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
…Have to RESIGN over much less! God, my typing makes me look weird as well.
Mick
I’ve said it a couple of times, or more, only you ignore it in order to say I ignore the ignored stuff. (Phew, how do leftists manage to logic-chop for a living?!)
And it’s no good to say as kids take in so much stuff already that you may as well chuck trannies into the mix as well. Nothing can be delayed ’til later in PC land. That’s why the most ‘progressive’ demand kids learn about puberty way before they get any pubes. (Or the ability to properly read, write and add up for that matter.)
And if individual kids are faced with seamy stuff earlier? Well, take things on a case-by-case basis.
They’re just kids. One thing at a time.
Ash
“Sounds very much like saying I was getting something from this person’s death to me.”
You were. You got to ‘enjoy a sit down out the rain here to warm up in front of a blazing hot leftist’. Remember? And that’s where I got the crazy idea that you like winding people up.
“Though suppose we can take back talk of oddballs and weirdos in exchange for a more neutral observation then. Say I was peculiar enough…”
…not sure how ‘peculiar’ is an improvement over ‘weird’, but OK…
” 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.”
There’s been no suggestion that she was incapable of doing her job. The idea that she must have been too ‘off-kilter’ to teach is based on nothing more than your own prejudiced belief that transsexuals must all be unhinged.
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Blimey, I’ve been deleted and blocked. Guess who.
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I got to enjoy sitting down in front of a blazing hot Ash. Figures. Which means I’m not the sort to get wound up rather than my enjoying the spectacle of a deceased something-or-other, as seems suggested.
And if we re-Google BASIC ISSUES IN TRANSGENDER MENTAL HEALTH, we’ll find they can have plenty of issues which set them apart from normal blacks or Sikhs. And whether or not this person was a good teacher, the other issues can have an impact on kids as well, as we already put our fingers on, to use an unfortunate phrase. And the poor sod was off-kilter enough to end his own life when the papers passed comment.