Mick Hartley

Etan Smallman in the Telegraph on the blacklisting of gender-critical voices in the arts:

Social media mobs can be spotted at 50 paces. But across the arts, a more insidious phenomenon is being reported – a secret blacklisting for having expressed views deemed to offend the consensus of the “community of the good”.

Overnight, gigs evaporate and polite excuses are made as invitations are rescinded and doors come crashing shut.

The Telegraph has spoken to gender-critical creatives across fine art, publishing, poetry, theatre, music, dance and TV who have said their reputations have been sabotaged and incomes decimated by behind-the-scenes boycotts several referred to as “soft cancellation”….

Laura* is a 50-year-old British TV writer-director, who found her ability to make a living placed in jeopardy after submitting a pilot script about transitioning teenage girls and their mothers to her US managers.

“It’s exactly the territory you’d think TV shows would want to explore,” she says. “It’s good,” said the reply, “but there’s just no way we could send this out.”

Laura was surprised by the silence she received when she then forwarded it to her agent. After much chasing, she was dropped as a client in 2021. “They sent quite a careful email, saying, ‘We don’t think that we are creatively aligned with you and we don’t think that we can help you any more.’”

Not creatively aligned? That is, they only want clients who agree with their ideology. Kind of like…well, you name it, but Stalinism certainly comes to mind along with McCarthy.

“This wasn’t a hateful diatribe, but a carefully considered and researched script and series outline,” she says. “It’s like McCarthyism, basically. Certain ideologies are considered unquestionable.”

Painter and digital artist Birdy Rose, 37, says her income “stopped overnight – it was like a lightswitch went off”, after posting that “women don’t have penises” on Facebook in 2017. She was left having to take a job at McDonald’s, but it did not stop there. Her critics aimed their sights on her fiancé, acoustic folk punk artist Doozer McDooze, and “started holding his career hostage”.

The 44-year-old, who had not entered the gender debate, soon started losing gigs. Some fellow musicians and festivalgoers even explained why. One spelled it out in writing: “You either need to live with the stigma of her choices, which will cost you gigs and friends, or publicly distance yourself from her beliefs.” One band explained they would not be on the same bill as him because his partner “has opinions that may be upsetting to other people”. McDooze now works as a delivery driver on minimum wage.

And so it goes.

A disabled visual artist who goes by the pseudonym Con-She says she has been “humiliated by these terrifying young zealots”. “I had a very posh bloke at a funding pitching session suggest to me, an abuse survivor, it would be OK for him to punch me – ‘hypothetically’ – if he identified as trans, because that would mean he was above me in the oppression hierarchy.”

She says she has stopped received any public funding in recent years, but knows she will never be able to prove why, and is left relying on food from community fridges. “I’ve worked very hard to keep it the right side of full public cancellation, so no kind of stooshie comes up when you google my real name, in the hope that I can salvage something.”

Rachel Ara was an artist-in-residence at the V&A, who was exhibiting everywhere from Vienna to Seoul, before a lecture she was due to present about her work in 2019 at Oxford Brookes University was cancelled when students from the LGBTQ+ society denounced her as someone who “frequently shares transphobic discourse on her social media”. “Literally everything stopped,” she says. She now works as a caretaker.

“There’s nothing concrete to sort of grip on to,” says Ara, 59. But she did receive an email from one curator saying that her views on the distinction between sex and gender identity were “out of date”. Ara says: “I mean, this was a straight woman and I’m gay. She was basically telling me that everyone’s gender-fluid.

“It’s not just the trans issue. It’s like you have to be a set thing to work in the art world now. You have to be left-wing, you have to be pro-Palestinian, you have to be blah, blah, blah, and although some of those things I am – it shouldn’t really matter. Art should be a mash-up of discussions and views.”

But, of course, cancel culture is a right-wing fantasy.