Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: LGBTQ+

  • 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.

  • Not my movement

    In the 2014 referendum campaign for Scottish independence, I was a proud Yes supporter. I wore the badge with pride, attended rallies, and felt part of something important: we had the opportunity to make a better, more tolerant, more inclusive country.

    In 2019 I wouldn’t attend an independence rally because I’d be scared for my safety.

    In recent years trans people have become the bogeymen among significant parts of the independence movement, especially online; this week’s news that a member of the SNP complaints committee has resigned over antisemitism has been blamed on a trans conspiracy, even though vocal and vicious transphobia has thus far resulted in zero consequences for any of the people engaging in it.  Outright transphobia has become mainstream, with even senior politicians embracing and signal boosting antisemitic trolls simply because they really, really hate trans women.

    The New Statesman, hardly the most pro-trans publication, has noticed too.

    In a turbulent social media microclimate that includes prominent MPs, MSPs and activists from across Scotland’s political parties, allegations and instances of transphobia and homophobia are being met by those of misogyny and abuse. Offline, the controversy has focused on provocative public meetings to discuss “concerns” about the reforms, opposed by demonstrations from LGBTQ+ activists. The issue has provoked conflict within the SNP that has spilled out into the wider nationalist movement, and also taps into socially conservative elements of wider Scottish society. The dispute has been enough to prompt a modest climbdown by the SNP leadership, which has delayed the proposed changes.

    …The various elements of Scottish nationalism that the SNP has tried to push to the fringes – such as socialists and a populist hostility to “minority” issues like trans rights – are coalescing around a new style of nationalist activism that feels, from the demonstrations I’ve attended, more like a kind of ecumenical religious revivalism than serious movement politics.

    I’m saddened by this, and scared.

    Update: 24 hours later, here’s the editor of the Scottish edition of The Times with an exclusive. According to the so-called paper of record:

    LGBT activists in the SNP are allegedly digging up dirt on members who oppose self-identification for trans people in a campaign to “purge” them from the party.

    Allegedly, of course, means that the claim can’t be substantiated. But facts don’t matter. The Times gets another bullet to fire in its war on trans people.

    This, incidentally, demonstrates the problem with press regulation in the UK. You can’t complain about any of this because the regulatory code only covers claims made about named individuals. Provided the Murdoch press doesn’t lie about specific people, it can print complete fabrications about – and incite hatred of – entire groups of people with impunity. And it does, every week.

  • Don’t give money to the Salvation Army

    If you’re considering donating to a charity this year, please don’t give to the Salvation Army.

    The charity says it’s dedicated to helping all people in need irrespective of their sexual orientation or gender identity, but it has a long history of discrimination against LGBT+ people.

    Here in the UK, the Salvation Army lobbied against repealing the hateful Section 28, which made it illegal for teachers to talk about LGBT+ people in schools, and against equal marriage. Last year in Australia it lobbied for legal “religious freedom” protection that would enable it to discriminate against LGBT+ people.

    Also last year, it urged its members not to discuss their opposition to LGBT+ rights because if the public knew of it, it would be a “threat to our reputation, our fundraising efforts, and ultimately our ability to serve people in need.”

    In 2017, the Salvation Army’s New York rehab centres refused to serve trans people; in 2013, the US operation referred people to dangerous and discredited “pray the gay away” conversion therapy; in 2012 one of its senior Australian officers told a radio programme that “gay people should be put to death”; and in 2008 a trans woman died in Texas after the Salvation Army shelter refused to let her sleep in the women’s quarters.

    The Salvation Army has of course done some good work, and it’s possible that this evangelical Christian organisation has changed its spots, but given its history – and some of that history is very recent – it would be wise to assume that it’s more concerned about negative PR than it is about LGBT+ people.

    Lots of other charities do good work too, and they manage to do so without fighting against other people’s human rights.

  • It can be lonely at Christmas

    Christmas can be tough if you’re not partnered or part of a nuclear family: the ads show a family life you don’t have while every shop seems to be playing It’ll Be Lonely This Christmas on a loop. As Owl Stefania writes in Metro, it can be particularly hard for LGBT+ people. Stefania’s writing specifically about trans people here, but much of what she says applies to the wider LGBT+ community too.

    …not everyone is as lucky as I am and Christmas, a time when most people go home to see their families, can be especially tough for trans people. Many trans people have been disowned simply for being themselves, while others face serious rifts at home.

    I have other trans friends who simply can’t spend Christmas with their families because their families don’t want them there or they don’t feel understood. And some of those who do go home feel forced to play a role that isn’t really them to appease their family or to make them feel comfortable.

    A few days ago I linked to a survey in which more than 1 in 10 parents said they wouldn’t be comfortable having their child live with them if their child was LGBT+, something that contributes to the disproportionately high proportion of young homeless people that are LGBT+.

    Stefania:

    If you know a trans person who is estranged from their family, please offer them support and check in on them. And if you’re someone who is struggling with accepting a family member who is trans, please set your reservations aside and embrace them – they need you.

    And if you can’t be part of the solution, please don’t be part of the problem.

  • Bigots of a feather flock together

    I wrote the other day that many bigots are stupid. So it was just a matter of time before they combined multiple flavours of stupid, as they do here.

    Is a new trend that isn’t a new trend caused by something that doesn’t exist? Hoo boy, we’re gonna have to get our thinkin’ caps on for this one!

    To be fair, banging on about the incredible power of things that don’t exist is kinda the raison d’être of religious loons. But even by their standards this one’s incredibly dumb. It combines three kinds of idiocy: anti-vax scaremongering, anti-trans scaremongering and deliberately misunderstanding or misrepresenting research.

    The study on which this ludicrous story is very loosely based found that among a very small data set (177 people), there was a higher incidence of autism among the trans and non/binary participants than among the cisgender ones.

    What the study categorically doesn’t say is that what the article argues: vaccines cause autism which causes “transgenderism”.

    From the article (no link because nutcases):

    Of course, this study neglects to mention that autism is caused by vaccine damage

    Because it isn’t.

    Get rid of these dangerous and ineffective vaccines, and you will greatly reduce gender confusion in children

    Well yes, but not in the way being suggested here. If more children die of preventable diseases, then of course they won’t want to transition after their entirely avoidable deaths.

    even if vaccines were shown to cause transgenderism

    Which they won’t be, because science.

    the LGBT community would come out firmly behind increased vaccination rates for children, as it would be yet another way to increase their numbers.

    Remember I said bigotry is intersectional, that people who are bigoted against trans people are usually bigoted against other groups too? Let’s look at the good Christians in the article comments.

    That guestion is a diversion, a deceit. The cause is j€wish ‘fueled’ preschool ‘education’

    A bigot being anti-semitic? This is my shocked face. There’s more.

    Obviously, a major factor in promoting transgenderism is jewish propaganda

    Much more.

    Big Pharma is run by jews

    More.

    Jews sell the vaccines and run the transgender propaganda machine.

    And more.

    the jews are the masters at divising methods to make people more susceptible to their powers of suggestion…and it usually involves something detrimental to our health, so then they can make money from the misery they cause us.

    Big Pharma. Secret Jewish funding. A conspiracy to get people hooked on HRT. These hate-filled theories may seem extreme, but you’ll find UK anti-trans activists expressing exactly the same antisemitic conspiracy theories and many high-profile figures supporting them; if they’re not pushing anti-semitism you’ll often find racism and/or homophobia instead. Just look at the various political candidates currently getting booted as their history of antisemitism surfaces: many of them were already publicly bigoted against us, but because they were going after trans people there weren’t any consequences. The same applies to the vocal transphobes here in Scotland who are now turning their attention to the wider LGBT+ community. They were never going to stop with just the trans people.

    Again and again, transphobia is the canary in the coalmine: if someone hates us, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll hate other minorities too. It’s just that with us, they don’t feel they have to hide it.