Response and responsibility: Mainstream media and Lucy Meadows in a post-Leveson context

Introduction

In March 2013, a woman named Lucy Meadows was found dead at her home. Meadows, a teacher, was transitioning from male to female. In December 2012, the school announced her decision to return to work after the Christmas break as Miss Meadows. This was reported in the local press and quickly picked up by the national press. Three months later, Meadows was found dead. Her death came at a time when the press was under intense scrutiny due to the Leveson Inquiry, and prompted discussions of responsible media reporting, press freedom and the contributions of transgender people to society. I focus on Lucy Meadows, and her pronouns in particular, for three reasons. As outlined above and in the following section, her life and death was reported at a sociopolitically significant time. Secondly, I offer a case study of British reporting rather than US reporting (cf. Capuzza, 2015; Schilt and Westbrook, 2009). Thirdly, by focusing on pronouns, I offer a detailed, systematic examination of easily identified and socially significant lexical items. Pronouns are words that can replace proper nouns; for example, she, him, they and it. In English, third person singular pronouns are usually gendered as she, her, he, his and him. There is also an increasing use of non-gendered singular pronouns such as zie, hir or singular they. Pronouns are especially significant for trans people: many trans people change their pronouns during their transition in order to better reflect their identity. Pronouns also reflect other people’s perceptions of our gender, something particularly salient in this study. Wayne (2005: 87) locates pronouns as a particular site for erasure, non-signification and violence, observing that ‘[i]f transgendered people cannot speak they are nonetheless spoken to and about, and here pronouns not only fail to signify but can lead to violence against the subject who is estranged within the binary sex/gender system’.

Within a journalistic context, pronouns are one of several strategies that are used to question, undermine or validate a transgender person’s gender identity – and, indeed, impose limits on what gender identities it is possible to express (Barker-Plummer, 2013; Squires and Brouwer, 2002). Barker-Plummer (2013: 717) argues that pronouns in news media serve to establish a ‘dynamic of (unintentional?) gender containment by journalists and sources’ in which pronouns reflect political, as well as linguistic, choices about which genders are recognised, validated and made visible in culture. Billard (2014) also addresses issues of validation in discourse in mainstream US media; in the article, pronouns are one of 15 key ‘legitimacy indicators’ examined. Billard (2016: 4198) identifies use of a transgender person’s preferred pronouns as a legitimising strategy and use of those reflecting the gender they were assigned at birth a delegitimising strategy.

An examination of pronouns, therefore, not only reveals how Meadows was perceived before and after her death but offers an insight into the violence, erasure and invalidation enabled by such perception.

The Leveson Inquiry

Prompted by the revelation that phones belonging to family members of people dead as a result of murder, terrorism and war had been hacked by journalists, the Leveson Inquiry, chaired by Lord Justice Leveson, was set up to investigate ‘the culture, practices, and ethics of the press’ (Leveson, 2012: 5). Part 1 of the Leveson Inquiry was opened on 14 November 2011; Lord Justice Leveson published the report resulting from the first part of the Inquiry on 29 November 2012. Trans Media Watch submitted evidence as a specialist organisation monitoring newspaper reporting of transgender people and offering advice to journalists. Three pieces of evidence were submitted: ‘The British Press and the Transgender Community’ in December 2011, an additional submission in February 2012 (Trans Media Watch, 2012) and oral evidence by Helen Belcher of Trans Media Watch on 8 February 2012. The Leveson Inquiry report (Leveson, 2012: 448) highlighted their evidence, noting that:

transgender people are subject to disproportionate and damaging press attention simply by dint of being members of that group, rather than in consequence of anything they might have said or done, and because of what they describe as an obsession in parts of the British press with ‘outing’ members of the transgender community.

Negative media representation’s effect on mental health

It is important to note that negative media representations have a devastating effect on an already vulnerable population. The Trans Mental Health Study (McNeil et al., 2012) is a detailed insight into the mental health of British transgender, non-binary and agender respondents. It found that ideas concerning the abnormality of trans people were pervasive, with 92% of respondents having heard such views (McNeil et al., 2012: 41). Trans Media Watch’s (2011: 8) Leveson submissions highlighted the emotional effect of negative media representation on respondents:

67% of respondents said that seeing negative items in the media about transgender people made them feel ‘angry’.

Using corpus linguistics to examine social discourses

In this article I use corpus linguistics, an approach that, very broadly, utilises computer programs to search for patterns in large collections of machine-readable text. These patterns may focus on the lexis used, or on grammatical functions or semantic associations of the words. Hunston (2002: 109) explains that ‘[p]atterns of association – how lexical items tend to co-occur – are built up over large amounts of text and are often unavailable to intuition or conscious awareness’, and as a result, ‘can therefore convey messages implicitly and even be at odds with an overt statement’. In contrast to traditional ways of reading a text horizontally, as a whole, coherent and unique piece, and for its content (Tognini-Bonelli, 2004: 18), corpus linguists read texts as mediated through computer programs such as WordSmith (Scott, 2012) or AntConc (Anthony, 2014) to identify these recurring patterns.

Corpus linguistics is often combined with other approaches to analysis. A particularly useful approach has been to combine corpus linguistic and (critical) discourse analysis: an online bibliography lists some 600 items (Gabrielatos, 2016). As Mautner (2009: 32) argues, these two methodologies for analysing texts have ‘a shared interest in how language “works” in social rather than merely structural terms’. This focus on naturally occurring language and reading for language as a social, discursive phenomenon is at the heart of both approaches.

One way in which these two approaches can be used together is by acknowledging ways in which their strengths can be used to complement each other. Corpus linguistics, in its focus on large collections of texts, avoids some of the issues of researcher bias and cherry-picking data associated with discourse analysis. Because so many texts make up a corpus, it is necessary to form interpretations which account for frequent patterns in the data. Corpora are also invaluable for searching for very subtle patterns in language use. For example, Baker (2006) offers the example of a sailor who uses a wheelchair praised in a newspaper article for their courage; it is only when looking at a large collection of texts that the assumption that wheelchair users are not expected to be physically active and independent becomes clear. Baker (2006) argues that the use of corpora enables the researcher to examine the incremental effect of discourse and explore resistant and changing discourses – both areas that critical discourse analysis has investigated extensively.

In turn, critical discourse analysis (for example, Fairclough, 1992, 2000, 2001; Reisigl and Wodak, 2009) often supplies the concepts and intellectual framework used in this ‘methodological synergy’ (Baker, et al., 2008). A considerable body of work utilising critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics demonstrates that combining these approaches can reveal different features and thus the two can complement each other in linguistic analysis. Approaches combining corpus linguistics and (critical) discourse analysis ¹ have been used to explore the discursive construction of concepts of groups of people. Recent work focusing on the media representation of (often minority) groups includes work on refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and migrants (Baker et al., 2008; Gabrielatos and Baker, 2008), feminism (Jaworska and Krishnamurthy, 2012), Muslims (Baker et al., 2013a, 2013b), migrants (Taylor, 2014) and the suffrage movement (Gupta, 2015). While corpus linguistics have been used to explore gender (cf. Baker, 2005, 2008, 2014), these have tended to focus on the construction of cisgender gay identities, ² with little attention given to transgender identities.

Using corpus linguistics, I am able to explore the cumulative effect of misgendering. As I will demonstrate later, there are consistent patterns in which pronouns are used to describe Meadows at different points in the news narrative. However, it is only when looking at a lot of news texts reporting Meadows’ transition, death and its aftermath that striking changes can be revealed.

Lucy Meadows

Lucy Meadows was a primary school teacher working in Accrington, Lancashire. In winter 2012 she stopped working in a male role; in December 2012, the school newspaper announced her decision to return to work after the Christmas break as Miss Meadows. Three months later, on 19 March 2013, she was found dead at her home. The coroner leading the inquest into her death recorded a verdict of suicide, but condemned the media response as intrusive, sensational and a factor in the distress she had experienced in the months leading to her death. The coroner was rebuked for his comments in August 2013.

Lucy Meadows’ death and the inquest into it came at a time when the press was under intense scrutiny in the Leveson Inquiry. Meadows’ transition had been reported in the local press in December 2012 and picked up by the national press. The initial reporting was swiftly followed by commentary, most significantly by Richard Littlejohn, about the suitability of transgender people for teaching in schools. Littlejohn’s comments, published in the Daily Mail and titled, ‘He’s not only in the wrong body … he’s in the wrong job’, argued that pupils would be ‘forced to deal with’ Meadows’ transition, which would have a ‘devastating effect’ on them. Littlejohn concluded that rather than transition at work, Meadows should have resigned from her job, ‘disappear[ed]’ and reappeared as Meadows in a different school. He concluded that Meadows’ failure to do so indicated a lack of concern for ‘the sensibilities of the children he is paid to teach’. Littlejohn’s comments attracted vigorous rebuttal online but, at the time, attracted little press attention.

Meadows’ death three months later was also reported in the local and national press. Many news sources discussed the announcement of her transition in December 2012 and revisited older articles written about her. Littlejohn’s comments were also revisited, this time in the context that they were not only transphobic, but were implicated in Meadows’ suicide. After her death was reported, an online petition for the withdrawal of Littlejohn’s article and a protest outside the Daily Mail offices were organised; both the Independent and the Guardian reported on this response.

As discussed above, considerable numbers of transgender people have reported anger, unhappiness, exclusion and fear as a result of poor media reporting on transgender issues. This link was made by Michael Singleton, the coroner in the inquest into Meadows’ suicide. The Times quoted him extensively, describing his comments as ‘a tirade against journalists’:

‘It seems to me that nothing has been learnt from the Leveson inquiry,’ he said […]

He added: ‘I’ll be writing to the Government to consider now implementing in full the recommendations of the Leveson report in order to seek to ensure that other people in the same position as Lucy Meadows are not faced with the same ill-informed bigotry as seems to be displayed in the case of Lucy.’

As this brief description of events shows, Meadows’ transition and death, and the aftermath of her death, were widely reported in the UK press. By focusing on an individual trans person rather than commenting more widely on transgender issues, the press has the ability to discuss Meadows’ experiences – and Meadows herself – in individual, personal terms. As I will show, this makes pronouns an illuminating part of speech to examine in greater detail.

Data

I use two corpora: a small, focused corpus (166 texts, 108,643 words) of news texts reporting on Lucy Meadows between October 2012 and October 2013, and a reference corpus (7000 texts, 3,954,808 words) of general news texts. The focused corpus was collected from the UK newspaper section of Nexis, an online database of news stories, using the search term ‘Lucy Meadows’. It includes broadsheet, tabloid, local and online news reporting, published both in print and on UK newspapers’ websites. The reference corpus is composed of news texts sampled within the same time frame, also from Nexis, also from the UK newspaper section and also including broadsheet, tabloid and local print and online newspaper reporting.

Table 1 is a visual representation of the timeline of events from December 2012 to October 2013 and indicates the months in which Meadows is discussed in the corpus. As the figure shows, events were reported simultaneously: for example, articles discussing the media response, remembrance events, the inquest into her death and news stories about other trans women were published in May.

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Table 1.

Timeline of events, December 2012 to October 2013.

	Dec	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sept	Oct
Meadows’ transition
Meadows’ death
Media response
Remembrance
Other trans women
Inquest
Coroner’s rebuke

However, Lucy Meadows’ death was mentioned in other contexts and was used to launch other news stories. This included criticism of some newspapers and columnists by other newspapers and columnists, defences of previous reporting and metacommentary discussing the roles and responsibility of the press in covering sensitive stories. Finally, Lucy Meadows is discussed when reporting on other transgender women, primarily Chelsea Manning.

Keywords

In corpus linguistics, keywords are words that occur more frequently than expected in a target corpus than in a reference corpus. They are generated by calculating the actual occurrences of words in a target corpus, calculating the actual occurrences of the same words in a reference corpus, then calculating the expected frequency of those words in the target corpus based on the reference corpus. Keywords can be both positive (more frequent in the target corpus than expected) and negative (less frequent in the target corpus than expected).

A list of the words in a corpus ranked by frequency will usually contain function words in the top 50 words; typically, the, and, a and to are in the top five. Keywords, however, indicate what is different about a target corpus from the reference corpus and instantly offer an insight into the ‘aboutness’ of the target corpus. Reference corpora therefore have to be carefully chosen to highlight meaningful differences. For this reason, the reference corpus was built using the same criteria as the Lucy Meadows corpus, but without the focus on Meadows. In this particular piece of research, the target corpus is the small Lucy Meadows corpus (166 texts, 108,643 words) and the reference corpus is the corpus of general news texts (7000 texts, 3,954,808 words). A corpus tool, WordSmith 6 (Scott 2012), was used to calculate keywords.

The most frequent key words tend to be concrete words and tend to be nouns. They are often proper names: Meadows, Lucy, Upton, Accrington, Littlejohn. ³ Some describe job titles, such as teacher, teachers and coroner. Others describe Meadows’ place of work: school, primary and Magdalen’s. Some describe gender, such as transgender, gender and trans. Some describe the manner and aftermath of her death: suicide, press and inquest. There are a small number of words associated with the online platforms on which her transition, death and aftermath were reported, such as http, twitter and com. Finally, there are two pronouns, her and she. It is these pronouns that I will examine in greater detail.

Lucy Meadows’ pronouns before and after her death

In the Lucy Meadows corpus, there are 2515 third person singular gendered pronouns, of which 1512 are used to describe Lucy herself. Significantly, gendered pronoun use shows a very clear trend, as indicated in Table 2. These are presented as raw figures in order to better represent the volume of coverage of Meadows before and after her death.

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Table 2.

Frequency of gendered pronouns before and after Meadows’ death.

Pronoun	Total frequency	Frequency used before death	Frequency used after death
Her	670	6	664
She	471	20	451
He	162	121	39
His	156	90	63
Him	53	50	3
Total	1512	287	1220

While the feminine pronouns she and her are most frequent overall, they were rarely used to describe Meadows before her death. Instead, there is a striking tendency for the masculine pronouns he, him and his to be used to describe Meadows while she was alive. These masculine pronouns continue to be used after her death, albeit less frequently; I will explore the reasons for this in the next section.

Of the 670 occurrences of her used to describe Meadows in the corpus, only six occurrences (0.9 per cent) were used to describe her before her death. In contrast, 664 (99.1 per cent) of the occurrences of her when used to describe Meadows were used after her death.

Similarly, of the 471 occurrences of she used to describe Meadows in the corpus, only 20 (4.2 per cent) were used to describe her before her death. However, 451 (95.8 per cent) occurrences were used to describe Meadows after her death.

What this quantitative evidence shows is that while she was alive, Meadows was overwhelmingly described, through pronoun use, as male. Before her death, the corpus evidence shows that the pronouns used to describe her reflected her female identity a mere 26 times; instead, pronoun use represents her as male a total of 261 times. It is only after her death that Meadows is typically described, through pronouns, as female. These shifts in pronoun choice demonstrate a striking change in the way Lucy Meadows was represented in the press.

Accounting for masculine pronoun use

In this section, I will account for newspapers’ use of masculine pronouns to describe Meadows. As shown, the frequency of she and her differ dramatically in frequency before and after Meadows’ death. However, the masculine pronouns he, him and his tend not to exhibit the dramatic reversal in frequency seen in she and her and continue to be used to describe Meadows after her death. There are a variety of strategies employed when using masculine pronouns; particularly significant is the use of direct and indirect quotations and journalists’ repetition of quotations. I address indirect quotations, direct quotations and repetition in the following three sub-sections.

Selective quoting

A second significant choice in newspaper reporting is deciding who to quote, and, in doing so, deciding whose point of view to reproduce to a wider audience. As Table 3 indicates, quotes accounted for a significant percentage of uses – a minimum of 42.6 per cent in the case of he and a maximum of 70 per cent in the case of him.

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Table 3.

Frequency of masculine pronouns in direct and indirect quotes.

Pronoun	Direct quotes	Indirect quotes	Percentage accounted for by quotes
He	60	9	42.6%
His	71	20	58.3%
Him	27	10	70%

The people quoted include parents of Meadows’ pupils, Meadow’s former wife’s parents and Meadows’ pupils themselves. It is important to note here that use of masculine pronouns does not necessarily indicate an insult: for example, some uses are from Meadows’ former father-in-law. Meadows’ father-in-law, Mr Smith, is quoted extensively in the Daily Mail on 19 December 2012; this is one of the first articles to be published reporting Meadows’ transition. In it, he says:

‘He is a lovely person as well and we will support him no matter what […] If he was a rubbish teacher then they would not have stood by him. All the time he has been teaching as a he or she, everybody has said what a good teacher he is. When we first heard it was a shock yes but we are going to stand by him.’

This quote clearly affirms Smith’s high regard for Meadows, and in its use of ‘he or she’ acknowledges that Meadows has been presenting as a gender other than male. However, this quote also reveals one of the issues in using quotes from people who know the person transitioning: that they sometimes have not adjusted to using pronouns which accurately reflect the transitioning person’s gender identity. Similarly, a child is quoted in several newspapers: ‘One ten-year-old pupil said: “He spoke to us and said he’s going to be changing into a woman and wearing women’s clothes after Christmas. We were all a bit shocked.”’.

Again, this quote is more likely to indicate the child’s current understanding of their teacher’s gender rather than any hostility on their part. A grandmother voices approval for Meadows’ transition, describing Meadows as ‘brave’, but uses masculine pronouns: ‘A grandmother, collecting her seven-year-old granddaughter from the school, said: “It has been handled very sensitively by the school and I think it’s a very brave thing for him to do.”’.

A mother of a child attending the school also uses masculine pronouns to describe Meadows, but does so in a context of normalising Meadows’ transition as something that has been done before and describing her children as ‘happy’, possibly responding to claims that Meadows’ transition would upset and confuse children: ‘One mother was quoted by the Mail as saying: “My children are happy. I don’t see anything wrong with it. He’s not the first and he won’t be the last.”’.

The four quotes discussed in this section so far appear to reflect a naïve usage of masculine pronouns: it is unlikely that Mr Smith, the school pupil, the parent or the grandparent would expect their words to be used in order to attack or undermine Meadows. However, there are also usages in the corpus which reflect a more hostile response to Meadows’ transition. The four quotes below from Wayne Cowie appeared more than once in the corpus:

Wayne Cowie, whose ten-year-old son has been taught by Mr Upton for three years, said his children were worried and confused. ‘My middle boy thinks that he might wake up with a girl’s brain because he was told that Mr Upton, as he got older, got a girl’s brains,’

Dad-of-three Wayne Cowie said: ‘I didn’t think I’d need the birds and the bees talk with my sons until they were at high school, and now they are coming home asking about transsexuals. ‘My lad is very confused and upset about it. He should have taken a couple of years off to sort himself out.’

Wayne Cowie, 35, a father of three who has a child at the school, said: ‘I have not forced my way of life on to him so why is he forcing his on to my kids? He went for the job as a man. The kids are all going to be laughing and giggling at him. He is still Mr Upton but in a dress. He should start a new life in a new place and at a new school.’

Talking about Mr Upton, Mr Cowie said: ‘I have not forced my way of life on to him so why is he forcing his on to my kids? We all knew what he was. My partner saw him dressed as a woman. This has been forced upon us. I can’t fault the school but I’d like to see how it’s doing in a year.’

In these quotes, Cowie rejects Meadows’ identity: he explicitly identifies her in terms of her past male identity but ‘in a dress’, as an object of mockery in her workplace, and, significantly, he consistently uses masculine pronouns. While Cowie’s is one of the most quoted parental responses and therefore has more presence in the corpus, other parents also undermine Meadows’ gender identity as something that could be confined to her private life and from which children needed to be shielded:

A mum said: ‘It’s his life, but he can dress as a woman in his own time. It’s just going to confuse the children.’ And another said he should have changed schools. She said: ‘I think he should have left St Mary’s and joined another school with his new name for a fresh start.’

While there are examples of naïve use of masculine pronouns to describe Meadows, these uses of masculine pronouns combine with transmisogynist tropes invoking the figure of trans women as ‘men in dresses’ to undermine Meadows’ professionalism, the seriousness of her need to transition and her female gender identity.

As I have discussed in this section, a significant number of occurrences of masculine pronouns can be accounted for by quotes, thus enabling journalists to use masculine pronouns and position Meadows as male in the guise of reporting opinions. By examining these quotes in more detail it becomes apparent that some speakers are supportive of Meadows; however, the cumulative effect of such quotes is that Meadows is only recognised as female in pronoun use after her death. It is very much worth considering who gets quoted and why.

Conclusion

By examining the language used to describe transgender identities by the mainstream UK press, I am able to investigate issues of minority representation, press tactics of negative representation and the interactions between press, public, reporters and reported. I demonstrate that the use of the wrong pronouns, while a key part of negative media portrayal used to dismiss trans peoples’ gender identities, is more complex than the hostile use of quotation marks identified by Trans Media Watch.

Through repetition of selected direct quotes, the press is able to reinforce some voices and not others. In doing so, reporters are able to evade direct responsibility for misgendering while continuing to produce the effect of undermining a trans person’s gender identity. This was particularly noticeable in journalistic quotation of Wayne Cowie, a parent of a child attending Meadows’ school. Cowie strongly rejected Meadows’ transition and female gender identity, describing her as ‘Mr Upton but in a dress’ and stating that ‘He [Meadows] should start a new life in a new place and at a new school’. By quoting from Cowie so extensively, newspapers are able to voice transphobic attitudes without being directly responsible for their expression. Several of the people quoted – included those close to Meadows – use masculine pronouns. While they often express support and praise Meadows’ teaching ability and bravery, their use of masculine pronouns contributes to the startling lack of realisation of Meadows’ female identity through pronoun use seen before her death.

It is crucial to recognise that the reporting of Meadows’ transition, death and its aftermath took place shortly after the Leveson Inquiry; by December 2012, Lord Leveson had already published the first part of the report. Trans Media Watch had submitted both written and oral evidence to the Inquiry identifying press strategies for misgendering trans people. As discussed, use of pronouns in quote marks was a tactic singled out by Trans Media Watch as particularly widespread and used to undermine trans people’s stated genders. This tactic was not found in texts discussing Lucy Meadows; instead, the writing about her could be just as hostile but expressed through different, non-journalist voices and with an elision of journalistic responsibility. From this study it is clear that there are emerging strategies for the production and reproduction of transphobia in news texts. As transgender experiences and voices become more widely discussed, the expression (and mechanics for expression) of transphobia also has new possibilities of which we must be aware.