Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: LGBTQ+

  • A “grotesque obsession”

    I do like it when people get righteously angry, and Sean Morley is righteously angry about “Britain’s Grotesque Obsession” with trans people. 

    You will recall that the presence of trans people in the public eye was a non-issue until the mid-2010s, when suddenly it became the cause de jour for every entertainer, journalist or social media influencer gracelessly shattering into a million pieces when faced with the mildest career turbulence, only to re-emerge as a just-asking-questions reactionary transphobe.

    …Trans people, just like gay people and short people, are just one of the types of people any person can turn out to be. And just like the gays and the shorts, they cannot be legislated out of existence. The most you can do is fearmonger them into retreating from public life.

    That is what the supreme court decision is about. There is a small but relentless social movement calling for erasure of transness as a concept. They are tiny in number but wield immense social power due to coming from the same social class and swirling in the same WhatsApp groups as the people who make decisions.

  • Demand their papers, say the papers

    The EHRC draft guidance has been published and as expected, it’s an incoherent and in many places illegal shitshow that appears to have been written by the same anti-trans groups the EHRC chair and commissioner are close friends of. But it’s achieving its goal, which is to get the newspapers to tell their readers that trans women must be excluded from public spaces or gendered toilets, which is not what the Supreme Court ruled and is not what the law says.

    I’m not a lawyer, but even I can see that a lot of the guidance in the consultation document misrepresents the law and exposes companies to significant legal risk by falsely telling them that they should discriminate against service users. And the papers’ reporting of it is even worse, with the likes of The Telegraph saying that retailers must interrogate trans customers (or suspected trans customers) who want to use changing rooms and to demand birth certificates to prove customers’ sex.

    It’s a mess, it’ll harm people, and it’s going to get retailers and other service providers sued. The EHRC chair and commissioners are malevolent and incompetent, and should be replaced before they cause even more chaos.

  • Don’t get sick. Don’t get old

    One of the things that really scares me is getting old – not because I’m scared of ageing, but because unless I die first I’ll eventually need to enter the care system. The care system in the UK is horrific for most, and there are extra terrors for LGBTQ+ people – so much so that many UK care homes believe they have no LGBTQ+ residents, as those residents have chosen not to reveal their sexuality or gender history for fear of discrimination or worse.

    Writing in Yorkshire Bylines, Nell Stockton explains the additional fears caused by the anti-trans Supreme Court verdict and subsequent EHRC misinformation.

    The short version: it’s an absolute shitshow that could do serious damage to older trans people’s lives, their health and their safety.

    All of us will hopefully get to live to a ripe old age. Trans older adults deserve to enjoy their later years as much as anyone, without fear of being outed and shunned, and we should not be forced into becoming recluses.

  • Making tits of themselves

    Let’s talk about tits, shall we? Both literally, as in breasts, and metaphorically, as in bigoted men making complete tits of themselves.

    This weekend, a group of Scots trans women held a topless protest outside Holyrood over the Supreme Court verdict and its aftermath. With some irony, the very newspapers that love to call trans women men blurred their breasts so as not to fall foul of obscenity complaints.

    The photos of the event have caused some confusion among the genital-obsessed weirdos crowd, with figures such as disgraced former comedy writer Graham Linehan taking time out from court appearances (harassment and property damage here, defamation there) to opine that some of the women must have been cisgender women pretending to be trans.

    “OMG uncensored picture of the boob protest,” the man who used to write words for a living typed. “Eh, is it just me or is there an actual woman in here pretending to be a transwoman? Because the men are easy to spot.”

    So much for “we can always tell”.

    The woman in question is a trans woman – and like many young trans women, and many young women who aren’t trans, she’s very good-looking.

    Linehan’s rather grubby response – essentially “she can’t be trans, I like her tits” – does help prove the point the women were trying to make (as well as emphasise yet again how little the genital-obsessed weirdos know about trans people’s bodies): the anti-trans mob cannot, in fact, always tell.

    That’s important, because if the UK’s proposed bathroom ban is implemented then women of all shapes and sizes, almost all of whom won’t be trans, will be judged and in some cases punished by witless misogynists and other bullies based on a very arbitrary set of beauty standards.

    If you’d rather not have your access to spaces and public life conditional on whether lonely old men think you’re fuckable, you might want to write to your MP to demand an end to this idiotic campaign to segregate trans people and create a legion of self-appointed toilet cops.

  • It’s oh so Quietus

    I’m absolutely delighted to be featured in The Quietus, courtesy of excellent interviewer Claire Sawers.

    And so it was that Marshall embarked upon a two and a half year project to research queer music in Scotland. Small Town Joy: From glam rock to hyperpop: how queer music changed the sound of Scotland is her wonderful, trivia packed, often fascinating and fangirling look at the LGBTQ+ artists that have shaped Scotland’s cultural landscape. She’s deliberately not aiming solely for a nostalgic, retromania style read either. After tracing historic lines, the second half of the book is a rich collection of her interviews and essays exploring current queer scenes, sometimes ones thriving in places where she least expects. (See her interviews with queer Scots trad folk musicians for example, or conversely, a notable lack of interviews with gay male rappers.)

  • No politicians at Pride? Here’s why

    Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner holding trans pride banners at Pride. Labour have seen the UK drop to 22nd place in Europe for LGBTQ+ rights.

    One of the longest-running assessments of countries’ performance on LGBTQ+ rights and healthcare is the ILGA-Europe Rainbow Map and Index. British politicians used to speak proudly of our place in it, because in 2015 we led Europe: the UK was ranked as the best place in Europe for LGBTQ+ people to live, work and love.

    And then in 2017, the war on trans people started.

    Under the Conservatives, we dropped from first place to 9th place by 2020.

    We dropped again to 10th place in 2021, and to 14th place in 2022.

    Then Labour came to power, promising to protect LGBTQ+ people’s rights. But instead of reversing the decline Labour accelerated it.

    We’re now ranked 22nd.

    That means we’ve dropped from being the best place in Europe for LGBTQ+ people to one of the worst, with the UK ranked alongside Hungary and Georgia.

    The political parties that enabled this are currently complaining that they’ve been banned from many of this year’s Pride events. Which says a lot about how they really see the LGBTQ+ community: as a resource they can mine for PR, not a community of people they should protect. Because the bans aren’t on individual members; they’re a ban on the parties using Pride to pinkwash their reputations, wrapping themselves in the colours of communities they’re actively harming.

  • A feeding frenzy

    The trans advocacy group TACC has been counting the (overwhelmingly anti-) trans stories published by many UK newspaper websites. Over the last 30 days the Times has run 38 stories; the Daily Express, 91; The Sun, 123; The Daily Telegraph, 147; and the Daily Mail, 228.

    In the case of the Mail that’s an average of over 7 anti-trans stories per day, but it’s even worse than that: on just one day, the day of the Supreme Court ruling, the Daily Mail published over 35 stories about trans people while The Telegraph and The Express published more than 25 each.

    That isn’t journalism. It’s a feeding frenzy.

  • Cass, peer reviewed

    A new peer review of the Cass report yet again shows that it was a political exercise designed to rubber-stamp the government’s war on trans people and our healthcare. The report’s conclusion is damning:

    Our critical analysis reveals significant methodological problems in the commissioned systematic reviews and primary research that undermine the validity of the Cass report’s recommendations. During our review of the report and supplementary primary research, we found insufficient statistical rigor, unreliable datasets, claims presented without evidence, and misrepresentation of quotes from primary research participants.

    Cass should have been struck off for this. Instead, she was given a peerage.

  • Making it clear

    Tribune Magazine explains why the supposed “clarity” of the Supreme Court ruling is anything but.

    This sleight-of-hand has been demonstrated by Keir Starmer himself, who has repeatedly praised the ‘real clarity’ provided by the judgment, but only given one example of that supposed clarity: the idea that the judgment says ‘a woman is an adult female’. These words occur nowhere in the judgment; the judgment explicitly says that its role is ‘not to define the meaning of the word “woman”’ beyond a specific interpretation of the Equality Act.

    Yet this invented ‘clarification’ of how gender works has resulted in an onslaught of institutions falling over themselves to drop any pretence of trans inclusivity, from the British Transport Police announcing trans women will be exclusively strip-searched by male officers, to the FA and ECB banning trans women — who were already subject to heavy testing and surveillance — from their women’s football and cricket events.

    What’s clear here is that the verdict is being used to push the right-wing narrative of “luxury beliefs” – something that’s been corroborated by Labour MPs chortling sarcastically on social media this week about how working class people won’t be interested in trans people’s rights and safety, as if no working class people are trans people, or don’t have trans family members, friends or colleagues.

    A “luxury belief” is whatever real thing right-wingers want to delegitimise and demonise. It’s just a slightly smarter-sounding way of saying “woke”, and comes with the same dismissive sneer. Luxury beliefs include feminism, LGBTQ+ equality and anti-racism.

    This is more than an assertion that trans people are ‘really’ our birth sex: it’s a call to punish trans people for looking and acting in ways that have sustained the ‘luxury belief’ that people can, in fact, change their sex and gender.

    Those who cannot pass as their birth sex are supposedly obfuscating the ‘truth’ that sex change is not real, and must therefore be pushed out of public life. This farcical move is clear in the Supreme Court judgment’s discussion that trans people of any gender may be reasonably excluded from both men’s and women’s facilities and services, from one because of their birth sex, and from the other because their changed appearance makes their inclusion unworkable.

  • Sturgeon speaks out

    In Carrie Kills A Man I wrote about meeting Nicola Sturgeon in 2019 as part of a group of trans and non-binary people; I said that my impression of her was of a genuine ally, but that many in her government were not. As The National reports, she’s spoken out about the Supreme Court verdict and the attempts to spin it into trans segregation.

    She told reporters on Tuesday: “The Supreme Court judgement by definition is the law of the land.

    “The question for me, and I think for a lot of people, is how that is now translated into practice. 

    “Can that be done in a way that protect women and also allows trans people to live their lives with dignity and in a safe and accepted way? I think that remains to be seen.

    “I think some of the early indications would raise concerns in my mind that we are at risk of making the lives of trans people almost unliveable and I don’t think the majority of people in the country would want to see that.

    “It certainly doesn’t make a single woman any safer to do that because the threat to women comes from predatory and abusive men.”