Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: LGBTQ+

  • 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.

  • Acting up

    On Friday, a group of trans kids disrupted the conference of everybody’s favourite pretendy-gay organisation, the LGB Alliance, by releasing thousands of crickets into the white-haired audience shortly after JK Rowling delivered a short speech from her luxury yacht.

    The LGB Alliance is, of course, the Tufton Street-based, dubiously funded anti-trans organisation who admitted in court that the overwhelming majority of its supporters and members are straight, who misled the Charity Commission that a venomous troll was no longer connected with the organisation when in fact he is their Director of Research, and whose Irish division has been classified as an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. As infamous anti-trans activist Kellie-Jay Keen noted on Twitter, at the event “most attendees and volunteers seem to be straight women.”

    The organisation and its supporters were quick to condemn the protest, with some claiming it was a “biohazard” and others doing the usual nonsense about violent transes silencing legitimate concerns. But if the LGB Alliance really were a gay rights organisation it’d be familiar with the tactics, which were used by organisations such as ACT UP! and the Lesbian Avengers against previous generations of bigots. The use of crickets to disrupt a meeting was a clear echo of the same tactic the Lesbian Avengers used in the early 1970s in a protest against conversion therapy.

    When it comes to queer activist groups such as The Lesbian Avengers, the LGB Alliance wouldn’t even need to Google to find out about them: they could just ask one of their earliest and most prominent members, JK Rowling’s charity partner Baroness Nicholson, who was at the event. Nicholson, who as an MP voted against equal age of consent, voted for Section 28 and denounced lesbian families as “neither normal nor natural” knows the Lesbian Avengers well: she was the subject of one of their protests, which they held on her front lawn in 1995.

  • “Hopeful and broken”

    Juliette, who writes the Kierkegaard’s Lunch blog, has written a dual review of the Will and Harper road movie where Will Ferrell goes on a trip with his recently transitioned trans friend Harper Steele. The first half of the review is for cisgender people:

    Watch it all and pick a side. Because you can’t be neutral  – and one side is winning this fight. 

    It’s not the side that meets Harper with compassion and humanity…

    And the second half is for trans people.

    Above all, perhaps be ready to watch it and to feel both ‘I’m glad they made this movie’ and ‘I’m broken that they still felt they had to make this movie’.  I have been watching movies and reading books trying to explain to cisgender people that we are humans, with feelings, not monsters, rapists or freaks for over 40 years.

    I think Juliette is articulating something I’ve been feeling a lot lately: we’ve had decades of programmes and movies and books that have tried to say something very simple, which is that trans people are people. And yet we’re going backwards, not forwards.

    I had hoped that some of all this, and all the rest, might have moved the dial to a place of greater understanding and decency towards us. For a time I thought it was happening. These days, it often feels like faith in that progress was delusional.

    It’s something I think about in relation to this blog, because I’m so tired of writing about the same things over and over again: a group of anti-trans bigots will do something terrible, and nobody gives the slightest shit. Today it’s the news that those friends of JK Rowling, the Tufton Street anti-trans group Sex Matters and our own anti-LGBTQ+ weirdos For Women Scotland, intend to compile a database of every trans woman competing in sports in the entire UK. Given that there are no trans women competing in elite sport, it’s very clear that the role of this database – which seems illegal under multiple laws – is to find targets for harassment and abuse among people taking part in grassroots sport. You’d have to be very stupid to believe that it’s got anything to do with any kind of fairness, let alone protecting any participants.

    Yesterday, it was the news that multiple senior figures in NHS trans care have boycotted the WPATH conference, the international conference on transgender health, but attended a conference by the anti-trans, religion-based pseudoscientists of SEGM, an organisation opposed to all gender-affirming healthcare. The SPLC, which tracks hate groups, says that SEGM is the hub of the “anti-LGBT pseudoscience network”.

    Also yesterday, it emerged that Elon Musk has so far contributed $50m – that we know of – to fund anti-immigration and anti-trans propaganda.

    The day before it was the US school district whose genital-obsessed weirdos carved new windows in its mixed-gender toilets so that adults could watch children urinate, the presidential campaigns blasting anti-trans ads all over the TV, and the presidential candidate claiming that US schools are transgender surgery factories.

    And the day before, and the day before, and the day before.

    As I’ve written before, to be trans right now, to be talking about being trans right now, feels like the curse of Cassandra, fated to know the truth but never be believed. We’ve watched our healthcare, already wretched, be dismantled. We’ve watched our employment rights, already precarious, attacked on multiple fronts. We’ve watched our politicians embrace beliefs that just a few years previously were largely and rightly considered abhorrent. And through it all, instead of reporting on this the bulk of the press is supporting it.

    It’s hard to see a light at the end of this tunnel. I know there is one. But it seems very far away.

  • “I see myself in corners”

    Like pretty much every other trans person on the planet, I watched Will Ferrell’s Netflix documentary Will & Harper. It’s a road trip featuring the titular duo, the Hollywood actor and his recently transitioned friend. Niko Stratis, a writer who is also trans, posted an interesting review that doesn’t gloss over the film’s flaws but makes it clear why it’s worth watching.

    I think the experience of being trans on the road is different if you’re joined by a movie star, and a camera crew, and (probably) security. But I also don’t think all of those things negate how it feels to be sitting in a steakhouse in Texas while hundreds of people take photos of you to post insulting shit on Twitter with.

    …I see myself a lot in corners of this movie. Harper wants to feel at home in her life as a trans woman, wants to hold onto the shades of the past she holds as important truths to her. She wants to drink shit beer, go to dive bars and race tracks and mud pits. It’s only that now when she does, she would prefer to wear a dress and heels when she does this and this should all be afforded her, she deserves that same as anyone, but we know this is not always going to be true, and confronting the way that the world has shut doors to you is a hard truth in transition for a lot of us who lived with relative ease and privilege. 

  • Real numbers

    Ireland introduced self-ID for legal gender recognition in 2015 – the same system we’ve endlessly told will lead to a “wave” of people changing their gender.

    The latest figures have been published and show that from September 2015 to 2021, the total number of people who changed their gender legally was just 882. The male/female split was close to equal, with a narrow majority of people changing their legal gender to female.

    882 people over six years in a country of over 5 million people? Some “wave”.

  • Spot the difference

    The UK isn’t the only place where “reasonable concerns” over trans healthcare have sparked official reviews. It’s happened in Queensland too, sparking a review very similar to NHS England’s Cass Review. But despite reviewing very similar evidence, this review resulted in a doubling of funding for trans healthcare. Here in the UK, the Cass Review has been used to stop trans healthcare for teens, and it’s increasingly being used to demand the end of healthcare for trans adults.

    The difference? The Queensland review didn’t prioritise quacks and bigots over healthcare experts. As one doctor explains:

    “If you were reviewing a neurosurgical service, you’d need to have some neurosurgeons on the review panel,” she said.  

    “You don’t put faith healers on it.  

    “You have to have people who understand how it works.” 

    The UK seems to be the only country where expertise in healthcare is simply dismissed in favour of ignorance and ideology.

  • Librarians shushed over LGBTQ+ books

    Index on Censorship reports that 53% of school librarians have been asked to remove LGBTQ+ books from their shelves.

    In an Index survey of UK school librarians, 53% of respondents said they had been asked to remove books, with more than half of those requests coming from parents.

    Of those, 56% removed the book or books in question. Titles included This Book Is Gay, by Juno Dawson; Julián is a Mermaid, by Jessica Love; and the alphabet book ABC Pride, by Louie Stowell, Elly Barnes and Amy Phelps, as well as plenty of other titles featuring LGBT+ content.

    Manga comic books were removed in some schools because of the perceived sexualisation of characters, other books following complaints about explicit or violent content.

    Books challenged in several schools – but ultimately not removed – included various Heartstopper books by Alice Oseman, which were accused of homophobic language, swearing and self-harm discussions. Young adult fiction also came under fire in many schools, with librarians usually able to hold firm in keeping their collections.

    One was asked to remove a book for “racism against white people”. They did not comply with the request.

    It’s a relatively small sample but it does demonstrate that yet another hateful right-wing US culture war tactic is crossing the Atlantic. And it’s a chilling echo of the 1980s, when a right-wing moral panic over a queer book resulted in the hateful Section 28, an anti-LGBTQ+ law that stayed on the statute books until the 2000s.