Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: LGBTQ+

  • Death before healthcare

    When I self-referred to Glasgow’s gender clinic in 2016, the waiting list for a first appointment was 11 months. Now, it’s 224 years.

    That’s not a typo. The Sandyford gender clinic is so hopelessly understaffed that it’s barely seeing any people, so the backlog is ever growing. The national average is bad enough – 25 years – but in Scotland, the majority of people waiting for an appointment will die without ever being seen. The average wait time in England is 12 years; in Scotland it’s 58 years.

    And that’s not the waiting list for treatment. That’s just for the first assessment. Getting the same HRT that other women can get the same day from their GP can take months more.

    This shouldn’t be a surprise, because the NHS has long been told that the gender clinic model – created not to provide basic healthcare for trans people, but to gatekeep it – is hopelessly broken. The 224-year waiting list is the inevitable result of years of underfunding, understaffing and deliberate neglect.

    QueerAF:

    Trans+ people do not need to be assessed by gender clinics or diagnosed by psychiatrists to tell us what we already know: we are trans. The healthcare we need, especially when it comes to hormones, is already available to cis people through making an appointment with their GP. 

    Gender clinics are unnecessary and exist to segregate healthcare for Trans+ people. Abolishing this system and providing Trans+ healthcare in primary care, at the GP through an informed consent model, would solve many of the issues this data reveals. GPs already prescribe hormones to cis adults. Trans+ adults simply need the same access to this healthcare.

    The purpose of a system is what it does, not what it claims it does. And the gender clinic system is to all intents and purposes a ban on trans people’s healthcare. For much of the UK, if you cannot afford to go private your healthcare is denied.

  • Corruption and collusion

    Freedom of Information requests have revealed collusion between the Department of Health and Social Care and anti-trans groups:

    The correspondence shows Sex Matters, LGB Alliance and Transgender Trend manoeuvring their way into government as so-called “stakeholders” on trans policy, despite lacking any medical expertise and spreading narratives that misrepresent science, misuse human rights law, and dismiss the lived realities of trans people.

    It’s not just emails or letters. The documents show meetings arranged, consultations granted, suicide statistics disputed, and legal rulings twisted into tools to attack trans healthcare. While trans people themselves were left out of the room, ministers were treating hostile lobby groups as if they spoke for the public.

    There’s much more but the DHSC is trying to hide it behind freedom of information exemptions.

    This is not neutral “stakeholder engagement”. It is collusion with groups intent on dismantling the rights of others. And it is happening in secret — behind FOI exemptions, closed consultations, and redactions — while trans communities are left paying the price with their lives.

  • It’s never enough

    The Scottish Government has published new guidance about segregating school toilets, which means trans kids will be prevented from using the toilets appropriate to their gender. Is that enough for the transphobes? Of course it isn’t. The Scotsman quotes Maya Forstater of anti-trans hate group Sex Matters, for whom segregating trans children doesn’t go far enough.

    The policy “still suggests that a pupil might be able to go through their school career pretending to be the opposite sex without ever being ‘outed’ – that is, recognised as the sex they actually are.” Allowing trans kids to use other toilets, or at different times from other children, “will only worsen the child’s dissociation from the unchangeable physical reality of their sex.”

    They’re not even trying to hide it any more: it was never about protecting women and girls. They want trans people eliminated from society, and intend to do so by making trans people’s lives unliveable.

  • Gender and power

    There’s a good piece in Doing Feminist Legal Work about the connections between gender and tyranny going back hundreds of years, and the way they’re connected on both sides of the Atlantic today.

    The article makes the point that the US state-by-state attack on women’s reproductive freedoms, Donald Trump’s assertion that domestic violence by husbands shouldn’t be considered crimes, the growing calls on the US right to disenfranchise women and the war on LGBTQ+ people are all part of the same movement.

    Protecting women, in this context, isn’t about giving women freedom or autonomy. Quite the opposite. It’s about concentrating power in the hands of (mostly; every repressive movement has its Ernst Röhms) straight white men and removing it from everybody else. And to concentrate that power, in a playbook as old as time, you create an out-group who the laws bind but do not protect. That out-group usually includes queer people and in this current moment, trans people in particular.

    Trans people are being removed from the public sphere. And this is how you start. You are “protecting” women. But you do this by reducing women to a set of biological facts. We all know where that leads. In the US they are already there. The weaponisation of women’s rights or protecting women to marginalise and hurt another group, be they Trans people, immigrants or anyone else, is never feminist. Rather, it’s one of the first steps to tyranny.

  • The bathroom ban

    This, by Toby Buckle, is very good: Britain’s Bathroom Ban.

    The UK is in the process of implementing a prohibition on any trans person accessing any single-sex space. Trans people will be barred from using facilities that match their gender (i.e., a trans woman will not be able to use the women’s toilets), but also, it seems, may be barred from using those that match their sex at birth (nor may the same trans woman use the men’s toilets). Effectively, this policy will bar trans people from leaving their homes, and as such it is radically oppressive. 

    The ban is sweeping: it applies to workplaces, hospitals, schools, shops, restaurants, gyms, pubs, clubs, sporting bodies, schools, services like counseling or a women’s support group, and even voluntary clubs and associations. And it is mandatory: it’s not that these institutions can exclude trans people but they must exclude trans people. 

    And this is being done without a vote in parliament, by a Labour government elected on a manifesto pledge to make trans people’s lives easier. 

  • The only Kirk piece you need to read

    I’ve been saddened but not surprised by the rush to canonise Charlie Kirk, the murdered bigot, in so much of the UK press: reading pieces like yesterday’s utterly deranged column by Kevin McKenna in The Herald would leave you with the impression that Kirk was some kind of Debate Jesus crucified by trans women rather than what he was: a man who pushed hatred, advocated violence and profited handsomely from defaming marginalised people, a man who was murdered not by “the tolerant left” or the “trans lobby” but by a white man from a Republican family.

    Part of it, of course, is that many of the people writing about him share many of his views – maybe not all of them, but enough of them that admitting Kirk was a bigot would mean admitting that they’re bigoted towards certain groups too. Hence the whitewash.

    In that context, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s piece on the Kirk coverage is a must-read. It’s damning in part because it simply shows you what Kirk believed in and how he expressed it. But it’s also a pretty savage indictment of the people writing about him.

    Before he was killed last week, Charlie Kirk left a helpful compendium of words—ones that would greatly aid those who sought to understand his legacy and import. It is somewhat difficult to match these words with the manner in which Kirk is presently being memorialized in mainstream discourse… Kirk subscribed to some of the most disreputable and harmful beliefs that this country has ever known.

  • Doing their sacred duty

    Yesterday, three UK newspapers said that the killer of hatemonger Charlie Kirk was pro-trans on their front pages. The Daily Telegraph had the headline “Charlie Kirk suspect ‘left gun with trans message’”. The Sun front page said that “Ammo ‘carried pro-trans message’”. The Times front page headline was “Trump ally’s killer left ‘transgender ammunition’”. Other papers carried the same story inside their print versions and online.

    None of those reports were true.

    There was no trans message, pro- or otherwise.

    And crucially, all of the newspapers knew that, because long before they had gone to print the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the wrong information, had started walking it back.

    The messages on the ammunition were memes from far-right internet culture and shitposting; the one supposedly relating to trans people was the code to call in a bomb in the video game Helldivers 2, which is a popular meme in the alleged killer’s online world.

    We know that many people don’t read beyond headlines, and on the rare occasions that newspapers retract stories they do so in very small boxes buried deep inside the papers. So three of the UK’s biggest papers told everyone passing newsstands yesterday that trans people were connected to a brutal murder. And that lie will now be repeated endlessly as yet another reason to fear and hate trans people.

    Trans people have no comeback for this, because the code of practice newspapers pretend to follow doesn’t allow groups of people to complain: you can only make an actionable complaint about hate if it names a specific person. So if The Times says that Trans Person X did a thing, and that isn’t true, Trans Person X can complain. But if The Times says trans *people* did a thing, and that’s a lie, there’s no comeback. And of course there’s no legal redress either.

    The Onion has a famous headline: It is journalism’s sacred duty to endanger the lives of as many trans people as possible. And that’s exactly what the press is doing here.

  • “A community living in fear”

    Transactual’s doing great work about terrible things right now. Its new report details how LGBTQ+ people are living in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, and it’s clear that the UK has become a terrifying and hostile environment for many of us. The report says:

    • “some trans people are planning to flee to safer countries
    • many expect to lose their jobs
    • yet more fear being driven out of public spaces by a constant stream of humiliation
    • people are telling us of panic attacks and being afraid now to go outside. There is a widespread feeling that this a breaking point; culmination of a decade of growing hatred and persecution
    • there is frank discussion of suicidality directly linked to this ruling and the policies it will enable
    • We are getting anxiety from gender non-conforming people about being policed at every turn ‘like it’s the 1970s’
    • there is much sorrow and anger from cis women that this has been done in the name of “protecting” them from their sisters.”

    It’s notable that the report also includes lots of contributions from cisgender people (ie, people who aren’t trans) such as partners and parents of trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming people, and from women who are just appalled at the scapegoating and harm being done in their name.

  • A good letter

    The Quakers in Britain have published their response to an activist’s demand that they segregate trans women in their premises and at their events. It’s a masterclass in how to respond to bigots’ unreasonable, aggressive and unlawful demands, and an excellent example of a very British form of literary work: telling someone, very politely and at great length, to go fuck themselves.

  • What it’s like

    What’s it like to be a woman (trans or otherwise) or non-binary person since the EHRC tried to segregate trans people? Transactual’s new report goes into detail and makes grim reading. It’s based on hundreds of testimonials and shows that the EHRC interim update, and bigots’ misrepresentation of the Scottish Ministers verdict in the Supreme Court, is already resulting in harassment and threats of violence against cisgender (not trans) and transgender people alike.

    Women of all kinds, not just trans women, are being harassed and threatened with violence simply for trying to exist – and because there are so few trans women in the UK and so much rabble-rousing reporting in the press, self-appointed crotch cops are picking primarily on non-trans women who they’ve decided don’t look womanly enough. That typically means women who aren’t slim, young, white and perfectly, stereotypically pretty.

    From the executive summary:

    Frequently, people trying to follow the guidance given to them are prevented from doing so or experience harassment and threats of violence as a result of being ‘in the wrong bathroom’.

    Trans and cis people continuing to use the spaces they belong in have faced harassment and threats of violence from both venue staff and vigilante toilet police, including men coming into the women’s bathroom in order to harass someone they suspect is trans.

    Many butch cis lesbians and intersex people in particular reported increased instances of harassment and exclusion due to not “looking like a woman”.

    Many people report being excluded and bullied out of workplaces, being forced to choose between their mental health and dignity or their livelihood, and fearing for their ability to support themselves.

    People also report being outed by having to stop or start using different bathrooms or by HR staff who are communicating changes in policies in targeted ways.

    Trans people report being suddenly excluded from social spaces and clubs which have been safe previously, and now avoiding going out or only going to places confirmed as trans inclusive.

    The changes are reported as empowering bullies who are already engaged in campaigns of harassment against trans people.

    In both workplaces and otherwise, people were asked invasive questions about genitals, asked to produce Gender Recognition Certificates, and exclusion was frequently justified based on people’s perceptions of whether the trans person passed or based on what genital configuration they had; “you can’t use this until you are post-op”.

    This is exactly what the EHRC intended. The EHRC’s guidance is not fit for purpose, is wrong in law, and is championing discrimination – and the Labour government, no friend to LGBTQ+ people, is complicit.

    The people being hurt by state-sanctioned bigotry can’t wait years for the European Courts to find what we already know is true: the EHRC is in flagrant breach of multiple laws and is attempting to deprive trans people of their internationally agreed human rights. And by doing so it’s placing all women, trans men and non-binary people in danger.