How I was stitched up by the Royal Academy

Recently I found myself cancelled by the Royal Academy. It was a strange affair, and this is how it happened.

I’m an artist who makes a living out of creating intricate hand-embroidered portraits and flowers. I was working in my garden one afternoon last month when a glance at Instagram took me aback. My friend Laura was defending me against… well, I didn’t quite understand who or what. Laura was at work and couldn’t talk, so it was only later that evening that I began to realise what was going on.

It turned out that some keyboard warriors had mounted a witch-hunt against me with the intention of getting me banned from the RA, which sells my work in its shop. My transgression? A blog post I wrote two years ago in which I mentioned my concern about the growing dogmatism around the issue of gender identity. I do not believe assertions that trans women are women or trans men are men. My position isn’t rooted in any dislike, let alone hatred, of trans people. It is simply, in my view, stating the biological facts, and this is what I’d written.

The reason for my blog post was a growing worry that single-sex spaces and services for women and girls are threatened by gender self-identification. The inclusion of trans women in sport (as with the upcoming participation of New Zealand’s transgender weightlifter Laurel Hubbard at the Olympics) is plainly unfair. More perniciously, the erosion of words such as ‘women’ and ‘mother’ in the misguided interest of ‘inclusion’ makes it increasingly impossible to name and tackle those issues women face precisely because we are women. My personal reason for feeling alarmed is that it makes it hard for me to create any kind of artwork that veers from the accepted narrative without being branded a ‘bigot’.