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”
Mick
You’re right, there has been a history of people feeling hostile and alienated when faced with those from different races or of different creeds. And it can happen with any people, anywhere and it’s rarely fixed by calling names or applying labels. (I never expected any views to change by revealing this person to have been an oddball.)
But as we recap, trans-sexual people are the way they are because they’re not normal rather than because their skin’s a bit dark. That’s not to say I hate them, unless they’re particularly annoying individually, just that you keep this kind of thing away from kids.
And yes, kids can be affected. One kid in the article had nightmares and, on a wider level, kids can even be freaked out even when others of their age do it. Google STUDENTS WHO REFUSE TO AFFIRM TRANSGENDER STUDENTS FACE PUNISHMENT.
So you can’t guarantee all kids will be mature. Because they’re kids. And you keep people with their own complex issues out of the way. (And they don’t let other supposedly harmless weirdos work in schools after all.)
Mick
Aah, the names. Sticks and stones my break a Red’s bones!
I’m not moralising on the gender, if you can call it that, except when it’s put in front of kids. And kids may seem to take it in their stride but they still won’t understand properly, which can only upset the kind of person so mixed up that they drag up in class and feel they’re being ‘hounded’ by a few columnists commenting on the issues.
And it never crossed my mind to think in terms of class.
Ash
What a lovely bit of spin. Let’s pick some of this apart.
“Oooo, the mask! Where would anyone who doesn’t agree with left-wingers be without their masks?”
It has nothing to do with being left-wing or right-wing. It has to do with pretending to be a reasonable individual interested in having a conversation, rather than a wind-up merchant who simply “enjoy[s]… warm[ing] up in front of a blazing hot leftist”. A troll, in other words. Now, trolling political opponents by expressing ridiculous opinions etc. is one thing; but trolling them by hurling abuse at a dead primary school teacher? You’ll excuse me if I think that’s a teensy bit ‘off’.
“I never said I took anything from the dead teacher.”
No idea what you’re talking about here. I never said you ‘took anything’ from her either. What you did was to call her all sorts of names and imply that she wasn’t a fit person to be around children.
“leftists say the person was ‘hounded to death’ by a few columnists saying ‘Phew, what a weirdo'”
What a ridiculous attempt to downplay the all the negative media attention. When’s the last time you opened a national newspaper to find columnists dragging your name through the mud and demanding you be sacked and kept away from children? When’s the last time you had to plan your day around dodging journalists and photographers?
“To be clear, my reaction was remembering this person from the paper, reading how leftists say the person was ‘hounded to death’ by a few columnists saying ‘Phew, what a weirdo’ and then leaving a comment or two to gain insight into the opposite view of the issue.”
Yes, all you did was leave an innocent comment or two banging on about this teacher being a weirdo, a tranny, a gender-bender, an oddball, a man in drag etc., just to help you gain insight into why leftists think anti-trans prejudice might have played some role in her death. How admirable.
Ash
Funnily enough, you’re continuing to completely ignore the obvious truth that we recognise the need for children to address all sorts of complex and potentially upsetting or confusing issues as they grow up – birth, death, love, illness, old age, disability, divorce, puberty, etc. etc. You can’t give a reason why transsexualism should be any different because there *is* no reason.
Mick
Well let’s pick apart the pickings. You’re the one who mentioned winding up leftists. On a leftist board proud of its leftism. And I don’t mind being called a troll, or any name. Though I would appreciate if you calmed down.
And you said I was ‘spewing hate about transsexual people in general, and a dead primary school teacher in particular, just to wind up lefties for your own amusement.’ Sounds very much like saying I was getting something from this person’s death to me.
Though suppose we can take back talk of oddballs and weirdos in exchange for a more neutral observation then. Say I was peculiar enough to do what this guy did to try and keep his mind in some kind of check. I’d realise I was too -off-kilter to do anything as delicate as be a teacher. I know I would. Goes without saying the papers would notice.
And after all, people like politicians have to reign over much less.