Priorities

In March of 2013 Lucy Meadows, a british schoolteacher, was found dead in her apartment.  There were no suspicious circumstances surrounding her death; the inquest ruled a suicide.  As I'm sure many of you know, Lucy Meadows was a transgender woman.  In 2012, she transitioned from male to female and returned to school that fall.  Thing initially went well, but that december, the grandfather of a student complained that someone like Lucy should not be allowed to teach.  I have no idea whether or not she was a good teacher (they are hard to come by), but regardless, she found herself on trial for being transgender.  I think it's absolutely outrageous that she was being judged for this, while back in the states a teacher can literally have sex with a student and still get full pay for years before anything actually happens, but I digress.  Things went from nasty to terrible when a british tabloid, the Daily Mail took up her story and Richard Littlejohn wrote and published an article on her-it was rude, crude, and very offensive.  When she committed suicide, the only blatant culprit was this publicity-this unwarranted personal attack left her with nowhere to turn.  But despite how horrible the attack on her was, I cannot in good conscience accuse Richard Littlejohn of her murder, because he did not kill her.  Lucy Meadows killed Lucy Meadows.

I think the accusation that this article caused her suicide is an insult to transgender people everywhere.  As much as I would like to say that saying something bad about someone in a tabloid is a hate crime, I can't because it isn't.  The price we pay for living in a country that allows people like me to speak our minds is the right for people we disagree with to do the same.  And the only way that someone can be protected from this sort of attack is to endure it-within the LGBT and Feminist communities, I have seen an alarming growth in movements that seek to suppress speech and expression that is, well, offensive.  I do not think that the Daily Mail was in the right, I think that they are idiots-but they are not murderers, and they are not even biggots.  Their crime was stupidity, and the only person I can blame for that suicide was the victim.

Bigotry is very, very real.  People like myself are killed every day, and I can honestly say that late at night, I sometimes hold my hand inside the pocket of my bag where I keep my multitool.  My blog became a playground for a few days for a band of rad-fems who would be very happy to see me and everyone like me gone.  These are people who hate us, simply and absolutely.  Some of them will come to their senses; most of them will not.  And yet I think there is a certain grudging acceptance that we have for people like this-I feel sometimes like we have given up on those that mean us ill, and now are just trying to compensate by going after people for making stupid mistakes-calling the misgendering of a transgender person a "hate crime" for example.  I have been involved in a hate crime once, and I can tell you reader, that misgendering someone is not a hate crime any more than insulting them is a murder.

These people are not biggots; they are idiots.  They do not need to be attacked, they do not need to be scolded, most often they do not even need to be bothered.  The best thing to do in these cases is to nicely tell them that what they said was offensive, and hope for the best.  Despite this, we as activists bite back as hard as we can, and as a result we make enemies instead of educating.  Sometimes, the best way to induce change is to know when to leave something be-nobody likes being called out and frankly it usually just makes us look like the ones in the wrong.

I am not defending bigotry-I hate hatred as much as everyone else (should) but it is unfair of us to pin suicides on careless journalists, accuse people who use the word "he" of hate crimes.  This is a call for moderation, for us to direct our efforts.  We should not waste our time on mistakes, obituaries with the wrong names-we should spend our time trying to resolve the fact that there is a one in twelve chance that some day, perhaps some day soon, I am going to be cut down where I am standing because I had the gall to live my life the way I chose.  So please, spend all of the time you want calling out people who use the word "transgendered" or accusing the world for an act that was committed by the victim, and could have been prevented had the VICTIM been given help, and not the "cause neutralized".  But there is a one on twelve chance that my luck or the luck of you or someone you care about will run out.     And why we as activists do not spend our time trying to solve this rather than the trivial is far beyond me.