Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: LGBTQ+

  • Sadistic pencil-pushers

    There’s a superb piece in Dazed by Sasha Baker, who explains how a vocal minority of religious and social conservatives has managed to dismantle trans healthcare and human rights in the UK without a single law being passed or revoked.

    The British gender critical movement purports to represent a silent majority, but knows it does not command enough support to publicly shred the documents guaranteeing our rights. Instead it has adopted the methods of sadistic pencil-pushers – its true constituency – burying human rights laws in reams of secondary legislation, statutory and non-statutory guidance, grey literature, and fudged equality impact assessments.

    As the article notes, a key part of that is the Cass scandal: a supposedly clinical review that was created and staffed in order to achieve a pre-determined political outcome, and which – despite repeated claims to the contrary in the press – found no evidence whatsoever that puberty blockers are dangerous or that their use should be curtailed.

    You’ll read a lot about “evidence” in connection with the Cass scandal. Here’s one of the crucial bits of so-called evidence on which Cass leaned heavily.

    In February, Sallie Baxendale, a psychologist, published a terrible academic paper that claimed to look at existing studies on the negative effects of puberty blockers on trans children’s cognition. In reality, most studies surveyed were performed on animals, with only one case study showing that a single trans child scored lower on an IQ test after taking puberty blockers… it was rejected by three journals and met with scathing comments from peer reviewers [but] Dr Hilary Cass chose to cite it four times in her final report, and determined that puberty blockers should not be prescribed to trans kids outside of an upcoming clinical trial, in part because of “potential risks to neurocognitive development”.

    What we’re seeing on a frankly frightening scale is the very opposite of evidence-based policy; the policies are decided first, and the evidence cherry-picked, distorted or manufactured to support them. This will not end with us.

  • Don’t talk about the dead

    We know that more than a dozen trans teens have taken their lives since the puberty blocker ban was introduced in the UK, despite the government’s best efforts to cover that up: its small inquiry into trans suicides discounted documented trans suicides. So it’s particularly disgusting to see Hilary Cass, the author of the politically motivated and utterly discredited Cass scandal that’s being used to dismantle trans healthcare, to proclaim that “What is worrying is when people say that if children don’t get these drugs, they will die, because clearly that’s not true.” It is “irresponsible for people to shroud-wave in that way.”

    Not for the first time, Cass is parroting the stories of hateful, genital-obsessed weirdos. Morgan Page writes:

    The spectre of the trans death, particularly through suicide, hangs over all of the attacks on trans life. No one wants to admit that this is the desired end goal — that trans people simply cease to exist, whether that be through detransition or death seems to matter little. As Janice Raymond famously put it, the goal is for trans people to be “morally mandated out of existence.” Indeed, “shroud waving” threatens to stir up some empathy for the plight of this embattled minority, and we can’t be having that. Anti-trans actors have gone so far as to accuse trans people of acting like abusive husbands who threaten to kill themselves if their wives leave.

    It’s a useful strategy, this attack on the idea of trans death, because most cis people will never know a living trans person, let alone a dead one.

    It’s worth pointing out yet again that despite its very best efforts the Cass study found no evidence that puberty blockers harmed kids. It did, however, see plenty of evidence that limiting access to healthcare and support kills some of them.

  • Stacking the deck

    Yesterday, Wes Streeting made the UK ban on puberty blockers for trans kids permanent. The ban does not apply to cisgender children; puberty blockers are apparently magic medicine that are uniquely dangerous to trans and gender non-conforming kids.

    The decision was subject to a consultation, which – at the Government’s invitation – featured significant input from anti-trans, pro-conversion therapy organisations with no expertise in healthcare generally or trans healthcare specifically. And despite blatantly stacking the deck with those anti-trans groups, the consultation could still not produce evidence to justify the ban. It did, however, make it clear that the ban would have terrible effects on trans kids’ mental health. We’ve already seen more than a dozen children take their own lives as a result of the temporary ban.

    Streeting simply ignored the evidence and imposed the ideologically motivated ban on the UK, including Scotland. Pressure from the UK government ensured a similar ban was passed in Northern Ireland with the support of Sinn Fein. There’s bleak humour in seeing UK Labour and Sinn Fein finding common ground in killing children.

    I’ve long since given up on trying to get people to care about trans people. But an evangelical government minister banning medically necessary healthcare by prioritising the thinky thoughts of newspaper columnists and religious and social conservatives over evidence and international medical consensus is a terrifying precedent for everybody.

  • The strategy

    Infamous arsehole Matt Walsh has been saying the quiet bit out loud: speaking outside the US Supreme Court yesterday, the far-right clown vowed that “we are not gonna rest… until transgender ideology is entirely erased from the Earth.” He’s not the first to say that; last year Michael Knowles told the US Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.” There are many such examples from the US right, the Christian right and the UK anti-trans movement too.

    Helen Joyce, one of the key figures in the UK anti-trans movement, has spoken openly of her belief that the number of trans people should be reduced and that any trans person, even if “happily transitioned”, is a problem that society must solve: “the fewer of those people there are, the better”. All the key anti-trans groups and many of the key anti-trans activists in the UK have pledged their support for a campaign that calls for the elimination of “the practice of transgenderism”. The founding document of the anti-trans movement, Janice Raymond’s 1979 book The Transsexual Empire, says that “I contend that the problem of transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence.”

    By “transgender ideology”, Walsh means transgender people. By “transgenderism”, Knowles means transgender people. By “the practice of transgenderism” the campaign means transgender people. By “transsexualism”, Raymond meant transgender people.

    The only way to eliminate “transgender ideology” or “transgenderism” or “transsexualism” is to eliminate transgender people.

    And that’s the strategy.

    “The fewer of those people” there are, the better.

    When you understand that that is the goal, the connections between the different strands of the anti-trans strategy become chillingly clear.

    Removing life-saving healthcare for trans teens increases the suicide rate; the same applies with adults and ensures that there are “fewer of those people”.

    Removing legal protections from trans people unless they medically transition and then ensuring that nobody can access medical transition ensures that there are “fewer of those people”.

    Banning trans women from using women’s spaces or competing in women’s sports, part of the wider goal of pushing trans women out of society, means there are “fewer of those people” in that society.

    If that means that some trans women can be bullied back into the closet, well, that means “fewer of those people”.

    And if some of those bullied people are bullied into taking their own lives either suddenly or more slowly, well. That means “fewer of those people” too.

    The anti-trans movement is usually better at PR messaging than Walsh; he’s an extreme outlier in that his brand is built on saying the supposedly unspeakable. But he and the politer bigots of the UK anti-trans movement may not express it in the same way, but they share the same goal: they won’t rest until transgender people are “entirely erased from the Earth”.

  • LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back

    The writer Julia Serano has organised an online protest today: LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back. It’s a US protest but has worldwide support: the message to the Democrats, and to supposedly left-of-centre political parties elsewhere, is that human rights, healthcare and safety for LGBTQ+ folks are not and should never be negotiable.

    Serano has posted her own article, which will be updated to link to many others, and you’ll find it here.

    I’ll just post a few words from my book: we are not a fad or a phase, a lobby or an ideology, a cult or a conspiracy. We’re your sons and your daughters, your sisters and your brothers, your friends and your colleagues.

  • Fancy that

    The UK isn’t the only country where there have been reviews into the effectiveness and safety of puberty blockers. And it’s interesting to see what such reviews conclude when they’re not created to deliver, and staffed by people promised a peerage if they deliver, a pre-determined conclusion to support a political goal.

    The latest such study comes from France. Unlike the UK Cass Review, which decided that having medical specialists involved in a review of medicine would be biased, the French study was carried out exclusively by pediatric endocrinologists.

    Regarding puberty blockers, it notes that:

    None of the medical treatment used in the context of hormonal transitioning have marketing authorization for this indication, but these molecules have been used for a long time in the pediatric population for other indications (precocious puberty, puberty induction…). Nevertheless, they have been used for hormonal transition in trans youth since the late 1980s in some countries, and their use in adults goes back even further. In addition, off-label prescription is very common in pediatrics and child psychiatry.

    And based on the evidence, it recommends:

    We recommend that puberty suppression be offered by a multidisciplinary team or network trained in supporting transgender adolescents.

    In related news, a new scientific study funded by the IOC and published in the peer-reviewed British Journal of Sports Medicine demonstrates yet again that trans women do not necessarily have physical advantages over cisgender women in sports; in many cases, they have significant disadvantages in lower body strength and in lung function.

    I’m sure our trans-obsessed media will cover that story, and the French study, any day now.

  • The Missing

    I was honoured to lend my voice to The Missing, an episode of The Quilt, the LGBTQ+ audio exhibition and podcast in association with the Queer Britain museum. It’s an oral history of queer lives in the UK; this episode, the third in a series of eight, focuses on Scotland from the Highland Clearances to the loss of Glasgow lesbian bars.

    It’s available from wherever you get your podcasts, and directly from this link.

  • Enemies within

    The evangelical movement has spent a very long time practicing institutional capture, where it inserts its people into positions where they can enact its policies. And the same appears to be happening with the anti-trans movement here in the UK, with “gender-critical” people who reject the scientific and medical evidence increasingly inhaibiting positions where they can influence healthcare and health policy.

    The latest example, as reported by Novara Media:

    Six leading gender clinicians associated with a controversial NHS review of transgender healthcare spoke at the conference of a designated anti-trans hate group that shares funding with key pro-Trump outfits

    They weren’t there to defend trans healthcare.

    Two of those people were involved in the ideologically motivated and widely discredited Cass Review, which has been used to stop healthcare for trans teens and which is being widely cited by people who want to stop trans adults’ healthcare too. A third is cited in that review and also sits on the board of the anti-trans pressure group SEGM, known as one of the “key hubs of anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience”.

    SEGM, for example, takes money (via the Edward Charles Foundation) from the Charles Koch Institute, a conservative political network that also funds the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation is the group behind Project 2025, a 900-page “wish list” to centralise presidential power and normalise religious conservatism, including by tightly restricting abortion access and expanding political appointees.

  • Masks off, hoods on

    Maslow’s Hammer says that “it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” And if you’re an anti-trans obsessive, everything can and should be blamed on trans people, including the US election result.

    The narrative already emerging from the anti-trans commentariat on both sides of the Atlantic is that the Kamala Harris campaign failed because of The Transes. And as always with the anti-trans mob, that’s nonsense. The Harris campaign conceded The Trans Issue – how I hate that phrase – completely: it didn’t feature trans people in its campaigning, it didn’t stand up for trans people, and even when given the opportunity to refute the Republicans’ anti-trans scaremongering in direct questioning – by some estimates, as much as 40% of the Republicans’ ad spending was spent on demonising trans women – Kamala Harris flatly refused to do so, calculatedly throwing trans people under the bus in the hope of winning a few bigots’ votes.

    But the problem with offering far right lite is that nobody’s buying it. Time and again, given the choice between full-on evil and slightly less evil, people choose the full-fat version. The supposed good guys concede territory to the bad, and having done that the bad guys demand they concede more.

    What far-right lite does do, however, is alienate some of your own voting base – without bringing any of the other side across. When the Democrats weren’t throwing trans people under the bus, they persuaded 6% of registered Republicans to vote Democrat. In this election, that figure didn’t increase. It dropped, to 5%, with the Republicans’ total vote numbers remaining roughly the same as in the last election. This wasn’t an anti-trans swing to Trump.

    You cannot meet bigots halfway because they lie about where halfway is. You can see that here in the UK: the supposed “reasonable concerns” (which were never reasonable) over trans people were only supposed to be over changes to the Gender Recognition Act; when they destroyed those changes, the bigots then decided they wanted rid of the Gender Recognition Act, the Equality Act and all other protections for trans people. Supposed concerns over healthcare for under-18s – again, never reasonable – have now expanded to demands for an end to all healthcare for trans adults – demands that as I and many other trans women can attest, are already being met by some GPs and health boards.

    The panic is such that organisations are now being attacked for doing things that only the deeply deranged could see through an anti-trans lens; for example this week, Marks & Spencer has been under sustained online and media attack for referring to teenage girls as “bright young things”, a decades-old phrase that the genital-obsessed weirdo brigade have decided is proof of pro-trans pandering.

    What we have now is a full-on, mask-off, hoods-on witch-hunt dedicated to erasing every aspect of trans people’s rights and safety until the goal of eliminating trans people completely is achieved – a witch-hunt in which the press is gleefully, hatefully complicit.

  • When ads attack

    In the US, the Trump campaign has spent nearly one-third of its campaign funds on anti-trans attack ads around major sporting fixtures and other popular events. Vox:

    Given that trans people make up barely half of 1 percent of the US adult population and that trans-related issues are low on the priority list of most voters, many might find it baffling that Trump has focused so much of his attention on singling out trans people. Indeed, two media research groups, the left-leaning Data for Progress and video marketing firm Ground Media, working in partnership with GLAAD, each released studies last week finding that the ads had no real impact on voter decision-making and instead alienated many viewers, even among Republicans, who felt they were “mean-spirited.”

    So why are they doing it? One reason is because by yelling about trans people, the Trump campaign can distract attention from their many failings – a strategy that’s been widely used by right-wing politicians worldwide, even though it doesn’t result in electoral success. But another key reason is because they really fucking hate trans people, and the ads help spread that hate. Vox again:

    these ads help to reinforce the idea of a common enemy. They are continuing — which is to say winning, in a very real sense — the larger ongoing culture war against queer and trans people.

    One of the most chilling explanations I’ve read, and I really hope it’s wrong, is that because the Trump campaign is likely to suffer a major electoral defeat it is preparing the ground for a violent response: its very vocal attacks on trans people and on immigrants in particular are telling the MAGA mobs who to target.

    Vox again:

    It’s vital to recognize the parallels to Hitler’s Germany here (especially given John Kelly’s recent allegations that Trump praised Hitler himself): to understand that trans and queer people aren’t being attacked in isolation, but rather in tandem with immigrants, the disabled and mentally ill, and women.