[BigDee]

Hello Everyone,

From an email I received today:

This week, a schoolteacher took her own life, a tragic result of media bullying that was egged on by a right-wing columnist for the UK’s 2nd-largest paper.

Lucy Meadows just wanted to quietly teach her students, but Richard Littlejohn of the notoriously inflammatory Daily Mail led a nasty witch-hunt against her. In a hit piece mockingly titled "He's not only in the wrong body... he's in the wrong job," Littlejohn began a wave of harassment that drove Lucy from teaching. Two months later, she would be dead.

Lucy’s death sent a wave of shock and anger across the UK, with tens of thousands of people demanding that Daily Mail fire Richard Littlejohn. The Daily Mail is one part a of huge global media conglomerate, and if people around the world stand up to hold the paper accountable, it will send a clear message that the media can’t peddle this kind of bigotry and get away with it.

Sign our petition to the Daily Mail: sack Richard Littlejohn, issue an apology, and institute an editorial review policy to ensure that this never happens again. http://act.sumofus.org/go/1426?t=2&akid=1451.376337.iGWyJ

Lucy was raised male, but recently underwent a transition to live as female -- which for Littlejohn was reason enough to attack her in his column. The vile article led to a witch-hunt targeting Meadows. Newspapers offered to pay parents for a picture of her, and she complained of having to leave home by the back door and arrive early to school to avoid the packs of journalists.

Throughout the hit piece, Littlejohn callously referred to Lucy as “he”, and claimed that getting gender reassignment surgery showed that she didn't care for the children she taught.

Richard Littlejohn has a long history of using his perch at the Daily Mail to mock and harass others, including people of color, the LGBT community, and people with cerebral palsy. Littlejohn is a disgrace to journalists, but the Daily Mail is defending him. The paper released a statement that “it is regrettable that this tragic death should now be the subject of an orchestrated [attack on us], fanned by individuals... with agendas to pursue.” Disgustingly, the Daily Mail thinks that it is the victim in this situation.

The Daily Mail needs to make amends and Littlejohn needs to go. Click here to add your voice.
http://act.sumofus.org/go/1426?t=3&akid=1451.376337.iGWyJ

Trans people face a horrifying level of discrimination and violence around the world. If we want to make the world safe for the trans members of our community, we need to act together to ensure that major institutions like the Daily Mail aren’t contributing to this climate of hate.

Littlejohn claimed that children don’t have the capacity to handle a gender transition -- but kids are smart and don’t carry the bias that adults have absorbed over the years. Just take the experience my partner Max had when he came out to his little cousin as a transgender man. The cousin said “Oh, that makes sense. I always thought you were a boy. Now can we go play Legos?” Gender transition is only an issue for kids when the adults in their lives -- many egged on by these sorts of offensive opinion pieces -- make it out to be a problem.

Everyone has the right to say what they think, but mainstream publications like the Daily Mail shouldn't promote this sort of hate. The Daily Mail needs to ensure that this never happens again -- by not only yanking Littlejohn’s column and apologizing for the paper’s decision to run the hateful opinion piece, but also instituting an editorial review policy that prevents discriminatory writing from ending up in its paper again.

Tell the Daily Mail that newspaper columns cannot be used for bullying and hate, and that Richard Littlejohn has no place in the papers.
http://act.sumofus.org/go/1426?t=4&akid=1451.376337.iGWyJ

Thanks for fighting for basic human decency,

Kaytee and the rest of us



**********
More information:

The Guardian: Trans teacher believed to have killed herself had told of 'press harrassment', 3/21/13
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/m...harassment

No I am not a reader of the Daily Mail, I had never heard of it before today. Still, they may well be a paper that caters to the bigots of this world. Mr. Littlejohn is entitled to his opinion, however, I do not believe that the media should behave in this fashion. My opinion.

BigDave

[AbiDrew85]

Unfortunately, the Daily Wail is very good at hate mongering. It's nicknamed such precisely BECAUSE it is so good at hate mongering...

I'd heard the story, though I'd failed to make the connection to the Wail. I'm not British though, just have a lot of friends over there.

[BigDee]

Unfortunately, the Daily Wail is very good at hate mongering. It's nicknamed such precisely BECAUSE it is so good at hate mongering...

Thanks AbiDrew,

So, there's probably very little chance that the Daily Mail will pay any attention to the petition, beyond saying to Mr. Littlejohn, "Good job, keep up the [bold]good[/bold] work."

BigDave

[Crim]

This LittleJohn fool needs to be put in a jail cell.
What a whack-job.

[AbiDrew85]

Unfortunately, the Daily Wail is very good at hate mongering. It's nicknamed such precisely BECAUSE it is so good at hate mongering...

Thanks AbiDrew,

So, there's probably very little chance that the Daily Mail will pay any attention to the petition, beyond saying to Mr. Littlejohn, "Good job, keep up the [bold]good[/bold] work."

BigDave

Well. It's possible, actually. From what I understand from my friends while they're good at the wailing, they don't like to be tooo obvious about it. So they MIGHT send him packing. Though they'd probably cushion it for him and might even give him as much "secret" reward as they think they can.

In the end, it won't really make much difference. Some other columnist with just as much an axe to grind will just take his place.

[bryony]

I'm not defending Littlejohn's style, but it worries me that the trend nowadays whenever someone says something unkind the instant response is "let's fire him!". What happened to the freedom of the press? In the UK we're already in danger of implementing press regulation for the first time in nearly 400 years, something which the American press has been flabbergasted about.

We need to remember that it is just as repressive to stop people we don't like from expressing their views as it would be if they were in power shutting down sites like these.

Just to be clear, I'm not defending anything that was said by the conservative press, but I do think that press censorship is the first step towards a communist-style totalitarian state, and firing someone for what they wrote is a form of censorship.

Getting back to the case in hand, the petition did not provide all the details of this case. As I have a real distrust of petitions like this, I thought I'd check out the facts.

It turns out that the teacher was employed by a faith school - something that may not be wholly familiar to people from the United States. The UK has an established church, and there is no separation of church and state at the moment (though they are pushing it as far as they can). Therefore it is possible for parents to send their kids to a state school that embraces the teachings of the Church of England. Regardless of how forgiving Christ was, these schools will naturally appeal more to conservative parents, as the non-immigrant population here has become much more secular over the last 40-50 years.

The teacher, in my opinion, did not get good advice. The school was naturally encouraging, because to do otherwise they would have fallen foul of our stringent Equality Laws, but that is the nature of unintended consequences. If they had not been worried about that, they might have warned the teacher that the parents may have had a bad reaction.

Yes the teacher was within rights to leave at the end of one term/semester as Mr Uption and return the next as Miss Meadows, but human nature is what it is... laws don't change it. The parents were upset and the newspapers got wind of it. The Daily Mail is a conservative newspaper and Littlejohn gave a conservative opinion.

The teacher was apparently stressed out by the constant presence of reporters. I just googled "Nathan Upton" "Lucy Meadows" for the period November to end February, and there are loads of results, so not just the Daily Mail. Littlejohn is a bête noire of the left-wing press, so he is getting the blame. I don't believe that a suicide note was left pointing to him in particular.

If this teacher had left the school, got FFS and was able to pass in stealth mode, this would not have happened.

I think the teacher was ill-advised to go for transition. The UK does not fund facial feminisation, which as I have said before, I think is far more important than genital surgery, particularly if you want to be able to pull off a role as a women in front of an audience. The end result was, I'm afraid, not good, in that it is easy to see a male face and hair here.

I suspect it was dissatisfaction with the end result (and possibly classroom reaction?) coupled with the publicity that was more likely the cause of the suicide.

Until society gets used to the sight of obvious men dressed like women, or we start funding facial feminisation surgery, this will continue to happen.

The therapists and counsellors need to throw away their political correctness and be more honest about the kind of life these poor folk are going to experience, and encourage them to explore alternative solutions like dealing with the dysphoria symptoms first.

The ones I feel most sorry for are the wife and child. I wonder how much she was told before committing to marriage and childbirth?
I wonder what the counsellors told her? Did they warn her of the possibility of adverse publicity?

This was a tragedy on multiple levels.

B.

[AbiDrew85]

And I'm sure that we don't really know how much was or wasn't said to her about the "unintended consequences".

She may have gone into everything fully well knowing she'd still need FFS eventually, and hoping to get it LATER, after paying off current debts and saving up for it.

What she wasn't prepared for, what no body is EVER prepared for, is press stalking.

I don't know what Littlejohn said, I don't know what any other press said, I try to avoid reading the garbage, and it doesn't matter what ANY of them said. The problem was the stalking itself. She was a TEACHER for crying out loud. TEACHERS expect AT WORST to be the subject of childrens lustful thoughts or some other childish thing.

Even among those who go into more public careers like music or movies people don't always handle the press well.

The REAL problem, and it's a problem the world over, in all different areas, is the press.

I'm not saying the UK has the right idea about trying to regulate them... but... something needs to happen to get the press to BACK THE HELL OFF.

[bryony]

Agreed Abi.

The form of press regulation that I would not mind seeing is the ability to stop them camping outside people's homes. How this could be achieved I'm not sure , but you're definitely right about that.

What is not ok is firing someone for expressing an opinion.

By coincidence, this interesting article was published today - the author is a left-wing writer that I have a lot of time for, because he tries to approach issues rationally rather than ideologically. It mentions the petition, and I think it is worth a read.

Article here.
B.

[sfem]

Bryony. Hate speech is always a bad thing. Period. It doesn't matter if it is enabled, empowered, and propagated by the press. Even if the press outlet is recognized to be a hate speech panderer.
Spinning things so the victim is at fault is also never a good thing. Identifying ways for them to avoid being victims is misdirection, and I'm a little surprised to see it coming from you. That is usually a tactic of those who believe might makes right.
I can't believe you think that because the health service isn't very enlightened that she should have stayed in hiding. This goes to the core of what our group is about. The right to decide for ourselves who and what we will be without fear of reprisal unless we do something to harm others. The ones you are exonerating are the ones who are using that "freedom" to harm others for their own personal and corporate gain. I take real exception to you supporting the hate mongers and denigrating someone who I'm sure was a wonderful person with every right to a safe and happy life.
The faith school argument is a red herring. It is at best part of the problem, not the solution.
The freedom of the press thing is not applicable, hate speech is not protected and shouldn't be. Equally, freedom of the press is not freedom to stalk someone, harass them and people they know, and interfere with anyone's life. Reporting by definition is documenting observation, not an intrusive act to create observation. Their definition of reporting coincides with the military's view that sending in drones, satellites, wiretaps, and spies is just reporting on things.
Saying the school should have tried harder to tell her she was wrong to make the change is barbaric, and just another path to suicide which doesn't help.
Saying there are other hate mongers doesn't excuse one of the worst from responsibility for his own actions.
The response "fire him!" is a valid response to someone who does something harmful to their employer without regard for the company. If the company wants him to do this, then they need to be given all the backlash that can be generated to show them why their behaviour is not acceptable. Corporations are not people. They require external forces to guide their actions past the bottom line. And why would you describe this as an "instant response"? It is simply the right response. Unless a significant numbers of their actual subscribers sign it, it likely won't mean much to them though. That's why there has to be legislation. Because people who behave like Littlejohn and his supporters at the Daily Mail never act for any purpose but their own greed and require daddy or mommy to make them stop misbehaving.
The suicide note likely didn't point to just one person being at fault because she knew there were many people contributing to the situation. Having more than one person misbehave in the same way doesn't exonerate any of them.
I'm astonished at your continual advocacy for the idea that anyone who isn't "good-looking" should not be seen. Makes me very sad and rather angry. Put the burque over your own head if it bothers you so much.
The photo link you posted shows to me a beautiful woman. What's your problem? That there might be a woman whose facial structure or hair or skin doesn't meet covergirl standards? I seriously disagree that she looks male, even in the photo you linked.
You need to get over your knee-jerk reaction to what you call "political correctness". Some of it is what enlightened folk call progress. Although like everything else, it should be examined on the merits of every instance, not judged by how it looks at first glance.
The therapists and counselors are highly unlikely to be able to advise them what will happen as they go through this. They don't know. I very much doubt that she and her family did no investigation of the possible consequences of this path. And I also seriously doubt that anyone would have predicted this kind of criminal behaviour on the part of the press. Are you really suggesting this is normal and expected when anyone does anything to deviate from the social norms? Presumably it is actually similar to the USA where there is no shortage of vocal nutjobs, but the majority can recognize it for what it is.
And last, but far from least, how dare you try to stir up controversy and derision about her family life? Do you know anything about her family? How they actually felt? What it was like for them to deal with the changes to their world, before the hate mongers got involved and made the situation 10,000 times more difficult and genuinely harmful? Do you plan to supply the Daily Mail and their ilk with ideas for who to harass to the point of suicide next? It's outrageous to blame the victim for things you don't know even exist, just to support a view that hate mongers should be free to destroy anything they like for fun and profit.

[sfem]

By coincidence, this interesting article was published today - the author is a left-wing writer that I have a lot of time for, because he tries to approach issues rationally rather than ideologically. It mentions the petition, and I think it is worth a read.

Article here.
B.

I read it and as much of the commentary it stirred up as I could stomach. You describe him as a left-wing writer, but that doesn't validate anything he said. His "wing" isn't relevant, the article is and it is counter-productive at the very least. The clearest evidence is how it draws the hate mongers (in support of the article) like flies in the comments.