Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: LGBTQ+

  • Victim blaming

    The Mail, the Telegraph and the Times are all framing a horrifically violent attempted murder in the same way: they’re blaming the victim. Of course they are. She’s trans.

    [I don’t usually come back and edit posts but I’m going to fix this for clarity the day after posting it, because it was written in a hurry and got the timeline slightly wrong.]

    The attack was on a teenage girl who’d been flirting with a young man. He’d been told that she was trans, but when he asked her if that were true she said no; the girl had previously been attacked for being trans and seems to have been concerned for her safety if she’d said otherwise. They kissed, and the young man asked her to perform oral sex on him. He filmed the act without her knowledge or consent and shared it online on Snapchat.

    When the video circulated, the young man was told again that the girl was trans. He asked her again, but this time he told her that he’d stab her if she lied. So she said yes, she was trans. The young man and his friends then conspired to lure her into a trap.

    The girl was jumped in the street by the young man and several other people in a sustained attack during which she was stabbed multiple times, stamped upon, kicked and robbed. Their friends filmed the attack and shared it online; the most violent of the attackers, the one who brought a knife it to stab her, was a young woman who later posted a Snapchat story which included footage of the attack, an image of the victim on a ventilator and a number of transphobic slurs.

    The Mail describes this as being targeted “over her trans identity lie”; The Telegraph says she was stabbed “after lying about her gender”. The Times puts the last two words in quote marks but the headline is still “Transgender teenage stabbed 14 times by Snapchat gang ‘for lying’”.

    The Metropolitan Police rightly called it a “horrendous and violent assault on a young woman, motivated by the fact she is transgender”. But the response on social media and Mumsnet is to call the girl a rapist, say that the attempted murder was her own fault and demand her prosecution for not disclosing her gender history to the young man who filmed her performing oral sex without her knowledge or consent and who conspired to plan her attempted murder. His criminal behaviour doesn’t matter; she, the self-proclaimed defenders of women say, was asking for it. She had it coming. Although of course they don’t call her “she”.

    This is the world that “gender critical” journalism has created: a world where trans kids are beaten up if they tell people they’re trans and stabbed if they don’t. The UK press and the bigots they platform have blood on their hands.

  • A girl called “it”

    Platformer has obtained what it calls “the dehumanizing new guidelines moderating what people can now say about trans people on Facebook and Instagram.” Examples include “trans people aren’t real. They’re mentally ill”, “a trans woman isn’t a woman, it’s a pathetic confused man” and “a trans person isn’t a he or a she, it’s an it.”

    The report says that Meta’s chief marketing officer Alex Schultz, the firm’s highest-ranking gay employee, has suggested that for FB and Instagram users, “seeing their queer friends and family members abused on Facebook and Instagram could lead to increased support for LGBTQ rights.”

    It’s not just trans people. It’s pretty much anybody who isn’t MAGA. And it’s not really new, because marginalised people have been trying and failing to get Meta to moderate hate speech for a long time. But what’s different is that this is now policy, and the policy explicitly says that hate speech is fine when directed towards specific minorities.

  • A broken system

    Abigail Thorn, actor and writer of Philosophy Tube, posted a video two years ago about her (awful) experiences of the NHS. The short version: she demonstrated how the NHS is institutionally discriminatory towards trans people. So I imagine she was quite surprised when a very senior NHS figure approached her about being the face of a new campaign about changes in NHS trans provision.

    Thorn said no, and has written an article explaining why. Thorn is the first to say that there are some very good people working in the NHS, and in trans care specifically. But the organisation itself is broken, and treats trans people appallingly. And it’s getting worse.

    I’m writing this in my sixth month of having my basic healthcare refused by my GP, healthcare that the GP happily provides to dozens of cisgender people but which is apparently too difficult to provide to me. I’m a few months away from finally getting surgery I first asked to be referred for six years ago, a referral that was never made because the gender clinic doctor simply didn’t bother doing it, a mistake or deliberate omission that I didn’t find out about for two years. My next referral was delayed because the gender clinic made an appointment for the mandatory second opinion, never told me about the appointment, and then concluded that I had changed my mind about wanting referred because I didn’t attend. Another year gone.

    So it’s fair to say I’m sympathetic to Thorn’s argument.

    There are many problems with NHS care for trans people, and they’re about to get worse with a Cass-style stitch-up labelled as a review of adult care. That review isn’t going to recommend that the NHS does something about the infiltration of conversion therapists, or the humiliating assessments we have to go through, or the woeful lack of staff, or the waiting lists that mean many trans people will die before even having a first assessment. And it’s not going to do anything about making trans people’s access to care any easier, because as Thorn points out:

    every single person I have spoken to in the NHS- from local GPs to the National bosses- told me they are powerless. There is nobody at any level of the organisation who takes responsibility for the state the service is in and the suffering it is causing. Every single person blames the person above them, even the man at the top.

    …I agree with others who study this field that consultations and “stakeholder meetings” have become a form of abuse by the NHS and the government: we’re included nonperformatively – given time to speak in order to legitimise the process of ignoring us.

    In years to come, this will rightly be viewed as a scandal. But it’s going to harm many more people before that happens.

  • Sadistic pencil-pushers

    There’s a superb piece in Dazed by Sasha Baker, who explains how a vocal minority of religious and social conservatives has managed to dismantle trans healthcare and human rights in the UK without a single law being passed or revoked.

    The British gender critical movement purports to represent a silent majority, but knows it does not command enough support to publicly shred the documents guaranteeing our rights. Instead it has adopted the methods of sadistic pencil-pushers – its true constituency – burying human rights laws in reams of secondary legislation, statutory and non-statutory guidance, grey literature, and fudged equality impact assessments.

    As the article notes, a key part of that is the Cass scandal: a supposedly clinical review that was created and staffed in order to achieve a pre-determined political outcome, and which – despite repeated claims to the contrary in the press – found no evidence whatsoever that puberty blockers are dangerous or that their use should be curtailed.

    You’ll read a lot about “evidence” in connection with the Cass scandal. Here’s one of the crucial bits of so-called evidence on which Cass leaned heavily.

    In February, Sallie Baxendale, a psychologist, published a terrible academic paper that claimed to look at existing studies on the negative effects of puberty blockers on trans children’s cognition. In reality, most studies surveyed were performed on animals, with only one case study showing that a single trans child scored lower on an IQ test after taking puberty blockers… it was rejected by three journals and met with scathing comments from peer reviewers [but] Dr Hilary Cass chose to cite it four times in her final report, and determined that puberty blockers should not be prescribed to trans kids outside of an upcoming clinical trial, in part because of “potential risks to neurocognitive development”.

    What we’re seeing on a frankly frightening scale is the very opposite of evidence-based policy; the policies are decided first, and the evidence cherry-picked, distorted or manufactured to support them. This will not end with us.

  • Don’t talk about the dead

    We know that more than a dozen trans teens have taken their lives since the puberty blocker ban was introduced in the UK, despite the government’s best efforts to cover that up: its small inquiry into trans suicides discounted documented trans suicides. So it’s particularly disgusting to see Hilary Cass, the author of the politically motivated and utterly discredited Cass scandal that’s being used to dismantle trans healthcare, to proclaim that “What is worrying is when people say that if children don’t get these drugs, they will die, because clearly that’s not true.” It is “irresponsible for people to shroud-wave in that way.”

    Not for the first time, Cass is parroting the stories of hateful, genital-obsessed weirdos. Morgan Page writes:

    The spectre of the trans death, particularly through suicide, hangs over all of the attacks on trans life. No one wants to admit that this is the desired end goal — that trans people simply cease to exist, whether that be through detransition or death seems to matter little. As Janice Raymond famously put it, the goal is for trans people to be “morally mandated out of existence.” Indeed, “shroud waving” threatens to stir up some empathy for the plight of this embattled minority, and we can’t be having that. Anti-trans actors have gone so far as to accuse trans people of acting like abusive husbands who threaten to kill themselves if their wives leave.

    It’s a useful strategy, this attack on the idea of trans death, because most cis people will never know a living trans person, let alone a dead one.

    It’s worth pointing out yet again that despite its very best efforts the Cass study found no evidence that puberty blockers harmed kids. It did, however, see plenty of evidence that limiting access to healthcare and support kills some of them.

  • Stacking the deck

    Yesterday, Wes Streeting made the UK ban on puberty blockers for trans kids permanent. The ban does not apply to cisgender children; puberty blockers are apparently magic medicine that are uniquely dangerous to trans and gender non-conforming kids.

    The decision was subject to a consultation, which – at the Government’s invitation – featured significant input from anti-trans, pro-conversion therapy organisations with no expertise in healthcare generally or trans healthcare specifically. And despite blatantly stacking the deck with those anti-trans groups, the consultation could still not produce evidence to justify the ban. It did, however, make it clear that the ban would have terrible effects on trans kids’ mental health. We’ve already seen more than a dozen children take their own lives as a result of the temporary ban.

    Streeting simply ignored the evidence and imposed the ideologically motivated ban on the UK, including Scotland. Pressure from the UK government ensured a similar ban was passed in Northern Ireland with the support of Sinn Fein. There’s bleak humour in seeing UK Labour and Sinn Fein finding common ground in killing children.

    I’ve long since given up on trying to get people to care about trans people. But an evangelical government minister banning medically necessary healthcare by prioritising the thinky thoughts of newspaper columnists and religious and social conservatives over evidence and international medical consensus is a terrifying precedent for everybody.

  • The strategy

    Infamous arsehole Matt Walsh has been saying the quiet bit out loud: speaking outside the US Supreme Court yesterday, the far-right clown vowed that “we are not gonna rest… until transgender ideology is entirely erased from the Earth.” He’s not the first to say that; last year Michael Knowles told the US Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.” There are many such examples from the US right, the Christian right and the UK anti-trans movement too.

    Helen Joyce, one of the key figures in the UK anti-trans movement, has spoken openly of her belief that the number of trans people should be reduced and that any trans person, even if “happily transitioned”, is a problem that society must solve: “the fewer of those people there are, the better”. All the key anti-trans groups and many of the key anti-trans activists in the UK have pledged their support for a campaign that calls for the elimination of “the practice of transgenderism”. The founding document of the anti-trans movement, Janice Raymond’s 1979 book The Transsexual Empire, says that “I contend that the problem of transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence.”

    By “transgender ideology”, Walsh means transgender people. By “transgenderism”, Knowles means transgender people. By “the practice of transgenderism” the campaign means transgender people. By “transsexualism”, Raymond meant transgender people.

    The only way to eliminate “transgender ideology” or “transgenderism” or “transsexualism” is to eliminate transgender people.

    And that’s the strategy.

    “The fewer of those people” there are, the better.

    When you understand that that is the goal, the connections between the different strands of the anti-trans strategy become chillingly clear.

    Removing life-saving healthcare for trans teens increases the suicide rate; the same applies with adults and ensures that there are “fewer of those people”.

    Removing legal protections from trans people unless they medically transition and then ensuring that nobody can access medical transition ensures that there are “fewer of those people”.

    Banning trans women from using women’s spaces or competing in women’s sports, part of the wider goal of pushing trans women out of society, means there are “fewer of those people” in that society.

    If that means that some trans women can be bullied back into the closet, well, that means “fewer of those people”.

    And if some of those bullied people are bullied into taking their own lives either suddenly or more slowly, well. That means “fewer of those people” too.

    The anti-trans movement is usually better at PR messaging than Walsh; he’s an extreme outlier in that his brand is built on saying the supposedly unspeakable. But he and the politer bigots of the UK anti-trans movement may not express it in the same way, but they share the same goal: they won’t rest until transgender people are “entirely erased from the Earth”.

  • LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back

    The writer Julia Serano has organised an online protest today: LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back. It’s a US protest but has worldwide support: the message to the Democrats, and to supposedly left-of-centre political parties elsewhere, is that human rights, healthcare and safety for LGBTQ+ folks are not and should never be negotiable.

    Serano has posted her own article, which will be updated to link to many others, and you’ll find it here.

    I’ll just post a few words from my book: we are not a fad or a phase, a lobby or an ideology, a cult or a conspiracy. We’re your sons and your daughters, your sisters and your brothers, your friends and your colleagues.

  • Fancy that

    The UK isn’t the only country where there have been reviews into the effectiveness and safety of puberty blockers. And it’s interesting to see what such reviews conclude when they’re not created to deliver, and staffed by people promised a peerage if they deliver, a pre-determined conclusion to support a political goal.

    The latest such study comes from France. Unlike the UK Cass Review, which decided that having medical specialists involved in a review of medicine would be biased, the French study was carried out exclusively by pediatric endocrinologists.

    Regarding puberty blockers, it notes that:

    None of the medical treatment used in the context of hormonal transitioning have marketing authorization for this indication, but these molecules have been used for a long time in the pediatric population for other indications (precocious puberty, puberty induction…). Nevertheless, they have been used for hormonal transition in trans youth since the late 1980s in some countries, and their use in adults goes back even further. In addition, off-label prescription is very common in pediatrics and child psychiatry.

    And based on the evidence, it recommends:

    We recommend that puberty suppression be offered by a multidisciplinary team or network trained in supporting transgender adolescents.

    In related news, a new scientific study funded by the IOC and published in the peer-reviewed British Journal of Sports Medicine demonstrates yet again that trans women do not necessarily have physical advantages over cisgender women in sports; in many cases, they have significant disadvantages in lower body strength and in lung function.

    I’m sure our trans-obsessed media will cover that story, and the French study, any day now.

  • The Missing

    I was honoured to lend my voice to The Missing, an episode of The Quilt, the LGBTQ+ audio exhibition and podcast in association with the Queer Britain museum. It’s an oral history of queer lives in the UK; this episode, the third in a series of eight, focuses on Scotland from the Highland Clearances to the loss of Glasgow lesbian bars.

    It’s available from wherever you get your podcasts, and directly from this link.