Which Side of Broadchurch Are You On?

The thrilling crime series  Broadchurch has presented two views of under-age sex in the last two episodes.  Last week we were presented with a convicted sex offender who had sex with his later wife 4 weeks before her 16th birthday, with whom the writers want us to sympathise.  Then this week we were presented with a mother being distressed that her husband has kept from her that their 15 year old daughter has a 17 year old boyfriend (and she is not told by her husband that the relationship is sexual).

Those two sides of a difficult issue was brought home to me by reading an article by someone I have a great deal of respect for:  Stephen Whittle, founder of Press for Change, the campaigning organisation largely responsible for the trans community’s role in drafting what would become the Gender Recognition Act (2004).  In Chris Wilson:  Convicted Because of His Clothes, Stephen, now an Equalities Professor of Law at Manchester Metropolitan University, writes of a couple of recent court cases where defendants were found guilty of crimes for having mislaid young girlfriends about their gender.  The stories are reminiscent of the Oscar winning depiction of murdered 21 year old Brandon Teena in Boys Don’t Cry.  Those resonances are particularly strong because just as with the real-life story of Brandon Teena / Teena Brandon, it is unclear if all the case that Stephen cites actually do involve trans men.   If you search on Google for the Scottish Transgender Alliance’s change.org petition linked to Chris, you are given the following summary:

“We consider it essential that trans people’s right to privacy about their gender history ….This case, and the cases of Gemma Barker and Justine/Scott McNally in …”

Yet if you click on the link the petition now has been edited to remove mention of those two English cases, possibly because the petition is aimed at Scotland’s legal authorities, but more likely because it is unclear either of them identified as men.  Certainly, there is dispute whether the claim of Justine to want gender reassignment was true or a ruse to avoid the discovery that she was not Scott McNally.

Stephen assumes that Scott is a trans man, but there is doubt as to whether Justine wants to be co-opted into the trans community.  The rest of Stephen’s article is a good legally referenced article to the whole issue of the general lack of a legal requirement for at trans man to reveal his birth gender.  Apart from assuming too much about Justine / Scott, I have one major concern about his article, and that brings me back to Broadchurch.

The concern over Chris’s conviction for obtaining sexual intimacy by fraud is complicated by the fact that of the two relationships involved, the one that involved sexual penetration was with a 15 year old.  Chris claimed at the time to be 17, but was actually 21.  At the age he claimed to be, that mother in Broadchurch is appalled, and maybe that, not homophobia as Stephen claims, lies behind parental pressure to pursue a criminal charge.  At 21 we are talking about a young adult and (in the eyes of the law) a child.  I am concerned that Stephen wants to brush aside that aspect of the case as unimportant to society unless there was an abuse of power or a great difference in age.  Anyway, when you are 15, 21 is a great difference in age – 6 years is more than a third of the victim’s life, and she made her decision on the basis of thinking that her boyfriend was just 2 years older than her.  Admittedly, this is nowhere near as bad as the Broadchurch character was had a sexual relationship with a 15 year old in his forties.  We are supposed to be sympathetic to him, but I find that age gap deeply creepy.  The 15 year old victim of sexual assault would probably have found the revelation of losing her virginity to a 21 year old deeply creepy, as age differences are viewed very differently at that young age.

[The rest of this article was re-written on 11th April in the light of the judge's comments at the 10th April sentencing hearing]

It is completely wrong for Stephen to assert that the case against was only brought to court because Chris was born female bodied.   The age of consent is there for a reason and while the aims of the Scottish Transgender Alliance’s petition are laudable in hoping to prevent a dangerous legal precedent, Chris is not the sort of person to be basing a campaign around.  First and foremost, this is a case about the sexual assault of a minor and since this article was first published we know that Chris has been given a lenient sentence of three years probation, three years on the Sex Offenders Register, and 240 hours of community service.  The Edinburgh High Court has not published the judgement in this case, although it would appear to meet their criteria for publication of a “significant point of law or a particular public interest.”  That is frustrating as the judge, Lord Bannatyne, made a comment that Chris genuinely feeling male lessened his culpability.  What I would like to know is if the fraud for which Chris was sentenced is about his gender claim or his age claim.  Stephen is certain that it is the former, but for me the latter is the real issue and that is why Chris should not be held up as a martyr for the transsexual community.  He was guilty of fraud in presenting himself as a boy, when in fact he was a man six years older than his victim.

We Unhappy Trans

I have been thinking that the two campaigns that most of my Trans Scribe articles have been about in 2013, Suzanne Moore and  Lucy Meadows, and their common source in Twitter Storms.  Over the Easter Weekend I was trying to focus on my theology blog, Faith in Doubt, and take time out from writing trans articles.  This did not work as I could not stop thinking about the articles I planned to write connected to these campaigns and it occurred to me that there was a much darker connection between those two cases.  That is, the drive to manufacture the notion that the trans community is the most beleaguered and unhappy of all communities in all the world.  Indeed, woe betide anyone who dares to try to lighten the mood and detract from this key point of gaining trans political leverage via the message of doom and gloom.  Traitors to the trans cause include We Happy Trans, who have the audacity to suggest that there is something positive about being trans or anyone who challenges the dubious statistical analysis of the Trans Murder Monitoring Project.  What are these happy trans people doing?  Don’t they know that happiness will ruin the chance for the British trans activists to persuade the government to improve our lot?  I exaggerate for effect, but not by much.

The connection to the Trans Murder Monitoring Project is instructive, although whether the link to it will be instructive for you is another matter altogether –  warning: dubious statistics ahead.  That project prepares the lists of the dead for the annual Trans Day of Remembrance [TDOR] and it was the sharp rise in the murder rate of Brazilian trans people that lay behind a lot of the online campaign against Suzanne Moore for an illustration of an unobtainable female body shape goal being “that of a Brazilian transsexual” in an article on feminism.   The reaction to Suzanne is not only demeaning to Brazilian transsexuals (who were not the ones complaining), but it points up the danger of those elements of the trans community (and non-trans allies) who define themselves primarily through a day of death.  The importance of TDOR is understandable as each of the names that gets read out hides a tragic story of friends and family who have lost a loved one, although not necessarily to a hate crime.  This is because the Trans Murder Monitoring Project records all murder victims that can be identified as trans, not restricting itself to victims of hate crime murders.  That is something which goes back to TDOR’s origins in the vigil for Rita Hester, for whose murder no motive has been determined.   At the 2012 TDOR (as in 2011) the largest number of murders were recorded in Brazil, possibly due to a national project in that country to monitor better if murder victims identified as trans.  This meant that those who attended commemorations listened to a very long list of 126 Brazilian names being read out, and consequently to the anger provoked by Suzanne’s passing reference to a beautiful Brazilian transsexual.  In the London TDOR 2012 event there was further dubious statistics from the host seeking to justify why trans women were so much more at risk of murder than other women.  This was dubious in that it was acknowledged that the majority of victims were sex workers, but the statistical comparison was with all Brazilian women, not just those in the sex trade.

There is a similar process going on in the international online campaign about transphobic media reports and its links to high levels of trans people choosing to end their own lives, which has arisen in the wake of Lucy Meadow’s tragically early death .  With one huge difference; those 126 Brazilian transsexuals commemorated at TDOR 2012 were all murder victims, even if not necessarily victims of hate crimes, but we do not yet know if Lucy chose to end her own life,and, if she did, if her deadly choice was driven by the press harassment she undoubtedly experienced.  I first entered the debate on this campaign by complaining that activists need to wait until they know what the cause and reasons for her death were.  I would rather give Lucy’s family the space to mourn, but the continuing level of misinformation about Lucy’s death means that I have to keep coming back to the subject.  For example, since publishing my last article on the subject I have been blocked by a user on Twitter who lambasted me for weakening the anti Richard Littlejohn campaign by suggesting that Lucy might have died from natural causes.  This is despite our lack of knowledge of the precise cause of death being the official position (honoured in the breach as much as the observance) of Trans Media Watch, one of the principle campaigning organisations involved.

Trans suicide rates consistently come out alarmingly high in research, at about 35% of trans people having attempted suicide at least once.  Note that we are again with dubious statistical methods as most of these surveys would not pass muster in a non-trans survey, due to the unavoidable difficulties in researching small and often publicity-shy communities.  These surveys are generally self-selecting samples for online surveys, with the sample gathered through social media.  The question asked is usually a simple one of have you ever attempted suicide without any qualitative question about how the respondent is defining a suicide attempt.  It is also difficult to gain an accurate result because of a chicken and egg situation – those recruited via social media are generally aware that in terms of activism it is a good thing if the government is told that there is an alarmingly high level of suicide, and so will have a (possibly unconscious) bias in answering that question in the broadest possible sense.  Indeed, for many years the main survey used to give these statistics in the UK was that conducted among the mailing list of the trans campaigning group Press for Change, who tampered with the statistics.  Note that survey was also conducted through the mailing list of FTM London and that one of the report authors, Stephen Whittle, was a founder of both organisations.   Their government funded report Engendered Penalties concludes (p.78) that nearly 35% of respondents had attempted suicide at least once, despite the question being “attempted suicide or self-harm.”  That 35% figure for suicide continued to be used despite complaints that this is not what the question asked, but ironically figures for at least one suicide attempt are consistently around that 35% mark in subsequent research.  This raises a question mark against what respondents define as a suicide attempt.

Even allowing for a large margin of error in the figure of 35%, the suicide attempt rate is still alarmingly high among trans communities.  Yet for some campaigners the statistic is not high enough and I came across one recent commenter on social media who managed by a series of amazing statistical guesses to massage the figure up to 89%, a surprisingly precise number for something based entirely on spurious guesswork.  This long-running tendency to talk up trans suicide statistics for political purposes means that there was a hunger to quickly interpret Lucy’s death as suicide (even though those statistics are for attempts, not completions).  The coroner may report that she ended her own life when he re-opens the inquest at the end of May, but any campaigning using Lucy’s name seems premature until then, especially as Lucy showed little appetite for promoting such a campaign in the four months between Richard Littlejohn’s article and her sudden death.

It is that politically motivated We Unhappy Trans tendency that led in part to the creation of the We Happy Trans website.  Only in part, though, as it is also a response to those deeply opposed to transsexual therapy who argue that for the sake of a trans person’s mental health they must be “cured” of their trans feelings.  So the next time that you feel drawn by social media to the dark side of trans politics remember, be happy.

Bethany, Are You Having a Laugh?

Not for the first time I find myself writing about the ill-conceived protest against Richard Littlejohn and the Daily Mail (aka vigil for Lucy Meadows).  When LGBT.co.uk advertised it the only person that they cited in evidence of the unproven claim that Lucy Meadows took her own life was the comedian Bethany Black.   Not, you might think, the most reliable of news sources.  For example, the following morning they could have read the most detailed early report about Lucy’s death in the Bolton News, where it states that the ambulance service summoned the police because of a sudden death.  They would also have read that Lucy’s employer asked for the privacy of all concerned to be respected, which presumably includes the respect for Lucy not to be publicised as having been driven to suicide, when all we know for certain is that she suffered a sudden death. The police reported that there were no suspicious circumstances and that a file was sent to the coroner.  Since then the coroner has opened an inquest and quickly closed it again (as is the norm) adding two new pieces of information, that Lucy’s death was discovered by her estranged wife and that although there are reports of prior suicide attempts, it is not clear if that is relevant to this case.  Her body was released for the cremation last Thursday (28th March 2013), which means that the coroner was satisfied that no further post-mortem examination was required before the inquest re-opens on 28th May.

Back to Bethany, she is no journalist, her skill is in comedy.  She sought to give a balanced view of Lucy’s death by stating that while some were saying that it was suicide, there were no suspicious circumstances.  So far so good, but it did not last, and she concludes that this awful thing must never be allowed to happen again.   A quick intro on writing up news, Bethany, when you say that an awful thing must never happen again and that there were no suspicious circumstances, then you are saying that Lucy was driven to suicide by the Daily Mail article that you have just criticised.  Unless you think that she died from a tragic domestic accident and you want to campaign for better health and safety  protections at home.  Bethany presents this case as if it has all just happened, it being the school’s announcement that Lucy was about to start working as a woman teacher, that Richard wrote his article and before Lucy returned to work she suffered this awful thing.  This shows Bethany’s lack of ability as a journalist as there is no idea given of the timing of different events.  A lot of the subsequent erroneous reporting about Lucy’s return to work and the presumption of suicide may derive in part from Bethany’s foolish attempt at journalism, just a day after the school announced Lucy’s death.  It may also be why the change.org and SumOfUs petitions to sack Richard imply that he outed Lucy and led to her suicide (claims for which one of the co-sponsors of the change.org petition has since apologised).

The rest of the LGBT.co.uk advert for the protest is incredibly odd. After quoting Bethany it turns to David Allen Green,sometime legal advisor to Trans Media Watch,  who is quite clear that it is unknown if Lucy ended her own life, but who also criticised the earlier article by Richard (first published on 20th December 2012).  After brief mentions of Richard and Lucy, the last third of the advert is about a Press Complaints Commission judgement on a controversial article by Julie Burchill, which was in the Observer, not the Daily Mail.  There is no conclusion about Lucy, although there is a link to David’s resource page about her.

This was Bethany’s first blog article in 14 months, I wish for the sake of Lucy that she had maintained her silence.  Bethany, please stick to comedy and then when this is all over we can all have a laugh at your jokes rather than your reporting skills. Of course, if the coroner judges that Lucy did not take her own life, it will be no laughing matter for her family, as millions around the world already think of her as the trans teacher who ended her own life.

Her Name Was Not #RIPLucyMeadows

Maybe you read the article Her Name Was Lucy Meadows.

Maybe you are one of the hundreds of thousands who have been signing petitions and tweeting about the cruel “monstering” of Lucy by Richard Littlejohn of the Daily Mail.

Maybe you were one of the hundreds who protested outside the Daily Mail offices in posh but freezing Kensington.

Maybe you believe Jane Fae when she tells you that media moguls are quaking in their boots and you are about to steel the nerve of Parliament to challenge a complicit government to legislate against the press.

Maybe you still have the placard helpfully provided by Josephine Shaw on Trans Media Watch’s Facebook Group.  You know the one you printed out with “I Am Not Afraid” in big letters, the Daily Mail logo as a title in font half that size, and then at the bottom in letters so small that you cannot make them out in the press photographs, the footnote “#RIPLucyMeadows.”

Maybe you even believe that you were at a vigil for Lucy, rather than a protest against The Daily Mail, despite the fact that her name does not appear on the poster, instead it is the Twitter hashtag that helped to promote the protest that was not a vigil.

Maybe it is dawning on you that you once clicked on a article called Her Name Was Lucy Meadows.

Maybe you wrongly believe that we know that she chose to take her own life.

Maybe you are ignoring the fact that the coroner Michael Singleton has dampened expectation that he will definitely rule for death by her own hand.

Maybe it is time to stop campaigning in her name.

Maybe it is time to stop and remember Lucy.

Beauty

[N.B., this post is a former page that I wrote in 2009 and as I no longer want it to be a page I am putting it up as a post.  These are my views from nearly four years ago, but I would still hold to most of them.  It is not the best written of articles, I was a member of an online trans forum in 2009 and a new member asked questions about female and male shapes and I promised to write down thoughts I had been working on for a while.  I then cobbled together this page, not post, in a couple of hours.  The second word has been changed from "page" to "post" and the original closing paragraph deleted as it was merely an unfulfilled promise to update the page.]

This post is not about beauty tips, and if you meet me in real life you will know why I would not be a good style guide.  Being entitled Beauty the page is aimed towards the male to female section of the trans community.  It is not that the issues do not relate to transmen (although that statement will come as news to many transwomen), its just that being women, we get more concerned about our looks (rather than our muscles).  In online forums for transwomen there is an obsession with the topic of passing and being read.  Passing means the ability to go about dressed as a woman and to be treated as a woman and not as a transwoman.  Being read is when an individual sees through the mask and reads our biological origin.  Before going further I have an interest to declare, or rather a lack of interest:  I do not worry about passing and have no intention of ever going deep stealth and pretending that I never had a male existence.  In part that is accepting the roll of the genetic dice that I have to live with, it is also a refusal to accept the gender policing of society that requires me to fit a certain image of what a woman should look like.  From that political perspective, I have no interest in passing, but a very strong interest in the subject of passing.

I do not want to have to conform to those prescribed views of how a woman should look, and this is not just a trans issue, it is a feminist issue.   Yet taking a feminist issue on fashion and beauty can lead to being flamed on a trans site.  One particular personal example was when I was assailed (virtually) for having the affrontery to maintain that the purpose of female fashion is not to attract sexual partners. After all, married women do not spend the rest of their lives walking around naked, so presumably clothing has relevance to those who are not looking to attract a new mate.

The notion that female fashion is not designed for male viewing will not come as a surprise to most natal women, but there is an element missing from the lives of most transwomen that tends to make this more challenging- they have never been teenage girls.   Many of the  more transsexual among them might have felt inwardly that they were girls, but few would actually have been dressing solely in female fashion in their teenage years.  That means that they missed out on the gradual exploration of clothes, make-up, and hairdos with teenage friends, and were much more likely to have grown up gazing at the girls with the other boys, but with confused feelings, as I had, as to whether they fancied the girl or they fancied being the girl.  Most transwomen spent their teenage years viewing female fashion under a male gaze, even if the purpose behind their gaze was different to the other boys.  It is maybe not surprising then that the notion of fashion as a feminist issue, of challenging the notion of clothes and make-up as for the benefit of external viewing, is not welcomed by many transwomen.

That view is reinforced by the abuse that so many transwomen face in the street from those who regard them as a man in a dress, and so we are back to the fixation with passing, but now with a view to personal safety.  Yet here too that lack of teenage girl experience can play a role.  Those who have grown up as boys will have been given all the messages from parents and schools about stranger danger, but in their teenage years, boys are given a freedom to roam the streets that is not as readily given to girls because though the name changes from incest to rape, for girls the danger remains (and not just from strangers) in the eyes of their parents.  Transwomen, particularly transvestites or transsexuals who transition to living as a woman in later life, can tend to assume that personal safety is about passing, but around the globe, passing successfully as a woman is certainly not a passport to feeling safe walking alone at night.  This is the most poignant part of fashion as a feminist issue:  in the words of a Rape Crisis Scotland campaign, “This is not an invitation to rape me.”

I mention that the concern for passing was in part related to not being accused of being a man in a dress and therein lies another preference for many transwomen that is out of kilter with the rest of the female population.  Certainly in the UK and Ireland, wearing dresses or skirts are for special occasions or because a workplace dress code requires it.  Yet I have been criticised for wearing jeans most of the time, even when they are definitely girly jeans, and my clothing preference is hard-wired into the rest of the female population.  If passing as a woman is such a concern, why not dress like a woman?

I promise that this lengthy reflection on transwomen viewing beauty from a different perspective from  those who have been brought up female is leading somewhere, honest it is.  It is a long run-up to deal with another aspect of the beauty industry – namely cosmetic surgery.  There is an understandable concern for many transwomen that testosterone has moulded their bone structure in an irreversible way that gives them away as having a male biological history.  You get a lot of talk on transwomen sites about FFS – Facial Feminization Surgery.   It is very expensive and usually has to be self-funded.  It is therefore more than a little disturbing when you read of those who have had FFS, or are saving up for it, declaring that no one can pass without make-up on until they have FFS.  As this surgery costs the equivalent of three years of some people’s annual salary, that is a dangerous and class-ridden assertion.  Most of us would need to be saving for many years to be able to afford it, so to insist that others need it, is to fall into that trap so common among wealthier transwomen, and assert that to be a transsexual you need to be well endowed (in the financial, not the other sense of that term).

The FFS promoters will go through a list of things that differentiate male and female facial features, relating to brow shape, jaw line, nose shape, etc.   All of this can be altered in various ways by the cosmetic surgery industry, but with transsexuals generally being on lower (or often no) incomes, they could not possibly support that industry.  So guess what?  That means that natal women are supporting the industry, and if they are supporting the  cosmetic surgery industry that means that they also had these features that supposedly only result from the ravages of testosterone.   What you are actually dealing with here is a definition of beauty cobbled together by the fashion and cosmetic surgery industries, claiming that is there ideal type of a white Anglo-Saxon woman that the entire female population of the globe must aspire to.  If you want to see how racially determined this all is, just get yourself to an ethnically diverse metropolis, sit down in a cafe near a window and watch real women walk past.  Sooner or later you will realise that by the standards of FFS promoters, a high proportion of natal women do not pass, including many of the white Anglo-Saxon women.

This also goes back to that lack of a teenage girlhood.  That brings with it a lack of growing up with your girlfriends complaining about how they do not fit the look, and no amount of make-up can hide the features that they hate, and as soon as they get a good job, they are going to get surgery to correct the defect.   Furthermore, as transwomen gather in support groups or online forums they tend to repeat what they have heard or read from others and a tradition of transwomen beauty views develops with its fair share of fundamentalist defenders.   They need to get out more, as in out observing what real women look like.

Parliament (Maybe) Gets It Right

Graham Jones, Labour MP for Haslingden and Hyndburn, has posted a blog article about his raising in Parliament the press treatment of his constituent Lucy Meadows.  In the article he notes that he expects there to be a three hour backbench debate on press mistreatment of trans people on the basis of an online petition against Daily Mail comment writer Richard Littlejohn.  I originally titled this piece without the maybe, and was due to praise Parliament for doing what so many in the trans activist community have not done, namely wait for the coroner’s report before drawing conclusions about the tragically early death of Lucy Meadows.

Then I thought that I should pay more attention to the very long thread advertising this debate on the Facebook Group of Trans Media Watch.  This is particularly because when reading the MP’s article I was thinking that he might have been misinformed and thought that this was a government-based petition that would usually trigger such a debate.  Graham got in touch with Trans Media Watch’s Helen Belcher and pointed out that no such debate has been agreed to.  Nonetheless, Helen encouraged members of the group to continue writing to their MPs even though the debate might not happen, and to post details on the thread.  This they did and some posters put up letters that they had already sent to their MPs, including two that asserted that Lucy had taken her own life.  The Chair of Trans Media Watch, Jennie Kermode, noted that one of these was “a good letter.”

Parliament maybe has got it right as they would wait for the coroner’s report, but the Chair of Trans Media Watch has got it very wrong, as she thinks that it is unquestioned that Lucy chose to end her life.  Just for the record, the coroner opened and closed the inquest today and the case will not be re-opened until 28th May.  He was also careful to note that while there were reports of previous suicide attempts that may not be relevant to the inquest.  Therefore the earliest that Parliament could have a debate would be June and by then it may have been concluded that Lucy did not choose to take her own life.  Unless Trans Media Watch changes its stance, MPs are going to be flooded with letters assuming that they know what the coroner will conclude.  It is time for Trans Media Watch and the wider online trans activist community to step back and stop bringing Lucy’s death into their campaigning until the coroner determines how she died.

No Respect in Death

The online trans activist community is once more furiously tweeting, writing hastily put together articles for online news outlets, and planning the picketing of newspaper offices.  The difference this time is that the target is a member of the trans community who tragically died shortly after transitioning to live as a woman.  The cause of her tragic death is unknown, but the online trans activist community are banking on the cause being suicide, because why should they waste an opportunity to advance their own agendas.  One very big reason is that they should is that their haste to further their reputations is at the expense of a transsexual, Lucy Meadows, who  in life had asked for privacy.  Now in death she is being denied it by the very people she might have expected to agree to her wishes.

One gathering point for this highly inappropriate campaign of self-aggrandisement is the Facebook Group for the media charity Trans Media Watch.  I am ashamed to say that I was one of the founder members of that Facebook group, although glad to report that I left it in 2009.  What would it cost these activists to wait until they know if Lucy chose to end her own life?  Instead, we already have a protest planned (called a vigil, but it is a protest) for Lucy outside the offices of The Daily Mail.  Lucy died in her home in Accrington, so an office in West London would not be a good place to hold a vigil, so it is a protest.  The reason that the Daily Mail is being chosen for this protest is that from an early stage reports of her death was linked by activists to an article by Richard Littlejohn in that publication about Lucy.  The Daily Mail removed the parts of the article referring to Lucy from their website seven days before her death due to undisclosed legal reasons, but trans activists have been posting archived versions of the original piece.   So much for Lucy’s request for privacy.  I will honour her request and will not tell you where to find Richard’s original non-redacted article.

Trans Media Watch made two representations to the Levenson Inquiry, and posted the transcript of the second representation on their website.   Their representative, Helen Belcher, noted that one of their main concerns was representations of the recently departed.  Why then was this same Helen writing an article on her blog that acknowledges that the coroner has yet to determine if Lucy chose to end her life, but goes on in the next sentence to say that it looks like suicide?  Why did Helen not follow the standards she campaigns for (namely that the media treat trans and intersex people with dignity, accuracy, and respect) and wait for that coroner’s report, so that accurate conclusions can be drawn from what might be death through a domestic accident or health problem.  It is also reported that Helen will be meeting with MPs about the media treatment of trans people in the light of Lucy’s death, despite the fact that the cause of her death is not known.

There is now a media storm about Lucy’s death and would it have occurred at this point in time if the online trans activist community had not intervened?  I suspect not, as most of the press coverage suggesting that Lucy took her own life appears to come from trans writers or has been inspired by their indecent haste in publishing articles, thereby making her as yet unexplained death worthy of national media coverage.  Four months ago Lucy was alive and well and asked for her privacy to be respected, four days ago she died and various members of the trans community that she might have expected support from are advancing their own careers over her dead body and before the cause of her death has been determined.

[N.B., this article was edited on 24th March 2013, as I had not checked The Daily Mail website and realised that Richard Littlejohn's comments about Lucy Meadows have been edited out, rather than the whole article being removed.  I had accepted the activists' line that the offending article had been removed, without doing a search on the newspaper's website.  I have learnt in the twenty-four hours since my article was published that Richard's article existed in a redacted form on their website.  This was thanks to some social media comments by activists, including Helen Belcher.   Indeed, Helen had mentioned on her article I cited above that The Daily Mail had "removed" the piece "last week" and I had carelessly not noted that this meant before Lucy's death.  The Daily Mail notes on the article that comments are closed for legal reasons, but although the article has an update date of 12th March there is no mention of how the text was altered.  According to Helen's comment on a Trans Media Watch Facebook thread, the legal reasons are that Lucy complained to the Press Complaints Commission as the individual affected about Richard Littlejohn's article (something that she appeared to be unclear about at the time of her hasty blog article).   As a result of this development, the third from last sentence of paragraph two and the second sentence of my final paragraph have been re-written.]