left: 40px”>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.
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