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.
Jess De Wahls is an embroiderer, and the RA used to stock a range of her iron-on patches in floral designs, all ready to turn your favourite jeans into a work of art. For De Wahls, this was not a particularly big deal. The RA’s order was small, and as someone who sees herself outside the mainstream art world (“I don’t give a fuck about art institutions — I’m a trained hairdresser,” she says), winning the Academy’s approval held limited cachet.
For the RA, though, it seemed to be a success: it had just reordered her patches when the trouble started. 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.
And what had De Wahls actually done to make herself untouchable? In 2019, she published a long, considered essay laying out her thoughts on gender identity. “My hope is that this will help you, the reader, the viewer, to understand my conclusions about this subject,” she wrote. “And I will tell you them candidly so no mistake can be made in misunderstanding or misrepresenting me.” As anyone who has ever ventured an opinion on gender could tell you, this was always a vain hope given the torrents of bad faith that run through this subject.
So it didn’t matter how precise De Wahls was when she wrote: “I have no issue with somebody who feels more comfortable expressing themselves as if they are the other sex (or in whatever way they please for that matter).” It didn’t matter that she described her own close and supportive relationship with her father, who lives a gloriously gender-nonconforming life in heels and lipstick. It didn’t matter that De Wahls, who was a child in pre-unification East Germany, drew parallels between the chilling propriety of gender-identity dogma and the constant self-censorship demanded by life under the stasi.
What mattered was that she had said no, and no amount of thoughtfulness or articulacy can make female refusal inoffensive. “I can not accept people’s unsubstantiated assertions that they are in fact the opposite sex to when they were born and deserve to be extended the same rights as if they were born as such,” De Wahls stated, and in doing so she asserted both an internal and an external boundary: a boundary that said she would not automatically treat male people as though they were female, and a boundary that said she would not think of male people as though they were female.
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