Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: LGBTQ+

  • 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.” 

  • The big reveal

    The anti-trans groups have taken what’s left of their masks off: in a joint letter to the head of NHS England and to trans-hating health minister Wes Streeting, Sex Matters, the LGB Alliance, Transgender Trend and Genspect claim that because they’ve achieved a legal victory that will make life much harder and more miserable for trans people, the justification for transition-related healthcare “has fallen away”.

    Or to put it another way: “it’s unethical to expose trans people to the hatred, misery and discrimination we’ve campaigned to inflict on them, so they shouldn’t be helped to transition.”

    This particular letter is about puberty blockers for trans kids, and demands that the NHS trial to assess their safety should be halted. But the same argument will be used to demand the end of all healthcare for all trans people. Other key figures in the “gender-critical” movement, people who have the government’s ear, are now arguing that trans people should be considered criminals committing “gender fraud”.

    It was never about protecting women, or protecting children.

    It’s about eliminating trans people.

    There’s a word for that.

    As the Lemkin Instutite for Genocide Prevention said of the “gender-critical” movement in 2022:

    The gender critical movement simultaneously denies that transgender identity is real and seeks to eradicate it completely from society…

    The ideological constructions of transgender women promoted by gender critical ideologues are particularly genocidal. They share many features in common with other, better known, genocidal ideologies.

    Transgender women are represented as stealth border crossers who seek to defile the purity of cisgender women, much as Tutsi women were viewed in Hutu Power ideology and Jewish men in Nazi antisemitism.

    Trans people in general are framed as figures that threaten the wholeness of the patriarchal nuclear family as well as the strength and vitality of national communities, much in the way that ethnic and national targets of genocide are viewed as cosmic enemies of the perpetrator group.

    Like the religious targets of genocidal violence, trans people are often described as somehow polluted, sinful, or against God. They are blamed for a host of social problems that have nothing to do with them or with the free expression of their identities.

    The Lemkin Institute reminds readers that one of the first libraries to be burned under the National Socialists in Germany was the library and archive of Magnus Hirshfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, a groundbreaking research organization studying human sexuality and gender. The Nazis, like other genocidal groups, believed that national strength and existential power could only be achieved through an imposition of a strict gender binary within the racially-pure “national community.” A fundamentalist gender binary was a key feature of Nazi racial politics and genocide.

    Don’t ever claim you didn’t know, or that nobody tried to raise the alarm.

  • How it happened

    Juliet Jaques has written a terrific feature detailing exactly how the anti-trans takeover of the press and politics happened in the UK. And it’s been going on longer than you might think: while it really kicked into gear in 2017, the foundations were laid long before.

    The article details how trans writers were pushed out of media, how trans people’s voices were excluded from stories about them, and how fake grassroots groups were able to do so much damage to established LGBTQ+ advocacy organisations. But while the piece is detailed and evidenced, the gist of it is this:

    Our enemies didn’t look at publications that were platforming trans people or parties that were supporting trans rights and then vacate the battlefield – they drove us out and made our sympathisers afraid to speak up.

  • Basic biology

    The bigots are furious with doctors who dare to challenge their primary school-level understanding of human biology. Resident doctors of the British Medical Association approved a motion yesterday that called the Supreme Court verdict – which repeatedly used the term “biological women” but seemed unable to say what that actually meant – “scientifically illiterate” and “biologically nonsensical”.

    The anti-trans groups have of course lied about what the motion said, claiming that doctors said there was “no basis” for biological sex. But that’s not what the text said. It said:

    We recognise as doctors that sex and gender are complex and multifaceted aspects of the human condition and attempting to impose a rigid binary has no basis in science or medicine while being actively harmful to transgender and gender diverse people.

  • Illegal, immoral, hateful

    At 10pm on Friday night the equality and human rights committee published an interim update – not guidance, let alone statutory guidance – about trans people’s access to services and facilities. The document is not law, makes no sense, and flies in the face of settled law. But the goal is to persuade people that the law has changed, and that they should act immediately to ban trans people from public facilities.

    It’s nonsense. It says that trans people should be excluded from the toilets that match their gender, but can also be excluded from the toilets that match their assigned sex at birth. It says that gay men’s choirs shouldn’t include trans men, and that lesbian book clubs shouldn’t include trans women.

    It’s a sadistic fantasy written by people put in place specifically to wage war on trans people and trans women in particular as part of the Tories’ “war on woke”. In a fairly short period of time the Tories changed the EHRC from an independent human rights watchdog to an arm of the government, with many senior officials quitting in disgust. It now works closely with anti-trans pressure groups for the removal of trans people’s legal protections.

    To illustrate just how ridiculous and hateful things have become: in 2016 the UK government issued a travel warning for North Carolina and Alabama over their newly implemented anti-trans bathroom bans. Today, the UK government is being urged to, and seems inclined to, implement even more regressive bans here.

    There’s incredible outrage over this among people who aren’t trans and who know bigotry when they see it, although inevitably it’s not being reflected in the UK press. But the Irish Examiner’s Séamas O’Reilly puts it very clearly.

    Let us speak as adults. Despite being around 0.5% of the population, trans people have spent the past decade being attacked in one of the most flagrant moral panics ever perpetrated on the British public.

    Spread in the name of a “feminism” centred on a small, committed group of active transphobes backed by the entire might of British politics and media, including every misogynist you can name; either because they share this gut-level hatred of trans folks, or simply because it serves their political interests to heap sadism on a vulnerable minority, instead of addressing the multiple overlapping crises that face the British public, and in which they are directly complicit.

    The only way any of the absurdities of this ruling make sense, is if its aims are exactly what they appear to be: A punitive attack on the rights and dignity of trans people divorced from any real-world concern about safety or women’s rights, designed to demoralise and punish them simply for the crime of existing.

    If this madness is signed off by Labour it guarantees a kicking in the EU courts, because it’s a clear breach of EU-wide human rights legislation. But it will really harm lots of people in the interim. Not just trans people, but anyone who attracts the wrong kind of attention from self-appointed bathroom bouncers.

    Few MPs and MSPs care about trans people’s human rights and safety. But they care about staying in power. And that means you can put pressure on them by making it clear that this horrific bullying of marginalised people needs to stop.

  • Small Town Joy in Scots Whay Hae!

    I was absolutely delighted to chat with Alistair Braidwood for the Scots Whay Hae! podcast about Small Town Joy. Here’s the video.

    Our chat is also available as an audio podcast. More details and listening links are here.

  • “A defeat for all women”

    Writing in The Nation, Sophie Lewis delivers clarity about the UK Supreme Court judgement.

    The fact, already now, is this: If I am perceived not to be what I say I am, and I don’t have the relevant documents, I can be strip-searched by male transport police, and legally barred from single-sex spaces. Trans people will, of course, continue to live lives of authenticity, but make no mistake: Everyone’s bodily autonomy is curtailed (especially those of us who, cis or trans, are poor, undocumented, racialized, intersex, gender non-conforming) by the cisfeminist diktat against non-cis humanity’s existence in public.

  • Hiding in plain sight

    As of yesterday, Observer columnist and leader writer Sonia Sodha, LGB Alliance co-founder Malcolm Clarke, Rosie Duffield MP, For Women Scotland and many other very high-profile “Gender Critical” figures were still following Nicola Murray on X/Twitter.

    Murray is one of Scotland’s best-known anti-trans activists; she was one of the key figures in the witch-hunt against Mridul Wadhwa, the trans woman driven out of her job at a rape crisis centre in Edinburgh.

    And as Edinburgh Live reported last week, Murray was arrested in 2022 for, and has now been found guilty of,  “a shocking campaign of physical and sexual abuse against four children” over a 20-year period, and placed on the sex offender’s register. The case was reported in other regional newspapers and in both The Sun and The Times, at least in Scotland. But the non-Scots who follow her on X will know about the case too, because she was posting about her trial while it was ongoing.

    Imagine the immediate and ongoing outrage if Murray were a trans woman: the furious phone-ins, the condemnation in endless columns, the social media hashtags, the demands for the government to do something, the calls to place her in a male prison to protect women. But of course, she isn’t trans, so none of that is going to happen. The “gender-critical” movement wants you to hate imaginary monsters, not actual ones. And that makes it an excellent place for real monsters to hide.