Jess de Wahls victory over Royal Academy ban shows that the bullies can be defeated

During the lockdown, I made a small donation to the Royal Academy (RA) by waiving a refund for tickets to a cancelled exhibition. I was thinking this week of demanding the money back in outrage over the RA’s treatment of the artist Jess De Wahls, the latest victim of bullying by transgender activists.

But then the RA apologised to De Wahls profusely. So they can keep my paltry contribution, but the organisation’s reputation is not out of the woods yet.

The RA had (over) reacted after receiving eight complaints on social media that De Wahls was transphobic; it withdrew her work from its shop and issued a statement, emphasising the Academy’s commitment to “equality, diversity and inclusion”. The statement emphasised: “We do not knowingly support artists who act in conflict with these values.”

Immediately, this presented a problem. If De Wahls was offensive, how about other artists exhibited at the RA – for example, Picasso, who drew what have been described as pornographic pictures of a 13 year-old girl?
Apply the RA’s ethics to the arts in general, and few galleries would be safe: Caravaggio (murderer), Gauguin (paedophile); concert halls would be silent: Wagner (racist), Berlioz (stalker); and library shelves empty: Golding (attempted rapist), Salinger (paedophile).

Killing culture is not the goal of the transgender zealots who hauled the RA over the coals, but artists are necessary collateral damage in their quest to police our thoughts.

The RA’s chief executive, Axel Rüger, eventually came to his senses, phoned De Wahls and reaffirmed the Academy’s protection of free speech.

It probably helped her case that the artist and embroiderer was prepared to stand up to her tormentors. She was raised in East Germany and her childhood experiences of the Stasi, she said, bore sinister similarities to the punishment being meted out in the refinement of the UK art establishment.

“In our so-called enlightened democracy, we are seeing viewpoints that should be considered simple differences of opinion attacked with an avalanche of hatred and bile, while the silent majority hover on the sidelines, too fearful of not appearing ‘woke’ to speak out,” she wrote in a newspaper this week.

Her own viewpoint defines a woman as “an adult human female, not an identity or feeling”. In the essay that got her into trouble in the first place, written two years ago, she made a distinction between showing support (which she does) to people who identify as a different gender to the one they were born with, and accepting (which she does not) that they are, in fact, the opposite sex.

Such heresy is enough now to merit the slur of transphobia and has made pariahs, in certain circles, of JK Rowling and feminists like Julie Bindel.

It does not matter how liberal a woman’s words are (it is almost always women singled out for attack by trans radicals) or how progressive her actions, if she dares to challenge the trans orthodoxy that a trans woman is a biological woman, she will need to take cover.

It would be easy to ignore the abuse if it were confined to anonymous online vitriol; just don’t read it. But once it spills into the public or professional domain, it becomes entrenched.

This brings us to New Zealand and the inclusion of Laurel Hubbard in its Olympic weightlifting squad. As a trans woman, Hubbard has passed the testosterone tests to qualify as a biological female.

But she still has a man’s body, shaped by male hormones until she transitioned in her thirties, and in a sport based entirely on strength, she clearly has an unfair advantage over her natural-born female competitors. Yet if New Zealand had not selected her, or the Olympic authorities rejected her, they would have paid the price of international condemnation from trans rights extremists.

It cannot be the wider trans community that has escalated the hate in the transgender debate because those who go through the trauma of changing gender must undoubtedly do so for the love of that gender. A trans woman is not a misogynist, but there is a dark element of misogyny that drives trans activists to undermine hard-won women’s rights and hounds those who, in their judgement, transgress.

In Scotland, a woman is being charged as a “hate crime aggravator” over social media posts that reportedly included a tweet showing a ribbon in the purple, white and green of the suffragette movement.

She is to be defended, it was announced on Thursday, by the SNP MP Joanna Cherry, a QC and an outspoken champion of sex-based rights for women who oppose the transgender self-identification reforms proposed by the Scottish government.

It is not, of course, the first such test case – Maya Forstater, who lost her job over her beliefs, won a landmark ruling earlier this month, protecting those who think transgender people cannot change sex.

The victories of Forstater and De Wahls show that women will not be cowed, but they need the silent majority to stop hovering and come to their aid.