Art clearinghouse agrees to remove all trans-derogatory cartoons
THE GUERRILLA ANGEL REPORT — A HUGE thumbs up to Ed Beardwell, the director of UK’s CartoonStock Ltd, for agreeing to remove trans-exploiting cartoons from their database after members of the trans community voiced their concerns to him.
Heck, even I was a bit lukewarm on the idea of calling for the censorship of artwork when I first saw a social media post urging a protest of some sort against these derogatory cartoons. I believe I said ‘we had other things to worry about’. Well, lo and behold, enough of you contacted the privately owned site and the owner agreed that they were being insensitive to trans people and would make policy changes.
I missed this call completely, so my hats off to all of you who thought this was important enough to care about.
I’m reproducing the entire response from the site’s director:
To those who have contacted CartoonStock to complain about the treatment of transsexuality in cartoons.
Firstly many thanks for your considered and well reasoned comments about some of the cartoons on our site. We have listened to your views and are acting to ensure our editorial policy is more sensitive to transsexuals.
As the world’s largest cartoon database, we try to accept cartoons that cover all aspects of human endeavour, so whilst the content on our site is moderated, our moderators are told to edit with a fairly light hand. Nobody at CartoonStock wishes to offend and certainly not to marginalize or endanger any members of society. However humor is often targeted at someone or something and our moderators sometimes face a difficult task in deciding what is a legitimate humorous topic and what could be considered offensive of oppressive.
It appears that on transgender issues, some poor decisions have been made and we agree that over the years many cartoons have been accepted on this topic which fall short of the standards we would like to uphold. Over the next few days we will therefore be reviewing our editing of these cartoons, removing those which we feel are unnecessarily offensive and recataloguing those which have been tagged as relating to transsexuals and transgender issues, when in fact the observation or point being made is not really about those topics at all.
We agree that there is no need to portray transsexuals in a negative manner and will be treating the above action as a priority. Please bear with us as all changes do take some time to propagate throughout the CartoonStock site, then a little longer to propagate across search engine results such as Google Images, but our intention is to be fair and certainly not derogatory to anybody.
Kind regards,
Ed Beardwell | Director
CSL, CartoonStock Ltd. 6 North Parade .
Bath . BA1 1LF . United Kingdom .
t. +44 (0) 1225 789600 | Toll Free (USA/Canada) 1 888 880 8357
Art clearinghouse agrees to remove all trans-derogatory cartoons like this one
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Tip credits: Shelley Adrienne Mimi Belsky & Juliana Brown
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Filed under: Transgender, Transsexual, Trans, cartoons, CartoonStock, censorship, database, derogatory, Ed Beardwell
A pity, that is such a pity. A few people that are offended by cartoons, I am personally not offended by cartoons as I chose to transition, and there will be those that are seeking publicity.
A cartoon is nothing more than graphic commentary, and censorship is wrong!!!!!!!!!
must realize, that any form of harassment is wrong, it is on the same level as Racism. Its just not acceptable in society. I don’t want to read anything that is derogatory towards Race, sex, religion,sexual preference or nationality.
There were similar jokes about other stereotypes at other times.
No, these were not good, and I’m glad to see them gone.
It was quite a bit more than “a few people” it became a rather overwhelming majority that requested, politely, that they no longer portray trans in such a negative light.
For those of us who have suffered violence, exclusion, police and other official abuse due to being trans it does affect us, and we try and take the time to educate.
The pity here is you decide your personal feelings are right for everyone else.
I would suggest that this was a privately owned site and if we’re able to sway the owner, then more power to us. But on the other hand, if a cartoonist wants to push his wares in public or on his own site and wants to take a stand, then yeah, we pretty much have to let him be.
They have remove the most offensive cartoons and seem to be evaluating the others. Most that left are ok but they still have cartoons with whiskered face hooker transsexual cartoons. We will be watching to see if ones as these are removed in their removal process.
Reblogged this on Pasupatidasi's Blog and commented:
more progress. it will be many stepping stones like this one to take us forward to a world that sees trans-folk as real people.
I find trans slander the same as racism. It is a form of sexism. I can bet you anything they would allow a racist cartoon to be published, so why this? Stereotyping is wrong no matter what form it is in. I am glad they are doing something about it.