Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: LGBTQ+

  • 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.

  • Monster trucks

    There’s a lovely piece by Jude Doyle in The Cut: What coming out as transgender taught me about parenting. I won’t spoil the main narrative but this bit really resonated with me.

    I came out as trans just before my daughter’s 3rd birthday. I did it because it was not possible for me to be an effective parent while constantly examining my own life for missed opportunities; in order to be fully there for my daughter, I had to stop projecting my unmet needs onto her. I did it because kids learn by example; I could tell her to love herself, but if I lived in shame and denial, then she would never actually know what self-acceptance looked like.

  • The wedge

    Today’s Observer reports:

    A rightwing Christian lobby group that wants abortion to be banned has forged ties with an adviser to the prime minister and is drawing up ­policy briefings for politicians.

    The UK branch of the US-based Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has more than doubled its spending since 2020 and been appointed a stakeholder in a parliamentary group on religious freedoms in a role that grants it direct access to MPs.

    The ADF isn’t just one of the prime movers in the global anti-abortion movement; it’s also one of the prime movers in the global anti-gender movement, of which trans people are the initial targets. As The Observer puts it, the organisation “also supports outlawing sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ+ adults and funds US fringe groups attacking gay, trans and abortion rights”. It is also believed to be a funder of fake grassroots groups pushing anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ activism: many LGBTQ+ and women’s rights supporters believe that organisations such as ADF use crowdfunding to disguise their investment in such astroturf groups.

    The ADF is already a regular voice in British and Scottish media, almost always without any context telling viewers, listeners or readers what the organisation does and what its goals are. It’s presented as an organisation that advocates for freedom and freedom of speech, not an organisation that works tirelessly to remove women’s reproductive rights, to remove LGBTQ+ people’s human rights, to censor education and to give religious people – but only Christian religious people – freedom from the laws that bind others.

    What we’re seeing here is the wedge that began with attacks on trans people and has since moved to wider anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-abortion moves. This is not a secret: the ADF is one of the supporters of Project 2025 by the Heritage Foundation (another evangelical group close to the UK government, and which for a short time had its own pet prime minister in the form of Liz Truss), which sets out the Christian Right’s plan for what they hope will be another Trump presidency.

    Here’s Nancy Kelley on the stated goals of Project 2025.

    It is almost unfathomably obsessed with ending access to reproductive healthcare, along with total state control of reproductive knowledge, health and choices. It is deeply hostile to migrants, including the most vulnerable migrants, and violently rejects any analysis of racial disparity, or engagement with the USA’s past, present or future as a multi racial democracy. It is shocking, it is scary, and it is specifically scary when it comes to LGBTQ+ people and our human rights.

    And as Kelley points out, these ideas – and the groups behind them – are already gaining significant traction in the UK.

    The UK anti-trans movement and aligned social conservative movements already use the same arguments as Project 2025 (social contagion, sexualisation of children, parental rights, faith and belief) to argue for the same goals here in the UK, and they are doing so with some success.

    With the anti-trans part of the wedge well established, the door is now open to similar attacks on the wider LGBTQ+ community and to women’s and non-binary people’s reproductive freedom. And very conveniently, the most high profile self-identified feminists and women’s rights defenders in the UK are too busy defaming and demonising trans people to pay attention, let alone fight back; in many cases they’re standing arm in arm with the ADF and its fellow travellers.

    It’s tiring to write yet again that once they’re done with us, they’re coming for you: the religious right has been openly promising that for years now. But we appear to be sleepwalking into a very dark place because of journalistic malpractice, useful idiots and British and Scottish exceptionalism: we’re too enlightened, too clever; it couldn’t happen here. But it can happen here. It’s already begun.

  • Complete fiction

    I’ve been away for a bit, and while I was out of the country we had yet another completely invented scandal around trans people. This time it was around the new Scottish hate crime legislation, which does not make it an offence to misgender trans people. Despite it not being an offence to misgender trans people, it has been widely reported that the law would make it an offence to misgender trans people.

    Here’s Assigned Media.

    Presenter Justin Webb began his interview with the member of Scottish Parliament by asking, “Is misgendering a crime under this act?” Brown’s answer? “No. Not misgendering. Not at all.”

    …During their back and forth, Brown explains that if a report of a hate crime is made it would be the police’s job to determine if a crime has taken place.

    The latter doesn’t contradict the former, but that didn’t stop pretty much the entire UK press from reporting that misgendering was now a hate crime despite – as I may have mentioned – misgendering not being a hate crime.

    Bad faith scaremongering about legislation is a favourite tactic of the evangelical right, and in Scotland we previously saw it over the smacking ban – which, child-whacking arseholes told us, would see the prisons full of parents wrongly convicted of assaulting their kids. It’s also been used to attack women’s and LGBTQ+ people’s rights in other countries, such as in Spain.

    As ever, it doesn’t matter if the press amplifies bullshit through malevolence or incompetence, because the result is the same: newspapers and broadcasters are misleading their readers, listeners and viewers and doing real damage in the process.

  • A shameful sham

    The news that NHS England is banning the prescription of puberty blockers to trans teens (but not cis teens) is surprising if you look at the results of the consultation into that very plan: the overwhelming majority of responses were against the ban, pointing out that it flew in the face of all available evidence and was contrary to international best practice. The PDF is here if you fancy a look; it’s pretty damning of the proposals.

    But the point of the consultation, like many other sham consultations, was not to change a decision that had already been made. The ban we’re reading about this week was previously decided on and announced in the summer of 2023, months before the consultation was opened.

    The purpose of the consultation was to enable the NHS, and the government, to say that there has been a consultation – secure in the knowledge that nobody is going to report that the consultation overwhelmingly demonstrated that the decision chose to ignore medical expertise in favour of scaremongering and moral panic.

  • The minister for the Heritage Foundation

    Like many incompetent, idiotic arseholes, former PM Liz Truss – who crashed the UK economy and was famously outperformed by a lettuce – has found new friends among the US far right and the right-wing press by parroting their bigotry. And to please them she’s introduced a private member’s bill that attempts to bring the most hateful anti-trans legislation from the US to the UK.

    If it passes, which thankfully it probably won’t, it would undo the Equality Act, force teachers to bully children and criminalise doctors who provide healthcare in line with international standards of best practice.

    It is a vicious, hateful bill proposed and supported by vicious, hateful people – people who have made it abundantly clear that the war they’re waging on trans people’s healthcare and human rights is a war they want to wage more widely against all women and the entire LGBTQ+ community too.

  • Freedom to choose

    There’s an interesting and provocative piece in New York Magazine by Andrea Long Chu, in which she advocates for trans people’s freedom. It’s a long read and quite dense in places – and I don’t think she makes it clear enough that the only medical intervention available to trans kids is puberty blocking, which is fully reversible – but she’s very good on the role of transphobic liberals in laundering far-right views for a more mainstream audience.

    The most insidious source of the anti-trans movement in this country is, quite simply, liberals.

    Liberals are the ones “just asking questions” in the pages of newspapers, pretending to be objective when they’re just as biased against trans people as the most rabid right-wingers.

    The very simple fact is that many people believe transgender is something no one in their right mind would ever want to be… If the liberal skeptic will not assert in mixed company that there should be fewer trans people, he still expects us to agree on basic humanitarian grounds that at least there should not be more.

     

  • Politicians are preaching hate

    From ILGA-Europe, which consists of LGBTQ+ organisations across all of Europe and Central Asia:

    A NEW REPORT SHOWS A STARK RISE IN ANTI-LGBTI, AND IN PARTICULAR, TRANSPHOBIC STATEMENTS FROM POLITICIANS ACROSS EUROPE.

    Published today by ILGA-Europe, the 13th Annual Review of the Human Rights Situation of LGBTI People in Europe and Central Asia alarmingly reports hate speech from politicians in 32 European countries over the course of last year, 19 of them member states of the EU.

    There has been a clear accumulation of hate speech against the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex (LGBTI) community from officials across Europe, much of it targeting trans people, in countries including EU member states Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, and Sweden. 

    The vast majority of anti-trans statements instrumentalise children, using scare tactics to create opposition to trans minors’ access to healthcare and restrictions on education. This is a broader trend we see in the use of children, with politicians across Europe claiming that limiting access to information about LGBTI people prevents harm to minors.