Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: LGBTQ+

  • Overreacting

    From the very beginnings of the war on trans people, we’ve been accused of overreacting whenever we report what anti-trans groups and politicians say they want to do to us – which in many cases is the complete elimination of trans people by any means necessary.

    Most UK anti-trans groups and key anti-trans figures have signed a declaration calling for the “elimination of transgenderism”; many talk openly about removing all our human rights, healthcare and legal protections. Some openly wish to see us dead.

    This is something that campaigners for all women’s rights have long experienced: when they tried to raise the alarm about the US Republicans’ openly stated goal of rescinding Roe vs Wade, they were told not to be so silly. Roe vs Wade, of course, is gone with abortion and contraception now under sustained attack in multiple states – and Obergefell v Hodges, which enabled equal marriage, and Loving v Virginia, which struck down bans on interracial marriage, are next in the firing line. We know this because the religious right told us, as they usually do.

    One of the tactics that’s been openly discussed for a few years now is to classify the very existence of trans people as a sexual act, and to then use that classification to ban trans people from everyday life. And here’s legislators in West Virginia trying to do just that. In two separate bills, Republican lawmakers propose to ban “obscene matter”; in their definition of such, they include “any transvestite and/or transgender exposure, performances or display to any minor.” In other words, the mere presence of a trans person near a child would be a sexual offence.

    It’s easy to dismiss this as the latest whacky nonsense from crazed US fundamentalists. But the exact same arguments are being advanced over here by anti-trans groups, many of which work closely with US evangelical groups such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, one of the key drivers and drafters of US anti-trans legislation. And the arguments are in the 2025 Project manifesto by groups including the Heritage Foundation, which is very close to the current UK government. Many of these documents and strategies make it clear that it’s not just trans people being targeted here but queer people more widely, along with women’s reproductive rights.

    The West Virginian bills aren’t expected to become law. But they are a tiny part of a wave of anti-trans bills in the US, bills that UK anti-trans activists and politicians would like to see in the UK too.

    We’re not overreacting; if anything, we’re underselling the threat to trans people’s lives, to the wider LGBTQ+ community and to reproductive freedom.

  • Calling Scots writers

    Are you an early-career queer writer based in Scotland? Then you really need to know about the Queer Words Project Scotland, which is now open for applications. It’s a programme designed to help you with your writing, and with your writing career.

    Funded by Creative Scotland, it matches five emerging queer writers with five established authors who’ll provide help and advice – and this year those authors are Colin Herd, Heather Parry, Mae Diansangu, Shola Von Reinhold and me.

    It’s a great opportunity, it’s going to be tons of fun and successful applicants’ work will be featured in an anthology by the wonderful 404 Ink. You’ve got until Valentine’s day to apply and full details are available right here.

  • How we got here

    Jude Doyle is always worth reading, and his latest piece for Xtra Magazine is a good analysis of how a handful of powerful people have effectively destroyed US media’s ability or inclination to battle the far right. It’s written from the perspective of a trans person because, as is so often the case, trans people are the canaries in the coal mine.

    The impact of these platforms has not just been to spread bigotry, but to flood the field with junk, to make social media gossip and un-fact-checked blog posts the main vector for information—to make it harder to know what is real. In an emergency, you need to know where the exits are, but at least half of the signs you’ll read in 2024 are lying to you. 

    It is always in the best interests of the powerful not to have a robust press that can hold them accountable.

  • Papers please

    The right-wing press wasted no time in starting 2024’s Tory-fuelled attacks on trans people: on New Year’s Day both the Mail and the Telegraph ran scaremongering articles supporting Kemi Badenoch’s desire to roll back trans people’s rights by several decades.

    This time the target is our passports, which the Telegraph claims have a “loophole” that enables us to change our gender markers that is “self-ID by the back door”. Except it isn’t a loophole and it isn’t self-ID. We’ve been able to change our passports with a note from our GP since the late 1940s (anecdotally) and definitely since the 1960s: April Ashley changed her passport in this way in 1961. It’s standard procedure.

    What Badenoch and her acolytes are doing here is presenting something utterly ordinary and uncontroversial as a sudden sinister threat; in the 70-odd years that trans people have been changing their passports this has never been abused by either a trans person or a cisgender man pretending to be trans. But as ever, the intention here isn’t to protect anybody. It’s to stir up hatred and chip away at our legal protections and rights.

     

  • Rectal research

    A new report by Policy Exchange, the right-wing think tank whose job is to give the Telegraph and Daily Mail some scary headlines and rubber-stamp whatever hateful policies the Tories want to bring in, is a great demonstration of what I’ve seen described as “rectal research”: the report’s supposed facts have clearly been pulled out of the author’s arse.

    The report pretends to be an analysis of trans participation in sport, but it’s nothing of the sort: the figures it presents are complete fiction. For example, it claims that there are 527 trans women and 61 trans men participating in professional rugby; the correct figure is zero, as trans people are banned from the sport; before the ban there were fewer than 10 trans people taking part. It claims that there are nearly 9,000 trans people competing in professional swimming; again, the real number is zero. It claims nearly 500 trans competitors in athletics; the correct number is, again, zero.

    The best example of this rectal research is in cycling, where it claims that there are over 4 million men and over 2 million women taking part in the sport: not riding for fun, but competing professionally. That’s ludicrous, as is the claim that there are over 16,000 trans athletes competing in the sport.

    Update, 31/12: A number of people, including Vivian Wulf on Twitter, have investigated the source of the cycling numbers because they’re so clearly nonsense. The figures are taken from the Active Lives survey by Sport England, which wasn’t about elite sport: its cycling numbers tell you how many people used a bike at least twice in one month for more than ten minutes for the purpose of leisure, travel or sport. Policy Exchange took the number of positive respondents, multiplied it by the estimated proportion of trans people in the UK, and published it as supposed proof of a trans takeover in competitive cycling. 

    In total, the Policy Exchange report claims that tens of thousands of trans women are competing professionally in sport. Given that the UK census – which anti-trans groups say overestimates the number of trans people in the UK – reports that there are 166,000 trans women in the UK, that would mean somewhere between one-seventh and one-fifth of all trans women are professional athletes.

    It’s complete fiction, but it’s doing its job: it’s being reported in all the press as if it’s a credible document rather than the fever dream of anti-trans bigots, and those reports will be cited in future as proof of the entirely invented trans takeover of professional sports.

    Once again, the brave and fearless British press proves Humbert Wolfe correct:

    You cannot hope to bribe or twist
    thank God! The British journalist
    But seeing what the man will do
    unbribed, there’s no occasion to

  • Just the facts

    Since around 2017, it’s been very clear that if you hate trans people you can make up any old shite and have it printed or broadcast without anybody fact-checking it before, during or afterwards – and as a result, many anti-trans activists have taken full advantage of that to spread absolute bullshit with impunity. So it’s refreshing, albeit years overdue, to see some fact checking finally take place.

    Irish newspaper The Journal did some fact checking of a claim made by anti-trans obsessive Graham Linehan on Newstalk radio. According to Linehan, if you search the crowdfunding site JustGiving and look for people crowdfunding top surgery, there are “nearly 38,000 girls” raising money for surgery.

    The actual number of fundraisers is 38.

    What the Journal has done here is not difficult, but despite fact-checking being fundamental to good journalism it’s incredibly rare: there continues to be an assumption that contributors are coming in good faith, an assumption that is widely abused by endless bad actors. Their success should shame the journalists, editors, presenters and producers who’ve let them get away with it so publicly for so long.

  • Guilt

    Two teenagers were found guilty of the murder of teenage girl Brianna Ghey today, after what the Crown Prosecution Service described as “one of the most distressing cases the Crown Prosecution Service has had to deal with. The planning, the violence and the age of the killers is beyond belief.” I had to stop following the case because it was so upsetting, the manner of her death so horrific.

    Brianna was chosen in part because she was trans.

    Brianna didn’t go out much because she’d been the victim of anti-trans bullying (according to fellow pupils; her mother didn’t know about it); her anxiety and loneliness meant her killers saw her as “prey” that would be “easier” for them to kill. One of the murderers, Girl Y, told police that Brianna was “not a normal person”; messages between the two killers showed that the other murderer, Boy X, said that “I want to see if it will scream like a man or a girl.”

    You can read more about the trial in the many newspapers or hear about it from the many broadcasters that, since 2017, have paid many thousands of pounds to transphobes stirring up hatred about girls just like her. Time it right today and you’ll see that the news of her killers’ conviction is just above equalities minister Kemi Badenoch continuing to claim that it’s “harmful” for schools to support trans kids.

    Update, 22 Dec

    Predictably enough, the newspaper coverage of this has been vile. The Daily Mail, which you’ll remember bullied trans teacher Lucy Meadows to her death and which has spent the last several years demonising trans people, did one of its “this beautiful angel has been taken too soon” front pages while prominently plugging its Brianna Ghey podcast; it still hates trans people, but it’ll pretend otherwise when there are papers to sell and podcasts to promote. It’s back on its bullshit today, giving vocally anti-trans columnist Sarah Vine the masthead to claim it was the internet wot dunnit. Vine has written many anti-trans articles for the paper, including ones demanding schools don’t support trans kids.

    Meanwhile The Guardian, many of whose writers are proudly anti-trans, was quick to say on its front page that the police had ruled out transphobia as a motive for the killing. That simply isn’t true, as the transphobic messages produced in evidence by the police demonstrated. The police ruled out transphobia as the *sole* motive, presumably because a straightforward murder charge would be more likely to result in conviction.

  • Dee eye ess see oh

    There’s a wonderful new documentary on BBC iPlayer (and on PBS in the US) called Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution. It traces disco from its origins in the basement bars and warehouses of 1970s New York to its eventual world domination, and it’s a fantastic programme with a celestial soundtrack.

    While the music is of course the focus, it’s also very good at putting that music in its wider context: disco was music by and for marginalised people from the Black, Latin and queer communities, and the backlash against it was often because of precisely that: the Disco Sucks protests, which the show covers and which included a “disco demolition night” in a Chicago stadium, were toddler tantrums by largely straight, cis, white men railing against music embraced by Black, Latin and queer people of all genders. As Mark Anderson would later write:

    The chance to yell “disco sucks” meant more than simply a musical style choice. It was a chance to push back on a whole set of social dynamics that lay just beneath the surface of a minor battle between a DJ and a radio station that decided to change formats. More importantly, it was a chance for a whole lot of people to say they didn’t like the way the world was changing around them, or who they saw as the potential victors in a cultural and demographic war.

    As one of the interviewees puts it in the first episode, disco was political because the dancers’ lives were political.

  • A hateful echo

    In the same week that we heard closing arguments in the trial of Brianna Ghey’s killers, two teenagers who brutally murdered the young girl in part because she was transgender, the Tory government has finally published its draft guidelines regarding trans and non-binary kids in schools. As expected it’s a bigoted shitshow.

    The Department of Education’s own legal team says it’s unlikely to survive any legal challenge. And the fact that no LGBTQ+ organisations were consulted, but every bunch of passing bigots was, makes it clear what the agenda is here. If it weren’t clear enough, the introduction doesn’t even manage to make it into its third paragraph before using the Christian Right dogwhistle “gender identity ideology.”

    Smarter people than me will publish detailed analysis in the coming days and weeks, but the short version is that the guidance acts as if the Equality Act does not exist and often tells schools to act in ways that are against the law. As equality lawyer Robin Moira White put it, it is “a cruel attack on a vulnerable minority by a nasty government focused on running a culture war”.

    The guidance encourages teachers and other school officials to treat trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming children – who remain a tiny minority of pupils – illegally and unethically, which will make it harder for those children to live their lives. It’s a bullies’ charter, a bigots’ wish list, a hateful echo of Section 28.

  • The quiet part

    One of the not-too-hidden secrets of the anti-trans movement is that their goal is the total elimination of trans people. As with the forced birth movement, activists are very careful to disguise their goals, to self-censor and say only what they know they can get away with when they talk to the media. Hence “pro-life” instead of “forced birth”, “reasonable concerns” instead of saying the quiet bit out loud. But in their own events and their own social media, the masks come off.

    The strategy is gradualism, or a wedge strategy: you start small and use your win as a wedge for your real agenda. The US forced birth movement was a fringe movement for decades, but with cynical and significant help from the US GOP it began decades of gradualism to build the foundations for what we’re seeing now: the revocation of Roe vs Wade and moves towards the ultimate goal, which is to prohibit abortion without exception everywhere in the US (and elsewhere too). But even now they continue to pretend that their goal isn’t really their goal: again and again, forced-birther Republican politicians say the right thing about exceptions for rape, incest and medical emergencies before either removing those exceptions or, as ProPublica reports, making those exceptions almost completely inaccessible. The horrific case of Kate Cox, forced to flee Texas in order not to die after the Supreme Court said her life was worthless, shows how hollow those promises are.

    These extreme anti-women laws were always the goal, but the forced birthers pretend otherwise. And the anti-LGBTQ+ eliminationists are doing the same. Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law was initially pitched as for children from kindergarten to third grade, which means kids up to the age of nine; a year later it was extended to twelfth grade, which is 17 and 18-year-olds. Bans on LGBTQ+ books have pretended to be about pornography and protecting children, but explicitly targeted any books by or that mention LGBTQ+ people. Similarly the push for bans on trans healthcare on both sides of the Atlantic initially claimed only to be about protecting pre-pubescent children; the same activists are now pushing for a complete ban on healthcare for trans adults and the removal of all their legal protections too.

    It’s not that they don’t want us to be in sports. They don’t want us to be anywhere. One of the leading voices of the UK anti-trans movement says that trans people’s numbers should be reduced; our equalities minister, who has communicated and met extensively with anti-trans bigots but not LGBTQ+ organisations, claims that we are an “epidemic” and that “predators” are “choosing to exploit rights given to transgender people”, dogwhistling that “I’m not saying that transgender people are predators, but there are more people who are predators than there are people who are trans.”

    This is elimination by a thousand cuts as set out by the Christian right back in 2017: demonise trans people in every possible way. Go after trans people in sports, go after trans people’s use of public facilities, go after trans people’s healthcare, go after trans people’s protection from discrimination, go after trans people’s ability to live normal lives. Ban trans people who go through the wrong puberty; ban the healthcare that can ensure that they do not.

    You can see this in microcosm with Riley Gaines, the US swimmer who was beaten in a race by four other women and tied with a fifth. Gaines has since embarked on a highly lucrative campaign of revenge – not against the women who came first, second, third or fourth, but the trans woman who came equal fifth with her. It turns out that attacking trans people is much better for your profile and your bank balance than being a not-good-enough-to-win swimmer, a lesson other famous swimmers also appear to have absorbed.

    Remember the official line here: trans women must be banned from women’s sports because going through male puberty gives them a biological advantage. That claim is not necessarily true – while there are some sports where it may be a factor in some circumstances, it’s been used to demand bans on trans participation in snooker, darts, croquet and Irish dancing too – but that’s not the point: it’s the stated reason for anti-trans sporting bans. The post-pubertal body, they claim, is simply too powerful for fair competition.

    Except Gaines and the far right doesn’t want trans women to compete in anything at all, which is why she’s just turned the right-wing media machine against a teenage trans girl. The girl, who is 17, began transitioning before puberty and therefore doesn’t possess any of the claimed biological advantages. But the news that she had apparently been offered one of a dozen volleyball scholarships by the University of Washington was enough to set the anti-trans hate machine in motion. It now appears that the university has withdrawn the offer, depriving the girl not just of a sporting opportunity but an educational one too.

    This particular story appears to be another case of something we’re seeing a lot of in the US at the moment: bad losers (or their parents) invoking the spectre of trans people to harm their rivals. Sometimes it’s levelled at girls who are not trans but who aren’t pretty blonde white girls – something trans people and LGBTQ+ allies more widely have been warning about for years. Those warnings, like many others, were ignored – because the collateral damage is welcome too. Bigotry and intolerance run in packs, and they will not stop running when they’re done with us.