Lucy Meadows
Age 3219 May 2013
Accrington, Lancashire (United Kingdom)
Suicide
Lucy was a teacher. She died by suicide after being vilified by the tabloid press and continually hounded by reporters when news of her transition was made public.
At her inquest the coroner singled out the conduct of the Daily Mail in particular.
The first and most visible consequence of “press interest” is the press pack turning up on your doorstep. They appeared, en masse, to besiege Lucy in her home. Reporters. Photographers. Camera crew. You name it.
I was spared. By lucky chance, I was not on the electoral register for the address I was living at. So the press never found me.
My parents, both pensioners, however, were fair game. We weren’t prepared for such media interest so we didn’t warn them and advise them to offer no comment. The press pack knocked at all hours. They pushed notes for me through their front door, offering money: asking for comment. And pictures. And an interview. Because I had moved just a few hundred yards away, I could see all this from my front window. I got into the habit of looking outside first to see if any journalists were hanging round, either sat waiting in their cars or, sometimes, just hanging around on the street corner. My son had to be picked up from the school office, 15 minutes after the home-time bell, just in case.
And if it was bad for me and my parents, I cannot imagine what it was like for Lucy. Shortly before the New Year, she was writing to others in the trans community for advice on how to deal with the press. She wrote about how she had to leave her house by the back door, and arrive at school very early, or late, to avoid the press pack. She spoke too of how the press offered other parents money for a picture of her. In the end, they simply lifted an old picture from the Facebook pages of her brother and sister without permission. Our wedding photo as well. A Year 5 drawing removed from her school’s website in an attempt to protect her was recovered when the press accessed it through caching. The Press Complaints Commission ruled that the wedding photo must be removed from the Mail Online, but once online, always online. Our private moment, for me and my family, put out there.
"I'd now ask for my privacy to be respected so that I can continue with my job," said Lucy Meadows, whose face has been in every national newspaper over the past week. Why? She transitioned from male to female and was a teacher – and was persecuted by the press after her local newspaper ran a "story" on those two facts.
Her emails show she was stalked by journalists: "I'm just glad they didn't realise I also have a back door. I was usually in school before the press arrived and stayed until late so I could avoid them going home." Parents were offered money for photos of her. It's a wonder she even got out of bed in the morning – I doubt I could, in her situation. Last week, she died.
Meadows's children, meanwhile, are grieving. They'll learn, though, of how she described a hostile press that turned away those parents who wanted to give positive comments. They'll know how Richard Littlejohn saw her life as nothing more than something to fill his column and suggested she just go away, presumably with a scarlet T emblazoned on her chest.
A petition calling for the Daily Mail to sack Littlejohn has, so far, more than 180,000 signatures. The Mail has dismissed the criticism as an "organised Twitter campaign", but wasn't this the same paper that whipped up signatures (a mere 39,000) calling for Jonathan Ross's sacking after Sachsgate? Paul Dacre will ignore the petition, of course, but he'd be a fool not to see how out-of-step the Mail is with fast changing public attitudes towards trans people.
There are plenty of trans teachers in Britain, quietly working away. If Littlejohn and pals want to "protect" children from trans people's existence, perhaps they should stop hounding us and putting us in their papers. They promise to, now, like wolves promising to self-regulate a hunt. As lawer and journalist David Allen Green says: "The way the tabloids treated Lucy Meadows is how they would treat anyone, if they could get away with it."
Lucy grew up with a strong Christian background, and the school where she worked appears to have been a faith school. Although her school and colleagues respected her, Lucy was the one who paid the price of the media's callous and cruel behaviour.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/26/lucy-meadows-death-not-in-vain
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/may/28/lucy-meadows-coroner-press-shame
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-22694847
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/news/lucy-meadows/
https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/subject/lucy-meadows/page/2/
https://pure.roehampton.ac.uk/portal/files/1050774/Response_and_responsibility_FINAL_8_notrack.pdf
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/may/28/lucy-meadows-coroner-press-shame
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/mar/22/trans-teacher-lucy-meadows-press
https://www.kentlive.news/news/kent-news/story-dover-transgender-artist-driven-3559960
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Lucy_Meadows
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Meadows
