Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: LGBTQ+

  • What changed

    Jude Doyle’s piece on “the transgender tipping point” spurred one of its quoted experts, Julia Serano, to expand on her comments. As ever with Serano, this is worth reading: Revisiting The “Transgender Tipping Point” Ten Years Later.

    I do believe there was a truly positive development for trans people taking place in the early 2010s that is potentially worthy of the moniker “tipping point.” For most of my life, the trans experience was typified by isolation and invisibility. Most of us grew up not knowing any other trans people and this sense of isolation was reinforced by how infrequently trans people and issues were covered in the media. Even as an adult, it was really hard to find trans community, especially if you weren’t living in a major city. Gender-affirming care was also extremely difficult to access, both because there were very few providers and most adhered to a strict gatekeeping system wherein only a select few “true transsexuals” (people who would be “passable” and heteronormative post-transition) were allowed to transition. This only added to the sense that very few trans people existed.

    What changed, as Serano goes on to explain, was twofold. One, the internet suddenly enabled us to find information and support that was previously hard or even impossible to find. And healthcare, previously very hostile, moved to a more informed and evidence-based model that understood transness wasn’t a disorder to be cured but just part of human nature.

    Those two changes were seismic; we got to see that we were not alone, and that we were not broken. And naturally that meant that more of us felt able to come out and be who we are.

    As Serano says, the tipping point in the media was a confection, and it mistook trans visibility for trans acceptance. But there was a very real tipping point for trans and non-binary people in “trans autonomy and agency, where gender-diverse people could finally speak for ourselves and choose our own trans trajectories.”

    Despite the best efforts of the media, and the UK media in particular, there has been a massive shift in trans visibility – and with that visibility comes understanding and acceptance. Serano points out that at the time of the “tipping point” article, just 9% of Americans said they knew somebody who was trans. By 2021 it was 42%. That means more trans and gender non-conforming people can see that they’re not alone, and that more people who aren’t trans can see that we’re no different from them.

    As I’ve written endlessly, hatred thrives on ignorance; it’s one of the reasons the bigots want to ban any form of trans representation, and prevent us from living normal lives. But that genie isn’t going back into its bottle.

  • Ten years tipped

    Jude Doyle is on superb form in this piece looking back at the famous “Transgender Tipping Point” cover of TIME. As the piece says, it often feels like we’ve tipped vertiginously backwards with open bigotry against us running unchecked in the press, politics and social media. Who’d have thought ten years ago that in 2024, “transphobe” would not just be a career option but a very lucrative one?

    As one of the contributors, Katherine Cross, told Doyle, not all trans people were thrilled with the TIME cover. “there was a fear that this meant the Eye of Sauron was upon us, that whatever safety was afforded by the shadows of public ignorance was well and truly gone now.” Those fears proved to be well founded, and warnings by other marginalised people – people who knew very well that increased visibility often means little more than painting a target on people’s backs – were sadly prescient.

    Doyle interviews another excellent writer, Parker Molloy, and the two discuss the way in which mainstream media effectively threw trans people to the wolves.

    “The media, once eager to spotlight our stories for clicks and headlines, has largely abandoned us, leaving trans people to fend off a wave of hostility on our own. It feels bleak,” Molloy says. “It feels like we’re on our own, and I just have a hard time imagining things getting better in the near future.”

    Doyle somehow manages to remain optimistic, and there are positives: we have a much wider and better informed community than we did ten years ago, and despite the bigots’ best efforts trans and non-binary people are not going to return to the bad old days when the world could pretend we didn’t exist.

  • Uniquely dangerous

    Just over two hours before Parliament closed for the election, the Tories rushed through an emergency statutory instrument to ban the private prescription of puberty blockers for under-18s. The reason for the ban, and for the rush? The health secretary says it is “essential to make the order with immediate effect to avoid serious danger to health”.

    This medicine is so dangerous that the government is not banning, and does not propose to ban, NHS or private prescriptions for cisgender kids.

     

  • Doctors speak out against Cass

    The ongoing wrecking spree by Hilary Cass continues, but it’s getting significant pushback from medical experts. As Erin Reed reports, “both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society have categorically rejected the review as a justification for bans on care and have challenged many of its alleged findings.”

    Every time Cass speaks to the press things get worse: she’s now suggesting that trans healthcare shouldn’t be measured in satisfaction or regret rates (which are exceptionally high and exceptionally low respectively compared to other forms of healthcare) but in factors such as “employment”, which suggests that she’s either completely unaware of or couldn’t care less about the discrimination that means one in three UK employers say that – despite it being illegal – they would refuse to hire trans people. And more details of the people in her review board are starting to emerge; many have links with pseudoscientific anti-trans organisations. Cass herself met with people from Ron DeSantis’s anti-trans administration and appears to have lied about it.

    As the Endocrine Society says in a strongly worded statement:

    “We stand firm in our support of gender-affirming care. Transgender and gender-diverse people deserve access to needed and often life-saving medical care. NHS England’s recent report, the Cass Review, does not contain any new research that would contradict the recommendations made in our Clinical Practice Guideline on gender-affirming care… Medical evidence, not politics, should inform treatment decisions.”

  • Balance

    Lee Hurley of Trans Writes has been tracking trans-related articles in the UK press: The Guardian, The Observer, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday and Private Eye.

    In the 23 days since 16 April there have been 126 articles about trans people in those publications.

    121 of them were negative.

    5 were neutral.

    0 were written by trans people.

  • Snitches

    In Utah this week, the Republican administration introduced a snitch line, an online form for bigots to report any cases of trans or non-binary people using the single-sex facilities appropriate to their gender.

    It’s easy to point at this as an example of US right-wing bigotry, but for anyone thinking such vicious idiocy couldn’t happen here: on the very same day the UK Equalities Minister, Kemi Badenoch, introduced a snitch line, an online form for bigots to report organisations offering “bad guidance” about letting trans people use the single-sex spaces appropriate to their gender.

  • Illegal and cruel

    I’ve been loath to post about the current cavalcade of cruelties the Tories are heaping on trans people right now, but I wanted to point out something about the proposed NHS guidance that would force trans women out of single-sex wards: it’s illegal under multiple laws, especially for trans women who have gender recognition certificates. Not for the first time, the party of law and order is attempting to undermine the law by issuing guidelines encouraging organisations to practice illegal discrimination.

  • Complicity

    The Guardian has published a thoughtful article by playwright Jonathan Cash about the 1999 bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho, which he was injured in. The bomb was planted by a far-right sympathiser, a man who believed that gay men should be put to death. If you’re going to read the whole piece, which is very powerful, be aware that it contains some horrific details of victims’ injuries.

    Cash’s article includes some sections that The Guardian’s own writers, and their peers in other publications, should think about.

    The bombing campaign heralded a change in attitude from some of the UK’s most popular newspapers. Until then, the words “poofs” and “queers” were used in editorials, even in front-page headlines, especially since the advent of the HIV pandemic. Similarly hateful words were used to describe people from other minority groups. These words, in print, encouraged constant, casual discrimination and affected the way that LGBTQIA+ people and ethnic minorities were talked about and treated.

    As far as I am concerned, every single journalist, editor and newspaper proprietor who contributed to these attitudes in print is complicit in the deaths of three people who were standing just feet away from me, and the life-changing injuries of many others, both physical and psychological.

    …If you don’t call out derogatory words about people who are somehow regarded as different, hate is normalised and you’re complicit.

    In the UK we’ve already seen two trans girls stabbed, one fatally, and anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes – and anti-trans hate crimes specifically – are soaring. Too many writers’ words are contributing to an increasingly violent climate.

  • Snakes in the Cass

    The Cass review is a lengthy document and it’ll take time for detailed criticisms to emerge, but there’s already plenty of evidence to indicate that the worst fears of trans people and allies were correct. The review team included people vocally opposed to trans healthcare, applied different standards of evidence to trans-supportive and trans-antagonistic studies, is happy to accept anecdote and hearsay provided it is not trans-supportive, and appears to advocate conversion therapy and demand that doctors be involved in social transition, which is not a medical matter.

    This, by Trans Safety Network, is an excellent overview of some of the most blatant problems with the report.

    the Cass Review final report seems to assume, as an unspoken starting point, that growing up to be a trans person is a bad thing, and the rest of the conclusions follow from that assumption.

    …We have previously identified a number of professionals involved in both the Cass Review and the NHS Gender Dysphoria Working Group which helped commission the review who are involved either in lobbying efforts against trans affirmative healthcare, or who have actively promoted conversion therapy. 

  • The endgame

    In the US, the people who want to ban abortion will tell you that they don’t want to ban abortion; they just want to put some protections around some of it. This is a lie.

    Also in the US, the people who want to ban healthcare for all trans people – who, not coincidentally, are usually people who want to ban abortion – will tell you that they don’t want to ban healthcare for all trans healthcare; they just want to protect children. This too is a lie.

    We know these lies are lies because the people telling them admit it. For example in January, US Republican legislators discussed the importance of disguising their “endgame”, which was to ban all healthcare for trans adults. It was important to focus initially only on trans kids, the legislators said, because “what we know legislatively is we have to take small bites.”

    As one of the legislators said:

    we have to be looking at the endgame simultaneously, maybe even using that to move the window to say that this isn’t just wrong 0-18, it’s wrong for everyone and we shouldn’t be allowing that to happen.

    This is how you ban people’s healthcare: slowly, and with small bites.

    Here in the UK, we’re told that nobody wants to ban trans adults’ healthcare. This is a lie.

    In the wake of the Cass review into teen healthcare, a review that prioritised anti-trans junk science and anti-trans activists over actual science and medical expertise, it has now been announced that there will be a review into the provision of trans healthcare for adults. If it too prioritises anti-trans junk science and anti-trans activists, then like the Cass review it will conclude that trans healthcare – which after years of underfunding and now political attacks is barely functioning, with people dying on waiting lists that in some cases are now decades long – needs to be restricted too, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

    This is dangerous not just for trans people, but for everybody. Because the Cass review now has people openly discussing a ban on trans healthcare for anyone under 25 to “protect children”, even though 18 to 25 year olds are adults, on the spurious (and untrue) grounds that brains are not fully developed until then. In effect, the claim is that you cannot consent to healthcare until you’re 25.

    So far, this is only being discussed in relation to trans people. But if we establish the precedent that under-25s do not have bodily autonomy, women’s reproductive rights are next.

    That’s the endgame.