This story or actually stories is so full of different information I’ve hesitated to comment on it.
More questions than answers.
Was it an accident? Was it deliberate? Did the person being accused of pushing her know her or were they strangers? Was it in anger or were they just drunk or high and fooling around?
I’m going to let those questions wait for investigators to sort out.
What bothers me is how the UK press seems to use some of the grossest most abusive and transphobic language I’ve seen. Not only in this story but in every story that involves a transsexual or transgender person.
I’ve listened to so much America bashing from Brits about the short coming of the treatment of TS/TG folks in the US that I kind expect better.
Who set the language standards, the style guides for the press in the UK? Benny Hill, a scandal tabloid or Monty Python?
I’m far less up tight than many who write of the oppression of people whose lives have been impacted by trans prefixed words. I don’t think transvestite is a bad word and don’t associate it with some sort of pathology. I use trannie as a term that came from the streets where it was our word.
In the US we have GLAAD. They help us mediate respectful language. We don’t always achieve it but by calling them on it we can gradually improve the language used.
In cases of someone with an uncertain status transwoman or transman and using the pronoun of presentation unless told different is a reasonable standard to shoot for.
As far as I am concerned gender variant is as bad as “she-male” in that both create an impression of perversion as well as making it sound as though the victim deserved it.
If some one says they are transvestite, cross-dresser, drag-queen, transgender, transsexual, post-op transsexual transwoman, transman, woman of transsexual history… The words one chooses to describe their relationship to a trans prefixed word are the words people writing about them should use.
We are fighting abusive language that frames our lives and separates us from the rest of humanity.
At the same time there is an element of being members of a minority culture and so dividing up and using abusive language to members of different groups that are different from us but that the majority culture lumps together with us is sort of counter productive while pressing for respectful language is beneficial to all.
10/30/2010 at 5:56 am
Our Tabloid press are the leaders and agitators of the hatred, perhaps the worst being the Daily Mail which takes the respectful police reports and adds all the innuendo.
We have a press complaints committee to oversee these outrages and yes you have guessed it it is chaired by the editor of the Daily Mail!
10/30/2010 at 8:16 pm
Might I suggest that journalists might benefit from reading my chapter in “News and Sexuality- Media Portraits of Diversity”. This text was prepared for journalism students and recieved many favourable reviews:
http://books.google.ca/books?id=Ij1giegWHMoC&pg=PA111&lpg=PA111&dq=news+and+sexuality+media+portraits+of+diversity+Arune&source=bl&ots=ptyI5OBvas&sig=qIMqGHtQu5d4UlXh8Cc0F8HWoOc&hl=en&ei=qNDMTJfANY2-sAP38p2GCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&sqi=2&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false
11/02/2010 at 2:50 pm
My understanding is that David/Sonia identified as gender variant.
“Ms Burgess, 63, was described as gender variant by her family, who said she was known to friends, family and work colleagues as both Sonia and David.”
http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2010/10/28/kings-cross-tube-death-victim-named-as-sonia-burgess/
So, it would be correct to refer to him/her in the way he/she would have chosen – not using other terms (such as trans-, for example, if he/she did not identify as such).
11/02/2010 at 2:57 pm
Gender variant is a term that seems to have favor in GB. However it is a term I find especially repulsive and oppressive. It also reifies gender as something other than a fictional social construct. The social construct nature of gender begs the question as to how someone can be a variant of something that is an artificial construct to begin with.
My gender is crunchy old dyke.
11/03/2010 at 4:23 am
> Gender variant is a term that seems to have favor in GB.
No it hasn’t. My guess is that the family and the specialist and unsophisticated police force dealing – because it was in a railway station – the British Transport Police, have mistaken bi-gendered, if not transgendered.
As a highly skilled human rights lawyer it was obviously her choice not to have changed her documentation whilst presenting as female most of the time (indeed, the photographs would make me ask if she was able to present as male at all).
She could have changed her name at any time in literally seconds. And would would have been eligible for a change of legal gender too. Its unlikely that would have affected her career.
At first the police had it that she was a woman and only changed the line very late in recovery of the body. One has to assume that her documentation didn’t clarify matters. The family sought to have her entire identity withheld, but the first magistrate denied that. The information vacuum in the meantime allowed wild variation in description.
Latest – from the second court appearance – is that the perpetrator – immediately detained at the scene and stated everywhere initially to be a woman – is transgender un-oped, and legally male, and is therefore being held in a male prison. So the press handled her identity very well.
That helps explain the rapid decision by the police that it wasn’t a hate crime, despite them charging murder.
Its all very odd, not least why they were on that hot and crowded underground station platform at the peak of the evening rush at all. It doesn’t match a route Sonia would have taken from her office in Wood Green to her home in theatreland’s Shaftesbury Avenue. She should have passed straight through that station. And it isn’t a line to the perpetrator’s home either. The trial will be interesting, although its a tragedy.