Ooh, that Richard Littlejohn is a terrible man, and the Daily Mail, dreadful paper! Why just three months ago, he was demanding that young children be protected from the full onslaught of adult sexuality, as they were ‘too young to deal with it’.
“The school shouldn’t be allowed to elevate its ‘commitment to diversity and equality’ above its duty of care to its pupils and their parents.
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.”
What hateful sentiments, how dare he seek to protect young children! 3 months, almost to the day, later, it was being claimed that Richard Littlejohn, in the course of his earlier article, had ‘outed’ Lucy Meadows as ‘trangendered’ and thus ‘monstered her’. There is an on-line petition at ‘SumofUs’ which fights for ‘people over profits’ to fire him from his job, which has now collected near a quarter of a million signatures designed to hound Littlejohn from his job.
For suggesting that the school that employed Lucy Meadows should put the mental welfare of its young children ahead of its duty to diversity and equality? Surely not. I forgot, he also made the terrible error of referring to Lucy as ‘he’.
As it happens, Littlejohn didn’t ‘out Lucy Meadows’. The school did that in a letter to all its parents blandly stating that:
A primary school has written to parents to explain that a male teacher will be returning after Christmas as a woman.
St Mary Magdalen’s School in Accrington have asked pupils to address Nathan Upton as Miss Meadows from the start of the Spring term.
Karen Hardman, the headteacher at the Church of England school, said Mr Upton, who will also be dressing as a woman, has her full support.
Mr Upton has asked for his privacy to be respected, saying it had not been an easy decision to make.
Looks as though the school is also referring to Lucy Meadows as he too, without any campaign to sack the journalist responsible or the head teacher concerned? The day after that article was published, Richard Littlejohn wrote his piece suggesting that perhaps the teacher concerned (and the school, in my opinion) might serve seven year olds better by not asking them to confront full-on the confusing aspects of trangenderisim. At no point in the article did he condemn those who feel the need to reorientate their sexuality – he merely felt that asking seven-year olds to cope with Mr Upton becoming Miss Meadows ‘overnight’ in their eyes was asking too much.
“Why should they be forced to deal with the news that a male teacher they have always known as Mr Upton will henceforth be a woman called Miss Meadows?”
“Nathan Upton is entitled to his gender reassignment surgery, but he isn’t entitled to project his personal problems on to impressionable young children.
By insisting on returning to St Mary Magdalen’s, he is putting his own selfish needs ahead of the well-being of the children he has taught for the past few years.
It would have been easy for him to disappear quietly at Christmas, have the operation and then return to work as ‘Miss Meadows’ at another school on the other side of town in September. No-one would have been any the wiser.
But if he cares so little for the sensibilities of the children he is paid to teach, he’s not only trapped in the wrong body, he’s in the wrong job.”
This was akin to stealing an egg from a broody hen to the trangendered community, who puffed up their feathers and screeched with one voice ‘we’re being monstered, victimised, we’re vulnerable’ and the rest of the lexicon from the approved book of ‘Outraged Community’.
Three months after this article, sadly Lucy Meadows decided to take her own life. It appears it was not the first time she had made this decision, just the first time she had been successful. Last Wednesday the inquest opened with the Coroner saying:
I understand there have been previous attempts to commit suicide. I don’t know if they are relevant or not.
There are shades of Jacintha Saldana here, the nurse whose suicide was popularly believed to have been as a result of ‘hounding’ by pranksters who had asked her to put a call through to another nurse…she also was found to have made previous suicide attempts, but not before her death was used by those left leaning celebrities who would like to see the death of every right wing newspaper…
As it happens, the Daily Mail has been remarkably consistent in its support of transgenderism, possibly as a result of one of Richard Littlejohn’s past Daily Mail colleagues, ‘John Ozimek’, having successfully made the transition to ‘Jane Fae’ resulting in several sympathetic articles appearing in the Daily Mail. I count Jane Fae as a friend of mine, and I am in awe of the manner in which he has managed to hold together his extended family during spectacularly difficult and traumatic times. I know from my many conversations with Jane just what a fraught and frightening journey it is to make. I also know that it is not all that goes on in a person’s life.
Though it might surprise some of the more vocal activists, people undergoing treatment for transsexuality, also have difficulty paying their gas bill, rows with their ex-mother-in-law, partners that develop cancer, investments that suddenly lose money, disappointment in crucial exams, mental health problems, in fact the full panoply of traumas that afflict the rest of us.
There might be an argument that runs along the lines of ‘those who have made two previous suicide attacks should have that fact tattooed on their forehead’ so that everyone would know not to involve them in practical jokes, or dare to refer to them as ‘he’ when they are still legally ‘he’ and even their own school refers to them as ‘he’ – for fear that they will find themselves hounded out of a job by a baying crowd.
For when it comes to ‘hounding’ – what do the 250,000 who wish to hound Littlejohn out of a job know about his mental health? What did the thousands who wished to hound Jan Muir out of a job know about her mental health? Should, God forbid, Litteljohn suddenly be discovered swinging high in the cherry tree, what would be their defence for having ‘hounded’ him – Oh! He called Lucy ‘he’; he deserved to die?
Apparently hounding, true hounding, where thousands of outraged twitter moral activists describe someone as ‘vile and hateful’ and demand that they lose their employment is perfectly acceptable, where correctly reporting the comments of parents at a school who are concerned for the well being of their child is not.
Is it any accident that both Jan Muir and Richard Littlejohn work for the Daily Mail, the most successful on-line right wing newspaper? Is it any accident that the petition is raised by an organisation that declares itself ‘for people not profits’, a left wing campaigning organisation.
Do any of these shrill activists actually care about Jacintha Saldana’s family now she has ceased to be a stick to berate the right wing press. Do any care about Lucy Meadow’s family? Possibly about as much as they care for the well being of the original Duncroft girls now that they have had their fun whacking the BBC over the head with the Savile story.
It is a spectacularly ugly politics that is being played out in the media right now; no credit to the United Kingdom at all.