Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: LGBTQ+

  • Here comes the flood

    The Scottish Government will announce its proposals for and open its second consultation on gender recognition reform this week.

    This is the second consultation because the first one did not get the result that bigots wanted: of the 15,532 individuals and 165 organisations who responded to the months-long, widely publicised consultation, 60% respondents were in favour of reform. Rather than “silencing women”, the consultation received submissions favouring reform from women’s organisations including Rape Crisis Scotland, Scottish Women’s Aid, Women 50:50, Zero Tolerance, Close The Gap, Engender and Equate Scotland.

    When women’s groups said they were in favour of gender recognition reform, the “stop silencing women” groups told the government to ignore them and re-run the consultation. To its great shame, the government did.

    The first Scottish consultation ended shortly before the English anti-trans panic really kicked in, so the evangelical groups, right-wing nutcases and anti-LGBT+ bigots that have poisoned the issue down south didn’t really get to make as much noise up here as they did in the rest of the UK (although all the leading anti-trans organisations and anti-LGBT groups did make submissions to the initial consultation, despite many of them claiming the consultation was somehow kept secret from them).

    They’ve made up for lost time ever since, and the second consultation will see them given a much bigger microphone to try and incite fear and hatred of trans people, especially trans women. They will be supported by their friends down south and across the Atlantic and by the majority of the local and national press.

    The proposed reforms have been implemented successfully in many other countries and have never been abused; lurid tales of predatory men using gender recognition certificates remain firmly in the imaginations of newspaper columnists, religious fundamentalists and idiots on Twitter. The predator myth was created by the US religious right after losing its war on equal marriage; at least one group has admitted fabricating the “predators in bathrooms” issue to try and make people scared of trans women.

    GRA reform has no impact on who gets to use toilets, who gets to access women’s refuges, who goes where in prison.

    It will not redefine the meaning of “woman”, force children to see penises or any of the other nonsense claims made by the same people who a generation ago would have been the ones claiming that lesbians shouldn’t be allowed to be PE teachers and that gay primary school teachers would molest their pupils.

    Nevertheless these claims and many more will be churned out by the Scottish and national press and on social media for many months to come. Many of the people making those claims will be ill-informed but many more will be malicious.

    Look for newspaper columnists with a track record of Islamophobia, social media posters who can barely hide their homophobia, “family values” campaigners who’ve previously lobbied against women’s reproductive health and for the right of parents to beat their children. Look for the Mumsnet crowd who’ve tried to defund children’s charities, for the antisemites claiming conspiracy, for the “protect women” groups who don’t care about any of the issues currently harming women, for the public figures who once said exactly the same about gay and lesbian people that they’re saying about trans people today.

    Listen for the dog whistles behind the “reasonable concerns” and false claims to care about “real” trans people.

    The flood of abuse that’s coming won’t stop reform from happening; it’s in line with international best practice and reflects the medical, scientific and legal consensus. GRA reform is a niche issue that only affects a tiny number of people, and the current concerns will one day be seen for the bullshit they are.

    But in the meantime it means yet more daily abuse of people like me.

    What the endless, cowardly delays in Scotland and England have done is enabled the far right, the religious right and their useful idiots to demonise part of the LGBT+ community in an attempt to weaken the wider family. Trans people are just the start.

    We are a wedge strategy for anti-LGBT+ and anti-feminist activism, the softest targets in a war on gay men and lesbian women, on bisexual people and on women’s reproductive rights. We’ve seen the LGB Alliance’s social media run by Trump supporters and question the validity of bisexual people, seen Women Make Glasgow claim gay men shouldn’t get life-saving medicine, seen the leading lights of the UK anti-trans movement break bread with right-wing Christian fundamentalists and declare their support for Tommy Robinson, watched our MPs laud activists who claimed that trans people are a global conspiracy funded by the Jews. We’ve even seen people elected who believe that there’s a secret Muslim strategy to turn everybody transgender.

    We have endured more than two years of this, and yet the immediate future looks even worse. I’m scared not just for us, but for everybody else who’ll be targeted after us.

  • Won’t get fooled again

    Last night, the Hallmark Channel decided not to drop wedding adverts that featured two women getting married. It’s just the latest example of a business discovering that while evangelical and/or intolerant pressure groups can be very vocal, so can the people they hate.

    Being intolerant is rarely a good look, PR wise, and LGBT+ people, their friends and their families have purchasing power. How many businesses can afford to alienate a huge proportion of the population to mollify a small number of idiots?

    That’s something The Salvation Army is realising too. As CNN reports, it’s trying to detoxify its brand after years of anti-LGBT+ activity.

    Salvation Army bell ringers, the folks you see jingling bells by red kettles at Christmastime, will be carrying a new prop this year: A card explaining the Christian church and charity’s approach to LGBTQ people.

    Designed to help bell ringers answer questions from passersby, the cards include a link to online testimonials from LGBTQ people helped by the Salvation Army’s array of social services, from homeless shelters to rehab clinics and food pantries.

    “For years, Facebook posts, forwarded emails and rumors have been leading some people to believe the Salvation Army does not serve members of the LGBTQ community,” the cards read. “These accusations are simply not true.”

    As tends to be the case with these kinds of statements, the Salvation Army is responding to a straw man: people aren’t saying that the SA doesn’t serve members of the LGBT+ community. They’re saying that it has a record of discriminating against LGBT+ people and lobbying against their human rights.

    As CNN notes:

    Criticism of the army among LGBTQ supporters peaked in 2012 when a church leader told an Australia radio program that gay people should be put to death.

    …Salvation Army leaders say the group no longer lobbies or signs public letters pushing for specific policies, with the exception of tax laws. Some are frustrated their anti-gay reputation still sticks.

    Which reminds me of a joke.

    Two men are in the countryside, talking. One of them points to the fences that surround the fields and says, “See those fences? I made every single one of them. But do people call me Sammy the Fence Maker?”

    He shifts his aim. “See those dry stone walls? I made them with my own hands. But do people call me Sammy the Dry Stone Wall Maker?”

    He sighs.

    “You fuck ONE sheep…”

    The Salvation Army is very much in that situation. We’re not saying that all their refuges discriminate against LGBT+ people or that any of them are doing it now; we’re saying that there’s evidence of some of them doing it as recently as 2017. We’re not saying that their officials are going on the radio to say gay people should be put to death today; we’re saying that one of their officials did it a couple of years ago.

    Trust takes time to rebuild, and in the meantime there are plenty of charities who don’t have a record of anti-LGBT+ discrimination and activism that we can support.

    One of the reasons trust takes time is because organisations lie. Take Chick-Fil-A, the US fast food chain. After high-profile protests in 2012, it promised to stop donating to anti-LGBT+ organisations; its tax records for 2018 show that it didn’t keep its promise. After yet another PR storm this year, the organisation has promised once again to change things – but it hasn’t explicitly promised to stop funding anti-LGBT+ organisations, just to review its funding approach.

    You can understand why we’re cynical. Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, shame on us.

  • We are family

    In the US, the Hallmark channel has pulled a series of bridal adverts because they featured a lesbian couple. Of the six adverts submitted, only two – the only two featuring heterosexual couples – will be aired.

    The ads were pulled because of pressure from One Million Moms, a far right, anti-LGBT+ evangelical hate group. A post on the group’s website said that their call to the CEO of Hallmark’s parent company “gave us the opportunity to confirm the Hallmark Channel will continue to be a safe and family-friendly network.”

    This is the same pressure group that demanded a boycott of Toy Story 4 because in the background of one scene there was a same-sex couple dropping their child off at nursery and giving them a hug.

    The entire purpose of One Million Moms is to get offended about things and campaign against them. Not important things such as child poverty, structural inequality or women’s reproductive rights and healthcare. Things such as the names of ice creams and the gender of dolls and Drag Queen Story Hour and the presence of lesbian women in bridal adverts. They’re basically the US equivalent of the Mumsnet nutcases who spend every waking hour trying to hurt trans people and who have the right-wing press on speed dial.

    They exploit the public perception of mothers as kind, caring, nurturing people rather than rabid, reactionary right-wingers and have a media profile that’s much bigger than any group of intolerant evangelical assclowns deserves. And some firms are too craven and cowardly to tell them to go to Hell, which is where they’re all headed.

    The membership of One Million Moms is considerably smaller than one million mums. As Advocate.com points out, their history of petitions and boycotts demonstrates that these terrible arseholes have very little support, and they have close links with hate preachers who demonise not just LGBT+ people but Jews, Muslims and Mormons too. But that didn’t stop the Hallmark Channel from caving to their bigoted demands.

    The idea that the very existence of LGBT+ people is not family friendly fills me with rage. We are family. We are your family, even if your so-called family values mean we have to hide from you. We are your sisters and brothers, your fathers and mothers, your sons and daughters, your aunts and uncles and cousins and every other kind of family member there can be.

    The idea that our existence is not family-friendly, that simply by being alive we are threats to all that is decent and true, is what fuelled the hateful Section 28 legislation. It’s what leads supposedly intelligent adults to scream at primary school teachers because they teach inclusive education. It’s what prevented equal rights  for so long. And it’s what fuels the discrimination and violence against LGBT+ people that fills my news feed with new horrors each and every day.

    “We’re not bigots,” say the bigots. “We’re just defending family values.” But the family they mean is their religious family, and the values they speak of are hatred and intolerance.

    My family is a rainbow family, and I teach my children family values too. But in my house, family values doesn’t mean hatred and intolerance. The family values we preach are kindness, compassion, and not being hateful, bigoted bastards.

    Update, 16 December

    This story has really blown up, and Hallmark has reversed its decision. In a statement, GLAAD president Sarah Kate Ellis said:

    The Hallmark Channel’s decision to correct its mistake sends an important message to LGBTQ people and represents a major loss for fringe organizations, like One Million Moms, whose sole purpose is to hurt families like mine.

  • Behold the awesome power of the sinister trans lobby!

    Despite the valiant efforts of many trans candidates in the General Election, the number of transgender and non-binary UK politicians remains zero. As PinkNews notes, there are now more UK MPs who believe that there is a Muslim conspiracy to make people transgender than there actually are transgender MPs.

    The zero MPs elected by the much-publicised transgender lobby amounts to – you guessed it – zero percent of the 650 MPs who sit in the chamber.

    The result means that there are now more MPs who believe that transgender people are part of an extremist Muslim conspiracy to destroy the West than MPs who are transgender.

    It marks the 57th consecutive general election with no openly transgender people elected.

    Being viciously anti-trans and in some cases anti-LGBT and anti-feminist didn’t stop a number of other clowns from being elected either.

    So much for an all-powerful, well funded sinister trans lobby. Yet again we have zero trans or non-binary MPs, zero trans or non-binary judges, zero trans or non-binary newspaper editors, and zero trans or non-binary political columnists. Despite our awesome power we haven’t even been able to secure reliable supplies of HRT.

    It’s been interesting to see the mental gymnastics the anti-trans crowd have been putting themselves through over the election results. They claim that Jo Swinson lost her Scottish seat because she was in favour of gender recognition reform. They don’t seem so keen to point out that the candidate who beat her was from the SNP – a party whose manifesto was explicitly in favour of, er, gender recognition reform.

  • Bad form

    I’ve been living full time as me for two years now. I’ve been undergoing hormonal transition throughout that period; I’ve changed my passport, my driving licence, my NHS gender marker (at my GP surgery’s request) and changed my name with every organisation imaginable. The world knows me as female.

    But there are still some exceptions. HMRC says I’m a bloke. If I want to remarry, I’d legally be the husband (and if I were straight and wanted to marry a man, religious celebrants could refuse to marry me or host my wedding in their church). If I die, I’ll be buried as a man. If I were seeking employment, employers demanding a birth certificate as proof of eligibility to work here (I know trans women this has happened to) could force me to out myself because my birth certificate still says I’m male.

    To be blunt, living as female while remaining legally male is getting on my tits.

    So I’m applying for a Gender Recognition Certificate to cross the remaining Ts and dot the remaining Is.

    Although I’ve been full time since October 2017, I have to provide documentary evidence of living as me – I can’t just show the emails of me coming out to employers, the Facebook messages from friends. Because most of my paperwork is digital, the first bit of printed evidence I have of social transition is my amended birth certificate from December 2017, which I’d applied for several months previously.

    You can’t apply until two years after the date on your earliest dated piece of evidence, so I have to wait until late December to send in my application.

    My birth certificate isn’t the only documentation I have to provide. I have to provide my passport or driving licence, utility bills, bank statements. I have to complete a statutory declaration, and I need to provide two medical reports: one from my GP and one from a specialist in gender dysphoria.

    Because the system is so underfunded and overstretched, getting anything takes time – so I wrote to my GP and to my doctor at the Sandyford Gender Clinic in early November with the appropriate documents in the hope of getting everything in order for a December application. My GP responded within a week but I didn’t hear anything back from my gender clinic doctor until I met him yesterday.

    He received my letter, he says, but he’s a bit busy. He should be able to fill out the form by the end of January.

    Even if he does it by then, which I doubt, I don’t have much hope of actually receiving the form in late January; the understaffed admin department is currently taking up to three months to type and send letters. But in the meantime I can’t apply for a gender recognition certificate because his report is non-negotiable. I cannot get a gender recognition certificate without it.

    I’ve lost track of how much time I’ve already put into this, and it’s costing money too. I’ve had to pay for the GP report, presumably I’ll have to pay for the gender clinic report and I’ll definitely have to pay £140 to the gender recognition panel. And when I finally do send off my application, the gender recognition panel may reject it without explanation, without the right to appeal and without refunding the £140 application fee.

    This is why of the estimated 130,000 trans folks living full time in the UK, fewer than 5,000 of us have gender recognition certificates.

    The proposed alternative, the one the anti-trans mob are telling you will cause the end of the world as we know it, would reduce the period of living full-time from two years to six months and remove the requirement for a report from an approved psychologist. You’d still need to provide documentary evidence that you’re living as you. And you’d complete a statutory declaration; doing so fraudulently is a criminal offence that could put you in prison for two years.

    That’s how gender recognition works in other countries, such as Ireland. It has never, ever been abused. But it’s made a paperwork exercise a little bit easier, a lot less humiliating and a lot less dependent on whether a specific doctor is “a bit busy”.

  • It gets better for misfit reindeer too

    This, by the ever wonderful Jennifer Finney Boylan, made me cry. It’s ostensibly about a kids’ Christmas movie, but it’s about so much more. I don’t want to spoil it for you so I won’t quote any of it here.

     

  • They’re not bigots. They just want gay people dead

    As expected, the launch of the SNP’s LGBT+ manifesto has upset the worst kind of people.

    Among them is the anti-trans pressure group Women Make Glasgow, which is followed by a who’s who of anti-trans people in Scotland including many prominent names from the pro-independence movement and mainstream journalism. The group copied in SNP politicians Joanna Cherry and Joan McAlpine into their response to the manifesto announcement because they believe they are kindred spirits.

    The group is predictably outraged about proposed gender recognition reform. But it’s interesting to see what else it’s upset about: improving the treatment of LGBT immigrants, and providing PrEP medication for gay men.

    This is homophobia straight out of the 1980s. It’s saying that HIV is your own fault and the NHS shouldn’t give you medicine.

    So far, none of the account’s 3000+ followers appear to have a problem with that.

    PrEP can prevent HIV infection and can be life-saving for men and women who have HIV. It’s a very safe and very effective public health measure – and prescribing it has absolutely nothing to do with the manufactured panic over gender recognition. It is purely about saving people’s lives.

    Anti-trans activists generally try very hard to hide homophobia. The party line is that they are not homophobic (“I support equal marriage!”) and are purely concerned with women’s safety. That way you can reuse every bigoted argument once used against gay and lesbian people and link arms with the US anti-abortion, anti-LGBT religious right while claiming that you disagree with everything they stand for but support their stance on “gender ideology”.

    But many anti-trans activists are in full agreement with the religious right on much more than anti-trans issues. The columnists who rail against trans people frequently expose themselves as racist, islamophobic, anti-semitic or islamphobic, or use “reasonable concerns” about trans people as cover for fundamentalist beliefs that are anti-LGBT and against women’s reproductive rights. The bloggers who are absolutely, definitely not homophobic rail against inclusive education in primary schools and abuse lesbian women who disagree with their bile. And groups claiming only to campaign about women’s rights argue that the lives of people with HIV aren’t worth saving.

    It was never just about trans people.

  • A bold statement by the SNP on LGBT+ equality

    To mark Human Rights Day, the SNP has published a manifesto for LGBT+ equality. It’s not so much what it says as the fact that it says it at all, especially now: it’s going to make some high-profile bigots extremely angry, which is a bold move in the days before an election.

    The details are here. Here’s a short summary:

    • Demanding full devolution of employment, equality and immigration law
    • Urging the UK government to better protect LGBT+ people from discrimination
    • Gender recognition reform, and supporting the same in England
    • Pressing the UK government to recognise non-binary people in official documents
    • Retrospective pardons for gay and bi people criminalised for their sexuality
    • Pressing for effective protections for intersex people
    • Urging the rest of the UK to better provide life-saving PrEP medication
    • Opposing any attempt to roll back human rights, including the Human Rights Act and the Equality Act
    • Pressing the UK government to outlaw dangerous and discredited conversion therapy
    • Pushing for reforms so that LGBT+ asylum seekers are treated with dignity and respect
    • Championing LGBT+ equality and human rights worldwide

    I don’t think any other party has been this explicit in their support for human rights. It’s an interesting one: the obvious and often vicious transphobia in the independence movement and in some sectors of the SNP has made it very difficult for me to vote for them, but to see this as manifesto commitments rather than just vague promises paints the party in a very different light. It’s going to be interesting to see how that translates in terms of party discipline given the behaviour of some of its members, including senior ones.

    If you’re thinking about LGBT+ issues when you vote in Scotland, you might find it interesting to compare your candidates with the list of signatories to the Equality Network’s LGBTI Equality Pledge. In my constituency the Lib Dem, the Green and the Labour candidates have signed it. The right-wing candidates haven’t, but neither has the SNP candidate. I hope it’s an oversight: he’s been a signatory in previous years.

  • When the media promotes conspiracy theories

    Conspiracy theories aren’t just the preserve of cranks. The Sunday Times ran a long campaign claiming that AIDS was the invention of a “gay lobby”; as recently as 2009 The Spectator’s Fraser Nelson claimed that the link between HIV and AIDS was contentious and that “debate” on the subject was being silenced by a “strong and vociferous lobby”.

    In the late 1990s and early 2000s, much of the UK press chastised those who sought to “silence” Andrew Wakefield’s discredited and dangerous claims about the safety of the MMR vaccine, coverage that brought a fatal, preventable disease back into our classrooms.

    Just this weekend, The Sun published a far-right conspiracy theory claiming Jeremy Corbyn was part of a shadowy network of hard-left extremists – an article it quickly and quietly unpublished.

    So we’re hardly in uncharted territory if sections of the media promote conspiracy theories today. They do, particularly around trans people. This week, they’re claiming that Big Pharma is paying the Liberal Democrats to force gender recognition reform into law, thereby turning all our children trans, because reasons.

    This isn’t just cranks on social media. It’s Radio 4’s Today Programme and the Murdoch Press.

    Here’s the Sunday Times’ explanation.

    Ferring Pharmaceuticals donates to the Lib Dems.

    True. It’s done so for years, to the tune of about £1.5m.

    It markets the drug Triptorelin

    Also true.

    “which is used to block puberty among adolescents”.

    That’s a deliberate distortion. Triptorelin is not primarily prescribed as a puberty blocker. It is a cancer drug, and it’s used overwhelmingly for cancer patients – thousands of them, compared to the few dozen for whom it’s used to treat precocious puberty or as a puberty blocker.

    Now, Ferring doesn’t appear to be a very nice company. Pharmaceutical firms rarely are. But it’s not mainly in the puberty blocking business. It’s in the cancer business, which is much more profitable. The entire market for puberty blockers in the NHS is worth around £90,000 a year, but it spends more than £2 billion on cancer treatments.

    Let’s think for a moment. Which is more likely: a corporation that makes cancer drugs spending £1.5m as an insurance policy for a market sector worth £2,000,000,000 per year, or a corporation that makes cancer drugs spending £1.5m to make all the children transgender so it can bring in £90,000 a year?

    Aha, the anti-trans lot say. But the market will grow. There are so many people trying to access gender clinics that the market for puberty blockers will soon be worth, like, lots and lots and lots. Maybe eleventy billion pounds a week.

    More referrals does not mean more prescriptions. In 2014-2015, the number of under-15s referred to the UK’s only gender clinic for adolescents rose from 46 to 52 – but the number of people prescribed hormone blockers dropped from 41 to 32. Puberty blocking remains exceptionally rare. These drugs aren’t and won’t be handed out like sweets.

    And remember, the alleged plot here is that the money from Big Pharma is going on lobbying for reform of the Gender Recognition Act, which has no connection with trans healthcare of any kind, let alone adolescent healthcare.

    The argument, then, goes something like this.

    • Cancer drugs firm donates not to the political parties that will win the election, but to one that won’t
    • Political party that won’t win the election will somehow force the other parties to make paperwork slightly easier for trans adults, which they’d promised to do anyway
    • Something something something think of the children

    Not mad enough? On social media, high profile figures with tens of thousands of followers decided to add yet more skulduggery to the equation.

    • Vladimir Putin wants all UK children turned trans, because reasons
    • Putin gives a gong to the boss of a cancer drugs firm, possibly with mind control technology inside it
    • Cancer firm donates not to the political parties that will win the election, but to one that won’t
    • Political party that won’t win the election will somehow force the other parties to make paperwork slightly easier for trans adults, which they’d promised to do anyway
    • Something something something think of the children

    How did we end up with Vladimir Putin? Well, the boss of Ferring, Frederick Paulsen, has been awarded the Order of Friendship of the Russian Federation. What more proof do you need?

    Of course, Paulsen has been given some other honours. Maybe if we looked into that we could see just how big this international conspiracy really is.

    Paulsen’s honours include:

    • The French legion of honour.
    • The Order of the Druk Gyalpo of Bhutan.
    • The Order of Merit Class I by Germany.
    • The Cross of the Order of Chivalry by Denmark.
    • The OBE, the Order of St John Service Medal and Freeman of the City of London.
    • The Scottish Geographical Medal.
    • The Companion of the Royal Aero Club of the UK.
    • An honorary professorship of the University of Dundee.

    Now, I don’t want to alarm you, but clearly it isn’t just Putin. The international transgender conspiracy goes much deeper and includes President Macron of France, Angela Merkel of Germany, Queen Margarethe II of Denmark, King Wangchuck of Bhutan, The Queen of England, the Scottish Geographical Society, The Royal Aero Club of the United Kingdom and the entire University of Dundee. Together they are united with a single goal: to get the Lib Dems into power to turn all your children trans.

    Either that, or sections of the mainstream media will happily promote unhinged conspiracy theories that help create fear and distrust of trans people.

    One of these possibilities is much more likely, and much more frightening, than the other.

     

  • “If there were going to be mass gender fraud, we’d have seen it by now”

    Cyclist, academic and trans woman Rachel McKinnon writes for the New York Times:

    People are angry because I’m a transgender woman, and I race in the women’s category.

    Soon after my win, Donald Trump Jr. threw a Twitter tantrum about me. I’ve seen a huge uptick in the volume of hate mail I’ve received in the weeks since. I have four people who monitor my Instagram to delete hateful messages; they’ve been overwhelmed by the volume. Twitter is far worse. I’ve received death threats, but I try not to dwell on them.

    The article includes a key detail about McKinnon’s sporting performance that the anti-trans lot tend to omit.

    I lose most of my races.

    I doubt this will convince any of the haters, because they’re not interested in facts. And until they realised they could use the topic as yet another way to demonise trans women, they weren’t interested in women’s sports either.

    Trans women are women. We are female. And we are not taking over. No openly trans woman has set an open elite world record in any sport (remember: mine is in masters racing). No openly trans woman has won an elite world championship in any sport, let alone a medal.

    There haven’t been any reported cases of gender fraud, where a male athlete is given a female passport or birth certificate by an unscrupulous nation, for the purposes of slipping a “man” into a women’s Olympic event. If there were going to be mass gender fraud, we’d have seen it by now.