One aspect of the story will have sent shivers down the spine of every trans woman reading it: Swift’s friend says the hormones she was taking were abruptly withdrawn when she entered the prison system.Really? The Prison Service denies you prescription drugs?
Would the prison service care to comment on this? Apparently not: asked a direct question about the issue, it preferred to take refuge in yet more pieties about guidelines...So, were they hormones prescribed by the NHS or other medical authorities - in which case I agree, this is an outrage - or were they just something this mad old bugger had bought off the internet?
Because I'm pretty sure if it's the latter, we shouldn't be too surprised that the Prison Service stopped him from taking them.
And it's pretty disingenuous to fail to mention their provenance, just so you can work yourself up into a lather of righteous indignation, isn't it?
The comments address questions that Ozimek ducked. He was once a journalist such that he would have done so, but sadly that intellect is no more.
ReplyDelete"Swift, from Liverpool, was remanded in custody on 17 November after being charged with stabbing 26-year-old Eric Flanagan at a property in Balby, Doncaster, two days earlier. After Flanagan died on 15 December, police passed the case to the Crown Prosecution Service to upgrade the charge to murder."
The comments are also trying to work out from text changes and texual analysis whether the implication is exactly that: the hormones were not prescribed and were bought over the internet. It is looking very much that way.
One commenter makes the sensible argument that the job of the prison service was to keep the person safe in order to bring them before the court. Whether the problem is heart trouble, mental problems, AIDS, physical disability etc, the job is the same. In so far as they lost a prisoner, there are questions to be asked regardless of what the particular features were.
Ozimek, however, misses this and seems to think that the pet group with whom he identifies get deadder than anyone else or are special magic snowflakes. It is snowflakery in the extreme. I am annoyed partly because he was once so good at his craft; you may remember that he contributed at least once to the much-missed Anna Raccoon. He also helped with groups discussing the issue of freedom and was on at least one of OH's Westminster Rambles.
You may recall the suicide of Lucy Meadows, the teacher whose transition was bungled in Accrington? Perhaps unusually the suicide letter was published in full since in it Meadows absolves everyone of responsibility for the suicide and simply decides not to go on living. The point was, Ozimek attempted to hijack the death for his own agenda, much to the fury of the family who had their own problems to come to terms with. Ozimek was slated in an account of the affair, "Inquest in to a Campaign" by Mercia McMahon (most on Googlebooks, but you can also buy it for £2)
With bitter irony, the case was picked up by Leveson and used, wrongly, as an example of how the press needed to be curbed, especially Richard Littlejohn. It was up to the Press Gazette to fight a corner which once Ozimek himself had occupied: that Littlejohn had nothing to do with it, and anyway he was entitled to hold an opinion which clashed with others. Ozimek no longer seemed to hold the standards which once would have seen him chairing a panel on freedom of expression.
Even Pink News ran the analysis by Paul Canning:
"Like numerous other, similar instances in the UK, the death of transgender teacher Lucy Meadows appears to have been hijacked by people with an agenda other than the welfare of the people concerned."
Canning was rubbished in the comments but, as the Inquest shows, he was correct to draw attention to the inconsistent interpretation of the time line. The comments pretty much repeat the hijacking which took place in the original story, insisting that Meadows killed herself because of Littlejohn.
But the suicide letter was publishedthe suicide letter was published and disclosed debt, regret and weariness. It is just as valid to conclude that Meadows had gone to all the trouble of a transition, which she called 'gender problems' only to find it would not solve any of those.
Commenters again laid in to the paper - perhaps with reason - but could not see that so long as they kept trying to appropriate the story for their own purposes, it would be necessary for even the victim to contradict them in public.
Then I guess the bastard shouldn't have stabbed someone to death, should he?
ReplyDeleteJoe/Jane is/was an El Reg journo.
ReplyDeleteEl Reg, like J/J used to be serious, analytical, informative, investigative, inventive.....
Then they went all snowflake:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/04/ithe_registeris_entirely_serious_new_years_resolutions_for_2016/
Site now failing - was in top 3,000 (iirc ~2,800) - now:
alexa theregister.co.uk - Rank: 6,891
I still miss pre-2016 El Reg and their intelligent, informative commentards.
"He was once a journalist such that he would have done so, but sadly that intellect is no more... am annoyed partly because he was once so good at his craft; you may remember that he contributed at least once to the much-missed Anna Raccoon. "
ReplyDeleteSatan would envy the corrupting power of fame...
"Then they went all snowflake..."
How long before they get me?