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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

www.CartoonStock.com

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Tip credits: Shelley Adrienne Mimi Belsky & Juliana Brown

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Categories: Transgender, Transsexual, Trans