It was exactly three months ago that Richard Littlejohn published a piece in the Daily Mail viciously attacking Lucy Meadows, a primary school teacher in Britain. Littlejohn targeted Meadows because she’s transgender and had chosen to remain in her job as a teacher after beginning to present as a woman – this was the entire basis for his outrageous, unprovoked assault on her identity, her career, and her very life. It was vile and hateful in all the ways we’ve come to expect from a publication that, like much of the press these days, treats trans women as alternately ridiculous or a threat to society. It was quite literally intolerant of everything that Lucy Meadows was.
So it came as a surprise today that the Daily Mail has completely removed any mention of Meadows from Littlejohn’s column. What happened? Did they suffer a sudden attack of morality, three months later? No. Their decision was based on something much darker than conscience.
Lucy Meadows killed herself this week.
Read the rest of what she says.
I’m shivering a bit, myself. I’m so tired of human malevolence.
Update: via Bernard Hurley:
A petition to the Daily Mail to fire Richard Littlejohn
A candlelight vigil for Lucy Meadows –
This is despicable behavior by The Daily Mail.
Flushing the original article down the memory hole is, in itself, a detestable and cowardly act and an offense against journalism. (Not comparing the two things, just stating that the latter is also bad.)
Why the fuck do people need to be so awful to other people? What in hell did attacking her prove?
Richard Littlejohn is known for two catchphrases: “Political correctness gone wild” and “you couldn’t make it up.” The second is quite ironic because Littlejohn often does make it up.
This is incredibly disturbing.
On Monday there will be a candlelit vigil outside the Daily Mail’s office in memory of Lucy Meadows.
https://www.facebook.com/events/158234694340156/?ref=22
Here is a petition to the Daily Mail asking for Richard Littlejohn to be fired.
https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/the-daily-mail-fire-richard-littlejohn-for-victimizing-lucy-meadows-leading-to-her-possible-suicide
Thanks Bernard. I’ll update the post to add those.
I used to work with a transgendered woman (I hope this doesn’t sound like, “Some of my best friends are..). We made friends and we’d do things like go to the movies or have dinner together. I’m so clueless I initially thought she was a gay man, but she was male-to-female and still in a transitioning phase. (I don’t know if I’m using the right terms). People at work would joke about her all the time, some co-workers would call her “gross”. After a while she started to say to me that she didn’t need my ‘pity’ whenever I called her to chat. I didn’t pity her, I really liked her, but it was heartbreaking to see how lonely her life was and how she was wary of not being liked for herself. That people like me just felt sorry for her.
What assholes like Littlejohn forget is that behind what he calls “political correctness” are actual human beings with actual human feelings.
I’ve read all the articles I could find on this tragedy, and yet none of them give any clear reasons for her suicide.
So out of curiosity, how is it possible to make a direct link between the Littlejohn’s screed and the suicide?
Did she leave a note? Did she show any signs of becoming suicidal precisely because of Littlejohn? Did she ever express the desire to kill herself because of what he wrote?
Suicide rates among transgendered people are quite high, you know, particularly for those who go from male to female.
Some end up regretting what was an irreversable decision and are very disappointed with the results.
I know of two such suicides involving men-to-women transgendered individals for precisely those reasons…and I don’t know tons of transgendered people.
Doctors do detailed assessments of those seeking a sex change, but we hear very little about post-op followups.
Anyone tempted by Wave’s “logic” should know that a 2011 study (Close, Colin, Affirming Gender, Affirming Lives: A Report of the 2011 Transition Survey. Santa Rosa, CA: GATE, 2012.) found that satisfaction with transition was overall 96% and that people who received genital surgery were more likely to report an improved quality of life than those that hadn’t. When presented with this evidence in Zinnia’s thread, Wave dismissed it as ideologically biased, called us brownshirts and “pink sharia”, and steadfastly refused to present any evidence for his claim that significant numbers of trans women commit suicide over “post-op regret”. So remember, if you want speculate on a connection between a hateful reporter targetting a trans woman and her eventual suicide, you need evidence strong enough to hold up in court, but if you want to claim the same woman killed herself over “post-op regrets” when she wasn’t even post-op, you don’t need any evidence at all.