Sometimes things happen which are so sweet, so delightful, so… totally fucking stuuuuupid, that you just have to smile, snigger and appreciate that once political correctness and ‘woke’ bollocks take over, the world has to actually tilt on its own axis to keep things straight. And I imply no pronouns nor lack of them in the use of the word ‘straight’ in this strictly geometric context.

There’s an artist called Jess de Wahls. Her work is available in the Royal Academy of Arts shop. You know ‘those’ type of gift shops? 15 quid for a pencil with Picasso’s name on it, 35 for a carrier bag by Hockney. Anyway, she’s sold there for years. Even though she’s a German. But then she posted something online. About… trans-gender!!!!! The holiest of holy grails for the uber-sensitive pedantics of the PC Nazis. The subject which, as this story proves, generates no winners, ever.

Jess supported JK Rowling’s view that you can call ‘em what you like, but a girl is still a girl and a boy is still a boy. Shame on her!!! She actually said that just because they choose to identify as something other than how they were born, she doesn’t have to ‘believe’ that that is how they now are. Ooooooohhhhhh. You don’t say that out loud in Dalston, its like going into a vegan grocery to kill your pet chicken.

8 people complained that this post, from 2019, was discriminatory, not ‘inclusive’ and was horrible. And ‘is that the kind of artist you want representing your galleries???

So the Royal Academy, in a fit of… I’d have to say ‘panic’, more than any overwhelming sense of trans-sympathy or woke-ness, removed her works from their shop. For what it perceives as some form of ‘discrimination’. Best of all? They didn’t tell her. Nor ask her to explain, nor speak to her at all. She learned of it from the RA’s twitter feed. That she had been… CANCELLED!!!!

But this is the interesting bit (and by ‘interesting’ I mean ‘fucking insane’). There was a precedent set a few weeks ago when a woman was fired from her job for expressing pretty much these same views. And a tribunal judged it an unfair dismissal because they are her views, AND SHE’S ALLOWED TO FUCKING HAVE THEM. Their language may have been slightly different.

So now, the Royal Academy is at risk of, and has been threatened with, a lawsuit because the Equality and Human Rights Commission finds their actions to be discriminatory and lacking inclusivity. Because today’s discriminaTOR is tomorrow’s discriminaTEE. The RA has shown a lack of inclusivity in excluding someone accused of lacking inclusivity.

See what I mean?

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx