The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice

by Shon Faye

In December 2011, a year before the Christmas newsletter announcing Meadows’ transition, the Leveson Inquiry – the judicial public inquiry into the British press following the News International phone-hacking scandal – had received written submissions by Trans Media Watch, a charity founded in 2009 to encourage improvement in media coverage of transgender issues. The submissions detailed how the British press systematically misrepresents and maligns trans individuals, or makes them figures of fun. They would be chillingly prophetic in the case of Lucy Meadows. ‘Members of the press would not deny that they can be a force to shape society for good,’ the submissions state, ‘yet, in the case of transgender people, they have largely acted as self-appointed moral police. The defence the press uses in situations such as these is that they are simply reflecting public unease – downplaying its role in creating and shaping that unease to begin with.’