The horrendous news that the memorial to transgender people was urinated on by multiple people before being irreparably damaged was not covered by any of the national newspapers in the UK even though many of them devoted sympathetic space to a few transphobes who blocked Cardiff Pride and were asked to leave.
If you ever needed a week to clarify exactly whose side the national newspapers in the UK are on, then this is it – and we’ve only got to Tuesday!
After Cardiff Pride, the right-wing papers happily erased thousands of lesbians, to centre a handful of transphobes, while also setting forth claims that lesbians are being erased by trans people.
They then followed that up by completely ignoring a hate crime against trans people, not for the first time.
So after it was used (blatantly and consistently throughout the evening) as a urinal by dozens of attendees, the national trans memorial in Manchester was then irreparably damaged. I’m hoping this was not intentional, but fear that it was. The silence from so many is deafening. pic.twitter.com/ZvBmdkGc4E
— Adam Preston 🦕🦖 (he/him) (@adampreston1988) August 29, 2022
Absolutely devastating to see the national trans memorial tree in sackville gardens had been set on fire last night , I hope @ManchesterPride can explain lack of security pic.twitter.com/FrP1aYSf7w
— Claire the giraffe (@clairegreen66) August 29, 2022
It appears to have happened during Mel Cs set and eventually took 3 extinguishers to put out
— Claire the giraffe (@clairegreen66) August 29, 2022
The Trans Memorial is damaged every year during @ManchesterPride's events (and we have the receipts). @SparkleWeekend has asked them to put measures in place to protect the memorial, and every year they ignore us. https://t.co/4hKd7mjl5P
— Lee Clatworthy (@lrclatworthy) August 29, 2022
While the Manchester Evening News did cover it on their website, it was not in their Monday or Tuesday editions and I tend to deal with the actual papers rather than their online versions (I have to have some sort of rule or I’d never get anything else done).
Their headline of ‘Sadness as UK’s first national trans memorial ‘irreparably damaged’ after fire during Manchester Pride’ was far from the truth.
Yes, there was sadness, but there was also fury, as there would be had any other memorial to a community’s dead been treated in this manner.
Sparkle, in what I’m sure is a bid not to jump the gun, suggest the memorial could have been burned by someone discarding a cigarette. As someone who smoked for 30 years, this seems highly unlikely unless the memorial was made out of paper and balsa wood.
The same papers, who happily ignored this destruction, eagerly give over page after page, day after day, to whatever transphobe asks Maya Forstater, their go-to trans expert, to put them in touch.
And still they think they are the silenced victims…
In cis world, urinating on a memorial would be enough to generate pages and pages of outrage in the press, right and left. Heck, I’ve even seen them have a conniption because someone took a disrespectful selfie close to one.
But this? This is only trans people. What do we matter?
