The Columbia Missourian wasn't the only one to publish a recent "oddities" of the news story about a woman from Ohio who killed her husband by "exercising him to death". It's a wire story I would argue deserves a place in the Tabloid scraps I hope people only buy at the grocery store for bird nesting or cheap gift wrapping, but instead it played it's absurdity in the pages of our local newspaper and on it's online version. And the incredulous headline The Missourian originially featured echoed throughout the country in many other publications you could consider respectable to various degrees.
The harrowing aspect was that the original headline in print and online read: Transgender woman pleads guilty to exercising husband to death. (It has since been changed on The Missourian's website) This person's sexual identification has absolutely nothing to do with the story. In a discussion over this with some of my peers we said one of the key responsibilities of journalists that has ruled many of the toughest decisions we make is to do no harm. This headline does harm. It does harm to a group of people who have experienced so much hate, violence and misunderstanding already, so to draw a link between the facts of this woman's sex change (which happened years before this incident) and the crime is an injustice to these people. This person's race, religion, sexual identification or sexual orientation has nothing to do with this story. I know it's a weird story, but that's why it is so important to separate the unacceptable actions of this woman from being transgender. One argument that I've heard for using this detail in the headline was that it explained how this woman was able to physically dominate the man.
