Daily Mail. Photograph by Gideon
A primary school teacher has been found dead after returning to school in 2013 after a sex change operation to become a woman and being pilloried in the tabloid press including Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail.
Miss Meadows was a teacher at St Mary Magdalen’s School, in Accrington, Lancashire where both staff, pupils, and most parents were supportive of her decision to transition from male to female. A handful of parents were concerned about how their children would deal with the situation after they were informed of the teacher’s change in the school’s Christmas newsletter, which resulted in the story being picked up by the local press and tabloids such as the Daily Mail.
In the Daily Mail, columnist Richard Littlejohn in a piece titled “He’s not only in the wrong body… he’s in the wrong job” which has since been removed from the Daily Mail website. In the piece Littlejohn originally stated that he had sympathy for those who opt for gender reassignment surgery, before criticising Miss Meadows for not leaving the school for the transition claiming the transition will negatively impact the pupils saying:
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…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…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 kind of personal abuse in the tabloids is the reason that the press is currently faced with a Royal Charter. Intrusion from certain sectors of the press that crusade against individuals from their ivory towers is not new, but the ending of this tale is tragic. And now these very same school children that Littlejohn thought couldn’t comprehend the idea of gender reassignment, now have to deal with the death of a popular teacher.
Whilst the Daily Mail may have since removed the piece from their website, the Internet Archive has saved a copy, and we have embedded a screenshot below.
Richard Littlejohn’s column in the Daily Mail entitled “He’s not only in the wrong body… he’s in the wrong job”
