The concept of "tragedy" has an element of the inexorable about it. In ancient Greek drama "tragedy" denoted the type of suffering which is at the same time fateful – which has been written out across the stars – and which the protagonist is irresistibly pulled toward as part of an inescapable destiny. In this way alone, the death of transgender teacher Lucy Meadows was not tragic. It was inhumane and unfair and awful and sad, but it could so easily have been avoided.
The paparazzi need not have encamped outside her house, for instance, or waited, like hunters crouched in the undergrowth, to snap a picture of her as she emerged from her place of work. They didn’t need to solicit the parents of the children she taught with offers of money for pictures and statements about her. Nor were they required to describe Lucy – someone they had never met and did not know – as an individual who was "not only trapped in the wrong body but … in the wrong job", or as a person who didn’t have the best interests of the children she taught at heart, or as someone whose human choices were unnatural aberrations which could only distort and damage innocence.
However, the concept of "unnatural" is a pretty important one when it comes to the dull mind of the bigot. Most of us, at some point along the line, can probably remember being informed by some knuckle-dragging troglodyte how "the bible talks about Adam and Eve not Adam and STEVE" – and perhaps we might even recall the maniacal, delighted gleam in the eye which nearly always accompanies this revelation. Nevertheless the phrase is a useful one – because it neatly encapsulates just how homophobic and transphobic prejudice works: on the one hand you have the eternal heterosexual couple – the norm, the standard bearing bastion of family values and the bedrock of any stable society – while at the same time those relationship permutations which fall outside it are envisaged as existential threats to values and morality. They are considered unwholesome and unnatural to wit. It is obvious, so the argument goes, that – either by God or by design – human life is geared toward reproduction, and good old heterosexual contact is the natural means by which this is achieved.
Such logic is both common-sensical and invidious. Yes, it is obviously the case that reproduction requires the fertilisation of the egg by sperm. But to define ourselves exclusively by this fact seems to open the way to a particularly virulent form of self-hatred, of species hate, in fact. Human sexuality is clearly far more complex and open-ended; reproduction is merely one of its motivations. Pleasure, love, hate, economics, politics and a myriad of other elements can be as much embroiled in the sex act as the physical bodies of the people themselves. Now if you really want to reduce it to its lowest natural denominator – reproduction – it is not only the so-called "alternative" relationships which are undermined and must suffer but also the so-called "traditional" heterosexual ones.
Under this model birth control is out of the question because it is unnatural and prevents procreation (though one suspects any such prohibition would hearten many of the people who advocate such atavistic views). But what about kissing? Animals don’t do that – so that’s off the table. Speaking of tables – what about the romantic candle-light dinner beforehand? Again that’s a no-no because the other primates don’t tend to place much emphasis on culinary ritual. The cigarette afterwards? You should be so lucky. Even conversation is out of the question. In other words, if you choose to rigidly define human-sexuality in terms of what is "natural", you simultaneously annihilate in it all that is human. And that, dear reader, is … well ...unnatural.
The same argument applies to gender. Naturally – the difference between male and female can be reduced to the presence of dangly bits or their absence, or concentrations of estrogen or its lack – and so on. But to be a man or a woman suggests infinitely more. It implies the internalisation of a vast complex of social values which come to form a sense of self. Collective ideas of masculinity or femininity are absorbed from a very early age – even through simple gestures like giving a young girl a doll to play with while giving her little brother a toy tank. And such values are themselves in a process of flux and interruption; consider the tomboy, for instance – the girl who doesn’t want to want to play with dolls houses but prefers to climb trees instead. She has made, albeit unconsciously, a decision to depart from a traditional and static view of gender, and in so doing she enjoys a profound freedom: the ability not to be straight-jacked by a series of naturalised assumptions but to freely determine her own specific brand of humanness. And that is wonderful; something to be cherished.
But what would you make of the adult who branded the same girl an aberration for climbing those trees and exploring those facets of her personality? An adult who condemned her as unnatural and suggested that her behaviour posed some kind of deviant threat to the world at large. My guess is you would probably think the "adult" in question was more than a little sinister. But beyond this – such a viewpoint would be absurd, would it not?
And yet that is exactly the viewpoint of the tabloid press, evident in their condemnation and persecution of Lucy Meadows. Lucy chose to fully become herself, humanely and freely, and in so doing the "Adam and Steve" contingent of the gutter press chose to crucify her with their lack of imagination and empathy, their banal brand of dumb, immolating self-righteousness. What happened to Lucy is more than a tragedy. It is a crime.
