Mick Hartley

I mentioned this the other day, after Jo Bartosch spotted the re-presentation of lesbian artist Marlow Moss. Now here's Kathleen Stock in the Mail:

In its wisdom, the Tate Gallery in St Ives has decided that a trailblazing female artist from the early 20th Century, Marlow Moss, might not have been a woman after all.

Born in London and later living in Paris and Cornwall, Moss was an artistic pioneer and something of a heroine to me.

She produced wonderful, pared-down geometric paintings that were inspired by Dutch painter Piet Mondrian and then, later, minimalist sculptures.

Moss had also 'come out' as lesbian at a time when no one had heard of gay liberation and when such a choice was viewed not just as eccentric but shameful.

A striking figure striding about the fishing port of Newlyn in the 1950s, Moss used to wear men's clothing, as many lesbians always have done. Born plain old Marjorie, she had changed her name to the more exotic Marlow.

But these facts seem to have led curators at the Tate into thinking she could be ripe for retrospective – and posthumous – 'transitioning'. Today, Marlow Moss features in an exhibition at the Tate called Queer Cornwall, in which the labels referring to her use gender-neutral pronouns. There's no sign of 'she'.

A page on the Tate's website speculates that: 'Perhaps if Marlow was alive today, the artist would identify as transgender, which means that your gender is different to the one that the doctors or midwives presumed you were when you were born, or non-binary, which means that neither the word "boy" nor "girl" are a good fit for you.'

Shorn of today's gobbledygook gender-speak, this means that because she loved women, dressed like a man and gave herself an androgynous name, perhaps she was transgender and not really a woman at all.

This is anachronistic nonsense and an insult to the memory of a stellar artist who lived boldly and unconventionally.

And it is, of course, yet another troubling concession to a sadly fashionable orthodoxy that denies the biological reality of sex and seeks to give away women's rights….

This is pandering to activists who are campaigning for self-identification and who seek to quell all discussion of their radical plans, let alone allow anyone to dissent.

And institutions such as the Tate have effectively let themselves become servile instruments for coercive and narrow-minded lobbying groups.

Well, it's already happened to George Eliot.