Why does the Daily Mail have a sudden and urgent desire to understand transsexuals?
WHEN Richard Littlejohn attacked transsexual Lucy Meadows for working as a female teacher after her gender reassignment, his Daily Mail article was met with howls of protest and calls for his head. A short time after Littlejohn’s piece, Meadows took her own life. Many saw a link between the Mail’s coverage and her suicide. A vigil was held outside the Daily Mail offices in Kensington.
The Mail removed the article from its website.
This month, the Mail changed direction. An article by Jane Fae was entitled:
Prejudice. Abuse. And surgery that needs nerves of steel. A brave and moving account of… The cruel reality of feeling Nature trapped you in the wrong sex
Here, JANE FAE sets out her own experiences of being transgender — as well as the prejudice she’s faced — and challenges misconceptions about the issue…
This is the same Fae, who in reaction to the Littlejohn article wrote in the New Statesman:
“[Meadows] talks of her good luck in having a supportive head. But the stress of her situation is also visible. She complains bitterly of how she must leave her house by the back door, and arrive at school very early, or very late, in order to avoid the press pack. She talks of the press offering other parents money for a picture of her; of how in the end they simply lifted an old picture from the Facebook pages of her brother and sister without permission. A Year 5 drawing removed from the school website was simply recovered through the magic of caching.”
She spoke of Leveson:
Where is the public interest, beyond the pro-family moral agenda, proudly proclaimed by Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre in front of the Leveson Inquiry? Were this a trans woman stealing money to fund gender re-assignment, there might be a story. Or a trans patient going on the rampage. Though in both cases, the real-and-unlikely-to-be-addressed question might still be: why would an individual act in this way?
And in death, the disrespect, the “monstering”, as some commentators have described it, continues. Ms Meadows broke everything in her life for one desperate reason: to be the woman she knew she was…
Yet it is the same old, same old. In death, the most venial of politicians and press barons are usually airbrushed into almost-sainthood. Not the trans community. For without any possibility of legal retribution, the “tranny freak” is now “fair game”.
Just, I would suggest, as the whining, crocodile tearing lily-livered national press of this country. Maybe they played no great part in this tragedy. But they tried. And for that, they stand guilty as any common thug or thief in the night.
Not fair? No. Nor was Lucy’s death.
Odd, indeed, how the Mail has changed direction so suddenly. And as one voice notes, the paper’s readers are being untypically fair. MandyB writes on the Angels Forum:
The comments are so universally positive and out of step with the usual DM comment that the cynic in me wonders if they are being moderated. Either way, the DM deserves some credit for the long overdue change of approach. I hope it continues.
Further oddness is that neither the article nor any of the published comments mention Meadows. It’s like it never happened…
Posted: 16th, May 2013 | In: Reviews Comments (2) | TrackBack | Permalink
