Mick Hartley

Bristol Museum has a new exhibition, Gender Stories – "Challenging rigid definitions and binary narratives, Gender Stories dives deep into the intricate connections between sex, gender, sexuality, and identity." The museum's main entrance hall has been embellished by trans artist Samo White (‘he/they’):

Debbie Hayton in the Spectator went to check it out:

The Bristol Museum and Art Gallery is one of those places that makes me feel uncomfortable. I feel picked-on even visiting the website. At the top of the screen – before any mention of the collections and exhibitions – we are all told that ‘Bristol Museums welcomes trans and gender-diverse visitors, volunteers and members of staff’.

Perhaps this is a response to the Supreme Court judgement that biological sex quite rightly takes precedence over paperwork when distinguishing women from men? But I find it unhelpful and intrusive. I might be transsexual, but I am a human being just like everyone else, and I don’t need special treatment.

I certainly don’t want images that appear to promote elective double mastectomy – mutilating surgery in other words – emblazoned on two giant murals three metres high on either side of the main entrance hall of the museum. This, after all, is a place where groups of primary school children gather to be briefed before being shown the various collections held by the city.

Get 'em young – that's the trans way. "You are loved".

The language, the methods and the imagery – there was a space filled with shifting lights, colours and sounds in the exhibition to ‘recharge and heal’ – could have been taken straight from a religious cult on a recruitment drive. ‘You are loved’, we kept being told. From where else might we hear messages like that?

Art can be an educator, and sometimes it educates in a way that the creator did not anticipate. This exhibition certainly educated me. It left me with the distinct feeling that this is a cult and we need to be on our guard against it. The risk is not from society as a whole, but an activist lobby that appears to encourage victimhood and creates vulnerability. That’s no way to live.

Maybe others in the room had come to similar conclusions? But I didn’t ask. We were all under the beady eye of the museum staff and despite the ‘all are welcome here’ mantra, I got the feeling that heterodox views would be poorly received.

Times are changing fast, though, and in some ways this exhibition marked the great heresy of the past ten years – that gender identity trumps biological sex. Perhaps a museum is a good place for it?

Yep. A vision of a dying cult.