Lucy Meadows, a transsexual woman formerly called Nathan Upton, committed suicide earlier this month, the victim of a media witch-hunt. In December, Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn published an attack on her that aimed to hound her out of her job as a primary school teacher.
Marko Attila Hoare is a British historian who also writes about current affairs
Lucy Meadows, a transsexual woman formerly called Nathan Upton, is believed to have committed suicide earlier this month, following a media witch-hunt.
In December, Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn published an attack on her that aimed to hound her out of her job as a primary school teacher.
He claimed that having a woman teacher they had formerly known as a man would have a ‘devastating effect’ on Meadows’s pupils; apparently, she was trying to ‘project his personal problems on to impressionable young children’, while Meadows’s school, which supported her, was seeking to ‘elevate its “commitment to diversity and equality” above its duty of care to its pupils and their parents.’
Littlejohn concluded that if Meadows ‘cares so little for the sensibilities of the children he is paid to teach, he’s not only trapped in the wrong body, he’s in the wrong job’.
The ensuing media frenzy involved personal pictures of Meadows being published in the national press, and paparazzi camping outside her home, forcing her to leave for work early and return late to avoid them.
She complained to the Press Complaints Commission about the Littlejohn piece, but ultimately found the harassment unbearable.
This scandal follows another mainstream media assault on trans people earlier this year, when columnist, Julie Burchill, published a transphobic rant in The Observer, involving phrases such as ‘a bunch of dicks in chick’s [sic] clothing’ and ‘a bunch of bed-wetters in bad wigs’.
Apparently, Britain’s leading quality liberal Sunday paper considered such bigotry acceptable if the targeted minority was defenceless enough and if its circulation could be sufficiently boosted by the predictable storm.
However, The Observer underestimated the degree of its readers’ disgust that followed, which led it to remove the article from its website and publish an apology. But with wearying predictability, a horde of right-wing Daily Telegraph and Spectator columnists – including Toby Young, William Henderson, Allison Pearson and Rod Liddle – joined by a handful of liberals, waded in to defend Burchill on ‘free speech’ grounds and to condemn The Observer’s ‘censorship’.
There are reasons for suspecting that Burchill’s defenders were not really motivated by concern for ‘freedom of speech’. Her article remained freely available and republished on other places on the internet, including the Daily Telegraph’s own website; critics weren’t suggesting that the state should ban it, merely that the Guardian shouldn’t host it, so the talk of ‘censorship’ was a straw man.
Furthermore, some of them couldn’t resist chipping in with transphobic snipes of their own – Liddle referred to ‘trannies’ and ‘quasi-women’; Pearson humorously suggested transsexual people should ‘man up !’ and accept the insults; Tom Peck, in the Independent, wrote: ‘You’d think the trannies could take it really, their shoulders are broad enough’.
Burchill’s defenders were notable by their silence when a similar ‘free speech’ issue manifested itself immediately after.
Remarks made by Liberal Democrat MP David Ward in the run-up to Holocaust Memorial Day, and a cartoon by Gerald Scarfe of Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, that was also considered by some (wrongly but understandably) to be anti-Semitic, appeared on the day itself in the Sunday Times.
Ward was threatened with losing his LibDem whip, while Rupert Murdoch personally apologized to Netanyahu for the Scarfe cartoon.
The supposed ‘censorship’ of Ward and Scarfe was comparable to the ‘censorship’ of Burchill; it involved disassociation from, not actual suppression of the speech in question. Yet there was no comparable right-wing and libertarian storm in defence of Ward’s or Scarfe’s ‘free speech’.
One suspects that many columnists will only defend the ‘right to offend’ when it is directed against a target which they despise, such as transsexual people, but not when directed against one they like, such as the State of Israel or the Cenotaph (which young Charlie Gilmour was actually sent to prison for swinging from during a demonstration against tuition fees, on which occasion, far from defending his ‘right to offend’, Burchill led the media attack on him).
Hate speech is not just ‘causing offense’; its consequence is not only that people reading it will be upset. Hate speech is about intimidating and disempowering its targets; about making prejudice, discrimination, harassment, even violent assaults on them acceptable.
As the case of Lucy Meadows has brutally demonstrated, the results can be fatal.
82 Responses to “The media’s role in the death of Lucy Meadows”
Ash
The point I’m trying to make is that the same argument could have been made not so long ago about gay people, or black people, or Hindus, or any other group who would have seemed ‘weird’ at that time. But the children who were sheltered from all those ‘weirdos’ didn’t grow up ‘better equipped mentally’ to face them; they grew up racist, homophobic and generally suspicious and intolerant of anyone different from themselves. The people who are best able to ‘face the weirdos’ as adults are precisely the people for whom diversity was a simple fact of life from childhood onwards.
It’s neither possible nor desirable to prevent children from ever getting upset or confused as they learn about the world. The world is an upsetting and confusing place at times, especially when it’s all new to you – but you still have to grow up and live in it.
Is it any more upsetting and confusing, as a young child, to deal with the fact that your teacher has transitioned to live as a woman than it is to deal – for instance – with the fact that the ham in your sandwiches is made from dead pigs? I don’t see how. Yet I don’t hear any right-wingers demanding that children be raised veggie so as not to have to face these horrors before they’re ‘older and better equipped mentally’. Why, it’s almost as if all this stuff about protecting our children is a smokescreen for their own bigotry.
SadButMadLad
A lot of comment about how caused “Lucy Meadows” death without actually knowing what was the cause. Could it be the loss of his wife. Could it be bullying from pupils. Could it be neighbours and strangers. Could it be the loss of friends. It could be anything.
If you look at the facts and not get carried away by emotion you will see that a good proportion of transgenders commit suicide. Not surprising really when they are going through some really strong emotional and mental issues.
As always, the left are using the sad case of an individual for their own purposes, ignoring all the extra pain the family of the individual will be feeling from all the extra publicity/
Josephine Shaw
Have you ever considered that this individual, who you persist i referring to in the male pronoun, actually IS a woman? Who is not (necessarily) gay (sexual identity has nothing to do with gender identity – I don’t know any people who express their homosexuality by thinking of themselves in the other gender), who is not in it for some sort of sexual thrill, who doesn’t have any sort of dysmorphia…but simply IS who she says she is? We are the product of our inner knowledge, and our gender identity is something that is a fundamental part of our intrinsic selves. When this doesn’t accord with the way our bodies develop, society has a choice – to honour the right of the individual to own their own identity, or to insist, on the basis of something that they can observe, that this person has no right to do this. Society is all about taking the power away from trans people.
I cannot see how transsexual people are not similar to anorexics. I don’t know any anorexics so I won’t try and explain their experience, but the challenge many trans people have is that society tries really hard not give us our birthright (because it challenges preconceptions – often based on medical misunderstanding) to be who we know ourselves to be. Up to and including killing us – directly, or indirectly through suicide (for which the statistics are way higher than you would ever believe).
Jon Danzig
Why do you describe Miss Meadows as a ‘mental car crash’? She was a popular teacher, a respected member of staff, with the support of the children, parents, teachers, head teacher and governors. Had this not been the case, then possibly I could understand media interest. But since there wasn’t a problem locally, it seems that the national press went ahead and created one anyway. In my view, this was the worst kind of journalsm. My blog explains in more detail. http://goo.gl/xdJBd
Mick
‘…they grew up racist, homophobic and generally suspicious and intolerant of anyone different from themselves.’
Can the Left go five minutes without slagging people off? Sticks and stones, remember. Plus, there’s a difference between being strange and being different, even if some people may not tell the difference.
And that means the Left. They can now call for young kids to even be taught gay sex in primary schools, not to mention wanting to wreck the age of innocence further by upsetting them with all this tranny stuff.
That is why kids knowing some people are from ethnic minorities is a fact of life at any age, whilst you can’t expect them to compute strange men thinking they’re women and have them take it as a man of the world would.