Article here: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2643393/Boy-12-tur...
What is astounding is that a child, who should be protected by the adults of society is instead being singled out and scapegoated by them. Firstly, there is the parents of the 'poor' children who were not 'informed' in advance, like it is a requirement for every parent in a school to be informed in advance every time a child undergoes some medical procedure or name change. Would the same 'consideration' be given to parents because 'Molly just had a tooth removed' or 'Little Dave's mum remarried and he now has a different last name'? Also, there is someone local, who, IMHO has committed the lowest of the low acts and is trying to make money out of gleefully reporting this child's predicament in the national press. How else would they have gotten all the information they have. Lastly, the school have not done right by this child either, by making a big issue out of it in assembly in front of the entire student body, so that everyone there is made patently aware that this child is different, which only intensifies the feeling of being different for the child and sets her up for bullying. I hope they are feeling proud of themselves...
'Never underestimate the stupidity of people in large groups...' [www.despair.com]
Comments
Mishandled all way round
This has been poorly handled by pretty much everybody connected with it, so it's hard to single out the biggest villain. I was appalled at the picture they shot using a "model"; I at least took some satisfaction from the sidebar by Diedre Sanders referring readers to the Mermaids website.
It is a shame that situations such as this have to be handled with stealth and deceit, but they are correct that children can be insensitive and cruel. So can adults.
My heart goes out to this young girl. I hope she can get past this and become the woman she knows she is meant to be.
Karen J.
"Being a girl is wonderful and to torture someone into that would be like the exact opposite of what it's like. I don’t know how anyone could act that way." College Girl - poetheather
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” - Turkish Proverb
Talkback to the Sun
Here is a copy of the email I just sent to the Sun at [email protected]
After reading the story on the young transgendered girl, I am appalled at how this has been handled on every level. I am especially appalled that this was considered newsworthy by your paper. This poor 12 year old girl deserves to be treated with more respect than has been displayed by anybody connected with this. I won't run down a list of mistakes made, each one seems to breed two more and they quickly grow beyond count.
I won't say the authorities in the U.S. would have handled things much better, but I have been repeatedly told by my friends in the U.K. that people in the U.K. are more civilized and accepting. Apparently not.
A Texas gal,
Karen J. Taylor,
Fort Worth, Texas
United States of America
"Being a girl is wonderful and to torture someone into that would be like the exact opposite of what it's like. I don’t know how anyone could act that way." College Girl - poetheather
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” - Turkish Proverb
>> more civilized and accepting. Apparently not.
Oddly enough, one fails to notice the presence of a pious mob carrying placards with biblical quotations and references to burning in hell, so this judgment may be premature.
Cheers,
Puddin'
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Pious Mob?
This is the Sun... They'll be wearing football shirts and carrying six-packs of lager.
Penny
Premature judgement
Not being a recognized world's expert on everything such as you, I fail to understand the relevance of your reply to the topic at hand. Unless you mean that the British response is somehow better because it is less reprehensible than the response it would get in the U.S. I'm sure that is of great comfort to the girl reported on.
Much like the official who says after a police shooting, "Well, heck, we only shot the black suspect three times. Next town over, they shot that guy twelve times." Cold comfort indeed, we can scale and rate the level of indignity visited on the victim.
Karen J.
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” - Turkish Proverb
>> recognized world's expert on everything
Not by half, as I'm a recognised expert only in my particular field, but the difference between the public behaviour, and the way the story was reported in the Sun, is strikingly different to many similar cases in the USA, in which the responses are very different.
Here, for example, is the response of a right-wing Texas blog to a roughly parallel situation:
Transgender child disrupts school
Notice that the child is blamed by the "paper" for "disrupting" the school. By way of comparison, the Sun seems positively compassionate and thoughtful.
Here's another from Southern California:
School's Homophobic Atmosphere Fostered Hate Protest
Here's a fairly typical example of a like "coming out" by a transgender child in New York City:
Transgender Murder Trial Opens In New York
Here's an article about US-based hate groups who planned to encourage their children to skip school and create signs with hateful slogans instead of listening to the US President Obama's message to schoolchildren, in which he was likely (according to the nutcases) to reveal his secret homosexual agenda, and for which no official action can or will be taken in the USA:
SistersTalk Blog
Here's a similar story from the Times:
Parents face prosecution
All in all, with the possible exception of certain members of the BNP and violent football firms, the citizens of the UK seem both more temperate and civilised than the general run of the mill in the USA.
Not perfect, by any means, and there are many fine people in the US who far surpass the bad example of the worst, but in general I would say that if one has to be any sort of odd, the UK is the better place to be.
Whilst the world is not now and has never been a bed of roses, I think that looking for the good is more productive than decrying every lapse from angelic perfection, which finally appears, after all, only when thoroughly dead.
As has been noted by others in this thread, the row is mostly about the lack of planning for an orderly integration of the child involved, not whether or not either the school or the parents were inspired by Satan, which is surely an improvement over generations past and many other parts of the world.
When I was young, "queers" were still being given electroshock "therapy" to "cure" them, or injected with insulin to induce convulsions and life-threatening pain, with similar expectations of therapeutic conversion to "normality" through torture. One supposes they too were "lucky," as not too many years previous, lobotomies were all the rage, and within recorded history the rack and burning at the stake.
We must count our blessings as well as our grievances.
Human beings are "hard-wired" to care for and protect other human beings, and must be manipulated by fear and fairly sophisticated mental coercion into behaving differently.
In the Fifties, Harry Harlow, at the University of Wisconsin, conducted his famous Monkey Experiments in which he indentified a probable precursor for inhumane maladjustment in humans, a harsh and unloving environment, which turns out to produce fearful, hateful monkeys as well as people.
The opposite, a secure and loving environment turns out to be absolutely necessary for human beings and monkeys to thrive and achieve their full potential as caring adults, yet various societies* have, over the ages, instituted child-rearing practises that deliberately create harsh conditions for inants and babies, not least of which are "parental rights" partisans who insist that children be kept in perpetual, but serially-disruptive, foster care until the parent or parents children deserve come back from whatever journey they took off on, and deliberately harsh treatment of boys, even those of tender years, to "toughen them" for the "real world."
The problem is that loving parents are quite easy to find, since it's instinctual, and the "real world" is one of love and compassion. Wherever one finds the opposite, one finds a sick individual, and sometimes a sick group within a larger society.
Cheers,
Puddin'
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* The Spartans, for example, who quite deliberately brutalised male children until they were either dead or strong and ruthless.
All You Need Is Love
--- John Lennon, 1967
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
I was Appalled
As I read the piece, I was appalled that The Sun persistently referred to the poor girl as “HE†throughout. The least they could have done was to give her the courtesy of giving her the correct personal pronoun. At least David Hawley referred to her as she and her; but then he's a TG counsellor, so he would, wouldn't he?
In the many years that I worked on newspapers—both national and local—I always tried to steer my colleagues away from this sort of “Wow-fancy-that!!!†sensationalism. Sadly, ever since the time of Roberta Cowell’s emergence in the fifties (when I was still at school) tabloids such as The Sun and the Daily Mirror (which headlined Roberta Cowell's story) see stories about the transgendered as circulation boosters among the sneering, the sensationalists and the ghoulish.
Why must they have such a fixation on our transgendered community?
Gabi.
Gabi.
Descriptions
Even the "best" journalists, magazines, radio and tv reporters have become very remiss in actually investigating all aspects of a story; they've become lazy and uncaring in so many ways. As far as this story goes, perhaps we should refer to the modifying words as IMPERSONAL pronouns, because any one can ask a question and write an answer; it takes a really diligent person to understand that it's the person who's being asked the question that's the story, not the reporter or the question. They're fixated because it makes them feel important and superior I suppose. As long as they treat people as "stories" instead of writing stories about people, this will continue to happen. It's not a tg thing, it's a human thing. And on top of all that, they actually get paid to be incompetent and uncaring. As Sephy might say, Sheesh!
Love, Andrea Lena
Let's face it...
...the more we discuss this, the more people are likely to read the Sun just to see what the fuss is about, hence bolstering their circulation. The best thing to do with the gutter press is keep it in the gutter and ignore it. Incidentally, the sister newspaper of The Sun is The Times.
You may not think much of your own national press - I think mine (the UK) is the worst of all.
If it's any comfort, UK newspaper circulation has been gradually dropping - but never fast enough
>> UK newspaper circulation has been gradually dropping...
This seems cold comfort, as it reflects a general move away from literacy, leaving the field of adult public education to Benny Hill lookalikes and wannabes.
Cheers,
Puddin'
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Even the Sun...
and the parents involved say:
>> They added that the school's failure to do so had left the boy to suffer cruel taunts and bullying.
The gist of the story, aside from pronoun confusion, seems to be that the school acted in a precipitous manner, their hand forced by the parents, who had evidently failed to inform the school prior to presenting a fait accompli, so the "villains" of the piece seem to be the children, who had bullied the child involved before, and whose bullying was exacerbated by the school assembly, and the parents, who seem naïve to a fault.
What seems to be the main complaint is that, with more warning, at least some parents could have magically transformed the ignorant louts they'd raised thus far into kind and sensitive human beings. Good luck with that.
Cheers,
Puddin'
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
I hope I am just reading something into it that is untrue
Did anyone notice down at the bottom of the story ...
"Psychotherapist James Caspian said the child would not be allowed hormone treatment in the UK until passing puberty."
I hope that does not include blockers, to keep her from developing male facial characteristics and voice while "passing puberty."
It’s not given to anyone to have no regrets; only to decide, through the choices we make, which regrets we’ll have,
David Weber – In Fury Born
Holly
It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice.
Holly
I am afraid you read correctly
But aside from the poor child, it is the actions of the adults whom are supposed to be role models to our children that are most at fault here, if all the parents, teachers and journalists spent their time focusing on what we have in common rather than that which sets us apart, there would not have been this mess in the first place. Children go only where led and no-one is born prejudiced.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________
That which does not kill me only serves to delay the inevitable. My blog => http://jaym.angelblogs.co.uk/
That which does not kill me only serves to delay the inevitable. My blog => http://jaynemorose.wordpress.com/ <= note new address
Perhaps due to the NH
In the USA, where things are arguably more uptight than the UK, at least in general, although there are areas of extreme liberality, one has only to find a willing doctor, if one can afford to pay privately.
Is it possible to visit the other bits of Europe and find willing doctors, or is this an absolute prohibition?
I know it's possible in the Netherlands:
http://www.bilerico.com/2008/12/new_international_guidelines...
Cheers,
Puddin'
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
There But for the Grace of God…
This article only goes to reinforce our decision to live in deep stealth. Trish transitioned before we went to live in The Netherlands five years ago when she was nine. When we returned to UK we made our home in an area where we were unknown, and where Trish could be herself without the fear of exposure by erstwhile “friendsâ€. Now she attends an all-girl convent school where the school authorities know of her status, but allow her to use the same loos, etc. as the other girls, reasoning that giving her separate facilities would only make her stand out as being “differentâ€.
T feels really upset about this article and after reading it remarked, “There but for the Grace of God…â€
Hilary
Rights and responsibilities
I saw this headline just before I caught a bus to the Citizens Advice Bureau where I volunteer. Everyone working there was appaled by the story and the apparent lack of concern by all the parties involved.
However, The Sun is a sensationalist rag that often avoids the better aspects of a story and concentrates on the alarmist views. Therefore nothing surprised me, unfortunately.
But, the child is a child regardless of the story and any 'public interest' defence. The Sun did not have a right to print this story and did have a responsibility to protect the child having been given the 'story'. It will take little investigation for anyone with access to the internet to identify the child.
I just hope that the next actions by anyone involved are for her benefit and not theirs.
Topsy
Mostly Harmless
A different view...
To my minds eye, this is simply another example of child abuse and that is the only real issue. May all those involved burn starting with the parents and ending with the editors of The Sun.
Having been outted...
by the Sun's sister paper, The News of World, I tend to avoid both like the plague. I did however, buy a copy today to see what all the banner headlines on the front page were about. I'm horrified by the way it's been handled all round from the parents seemingly getting it wrong with the school, the school's subsequent attempts to 'legislate' or impose equality, the community who failed to accept or tolerate the child, and the media for blowing it out of all proportion.
I'm minded to compare it with a short piece on AIS children on the Today programme on Radio 4 this am. That I thought was dealt with much more sympathetically.
Angharad
Angharad
BBC Radio 4 Today Programme
The AIS piece Angharad refers to was at 0722hrs BST this morning. Here is a link for it:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/listen_again/default.stm
Scroll down until you see O722 and click on it to play.
Gabi.
Gabi.
Or get it directly here
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8262000/8262262.stm
That which does not kill me only serves to delay the inevitable. My blog => http://jaynemorose.wordpress.com/ <= note new address
Mirror did better job
Just found this link over on the FM Hyperboard. The Mirror seems to have done a much better job, certainly a more sensitive piece. Surprises me a bit, as I remember the Mirror from when I lived over there as being rather racy. But I was very young then and green as grass. :-)
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/latest/2009/09/18/sex-change-bo...
Karen J.
"Being a girl is wonderful and to torture someone into that would be like the exact opposite of what it's like. I don’t know how anyone could act that way." College Girl - poetheather
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” - Turkish Proverb
The 'Scum'
I hope the young girl mentioned and her family survive the media interference in their lives.
For anyone without the first hand experience of coming across this 'fine' newspaper before, the 'Scum' is a racist, sexist, homophobic, reactionary comic which only exists to promote the similar views of its owner Murdoch.
As you may guess I'm not its greatest fan, lol.
Alys
Rupert Moloch?
Well, that certainly explains a few things. That article was some f*cked-up sh*t!
~~~hugs, Laika
Well shit, I guess it really CAN happen here..,
.