Another One: Lucy Meadows, Transgender Teacher, Kills Herself After Columnist Richard Littlejohn Denounces Her In Paper

“I'd now ask for my privacy to be respected so that I can continue with my job," Lucy Meadows said, after a week of having her face appear in every national newspaper in England for over a week.

Why? Well, Lucy Meadows was a teacher, but she was also transgender; born male, she transitioned to female during the last year and, afterwards, was welcomed back to her teaching position at Accrington St. Mary Magdalen's Primary School.

And that was a story the press in England, and one journalist in particular, Richard Littlejohn of the Daily Mail, couldn’t let go: a transgender teacher. Littlejohn began publicly denouncing Lucy Meadows—whose birth name is being withheld out of respect—in terms usually reserved for child abusers. After enduring the onslaught of public humiliation, Lucy Meadows killed herself.

And, while the Daily Mail took Littlejohn’s article down after Meadows' death, this is an excerpt:

What are you staring at, Johnny? Move along, nothing to see here. Get on with your spelling test. Today’s word is ‘transitioning’.

Mr. _____/Miss Meadows may well be comfortable with his/her decision to seek a sex-change and return to work as if nothing has happened. The school might be extremely proud of its ‘commitment to equality and diversity’.

But has anyone stopped for a moment to think of the devastating effect all this is having on those who really matter? Children as young as seven aren’t equipped to compute this kind of information. ...

It should be protecting pupils from some of the more, er, challenging realities of adult life, not forcing them down their throats.

These are primary school children, for heaven’s sake. Most them still believe in Father Christmas. Let them enjoy their childhood. They will lose their innocence soon enough. ... Nathan Upton is entitled to his gender reassignment surgery, but he isn’t entitled to project his personal problems on to impressionable young children.

Littlejohn condemned the school for not "protecting pupils" from the "challenging realities of adult life," and personally attacked Meadows for "putting his [sic] own selfish needs ahead of the well-being of the children" in an article he entitled, "He's [sic] not only in the wrong body ... he's [sic] in the wrong job."

I guess what Littlejohn never stopped to think about is that children don’t know hate; children know hopscotch and coloring, kickball. They learn hate from their parents who learned it from their parents and feed on it when they see it in print.

But children see hate; they see hate, aimed at one of their favorite teachers, who was in class one day, and dead the next because some, and I use the term loosely, journalist, thought she didn’t have the right to be a teacher and decided to ridicule her in print; and sat back, no doubt laughing, as other so-called media outlets followed suit in the bullying, and subsequent suicide, of Lucy Meadows.

Here’s the deal: was she a good teacher? Did she do all the things that were required of her as a teacher? Did the students and parents—those who aren’t bigoted and transphobic—like her?

Then shouldn’t that been all that mattered? How can we expect our children to grow up safe and sane and open and nurturing and tolerant and accepting when many of us don’t know the meaning of those words ourselves?

A petition on SumOfUs.com calling for the firing of Littlejohn has received over 139,000 signatures; please stop by and add your name. It references his "long history of using his perch at the Daily Mail to mock and harass others" and expresses disgust at the Daily Mail's statement after Meadows' death, which read, in part, "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."

The Daily Mail seems to feel victimized, when, under their masthead, Littlejohn victimized Lucy Meadows right to her death.

Lucy Meadows deserves an apology.

An entire community deserves an apology.

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