Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: LGBTQ+

  • Enemies within

    The evangelical movement has spent a very long time practicing institutional capture, where it inserts its people into positions where they can enact its policies. And the same appears to be happening with the anti-trans movement here in the UK, with “gender-critical” people who reject the scientific and medical evidence increasingly inhaibiting positions where they can influence healthcare and health policy.

    The latest example, as reported by Novara Media:

    Six leading gender clinicians associated with a controversial NHS review of transgender healthcare spoke at the conference of a designated anti-trans hate group that shares funding with key pro-Trump outfits

    They weren’t there to defend trans healthcare.

    Two of those people were involved in the ideologically motivated and widely discredited Cass Review, which has been used to stop healthcare for trans teens and which is being widely cited by people who want to stop trans adults’ healthcare too. A third is cited in that review and also sits on the board of the anti-trans pressure group SEGM, known as one of the “key hubs of anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience”.

    SEGM, for example, takes money (via the Edward Charles Foundation) from the Charles Koch Institute, a conservative political network that also funds the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation is the group behind Project 2025, a 900-page “wish list” to centralise presidential power and normalise religious conservatism, including by tightly restricting abortion access and expanding political appointees.

  • Masks off, hoods on

    Maslow’s Hammer says that “it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” And if you’re an anti-trans obsessive, everything can and should be blamed on trans people, including the US election result.

    The narrative already emerging from the anti-trans commentariat on both sides of the Atlantic is that the Kamala Harris campaign failed because of The Transes. And as always with the anti-trans mob, that’s nonsense. The Harris campaign conceded The Trans Issue – how I hate that phrase – completely: it didn’t feature trans people in its campaigning, it didn’t stand up for trans people, and even when given the opportunity to refute the Republicans’ anti-trans scaremongering in direct questioning – by some estimates, as much as 40% of the Republicans’ ad spending was spent on demonising trans women – Kamala Harris flatly refused to do so, calculatedly throwing trans people under the bus in the hope of winning a few bigots’ votes.

    But the problem with offering far right lite is that nobody’s buying it. Time and again, given the choice between full-on evil and slightly less evil, people choose the full-fat version. The supposed good guys concede territory to the bad, and having done that the bad guys demand they concede more.

    What far-right lite does do, however, is alienate some of your own voting base – without bringing any of the other side across. When the Democrats weren’t throwing trans people under the bus, they persuaded 6% of registered Republicans to vote Democrat. In this election, that figure didn’t increase. It dropped, to 5%, with the Republicans’ total vote numbers remaining roughly the same as in the last election. This wasn’t an anti-trans swing to Trump.

    You cannot meet bigots halfway because they lie about where halfway is. You can see that here in the UK: the supposed “reasonable concerns” (which were never reasonable) over trans people were only supposed to be over changes to the Gender Recognition Act; when they destroyed those changes, the bigots then decided they wanted rid of the Gender Recognition Act, the Equality Act and all other protections for trans people. Supposed concerns over healthcare for under-18s – again, never reasonable – have now expanded to demands for an end to all healthcare for trans adults – demands that as I and many other trans women can attest, are already being met by some GPs and health boards.

    The panic is such that organisations are now being attacked for doing things that only the deeply deranged could see through an anti-trans lens; for example this week, Marks & Spencer has been under sustained online and media attack for referring to teenage girls as “bright young things”, a decades-old phrase that the genital-obsessed weirdo brigade have decided is proof of pro-trans pandering.

    What we have now is a full-on, mask-off, hoods-on witch-hunt dedicated to erasing every aspect of trans people’s rights and safety until the goal of eliminating trans people completely is achieved – a witch-hunt in which the press is gleefully, hatefully complicit.

  • When ads attack

    In the US, the Trump campaign has spent nearly one-third of its campaign funds on anti-trans attack ads around major sporting fixtures and other popular events. Vox:

    Given that trans people make up barely half of 1 percent of the US adult population and that trans-related issues are low on the priority list of most voters, many might find it baffling that Trump has focused so much of his attention on singling out trans people. Indeed, two media research groups, the left-leaning Data for Progress and video marketing firm Ground Media, working in partnership with GLAAD, each released studies last week finding that the ads had no real impact on voter decision-making and instead alienated many viewers, even among Republicans, who felt they were “mean-spirited.”

    So why are they doing it? One reason is because by yelling about trans people, the Trump campaign can distract attention from their many failings – a strategy that’s been widely used by right-wing politicians worldwide, even though it doesn’t result in electoral success. But another key reason is because they really fucking hate trans people, and the ads help spread that hate. Vox again:

    these ads help to reinforce the idea of a common enemy. They are continuing — which is to say winning, in a very real sense — the larger ongoing culture war against queer and trans people.

    One of the most chilling explanations I’ve read, and I really hope it’s wrong, is that because the Trump campaign is likely to suffer a major electoral defeat it is preparing the ground for a violent response: its very vocal attacks on trans people and on immigrants in particular are telling the MAGA mobs who to target.

    Vox again:

    It’s vital to recognize the parallels to Hitler’s Germany here (especially given John Kelly’s recent allegations that Trump praised Hitler himself): to understand that trans and queer people aren’t being attacked in isolation, but rather in tandem with immigrants, the disabled and mentally ill, and women.

  • Just a phase

    I came out as trans eight years ago today, so if this is just a phase then it’s proving to be an awfully long one.

  • Killer conspiracies

    The BBC reports that members of an “anti-establishment cult” have been jailed for trying to kidnap a coroner. What the BBC hasn’t clearly reported (and neither has The Guardian or The Telegraph, the latter of which devoted three pages to the case) is why they were doing it. They intended to enact a “death sentence” on the coroner for supposed crimes related to “gender reassignment” in children and railed against “the transgender movement” in their radicalisation videos.

    Here’s Trans Safety Network’s Mallory Moore:

    Here’s the fake death warrant the group issued regarding the Essex coroner, directly claiming linking the coroner to supposed child mutilation relating to gender reassignment, authorising a “death sentence” for the targetted victim.

    [image or embed]

    — Mal-eficent (Sin #60) (@mall.bsky.social) October 29, 2024 at 9:23 AM

    As Mallory says, “so much of this rhetoric is impossible to differentiate from common [“gender critical”] rhetoric about trans people.” Which is perhaps why the BBC and The Guardian, both of which generally act as uncritical mouthpieces for anti-trans activists, have been so reticent about drawing attention to it.

    Sometimes the anti-LGBTQ+ links are too hard to ignore, however. Last month, a Scots neo-nazi was found guilty of planning a series of terrorist crimes – specifically including an attack on a Falkirk LGBTQ+ group. “They have been pushing their luck for years, now they will pay in blood,” he wrote. “We should get masked up and go do a few of them at their little gay club.” When the police arrested him, they found weapons including a crossbow with telescopic sights, fourteen knives, machetes, a tomahawk, a Samurai sword, knuckledusters, an extendable baton and a stun gun.

    We like to pretend that we’re not like America. But in an age of global media, bigotry and conspiracism are global too. I’ve long written about the parallels between UK anti-trans activism, neo-Nazism and QAnon; rhetoric that’s laundered in the broadsheets becomes murderous in the streets.

  • Misreporting

    Let’s do this again, shall we?

    There have been a spate of important trans-related stories in the press this week, and predictably they have all been misreported.

    First up, after a long inquiry into the trans charity Mermaids, the Charity Commission found no evidence of the wrongdoing alleged by anti-trans activists and their pals in the press. Complaints that the charity did not have effective safeguarding policies or that it had inappropriate ties to gender identity clinics were unfounded. The commission tried very hard to find evidence of those things because it really, really wanted to – during the inquiry one member of its staff, clearly an anti-trans activist, forgot to use their own personal account and was caught retweeting an unfounded allegation against the charity on the Commission’s own social media – but failed.

    That’s not to say Mermaids is perfect. It isn’t, and there were failings identified in its management. But the core allegations that have been in the press for two years now were bullshit.

    It’s also worth noting that yet again, the BBC reporting of this is using anti-trans activists’ dog-whistles: we’ve previously had “gender ideology” used to describe trans people existing, and now we have “trans-identified” to describe trans kids. The use of “trans-identified male” and “trans-identified female” are common in bigot circles; the terms are intended to delegitimise trans people and suggest they’re not trans.

    Next up: another bigot fucked around and found out. In yet another case reported widely as a nice teacher losing their job just for saying “sex is real” or misgendering a student, Camilla Hannan has been barred from teaching. And if you look at what the tribunal found rather than what the press is telling you it found, you’ll see that Hannan outed one of her LGBTQ+ students online – a massive safeguarding breach as well as horrific behaviour for any teacher – and that her remorse appeared to be “self-serving”: the judge suggested that “Miss Hannan’s remorse stemmed from being caught, rather than from reflections on her own behaviour.”

    Over in The Atlantic, Helen Lewis claimed that when Donald Trump said this week that “Your child goes to school, and they take your child. It was a he, comes back as  a she. And they do it, often without parental consent”, “lines like this would not succeed without containing at least a kernel of truth.” It does not contain a kernel of truth.

    Lastly, we have the inquest into the murder of trans teen Brianna Ghey. In a report that went out of its way never to describe Brianna as “she”, a girl or a young woman, The Times focused on the real victim here: her killer. He was “set for Oxbridge” and was “a good child with good morals”. That’s good morals as in spending “weeks plotting Brianna’s murder after drawing up a ‘kill list’” and then stabbing her 28 times. The good-morals bit is from a statement by the boy’s mother, who of course is going to come to her child’s defence. But the tone of the reporting here and elsewhere strongly suggests that the real tragedy as far as the press is concerned is not that a young trans girl is dead, but that two cisgender people are in prison for killing her.

  • God knows

    I’m not a person of faith, but I thought this speech by Jay Hulme, “The Genderweird Vibe of God”, was illuminating. It’s about transgender people and the Christian faith, and whether the latter has room for the former. For Hume, the answer is a definite hallelujah.

    The core of the anti-trans movement, and therefore anti-trans theology, is restriction. A restriction placed upon the possibilities held within humanity, and a restriction placed upon God. A restriction that shrinks and conforms God to the image of the oppressor, denying the oppressed full personhood, as delivered by the wondrous seal of imago dei – the promise and fact that we are created in the image of God. Because if trans people are not made in the image of God – or, if we follow a more polite, but still transphobic form of the stance, if trans people are made in the image of God, but our transness is not – then God is a cis person. Just as, in times gone by, it was believed that God was a white person. A white man. A rich white man. A rich white man with power. But God is bigger than that. God is bigger than the boundaries we build around ourselves, and the categories we use to confine and divide humanity.

  • A brief history of torture

    There is a long and horrific history of conversion therapy being used against LGBTQ+ people, and we’ve known for a very long time that it’s dangerous, damaging quackery. This article by Mallory Moore is a good introduction and comes with a ton of content warnings; it describes some very awful things done by supposedly respectable doctors and psychiatrists.

    As Moore points out, the history is intertwined with so-called “race realism”, aka white supremacy; homosexuality and gender non-conformity were practiced by “savages” and “primitive races”, or were evidence of degeneracy among white people.

    Even if you accept the core assumption that being LGBTQ+ is unnatural, which of course it isn’t, we have decades of evidence proving beyond any doubt that conversion therapy, whether in the form of violent aversion therapy, electro-shock therapy or “pray the gay away” therapy, just doesn’t work. It’s simply abuse.

  • The real trans healthcare scandal

    More than 200 trans people (that we know of) in the UK have been refused basic healthcare by their GPs, in many cases after years of receiving that healthcare. A new report (PDF) by TransActual goes into detail: in most cases it’s not that new requests are being refused; it’s that existing healthcare is being stopped unilaterally by GPs. Almost half of the people who spoke to TransActual had been receiving the care for more than 5 years.

    I’m one of the people who’s been refused healthcare, and like many others I’ve been told it’s because of guidelines by the Royal College of General Practitioners, now clarified to make it clear that trans people’s healthcare should not be stopped. Others – adults – have been told that it’s because of the Cass Review, which was a (worthless, politicised) study of adolescent services and didn’t look at adult healthcare at all. Some have been told that their GP “doesn’t believe in” gender clinics.

    In Edinburgh, the gender clinic has stopped all surgical referrals for adults under 25 – again, citing the Cass Review. Meanwhile at current clearance rates the Glasgow gender clinic will see you for a first healthcare appointment seven years after you’re first referred, if indeed your GP will refer you; the reason we had self-referral, which has now been stopped, was because bigoted GPs were refusing to refer trans people.

    Stopping or refusing basic trans healthcare isn’t just dangerous and unethical. It is in defiance of the General Medical Council, which tells doctors that “you must not refuse to provide a patient with medical services because the patient is proposing to undergo, is undergoing, or has undergone gender reassignment.” And it’s the result of endless scaremongering and demonisation in the press and by politicians.

    You’d think that GPs deciding to stop treating hundreds of patients would be news. But of course, the papers who should be reporting this are the ones responsible for it.

    In the 1990s, the Labour government had to be dragged kicking and screaming through the European courts to give trans people basic human rights. It looks like history is repeating. And in the meantime, trans people will suffer.

    I try not to wish ill on people. But I hope that every so-called gender-critical columnist, celebrity and politician experiences all of the pain they want to inflict on trans people. May they never know peace.

  • A cover girl again

    Fierce Salvage book cover

    I’m proud and delighted to be one of the contributors to, and one of the mentors involved in, the new Queer Words anthology Fierce Salvage. It’ll be published in January 2025 and features a dizzying array of LGBTQ+ talent. And me.

    I haven’t had the opportunity to read the other contributions just yet bar one, a story by Colin McGuire that I helped polish a little bit. Colin’s great and his story is touching, funny and vividly told. I can’t wait for you to read it.

    Pre-orders for Fierce Salvage are now open and you can order your copy here.