Update 6/23: The Royal Academy has apologized, sort of – no sense of whether they are going to stock her wares, but it’s a start, I suppose.
More links related to Jess De Wahls:
It took 250 years for the Royal Academy of Arts to embrace women as something close to equal members. It took eight complaints for the RA to trash a female artist’s reputation and pull her work from its shop last week. The problem was not with the work itself, unless you’re the kind of person who is virulently offended by roses, dahlias and butterfly peas. The problem was with the woman.
And the trouble started because of a small number of people for whom it was unconscionable that De Wahls should have anything at all. De Wahls, they claimed, was a transphobe, and simply by having her work in its shop, the RA was condoning hatred of trans people. The RA contacted De Wahls, informed her it had received complaints then apparently panicked, and pulled the stock.
To assert the inarguable fact that humans are born with a sex and have that sex for life — regardless of how they dress, act or feel about themselves — is the most scandalous thing De Wahls could have done in 2021.
No one is really offended because they believe her statement to be untrue. Everybody knows, functionally, that sex is real and significant: even the most assertive of gender identity ideologues finds that genitals do not exist on an unknowable spectrum when they’re actually in bed, and they can all somehow figure out which kind of person should be called a bigot and denied an income. They are offended because a woman is not supposed to say the things De Wahls did. A woman today is not even supposed to acknowledge that she’s a woman, unless it’s to prostrate herself with guilt for her supposed “cis privilege”.
Matthew Dancona in the Standard:
It is precisely this that many trans activists will not accept. With a fervour that approaches religiosity, they insist that there is no debate to be had, that any discussion about the respective rights of trans and natal women denies their “existence” and that the slightest deviation from their own inventory of beliefs constitutes “transphobia”.
Yet the whole point of a diverse, complex society is that the values and rights of different groups routinely collide. The measure of civilised co-existence is that we find ways of negotiating these collisions and look for solutions. Only in the most extreme cases of outright bigotry and prejudice should we seek to exclude, “deplatform”, censor or ban from commercial spaces those with whom we disagree. The idea that de Wahls’ work or views constitute a threat to trans people or imperils their “safety” is absurd.
As Jonathan Rauch, author of a prophetic book on this broad social dilemma, Kindly Inquisitors, said on a recent podcast for the magazine, Persuasion, big organisations and employers “are a very vulnerable target. They are wired to avoid controversy”. This is so, as was made woefully clear by the reflexive speed with which the RA took measures to appease a handful of complainants.
The de Wahls case may look like a storm in gift store but is, in fact, symbolic of much else. If a globally-renowned cultural institution can be so easily panicked by a bit of noise on social media into ditching an artist, where stands the core principle of creative freedom of expression? If the Royal Academy won’t protect that foundation stone of civilisation and make the case for the civil exchange of ideas, who will? It is not too late for the RA to re-think, apologise — and be true to its public mission.
Speaking of videos and podcasts, if you’d like your Gender Critical brainwashing in smaller doses, try Karen Davis, whose channel is aptly called “You’re Kiddin’ Right?” She’s great.
Charlotte was Both 