Janice Turner on the Royal Academy’s venomous censorship of a woman artist starts with the fact that Jess DeWahls sent her an embroidery of her mother’s hands six months ago.

A photo I’d posted on Twitter of my first care home visit in many months had moved her to sew. She didn’t want payment, just for me to have it. Now this touching work sits by my desk.

De Wahls is no cosy cross-stitcher: she deploys her needle for political, especially feminist purpose. She embroiders fallopian tubes giving the finger, had a show called Big Swinging Ovaries, ran a vagina sewing workshop at Tate Modern. She’s funny, outspoken, has bright red hair and lavish tattoos. As all artists should be, she’s freethinking and bold.

Well! The Royal Academy can’t be expected to put up with that sort of thing.

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.

Imagine if eight feminists complained to the RA about an item in the RA shop by an artist expressing misogynist views. What do you suppose would happen? My educated guess is Absolutely Nothing. Misogynist views are entirely normal; “transphobic” views are a dire emergency.

[S]o a few years ago, when gender theory took off among Soho Theatre colleagues, “and they’d disinvite a friend from a party because she believed that only women have vaginas”, De Wahls was bemused. “I said, ‘Are you serious?’” They were. When she asked questions, they insisted trans women were biological women, just like her. This denial of science, of tangible reality, this insistence that 2+2=5, troubled her.

After immense thought, sleepless nights and with much trepidation, in 2019 she posted a 5,000-word blog. “I have no issue with somebody who feels more comfortable expressing themselves as if they are the other sex,” she wrote. “However, I cannot accept people’s unsubstantiated assertions that they are in fact the opposite sex to which they were born and deserve to be extended the same rights as if they were born as such.”

It doesn’t take much clairvoyance to guess what happened next.

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?

How bizarre that the art world, the crucible for shocking and subversive ideas, balks at the mere fact of biological sex. As I write, the RA’s tremulous head of commercial just told De Wahls “everyone is still thinking”.

Well think harder and better.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops trying to rule us all again:

The Roman Catholic bishops of the United States, flouting a warning from the Vatican, have overwhelmingly voted to draft a statement on the sacrament of the Eucharist, advancing a political push by conservative bishops to deny President Biden communion because of his support of abortion rights.

They’re bishops. They’re not senators or representatives or part of the executive branch, they’re bishops – clergy of one particular religious sect. They’re not the boss of us. They’re not the boss of Biden either.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, an assembly of the country’s 433 active and retired bishops, can issue guideline statements, but it does not have the authority to decide who can or cannot receive the sacrament of communion. That power is reserved for the local bishop, who has autonomy in his diocese, or the Pope.

But it’s theater. Look at us, we’re god’s janitors.

Hmm.

Last weekend in East Dulwich:

Three more women were violently attacked in East Dulwich over the weekend after police failed to respond to a 999 call from a woman who was strangled in the street in front of her child.

As the News reported earlier today, a woman was left waiting for a response car that never arrived last Friday night after calling 999 four times. 

She said she had been approached and strangled by a stranger in front of her ten-year-old son shortly before 9pm. 

She reported that the unknown man had attacked her out of the blue on Wood Vale and tried to smash her head against a wall while her distraught child ran to try and find help. 

…

Over the weekend reports have circulated that three other women were targeted in exactly the same location, including a knife attack. 

The victim’s injuries were, fortunately, not life-threatening but there is no update on the seriousness of her condition.  Two other women were also threatened with knives in the same three day period. 

Today (June 15) a 53-year-old woman was arrested on suspicion of grievous bodily harm with intent and remains in custody while enquiries continue. 

Police say they believe she is the only suspect, and had initially been mistaken for a man. 

Mistaken for a man? I think not. I think the police mean this violent man says he’s a laydee and they’re pretending he’s telling the truth while insulting the basic intelligence of the women who reported his attacks, as well as confusing everyone in the area about what the threat was and may be again. At this rate the police might just give him a new dress and tell him to go in peace.

But the victims all say it was a man who attacked them.

Stonewall wants to launder all the brains.

Teachers should drop the terms boys and girls in favour of “learners”, and mix up the sexes in PE classes, Stonewall has told schools.

The controversial LGBT charity is urging teachers to ditch all gendered language and gendered uniforms and suggests that children should compete against the opposite sex in sport.

Great idea! That way boys will always win! (Just don’t call them boys. Small price to pay.)

There are awards for schools that follow the most slavishly.

Those wishing to win are directed to a guide which tells them that “it is unnecessary to say ‘boys and girls’ when referring to learners of all genders, you could instead say ‘learners'”. 

They are told that they should check their policies and remove any “unnecessarily gendered language. Instead of using ‘he’/‘she’, you could use ‘they'”. 

On the one hand gender is the most important thing on earth, on the other hand gender doesn’t exist. Also it’s very useful for school children to learn that there is no distinction between female people and male people.

Tanya Carter, a spokesman for the parents and teachers campaign group Safe Schools Alliance UK, said “It is shocking that cash-strapped schools are paying for misinformation from Stonewall that undermines basic safeguarding.”

She said that sport should be “separated by sex for reasons of safety and fairness”, particularly in light of a recent Ofsted report that found sexual harassment was prevalent in schools.

Yes but it’s only girls it’s unsafe and unfair to, so that doesn’t matter.

The New Yorker on anti-anti-anti-racism. I think. I lose count after a while. It centers on a guy called Christopher Rufo.

… an employee of the city of Seattle documented an anti-bias training session and sent the evidence to a journalist named Christopher F. Rufo, who read it and recognized a political opportunity.

I’ve been an employee of the city of Seattle and I’ve attended one or two of their training sessions of that type and I have to say I found them stupid. Not too lefty but too stupid. In a way they weren’t lefty enough – they were more like self-help sessions.

When Rufo received the anti-bias documents from the city of Seattle, he knew how to spot political kindling. These days, “I’m a brawler,” Rufo told me cheerfully.

Through foia requests, Rufo turned up slideshows and curricula for the Seattle anti-racism seminars. Under the auspices of the city’s Office for Civil Rights, employees across many departments were being divided up by race for implicit-bias training. (“Welcome: Internalized Racial Superiority for White People,” read one introductory slide, over an image of the Seattle skyline.) “What do we do in white people space?” read a second slide. One bullet point suggested that the attendees would be “working through emotions that often come up for white people like sadness, shame, paralysis, confusion, denial.” Another bullet point emphasized “retraining,” learning new “ways of seeing that are hidden from us in white supremacy.” A different slide listed supposed expressions of internalized white supremacy, including perfectionism, objectivity, and individualism.

This is what I mean. It’s just stupid. It’s not left-wing, it’s therapy. The issue isn’t what every individual has in her soul, it’s how the system works. You can’t fix the system by retraining the nearest individuals.

Marooned at home, civil servants recorded and photographed their own anti-racism training sessions and sent the evidence to Rufo. Reading through these documents, and others, Rufo noticed that they tended to cite a small set of popular anti-racism books, by authors such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo.

Which is unfortunate because they both suck.

Rufo read the footnotes in those books, and found that they pointed to academic scholarship from the nineteen-nineties, by a group of legal scholars who referred to their work as critical race theory, in particular Kimberlé Crenshaw and Derrick Bell. These scholars argued that the white supremacy of the past lived on in the laws and societal rules of the present.

As it does! So the point is the laws and societal rules, not the innermost thoughts of every single individual, you get a retraining and you get a retraining and you get a retraining.

As Crenshaw recently explained, critical race theory found that “the so-called American dilemma was not simply a matter of prejudice but a matter of structured disadvantages that stretched across American society.”

So it’s far more urgent to tackle the structured disadvantages than it is to have touchy-feely training sessions. Far far far more urgent.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Mission creep creeps again.

YNnB? #20

Exactly, it’s roughly analogous to saying “I am entitled to get for free what you have to pay for”.

If they had better arguments, they would use them.

Indeed, and as you have correctly pointed out several times already, if they had any real examples of feminists stirring up “hate” against trans people, denying their “rights”, advocating “violence” etc. they would use it for everything it was worth. It should be a huge red flag to anyone when an ideological pressure group keeps making such outrageous accusations without providing any specifics apart from the words that they themselves put into the mouths of their opponents (like the corrupt cops often portrayed in gangster movies who plant drugs or weapons on an innocent person just to give themselves an excuse to have him/her arrested).

Funnily, when I got into feminism in the aftermath of “Elevatorgate” and the ensuing Anti Harassment Policy Wars, the women who were targeted by MRAs (including Ophelia) never had any problem with providing endless concrete examples of obvious hatespeech, bullying, and threats. Not that any more examples were needed. One of my most vivid memories from that time was watching Caroline Criado-Perez’ mentionings on twitter fill up with the ugliest cyberbullying I had ever seen, including the obligatory rape and death threats, faster than the twitter feed could load them. I would click “refresh”, and by the time the tweets were finished loading there were 15 new ones waiting in line. These attacks could go on for hours at a time, everyday for months or even years.

When my twitter feed started filling up with horror stories about the diabolical TERFs (supposedly at least as bad as the MRAs going after CCP), it was a very different story indeed. No direct quotes, or screencaps, or retweets of the alleged “TERF’s” actual words, only the TA’s own account of what her words supposedly implied as seen through the distorting lens of a Million unquestioned assumptions and ideological dogma, and only at the other end of a long train of impossibly sloppy inferences, extrapolations, mindreading etc.. In fact the only actual examples of hateful and violent rhetoric seemed to come from their own side. It wasn’t long before I realized that the diabolical “TERFs” they were talking about included at least half of the feminists I was following. That’s when I realized that this was a pseudo social rights movement with more in common with “incels” than feminists or anti-racists.

It didn’t have to be that way. There could have been a legitimate movement for people genuinely suffering from gender sex dysphoria, indeed there should have been, but that’s not the trans rights movement we have now. Feminists didn’t cause me to think this, TAs did. If this were about fighting real transphobia, then at least to an excellent first approximation 0% of their time and effort would be spent fighting feminists while 100% would be spent fighting toxic masculinity. Instead as good as 100% of their time and effort is spent fighting feminists, and rather than fighting toxic masculinity, they are actively engaging in it.

Abigail Shrier has a couple of thoughts on the subject.

Ok, Karen with eyeroll and facepalm is very science.

The feud widens.

The certain prominent skeptic is Michael Shermer.

Harriet Hall’s review is in the Skeptic reading room.

To be honest I can kind of see why they might have wanted some tweaking even if they agreed with the content. Hall doesn’t always make it clear whether she’s summarizing the book or offering her own generalizations. I don’t usually read SBM (not for any particular reason, I just don’t) so I don’t know if they have a house style, but it they do and it’s somewhat formal, I could understand their wanting a more Officially Sciencey note. I like the review myself, but I can see some non-invidious non-stupid non-orthodoxy-enforcing reasons why they might want changes.

But, the reality is, we know Gorski doesn’t like the content (I don’t know about others at SBM), so it’s hard to give him the benefit of the doubt on the whole “Well I gave it my best shot but I’m just going to go ahead and retract it now soz” thing.

Meanwhile, Shermer is wrong if he thinks the trans dogma is any kind of far-left progressive ideology. It’s extremely conservative and regressive, unfortunately.

David Gorski’s statement on why he retracted Harriet Hall’s review of Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage:

After careful review, the editors of SBM decided to retract this book review. Because we allow trusted authors to publish without prior review for the sake of efficiency and timeliness, occasionally corrections need to be made post-publication. In this case we felt there were too many issues with the treatment of the relevant science, and leaving the article up would not be appropriate given the standards of SBM.

Already there are false accusations that this move was motivated by pressure from readers. This is not the case. SBM had and never will cave to outside pressure. We have endured a great extent of such pressure, including the threat of lawsuits and actual litigation.

It didn’t occur to me it was pressure from readers, because I already knew Gorski is all-in for the trans ideology.

Further, any attempts at portraying this retraction as censorship are also false. This has nothing to do with silencing opinions or perspectives, but rather is entirely a matter of quality control. SBM is first and foremost about high quality scientific evidence and reasoning to inform medical issues, and we felt the article in question was below the minimal acceptable standard for SBM.

He can say that; we don’t have to believe it.

Suzanne Moore on the RA shop v Jess DeWahls:

Her work is desirable and sold in the shop of a prestigious museum. Yet her thoughts which she sometimes blogs about, these terrible thoughts mean that now this work must be banned from the museum’s gift shop because it “conflicts” with the values of “Equality, Diversity and Inclusion” that the institution stands for.

You know, I would have thought that the values the institution stands for are values that relate to art. It’s not a social work institution or a political institution, it’s an artistic institution. There are basic, background values that we generally assume public institutions adhere to, like not barring The Wrong Kind of People, but they’re basic and background, not up front and in your face.

And then, of course, whether they’re in your face or in a small closet two floors below ground level, it’s a funny kind of equality and diversity and inclusion that banishes a woman artist because she thinks men are men.

I am , of course talking about the completely ludicrous decision by the shop of the Royal Academy to no longer stock the work of Jess De Wahls because she “cannot accept people’s unsubstantiated assertions that they are in fact the opposite sex to when they were born.” She thinks that being female is not simply a feeling.

…

Maya Forstater won her case last week but clearly the Royal Academy does not understand the Equality Act. Nor do they mind hanging paintings on the wall by a man who bought girls from their mothers and gave them syphilis  –  Paul Gauguin – or selling his prints in their gift shop. Diverse? Inclusive? Equal?  Eric Gill who sexually abused his daughters was an associate of the Royal Academy. Indeed the place is full of art made by those with views that certainly do not embody the mantra of values that every institution now intones .

It would be nice if we could get someone from the Royal Academy shop to explain the thinking here. Why Gaugin & Gill fine but DeWahls banished?

What the Royal Academy has achieved here is not even the appearance of goodness but the appearance of stupidity. Does any of this – the banning of textiles – help a single trans person? 

Stupidity but also unabashed bullying of a woman, all too similar to the bullying of Rowling and Forstater and Murphy and Millar and Suzanne herself.

It’s really extraordinary. That tweet has been sitting there since January 4 (with replies turned off, gee I wonder why). Why does Twitter permanently ban women who reject trans dogma while leaving a machete threat alone?

On the one hand and on the other hand –

Today:

Six months ago:

People who will pick up machetes to chop up Adichie & Rowling – and the LGBT Foundation is whining about non-existent “transphobia.”

Hmm.

If people are “at risk of depression and suicide” because of pronouns then their problems go way deeper than pronouns.

Also what does this have to do with genetic testing?

Even…wait for it…Science-based Medicine.

Two days ago:

Yesterday:

SBM:

Book Review: Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, by Abigail Shrier

According to Harriet Hall, Abigail Shrier’s book describes a disturbing trend: an increasing number of adolescent girls who suddenly self-identify as transgender and demand puberty blockers and gender surgeries. We have no data on how many of them will suffer irreversible damage and regret their decision, and it appears that at least some of them have been unduly influenced by peer pressure, the internet, and by therapists who follow the affirmative care model. (Editor’s note: This post is currently under review by the founding and managing editors of SBM due to concerns expressed over its scientific accuracy and completeness. Until that review is complete, it has been removed from the blog.)

Concerns over its scientific accuracy and completeness? Really? Not over its failure to say the mandatory things? Not its failure to stick closely to the approved ideology?

Science-based. Ha.

Oh look, the Royal Academy wants us to draw something we would think but not say.

People are hastening to oblige.

The Telegraph reports:

The Royal Academy of Arts has pulled an artist’s work from its gift shop following claims she expressed “transphobic” views.

And it has issued a crawling apology.

Jess de Wahls was found to be in “conflict” with the values of the institution over opinions expressed in a 2019 blog [post] criticising “gender identity ideology” and the LGBT charity Stonewall.

Really. So the Royal Academy of Arts requires total agreement with everything an artist is known to have said or written or embroidered before they sell that artist’s work in its gift shop? Really? It must take weeks to go through it all for just one artist, so how do they keep up?

No, of course the Royal Academy of Arts doesn’t require any such thing, or go through any such ludicrous vetting process. It’s not a normal expectation.

On Thursday, the RA issued an online statement saying that it had received complaints for selling works “by an artist expressing transphobic views”.

It added that her work “will not be stocked in future”, and thanked those who had complained about it.

Their faces should be scorching hot with shame and embarrassment.

Ms de Wahls told The Telegraph that her work had been pulled from the gift shop after a “concerted effort” from online activists over her alleged transphobia.

But when was a law passed that transphilia is required before artists can sell their work in shops? When was a law passed making it the business of brainless twerps on Twitter what artists think about men who say they are women? Why do adults in charge at major institutions jump to do the bidding of these spiteful envious ratbags? Why is it almost always women who are subject to this hole in the wall persecution?

The artist wrote a blog in 2019 which said that a woman is “an adult human female” and “not an identity or feeling”, adding: “I can not accept people’s unsubstantiated assertions that they are in fact the opposite sex to when they were born.”

Neither can I, nor can I see why we should be expected to, let alone subject to punishment if we decline.

She argued that the “ideology” of gender politics placed people into reductive boxes, enforced censorship akin to that found in her birthplace of East Germany, and had a detrimental impact on the rights of women and girls.

Yes, yes, and yes. (The punishments were harsher in East Germany, to put it mildly, but the creepy spying and ratting out are all too similar.)

Maya Forstater, who won an appeal after losing her job following tweets stating trans women were “not women”, has raised concerns over the action taken against Ms de Wahls.

She told The Telegraph: “Organisations have got used to overreacting to complaints of transphobia. They need to take a deep breath, look at the Equality Act and consider that everybody has rights.”

And stop jumping every time one of these hideous goons says “jump.”

The campaign groups Sex Matters has written to the director of the RA in a letter stating: “The Royal Academy is carrying out an egregious and blatant belief discrimination against textile artist Jess de Wahls.”

And bragging about it besides.

Ms de Wahls, originally from Germany, has established herself as a textile artist making embroidered portraits, often dealing with feminism.

Her work was sold in the RA gift shop, where prints of prominent and controversial artists have previously been made available for sale.

The Telegraph cites Gauguin and Eric Gill as examples: Gaugin had sex with underage girls and Gill sexually abused his daughters.

Here’s how it’s done.

“gina” is an embroidery artist too, but a more obscure one. I’m sure that has nothing to do with this bullying attempt to destroy someone else’s work.

The stupid is out of control.

Look look look we’re apologizing please don’t hurt us please please please

THE APOLOGETIC APOLOGIZING APOLOGY

Written by Kerry Stapleton – Chair of Labour Nexus.

Earlier this evening, Labour Nexus messed up, and we announced that a transphobic Labour councillor would be speaking at our rally. We are sorry. The rally organisation team only vetted Laurie three weeks before we announced that he would be speaking before he had outed himself as a transphobe and did not check his timeline again before linking to his profile.

Laurie? Who is this Laurie? Don’t write a public statement as if it’s the middle of a conversation. Is Laurie Laurie Something or Something Laurie? Write like an adult.

And “outed himself as a transphobe” is just another smelly little orthodoxy.

When we were planning for our rally on 19 June, members of the executive committee asked various Labour elected representatives if they would be interested in speaking at the rally. On 24 May, the rally organisation team asked Councillor Laurie Burton and Laurie agreed to speak. At the time, the team checked through Laurie’s recent twitter timeline and saw no concerning material.

What does “the team” consider “concerning material”? And stop calling him by his first name – you’re obviously not a friend, and anyway this is a statement, so it should be formal, not you writing in your diary.

On 10 June, Laurie posted a tweet describing the procedural decision in favour of high-profile transphobe Maya Forstater at an employment tribunal as a “victory for women’s rights” and a “victory for free speech”, invoking two dangerous transphobic tropes.

Maya is not “a transphobe.”

And if you consider “women’s rights” a dangerous transphobic trope then you’re a misogynist sexist bully.

We are incredibly ashamed that, having made a public statement in the past that Labour has a transphobia problem, we failed to be cautious and check again before endorsing a councillor we were not familiar with. Our naivety has led to us contributing to that problem, we had a responsibility to know better, and we are sincerely sorry.

As Labour Nexus has said in the past, trans rights are not up for debate. Trans rights are human rights. If that statement is contentious for you, listen to trans voices and educate yourself, or leave.

Laurie Burton has been reported to the Labour Party, and we sincerely hope that the leadership will defy our low expectations and punish him.

Punish him!? For what?!

There’s no home anywhere for women now.

Another target selected.

Just like that. One inquisitor tells the Royal Academy that an artist is (or has been) “expressing transphobic views” and bam, the Royal Academy goes belly-up and says please don’t hurt us – and throws the artist to the wolves and stops selling her work. Just like that.

And what are these “transphobic views”? What is their content? Just that women are women, and no one else is. That’s all. It’s simple, it’s basic, we all used to know it perfectly well. We used to know it and now we’re subject to abrupt firing and banishing and boycotting for continuing to know it – all so that men can continue to pretend to be women and get lavish praise for doing so. The lies are rewarded and the truth is punished.

Also it’s not “their work won’t be stocked in future.” Miserable cowards. It’s her work. Hers. It’s a woman you’re doing this public harm to.