Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: LGBTQ+

  • We need you

    It’s Trans Day of Visibility tomorrow, a day to celebrate trans people and raise awareness of the discrimination we face.

    This year’s TDOV takes place in a terrifying climate. In the US, states have banned trans healthcare for teens and made it legal for healthcare workers to refuse to treat LGBT+ people; there are moves to prevent LGBT+ people from adopting children. In the UK the Christian Right-funded war on trans women continues apace, 65% of trans people hide their identity at work, 1 in 3 employers say they wouldn’t hire a trans person (even though such discrimination is illegal) and the new Scots political party formed by sex pest Alex Salmond seems to be recruiting every transphobic politician in Scotland. It breaks my heart to see people I thought were better parroting every bit of Sunday Times anti-trans scaremongering and reciting the Christian Right’s anti-trans talking points – “women’s sex-based rights”, “protecting women and girls”, “predatory males” etc – verbatim.

    There simply aren’t enough trans people to battle all of this. We need allies, and we need our allies to speak up. When your co-worker makes a joke about identifying as an attack helicopter or a relative tells the room that lesbians are being fast-tracked for gender reassignment surgery by an international Jewish conspiracy, call them on it just like you would if they were making rape jokes or being racist.

    I don’t think cisgender people fully understand just how awful things are for trans people right now. Most of the UK media is against us, and the BBC frequently platforms anti-trans hate groups; in England at least there is an editorial policy that says trans people cannot be on air unless there is an anti-trans organisation on air too. Imagine a policy that said Black people could only be interviewed if Britain First got the last word. And there is a concerted, multi-faceted attack on all our legal rights by people who want trans people eradicated.

    That’s not hyperbole. They don’t want schools to admit that trans people exist, or to protect trans kids from bullying, or to let trans kids play sports. They don’t want trans teens or even trans people under 25 to get healthcare. They don’t want trans adults to be able to import HRT even though the waiting list for a first appointment at one English gender clinic now appears to be 26 years. And they don’t want trans adults to be protected from violence or from discrimination in the workplace, in housing or in healthcare. They believe that “transgenderism” should be “morally mandated out of existence” and are spending hundreds of thousands of pounds to try and make that happen.

    Ari Drennen on Twitter:

    Hey if you’re cis and looking for a good chance to speak up publicly on trans rights, the trans people in your families, offices, and communities would really fucking love to hear it because we’re hearing from the people who want us dead all the fucking time right now.

    Lilah Sturges:

    You can say “I support trans people” or “support trans kids” or “trans rights are human rights.” Doesn’t matter, just say SOMETHING.

    Because right now we are facing a powerful, sustained attack, one that is going to end trans people’s lives, and we are feeling very much alone.

    Elaine Scattermoon:

    …do you speak up when a colleague starts talking about how “trans women are men who just want to perv on girls” or a family member laments “lesbians are being told they have to be trans men” or any Sunday Times trans panic headline?

    You can’t leave fighting for trans rights to trans people. We have to do it ourselves all the time and it’s personal and it’s incredibly draining and a whole bunch of people won’t even give us the time of day, but they might if it’s you, their daughter/coworker/best mate, etc.

    Nobody is listening to trans people. But they might listen to you.

  • IrnBruKIP

    The rash of defections to Alex Salmond’s new ALBA party, which one wag on Reddit claimed stands for “all ladies beware Alex”, reads like a who’s who of transphobic SNP members.

    Their defections give the lie to the claim that transphobes were ever concerned about protecting women and girls. They’re right-wing reactionaries, happy to rally round a man whose own QC said he was an “objectionable bully” and a “sex pest” and whose online supporters are often viciously misogynist.

  • A little bit of good news

    The Good Law Project:

    If a child cannot consent to taking puberty blockers their loving parent can consent in their stead. That is the outcome of the decision of the High Court, earlier this morning, in the case of AB v Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust (full decision below), the first case funded by Good Law Project’s Trans Defence Fund.

    The effect of the decision in the Bell case earlier this year, when read together with the practice hitherto of the Tavistock not to accept parental consent, was that even when a specialist doctor wanted to prescribe puberty blockers, a child wanted to receive puberty blockers, and their parents believed puberty blockers were in the best interests of the child, an application would still need to be made to the High Court.

    Good Law Project’s lawyers were unable to identify any precedent in English law for this situation. What role is there for a judge – what expertise would they bring or function would they fulfil – in circumstances where the child, parents and doctor all agreed on the right course of therapeutic treatment?

  • Why we hide

    A new study has found that 65% of trans people have had to hide their identity at work. That’s an increase from 52% five years ago. Despite it being illegal, one in three UK employers say they wouldn’t hire somebody who is trans.

    This is why things like the Gender Recognition Act are necessary. By enabling us to change our birth certificate, we can avoid being discriminated against at the very first stage of looking for work; with some employers requesting birth certificates as proof of eligibility to work (even though birth certificates are not ID documents), having the wrong gender marker can mean no interview, let alone a job.

    But of course, discrimination doesn’t end with the application form. Many trans people experience aggression and discrimination from clients, customers or colleagues.

    For most of us, things aren’t so overt. But many trans people find that freelance clients don’t commission them any more, or that they’re treated differently in the workplace.

    Writing in Stylist, Eve Livingston tells some people’s stories.

    And even when trans people secure employment, their experience continues to be shaped by their trans identity: a quarter of all respondents reported being socially excluded by colleagues, while three-quarters said their workplace does not offer information on trans issues or gender neutralfacilities. And 27% reported being deadnamed – addressed by the name they were assigned at birth despite having changed it to better match their identity.

    One of the horrible things about anti-trans activism is that it reverses victim and offender. We’re not a danger to cisgender people, but many cisgender people are a danger to us.

  • “I’m only transitioning so I can cheat at girls’ sports”

    This, in McSweeney’s, is perfect.

    It’s crazy. I started crying yesterday when I looked in the mirror. I mean full-on sobbing. It’s hard to express. I finally look… I look like me. By which I mean that I look like a boy who’s 100% just transitioning to unfairly be good at sports in the wrong gender.

  • Friends in the Right places

    This week, tedious contrarian Julie Burchill’s new publisher was revealed to be white supremacist blogger “Miss Britannia”. Despite expressing her contempt for gay men, the blogger was a loud supporter of the LGB Alliance. Isn’t it funny how people who hate gay and lesbian people seem so drawn to an organisation that is supposedly pro-gay and lesbian people?

    Trans people, particularly trans people of colour, have been trying to raise the alarm about the links between anti-trans activism and far right groups for several years now. As far as I’m aware, not a single UK newspaper has covered it at all.

    The trans safety network has a good overview of the key players, most of whom are very well known.

  • Where are our allies?

    This, by journalist and trans dad Freddy McConnell, is very good.

    trans equality has not gone from progress to standing still. Under this parliament, and the watch of our current so-called equality ministers, the UK has lurched from progress to a measurable loss of rights for trans people, both young and old.

    If our allies in government and media do not become more vigilant and proactive as a matter of emergency, trans people – friends, colleagues, classmates, siblings, children and parents – will be legislated out of public existence without the majority even noticing.

    As in America, the Christian Right is currently targeting trans people at every level. The goal is really simple: it’s to make it impossible for trans people to live normally in society.

    They start with the schools, demanding trans lives be excluded from relationship and sex education and that trans kids be forced to use facilities according to their birth sex, not their lived gender. They demand trans kids be excluded from anti-bullying and anti-discrimination protections.

    For trans teenagers, they have already removed access to crucial healthcare. They want to go further and remove it for under-25s.

    For trans adults, they want to criminalise private sourcing of HRT while on current trends, the waiting list for a first NHS appointment may now be 26 years for someone joining the waiting list today.

    Also for trans adults they want to remove anti-discrimination protections in work, in employment and in public. They just spent £100,000 to try and stop the census counting how many trans people there are. They have demanded gender-neutral language in legislation be changed specifically to exclude trans men.

    O’Connell:

    The strategy itself appears to look like this: target laws and policies that accidentally or potentially protect trans people, no matter how seemingly inconsequential. In other words, death by a thousand cuts. The goal is to adjust our political and legal systems such that they operate as if a) trans people do not exist, b) trans people are not to be taken seriously, c) trans people are a threat, or d) all of the above.

    This dogged work is not headline grabbing stuff, but then groups like Woman’s Place UK, LGB Alliance and Transgender Trend have had their fill of that. After months or even years of uncritical news coverage, they might have realised fawning journalists can only get them so far. If a campaign’s goal is, in effect, the eradication of a protected class of people, the work itself cannot be all OBEs and Newsnight specials. The architects of anti-gay and anti-abortion campaigns in the US, who UK groups may or may not communicate with online*, could tell them that.

    The strategy is very simple: it’s to go after trans and non-binary people in every conceivable way, no matter how obscure. Who cares about the wording of a law that won’t affect most people, or the guidance in the census? But the mistake is to view these things in isolation, to see them as single events rather than an extremely well-funded and well-resourced war on a vulnerable minority that’s being waged not by feminists, but by the Christian Right and right-wing politicians.

  • Grifters don’t care about facts

    Riley Black, writing for Slate: Stop Trying to Out-Science Transphobes.

    But regardless of their aims, transphobes of all stripes appeal to the authority of science—science that is pretty easy to refute.

    This is a trap. Allies fall for this time and again. The same conservatives who try to deny my rights based on “science” have also denied that cigarettes cause lung cancer, that humans are driving global climate change, and that evolution is real. They are not dealing in facts.

    …What we’re living through is a trans panic akin to the satanic panic of the ’80s and ’90s, when parents and police were convinced there were devil-worshipping cults infiltrating every facet of society. It is not logical. Going over, yet again, how hormone levels, chromosomes, skeletal features, and more vary in many complex ways is not going to make a lick of difference to people who see me and others like me as an abomination, a threat to the nuclear family, or somehow capable of ruining their day because I need to use the women’s room.

    As Upton Sinclair put it, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Hundreds of thousands of pounds are pouring into UK anti-trans activism, whether that’s through dark money, freelance fees, book sales or media appearances. Lying about trans people is pretty good for political gain, and it generates a lot of online ad clicks and newspaper sales too. Who’s going to let facts threaten all of that?

  • “These girls just wanted to run”

    This, by Esther Wang for Jezebel, is a superb piece of journalism. It’s about the war on trans girls currently being waged by the US religious right both in the US and over here and it does something rare: it tells you about the trans girls at the centre of the moral panic over trans women in sports.

    …shortly after Andraya placed third in the state’s girls’ outdoor 100-meter competition, the rightwing outrage machine zeroed in on the then-15-year-old as its next target. The New York Post and newspapers in the U.K., where a rabid transphobia pushed by groups like Fair Play for Women was flourishing, began writing about her. Adult men ranted about her in YouTube videos with titles like “How to Stop Andraya Yearwood from Beating Girls for Three More Years.” The next year, after Terry Miller—another Black trans girl in Connecticut whom Andraya would befriend—began running and at times winning races in their state, the attacks on Andraya, and now Terry as well, only intensified.

    The article is very good on the clear links between the extremely powerful and rich Alliance Defending Freedom, an anti-LGBT+ hate group, and the people trying to ban trans girls from sports.

    It’s also very good at pointing out that the young women supposedly losing to sinister trans people are also losing to tons of cisgender girls too.

    In 2018, after Terry and Andraya won gold and silver, respectively, in the state’s girls 100-meter event, Bianca Stanescu, the disgruntled mother of the girl who finished in sixth place in that race, circulated a petition during meets that called for the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference to change its policy on trans athlete participation. Though Stanescu’s daughter, Selina Soule, had lost to three other girls in addition to Andraya and Terry, Stanescu and Selina focused solely on the two trans girls. The mother-daughter duo became regular guests on Fox News and other right-wing media outlets, which was soon flooded with content that warned girls like Andraya and Terry would “destroy” girls’ and women’s sports.

    The idea that trans women would destroy women’s sports has been a right-wing trope since the 1970s and it simply hasn’t happened. Trans people have been able to compete in the Olympics for two decades; not a single trans athlete qualified for the last Olympic Games and there has never been a trans Olympic medal winner. You don’t hear about the majority of trans athletes who are not winning anything.

    Spreading the (false) idea that trans girls are a threat to other girls’ sports and doing so by forging alliances with supposedly feminist groups is one of the tactics described in the 2017 meeting of religious right groups who decided to target trans people after losing their battle against equal marriage.

    Few people seemed to care that while she and Terry were good runners—at times very good, medal-winning runners on the state-wide level—their best times in races like the 100-meters weren’t close to cracking the top results nationwide for girls their age. Other girls, a lot of cisgender girls, were faster, were better. Even in Connecticut, Andraya and Terry weren’t the only competitors who bested Selina in races. No one was talking about the supposed “competitive advantage” of those girls, or talking about how they had “stolen” something from Selina.

    …[former athletics head] Niehoff noted that a few other trans athletes, including trans girls, were competing in Connecticut at the same time, but with far less scrutiny. “Nobody’s paying attention to the transgender student-athlete that’s not winning the medals,” she said. At competitions, she encountered parents of athletes who jeered at Andraya and Terry from the stands. “Is that the direction we want to go or do we want to be supportive and encouraging so that a young person goes through high school and comes out with some personal strength and a healthy self-esteem and a positive outlook?” Niehoff said. It was, she said, “horrible to see the lack of class, the lack of empathy, the lack of maturity by the adults.”

    That lack of empathy was the result of a deliberate strategy.

    Andraya’s success came at the worst possible time for girls like her—a moment when trans girls and women competing in sports were quickly becoming the focus of the religious right’s efforts to legislate trans people out of public life, a coordinated assault that relied on a calculated partnership with so-called trans-exclusionary radical feminists and co-opting feminist rhetoric. After Christian conservatives lost their fight over marriage equality in 2015, they quickly pivoted to attacking trans rights, turning to collectively push for so-called bathroom bills in earnest the following year. When those failed, said Chase Strangio, the ACLU’s Deputy Director for Transgender Justice, “Our opponents started to shift very strategically to the areas of sports and healthcare for trans youth.”

    One of the things that’s really saddening about this is that much of the transatlantic hate traffic is coming from the UK. Arguments and bullshit first spouted by UK anti-trans groups have made it across the Atlantic where they are being amplified by the Religious Right and conservative pundits, and dark money from the Religious Right makes the return journey to the UK.

    The need to “save” girls sports—merely the latest variation of the “save our (white) children” rhetoric that has long animated rightwing social movements—fed neatly into an existing, paternalistic moral panic about trans young people, stirred up by writers like the Wall Street Journal’s Abigail Shrier, whose book Irreversible Damage warns absurdly of the “transgender craze” that is “seducing our daughters.”

    The ADF is a key part of all of this, and deeply connected to the anti-trans legal cases in the UK. Their goal is not to protect anybody. It’s to drive trans people out of existence. They are attacking trans people on multiple fronts: in anti-discrimination provision, in healthcare, in access to public facilities, in schools and in sports.

    In many states, as Republican legislators push to ban trans girls from sports, they are also simultaneously introducing bills that criminalize gender-affirming care for trans youth. Collectively, these bills represent “the most relentless legislative attacks on trans lives that I have ever seen,” according to the ACLU’s Strangio. Lately, Strangio has taken to calling them “dystopian,” a characterization that is particularly apt for the bills proposing the creation of sex verification boards that would scrutinize a young athlete’s genitals, chromosomal make-up, and hormone levels.

    …Cut through the “fairness” rhetoric that dresses these bills up in the hopes of making them palatable, and what lies underneath is, as Strangio put it, “a fundamental dislike and anxiety about the presence of trans people in the world.” “We’re seeing a revitalization of a sort of eugenics discourse around the abolition of the trans person and the idea that transness is itself a threat,” Strangio said. “The masks are off, so to speak.”

     

  • The real threat to women in sport

    Mother Jones: The Real Threat to Women’s Sports Isn’t Trans Athletes. It’s Sexually Predatory Coaches.

    As scandal after scandal emerges about the pervasive abuse of young athletes, it’s time we reevaluate our priorities. Trans athletes aren’t the problem.

    It’s not just sports. Here in the UK, the “protect women” crowd who talk repeatedly about the supposed dangers of the dozen or so trans women in women’s prisons have nothing to say about the widespread abuse of women prisoners by cisgender inmates and officers. The crowdfunding campaigns that raise five or six-figure sums never go to services that desperately need funding, such as rape crisis centres and refuges. And that’s because they don’t care about protecting women. They care about harming trans people.

    Penny Red’s article from a year or so ago is worth re-reading:

    I’ve spoken to cis women involved in that side of the debate who have lost everything that mattered to them over years of austerity, cuts to services and welfare, who have been ground down by male violence and are now being told by people with an agenda that men in dresses are coming to take the last safe spaces they had. They are hearing, again and again, that trans people are coming to corrupt their children and convert their daughters to deviance — but if they sign up to an ideology that portrays trans women as “poison” (as transphobic feminist Shelia Jeffreys recently declared in the House of Commons), they can fight back.

    This is how a lot of concerned, well-meaning women who only want a fairer, safer world came to be convinced that trans people are out to pervert children, prey on them in public toilets and refuges, and force lesbians to have sex with them against their will.

    …Transphobic feminists are right to believe that there is a crisis in women’s liberation. But it’s not because of any sort of insidious neoliberal trans agenda. The people who are actually undermining women’s rights around the world are not being at all subtle about it. They’re not sending in trans women to invade domestic violence shelters. They’re just closing the shelters and taking away legal aid protections for women fleeing abusive relationships. In Britain, over half the domestic violence shelters have closed in the past decade. Around the world, misogyny and violence are becoming more acceptable, women in the public eye are being attacked and killed, and reproductive rights and sex- and gender- based protections are being torn up by right-wing governments led by tyrannical strongmen… While transphobic feminists focus their energy and attention on trans activists, the common enemy gets on with dismantling the basic rights of women and queer people of every gender.