Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: LGBTQ+

  • Clarity

    The Supreme Court decision to effectively destroy the Gender Recognition Act and reverse the Equality Act has been described in newspapers as bringing “clarity”, which is ironic: it’s created anything but, and the anti-trans groups and their pals in the press have used the judgement to spread lies.

    One of the biggest lies is that trans women are now banned from women-only services. While the Supreme Court verdict is incredibly anti-trans, it doesn’t go that far: it says that if a service provider chooses to exclude trans women, it can do so without breaking the Equality Act. But the Act still says that such exclusion must be a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim, and blanket exclusion is unlikely to satisfy that condition. And trans people are still protected under the characteristic of gender reassignment.

    That may well change, and the EHRC – whose head was given the job specifically because she’s a transphobe, whose own staff have accused her of deliberately setting out to undermine trans people’s rights, and who has made it very clear that she is using the equalities body to attack trans women – is certainly going to craft guidance to try and change that. But the guidance is currently unwritten and has to be approved by Parliament.

    It’s also important to note that the Supreme Court decision is only about the Equality Act. There are many other pieces of legislation that affect trans people’s rights.

    Just because bigots want something to be true doesn’t mean it’s true. Even if – especially if – it’s printed in the UK press.

    That doesn’t mean the Supreme Court verdict isn’t horrific, at odds with the intention of both the GRA and the EA, and introduces more confusion rather than clearing it up: its definition of “biological woman”, for example, is effectively “we know it when we see it”. But be very wary of newspapers with an agenda parroting bigots’ wish-lists and pretending they’re law.

    It’s still a very bleak day for trans people, and for cisgender people too: the British Transport Police have already announced that they will have male officers strip-searching trans women; under the Supreme Court ruling, that means an officer can now molest any woman and claim he did it because she looked trans. There will be many more such examples, and many more cisgender women singled out because they’re tall, or masculine-looking, or Black. And there will be more legal attacks not just on trans people’s rights, but on human rights more widely.

    Here’s long-term human rights campaigner Jane Fae on the decision:

    I think the strategy of the anti-trans all along has been to swamp the UK with money – dark money, far right money, evangelical money – to reverse what they see as the evil of “gender theory.” Which also includes gay marriage, and women’s rights: they’ll be back for those later.

    And this post is very good too: The UK Supreme Court destroys 20 years of legal rights for trans people in 20 minutes.

    The odious and gleeful head of the EHRC continued that a complete ban of trans women from women’s toilets and changing rooms in British society was on the way, hinting ominously also that a review of gender ID change per se was in the pipeline. To the question of where trans women are supposed to urinate now, she replied that ‘maybe trans activists should campaign for a third space?’  That’s the head of Britain’s Equality body removing a minority from society and sneering at us. It’s not even that she doesn’t care. She’s loving it.

    …there is no reasoning with the people who have driven it all, in our country and in others. 

  • ”All will eventually fall”

    A superb piece by Morgan M Page on the Supreme Court shitshow.

    How this ruling will play out in the everyday lives of trans people across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland isn’t yet understood, but what is expected is that this will open up revision of the Equality Act, an important goal of Britain’s far right and their happy collaborators in the Labour government. By opening the door to revision on one characteristic of our primary human rights legislation, all will eventually fall. Sex, disability, race, religion — all for the taking. The irony that this challenge was brought forward by a group ostensibly trying to protect sex based rights sure will surely sting when it eventually causes all women to lose their rights entirely.

  • Despicable, predictable

    I wasn’t surprised by yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling, as horrifying, incoherent and discriminatory as it is; the verdict was never in question after the court refused to hear from any trans people or trans organisations but rolled out the red carpet for multiple anti-trans hate groups. Much of the judgement appears to have been copied and pasted from those groups’ documents.

    I’m getting very tired of saying this, but: the goal of the genital-obsessed weirdos is to eliminate trans people from public life. And the people funding them and celebrating their ill-gotten win won’t stop with trans people.

  • Demons, daily

    Researcher Lee Hurley tracks anti-trans articles in the English press, and the totals are in: in the last year alone, just three English newspapers – The Guardian, The Daily Mail and The Telegraph – ran 1,075 articles about trans people, almost all of them anti-trans. So if you’re a reader of any of those papers, you’re being sold an anti-trans story every single day.

    It’s a horrendous statistic but if anything it underplays things: just yesterday The Sunday Telegraph ran five anti-trans articles in a single edition. And the Scots press is similarly obsessed.

  • A tale of two ERs

    The Pitt has become one of my very favourite shows. It’s a hospital-set drama with a huge heart, originally conceived as a follow-up to the 1990s series ER in which Noah Wyle played a young doctor. Unfortunately – or fortunately, given the result – ER writer Michael Crichton’s estate nixed that so Wyle created a stand-alone series instead. This time around Wyle plays a grizzled veteran who’s trying very hard to keep it together while under incredible pressure. He’s fantastic, as are the rest of the ensemble cast.

    There’s a minor story in The Pitt featuring a transgender woman, and it’s really interesting to compare that with the trans storylines in ER. Because ER’s portrayal of trans and intersex people was vicious.

    [Content warning: slurs]

    Writing on Tumblr, Brin (aka Brinconvenient) describes multiple episodes of ER featuring trans, intersex and gender non-conforming people. The first, ER Confidential, was broadcast in November 1994. Brin goes into detail for that episode but to summarise: the trans woman is played by a cisgender man, she’s treated with disgust and hostility by the show’s stars, and she’s called a slur by one of the nurses. Her story arc ends with her jumping off the roof of the hospital because she’s too old and too mannish to be a believable woman.

    Brin was 16 at the time.

    Just think of the message this episode sends. Are you a young trans kid? Better transition while you’re young or not at all, because you’re on a clock – you have an expiration date. If you transition later, you’re just going to look like a man in a dress, everyone will clock you, everyone will find you disgusting, and they’re right too. You’ll get called names, you’ll get the barest modicum of tolerance, if you’re lucky, and even then, you’ll be kept at arm’s length.

    And hey, if you get old? Or older, really, because you don’t even have to be THAT old, then your life is over. It’s best just to kill yourself instead of not passing.

    I was an ER watcher too. So I got that message loud and clear – not just in that episode, but several times.

    There were plenty more examples.

    over 15 seasons, 331 episodes, ER had a total of 5 explicitly trans women and one explicitly intersex women (and zero trans or intersex men).

    None of them have a happy ending.

    As Brin says, “the general cis idea of trans people is informed by all of these Sad, Angst, Tragic Trannies ™”, and while things have got better we’ve had decades of this stuff in popular culture (I go into a lot of examples of that in both of my books). Other shows were just as careless/callous: for example NYPD Blue, another show I watched religiously, consistently showed trans people as sex workers, dead sex workers or ludicrous caricatures, had the star characters insult and misgender those characters, and titled a 2003 episode about the murder of a trans sex worker “Tranny Get Your Gun“. This was considered completely normal and entirely acceptable.

    I don’t know if Noah Wyle set out to try and do better now than his character did in ER. But The Pitt gets right what ER consistently got wrong.

    First of all, the trans woman is played by a trans woman (the luminous Eva Everett Irving). Tasha is a glamorous, likeable and fun character, a sommelier to the rich and famous. She’s not in the ER because she’s trans; she’s in the ER because she’s got a nasty cut on her hand. The hand is fixed, the deadname on her file is quietly corrected by one of the medical students, and she’s off again to her glamorous life. She’s not there to make the main characters sad, or to be a tragic figure. She’s just another patient.

    That shouldn’t be remarkable. But sadly, it is.

  • Welfare for losers

    Ben Collins, owner of the satirical newspaper The Onion, summed up the anti-trans movement beautifully this week: it’s “welfare for losers”. He was talking about the latest example of the grift: amateur fencer Stephanie Turner, who ostentatiously refused to compete with a trans woman in a tournament. Taking a knee, Turner said: “I am refusing to fence you, because I am a woman and you are a man.”

    Just days before, Turner competed in, and beat multiple men in, a mixed tournament.

    Mixed tournaments are commonplace in fencing because it’s a sport of skill, not strength.

    “It will probably, at least for the moment, destroy my life,” Turner lied to Fox News after accepting her first grift payment, a $5,000 “courage award” from the anti-trans XX-XY Athletics.

    Turner is not an elite athlete; she’s a 31-year-old amateur competing in low-level events and her best days are probably already behind her. But as failed swimmer Riley Gaines demonstrates, it’s very easy to turn sporting mediocrity into a six-figure salary by demonising trans women on behalf of the evangelical right. As Ben Collins says, it’s welfare for losers – and it pays exceptionally well.

  • Identify the author

    Stop me if you’ve read this before.

    Sadly, one of the most prevalent forms of child abuse facing our country today is the sinister threat of gender ideology. Proponents of the gender ideology movement are outrageously indoctrinating our children with the devastating lie that they are trapped in the wrong body – and that the only way they can be truly happy is to alter their sex with hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and sexual mutilation surgery. The evil and backwards lies of gender insanity are robbing our children of their happiness, health, and freedom, while imposing unimaginable heartbreak on parents and families.

    Was this in The Times? The Scotsman? The Daily Mail? The Telegraph? The Daily Express? The Herald? Spiked? The Courier? The Observer? The Guardian? The Spectator? Unherd?

    Nope. It’s the latest hateful, bigoted bullshit tirade from the misogynist sexual predator Donald Trump. The fact that it could have been lifted wholesale from one of hundreds of UK newspaper columns shows what monsters so many of our columnist class have become.

  • Another stitch-up

    Today’s papers are giving lots of space to The Sullivan Review, the latest anti-trans stitch-up initiated by the previous government under the banner of “kicking woke ideology out of science” and amplified by the current Health Minister. Transactual:

    Prof. Alice Sullivan is a prominent anti-trans activist and advisory group member of the leading anti-trans lobby group, Sex Matters, notable for her work on UK literacy. The report also contains legal advice written by the husband of the Chair of the Sex Matters’ Trustee Board, Naomi Cunningham, and research was commissioned for the review to an organisation led by fellow member of the Sex Matters’ advisory group Lucy Hunter Blackburn.

    Here’s data expert Kevin Guyan:

    The DSIT and UK Government, researchers, funders and public bodies need to recognise this Trumpian intervention for what it is: an attempt to erase trans and non-binary people from existing in data.

    It, the Cass Review and the forthcoming Levy Review of adult healthcare are all part of the same project: to drive trans people out of public life in the UK.

  • Stateless

    There’s a powerful piece in the New York Times by Massa Gessen: The Hidden Motive Behind Trump’s Attacks on Trans People. It argues that the Trump administration’s war on trans people has a goal, which is to “denationalise” trans people.

    The message, consistent and unrelenting, is that trans people are a threat to the nation. The subtext is that we are not of this nation.

    By making people “not of this nation”, you can remove all of the rights that apply to citizens of that nation.

    We’re seeing exactly the same playbook here in the UK, partly because it’s being orchestrated by the same people and seeded via the press in the same way: an attempt to make trans people a group who are excluded from society, undeserving of the rights, freedoms and protections others enjoy.

    Messe could make the familiar argument here – comparing the Trump administration to the Nazis and arguing that “if you don’t stand up for trans people or immigrants, there won’t be anyone left when they come for you” – but chooses not to:

    It is undoubtedly true that the Trump administration won’t stop at denationalizing trans people, but it is also true that a majority of Americans are safe from these kinds of attacks, just as a majority of Germans were. The reason you should care about this is not that it could happen to you but that it is already happening to others. It is happening to people who, we claim, have rights just because we are human. It is happening to me, personally.

  • Nothing is erased

    One of the many bullshit stories pushed into the press by genital-obsessed weirdos and their pet minister Wes Streeting this week has been the idea that transgender doctors are hiding evidence of terrible misdeeds by changing their gender.

    Headlines such as “GMC erases records on doctors who change gender”, “Doctors who change gender have wrongdoing ‘erased’ from public record, GMC admits” and “Fury as it’s revealed medics’ disciplinary records are ERASED from public view when they change gender” might lead you to believe that when a doctor transitions, their disciplinary history is deleted.

    Nope. Writing to Streeting and the UK’s other health secretaries last week, the GMC explained that yes, transitioned doctors get a new GMC identification number in order to comply with the law and protect their privacy. But “their fitness to practise history and any risk they may still present to the public attaches to an individual and remains the same whether or not their gender identity changes… all fitness to practise history is accurately displayed on the records of all of those doctors and no fitness to practise history has been removed or suppressed.”

    What’s going on here isn’t just the press happily spouting whatever bullshit the hate groups come up with, although that’s a huge and ongoing part of it. It’s that the press is actively collaborating with hate groups to paint *existing while trans* as deviant and dangerous.

    The implication of “erasing” records – and of words such as “wrongdoing” – is that all trans doctors have something to hide. The reality is that trans doctors, like trans people more generally, are being targeted by bigots simply for being trans.

    The same thing is at the root of the current high-profile, celebrity endorsed NHS tribunals which, thanks to some appalling judicial decisions, have been turned into show trials against individual trans women who are being defamed and demonised not just on social media but in the pages of newspapers too. The goal is to enshrine in law the idea that the very presence of a trans woman at work is terrifying and traumatic, and that as a result banning trans women, or refusing to hire trans women, is both reasonable and proportionate.

    There’s been some really horrific persecution of trans people in the US in just the last week: a trans military ban, a de facto ban on trans people getting visas that attempts to define being trans as committing fraud, a ban on all trans healthcare in some states, mass sackings of LGBTQ+ government employees, and much more.

    All of these things are on the British bigots’ list of demands too. Which perhaps explains why so-called “gender critical” women journalists in the UK press have been filing columns about how in their eyes Donald Trump is a feminist hero.

    None of this is about “reasonable concerns” or protecting anybody from anything. It’s about eradicating people from society. Trans women are the first targets, but they won’t be the last.