight through their grief and show the world that queer people would be visible, that they would dance, that they would sing, and in the face of tragedy, they would still find a way to smile and honour their friends.”

    I almost didn’t go to the show last night because I was sad; once again, these are dark times. But I’m glad I did, because at long last I was able to hear songs live that have lived in my head for decades and dance to a band who can turn sadness into joy. As Crighton says of Cosmic Thing: “There is real emotion. Real depth. Real tenderness. And a whole lot of horniness.”

  • Two lies

    Helen Belcher for Byline Times on the two lies being pushed by the EHRC:

    The position the UK now is in is driven by two big basic lies. The first is that the Equality Act was actually an act which excluded trans people from single-sex services and spaces aligned to their lived in gender but that the courts, Parliament or the EHRC, had somehow not noticed this until last year. The second lie is that trans people are always identifiable, and when they aren’t, they’re intentionally deceptive.  

  • Queerphoria starts today

    I’m delighted to be one of the contributors to Queerphoria, a new anthology of queer writing from Verve Books. £1 from every copy sold goes to Switchboard LGBT+. The eBook is out worldwide from today and the UK print edition comes out on 25 June. It’s getting rave reviews from readers and from publications such as DIVA, and it’s a genuinely excellent anthology with a huge range of voices.

  • 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.”