Lucy Meadows was a transgender teacher who took her own life. Her story must be remembered
It’s Transgender Day of Remembrance. This is the story of the woman Richard Littlejohn and the Daily Mail hounded to her death.
transphobia cw
a guide to british news sources
Because you (quite rightly) hear a lot about how awful the Daily Mail is, but not enough about how awful the others are.
The Daily Express:
Cons:
- Can very possibly lay claim to being even more racist than the Daily Mail
- Currently financing UKIP, which needs no further commentary really
- Also hates immigrants, the EU, and school shooting survivors
- Obsessed with a) Princess Diana and b) touting ‘miracle cures’ for stuff, all of which is nonsense
- Is less popular than the Daily Mail, but I suspect that just helps their particular brand of awfulness go under the radar more
Pros:
- None whatsoever
The Times:
Cons:
- owned by Rupert Murdoch
- Seems to have gotten steadily more and more right-wing over the years
- AA Gill writes for it and he’s a tool
- Ditto with Jeremy Clarkson (for the Sunday edition), who is the Worst
Pros
- Invented the Times New Roman typeface, so we have them to thank for that I guess
The Guardian
Cons:
- Once published (alright, it was in its sister paper The Observer, but still under the Guardian name) a piece by Julie Burchill so shockingly transphobic it’s remembered with disgust even now
- Is pretty white-feminism-y, really
Pros:
- Still probably better than most of the others, although you may have guessed that’s not saying much
The Sun
Cons:
- another one that could make a convincing case for being even worse than the Daily Mail in many aspects
- ACTIVELY ENDANGERED PEOPLE’S LIVES back in the 80s with their headlines about AIDS
- Is still loathed in Liverpool to this day due to its coverage of the Hillsborough disaster
- Happily and casually racist, homophobic, ableist and transphobic
- Just…read its Wikipedia page. How the hell is this clusterfuck still a newspaper
Pros:
- absolutely zero
The Daily Mirror
Cons:
- I think it’s sort of responsible for Piers Morgan’s fame, sorry about that
- wrote a really gross article about Charlie Sheen’s HIV diagnosis
Pros:
- presumably hates racist comedian Frankie Boyle almost as much as I do
The Independent
Cons:
- was a pretty good newspaper as far as I know, is now no longer published
- neither are most of its sister publications I think
Pros:
- Its website is still around
The Daily Star
Cons:
- I refuse to call this a ‘newspaper’
- It literally just makes shit up and puts it on the covers
- It’s a sexist, racist, Islamophobic, gross mess
- Just…look at its headlines, and despair that people actually buy this
Pros:
- Nope
The Daily Mail
Cons:
- Where even to start
- Constantly outs or tries to out transgender people, this has led to someone’s actual death
- They kept Richard ‘Human Scum’ Littlejohn on their staff even after that: he’s also called the deaths of five women sex workers ‘no great loss’ and mocked the family of Mark Duggan
- And countless other things
- After the death of 90s pop star Stephen Gately, published an article insisting his homosexuality killed him
- Responsible for possibly the most disturbing, homophobic headline ever put to print
- Happily supported fascism in the 1930s and opposed Jewish refugees fleeing Germany coming to Britain
- EVEN THAT is just scratching the surface
Pros:
- If you were some sort of detective and the outcome of your case relied on knowing exactly what Kylie Jenner was wearing on the evening of 11th December 2015, then you’re in luck, because the Mail obsessively details young female celebrities and their choices of outfit
- Other than that, absolutely nothing.
PLEASE SIGNAL BOOST!
I found this on Instagram but it apparently originated on 4chan, it’s dated today (5/10/16) so I hope if I can get this out there I can help in some way.
This is a truly horrible, cruel thing to do and if anyone knows the person who posted this or can contact them somehow, please do!!!
Hopefully we can help this poor woman have a healthy, safe transition without any asshole brothers getting in the way!!
PLEASE READ AND SIGNAL BOOST!!IF YOU CAN CONTACT THIS PERSON OR THEIR SISTER PLEASE DO!!!
OTHERWISE PLEASE JUST HELP ME SPREAD THIS!!!
This made me feel physically sick.
The original post is here, if that helps anyone. (I Googled the subject line of that screenshot). Don’t read it. Just…don’t read it.
But intriguingly, that person appears to be based in the UK, and we actually have laws against hate speech here, and that post would certainly count. I think so anyway?
Cellphone video of transgender woman Pearl Love being physically and verbally assaulted on New York City’s No. 4 train was posted to Facebook on Monday. Pearl was on her way to New York City’s LGBT Community Center when the female passenger began to berate her. In addition to the above, she has two other videos showing the woman chasing her around the subway car. Why Pearl isn’t planning on filing a police report at this time.
“Trans women in public minding their own business aren’t appropriate for my child but what is appropriate is me abusing a complete stranger.”
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Aggressive reminder that this is completely and total bullshit. This is the fucking post that started this rape joke hysteria.
There were no rape jokes, there were no transmisogynist jokes. There were no jokes degrading gender or sexuality. There was no racism. That being said there was a ton of offensive humor. BUT THATS DEADPOOL.
WHY WOULD YOU BE SURPRISED? WERE THE OBSCENE MOVIE POSTERS NOT OBVIOUS ENOUGH? WHAT ABOUT THE EXPLICIT MOVIE TRAILERS? MAYBE EVEN THE R RATING?
Even if you haven’t read the comics, THERE IS NO WAY YOU WOULD NOT HAVE KNOWN THIS MOVIE WASN’T FOR THE FAINT OF HEART.
Regardless, THERE ISN’T A SINGLE RAPE JOKE MUCH LESS AN “UPSETTING” AMOUNT.
Quit spreading this bullshit around. It’s a blatant, distasteful lie. The OP claims to have seen an early screening. SO WHAT? ITS STILL THE SAME MOVIE. The same movie that has ZERO rape jokes.
Deadpool is not an “unsafe” movie. Good grief, fuck of with this blatant announcement of misinformation. And Tumblr, learn to fucking fact check and maybe even watch something for yourself before latching onto bullshit like this.
Except that this post is itself spreading false information. And the sort of false information that hurts real people, as opposed to hurting…a movie, which does not have feelings and is unlikely to react to someone shouting death threats at it.
Deadpool does have rape/sexual assault jokes. If rape has never touched your life you probably won’t notice them, in which case good. I’m glad rape has never touched your life, I’m glad you’ll never have to deal with that. But unfortunately, as plain and simple statistics will tell you: stand in a room of six women and make even the mildest of rape/sexual assault jokes and chances are you’ll have catapulted at least one of them back to an experience they would much rather forget. How does that relate to Deadpool? Well-
No, most people will not see a line like “I pity the guy who pressures her into prom sex” (which, I hope everyone is done denying exists, it was in the pre-release clips) as a joke about a potential rape. They’ll take it as a crack about Negasonic being able to destroy any guy who actually tries that, and I’m assuming that’s the spirit in which it was intended, too. But, anyone in the audience who actually was pressured into prom sex – and honestly I think it’s be up to them whether they would count an experience like that as rape or not – would probably not appreciate seeing their experience trivialized. (Or, depending on the person, maybe they would not. Maybe they’d find that line empowering. It’s almost like nuance and different reactions and survivors of trauma not being a homogeneous group exist. That too would be up to them.)
Likewise, most people will probably laugh at the scene where Deadpool reaches for Colossus’s cock and says “Daddy?” on finding it. Why they laugh, you could get a whole thesis out of that. I probably laughed too, incidentally, and I wonder why too. Someone who had been the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of their father, though – they may laugh or they may not, because again (woo, we’re getting to the crux of the argument here) people have different reactions to jokes, to trauma, to everything. But if their reaction was to be furious and/or upset at a movie suddenly catapulting them back, without warning and rather casually, to a horrible time of their life – I’m assuming we can all agree that anyone who disregarded their right to do that and to discuss it with people afterwards would be, shall we say, in the wrong.
The bit where Deadpool sexually threatens the stalker at the beginning and kisses him? (his exact joke was something like “leave her alone or you’ll find I have hard spots too. That came out wrong…or did it?”) Totally overlookable, unless you’ve been sexually threatened and non-consensually kissed, in which case – oh, you were enjoying your movie? Well, now you have a cruel little thud in the pit of your stomach to go with it. Because that’s now Reminders Of Bad Things tend to work. Same with the “terrible childhood”/molestation jokes when Wade meets Vanessa. Yes, I know that in this capacity both of them are probably joking from the standpoint of being survivors, but there’s no way a complete newcomer to Deadpool would know that. All they’d see would be a movie joking about the unimaginably awful thing that actually happened to them. Thud.
Anyway, especially when you consider that most people use ‘rape jokes’ as a catch-all banner for ‘rape/sexual assault/molestation/paedophilia jokes’ – “this movie has no rape jokes in it!” is not true. It has Jokes That Evoke The Concept Of Rape. I.e, rape jokes. Why everyone is denying their existence, I have genuinely no idea. Did one half of Tumblr see a completely different cut of the movie? (I’m lying. I have some idea.)
….Oh, that brings us to the transmisogyny/transphobia. Okay: Deadpool tells Angel Dust that she looks like a guy, essentially, and “I’m guessing wang” (Or a line very like that, the joke being: “this woman has a penis, that’s funny.”) I am willing to accept that some people don’t know what transmisogyny is, but … this seems like a pretty good definition. Treating the idea of a woman with a penis as something intrinsically funny, that’s transmisogyny, I’m pretty sure. It’s not my area of expertise, but with so many transgender women saying they found it offensive it may be worth considering…that it might be offensive.
So, to reiterate: if any post is spreading misinformation, it’s this one. (And doing it in the most aggressive, nasty way possible.) Oh, and then there’s this:
WHY WOULD YOU BE SURPRISED? WERE THE OBSCENE MOVIE POSTERS NOT OBVIOUS
ENOUGH? WHAT ABOUT THE EXPLICIT MOVIE TRAILERS? MAYBE EVEN THE R RATING?
An R rating doesn’t reveal what triggers a movie might contain. Nor do the movie posters. The transmisogynistic joke wasn’t featured in trailers, to the best of my knowledge. Not helpful.
God, if only, if only there was some sort of system that people could use to determine precisely what jokes an R-rated movie would have, and what sort of things people might want to avoid. Like making blog posts to warn other people that the movie contains rape and transgender jokes!
…which it, you know, does.