We’re going to get rolling this morning with a couple of gender-controversy posts. The topics may not seem to be of general interest, but oh, they are. You know how in looking back on “progress” in history, we note the singular steps that helped knock down a wall or forge a path? That gives us a reason to not ignore the relatively small moments in the present.
So first, artist Jess de Wahls
Jess de Wahls is an embroidery artist, born in East Berlin, but living in England, whose work is widely regarded and respected. She’s liberal, gay-friendly with all that means, has a very gender non-conforming father, and most of her work is unabashedly radically feminist. Her work was also carried for sale, for example, in the shop of the Royal Academy of the Arts. Until last week. Why? Because de Wahls has been under fire by the typical suspects for a couple of years now, since her “radical” feminist views include the “radical” feminist view that woman=biological human female. A view which she laid out in a well-constructed blog essay in 2019 – a good primer for anyone who needs it, by the way.
But I really struggle with the increasing demands of having to validate somebody’s idea of themselves, which is solely based on subjective feelings rather than objective realities.
It strikes me as a bad idea to demand others to bend or discard the facts of biological science, in favour of unjustified imposed mantras such as “transwomen are women”.
Similarly, for someone suffering GD who has the ideation that they must transition to resolve their anguish, I struggle to see how the compassionate and responsible response is the facilitation of the surgical removal of their healthy penis, breasts or ovaries and the ingestion of hormones (which will bring with them numerous future health problems). All without the guarantee of curing their dysphoria.
This should illicit equally as much concern as the others and yet we as a society seem to have embraced the ‘born in the wrong body’ tale fully.
I know, I know. Revolutionary, right?
Since the publication of that essay, de Wahls has experienced, shall we say, pushback:
The response was immediate and merciless. She was driven from her Soho Theatre salon. A gay friend whose hair she’d cut for ten years tweeted: “Never trust a bitch who does vagina art.” A colleague trawled her Facebook page, ordering lifelong friends to disavow her. All her offers to meet and talk were blanked.
Meanwhile the Instagram “embroidery community” set about destroying her livelihood. Petitions were launched, an exhibition in Australia was cancelled and every collaboration with a charity or company sabotaged. When she donated a work for raffle to raise money for period products in India, a male embroiderer hoped he’d win so he could burn it. One prominent stitcher of cheery flowers and “be kind” homilies has ranted non-stop about the injustice of it being De Wahls’s work that the snobbish RA chose when it finally allowed embroidery into “its hallowed halls”. Rather than her own, maybe?
And then last week, from the Royal Academy:
She also has a sideline in embroidered flower patches, dahlias and pansies you iron onto T-shirts or jeans. Liberty stocks them, and the Royal Academy shop had just reordered when this week its head of commercial emailed to say she’d received eight complaints that De Wahls was transphobic. She wrote back. Silence. The RA Instagram account, with 500,000 followers, then posted: “Thank you to all those for bringing an item in the RA shop by an artist expressing transphobic views to our attention.” They would no longer sell De Wahls’s flowers.
Let me emphasize that what the RA carried in their shop was not any of her woman-forward, swinging ovaries work – it was…flowers. Like this one:
De Wahls was on BBCRadio4’s Today show this morning. Her interview is at 1.51. There’s a possibility that she can sue under the Equality Act, especially with the recent victory of Maya Forstater.
As many have pointed out over the past few days, one looks to see if the Royal Academy will, in their shop or their exhibits disavow the work of abusers and misogynists such as Eric Gill, Gaugin and Picasso…or is it only women who assert that woman=adult human female who are unacceptable?
This is happening in England and it’s happening in a niche of artistic life, but yes, it still matters, for we know it’s actually happening everywhere and the pressure to conform is growing. Get it sorted out in your head, know the issues and the nuances and be prepared.
Charlotte was Both 