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of Arts has apologised for removing the artist Jess de Wahls’s work from a gift shop after she was accused of transphobia, saying it had “no right to judge her views”.

The move was welcomed by De Wahls, who urged all institutions to “grow up” and “make space for disagreement”.

The academy added in a statement today that its decision not to stock De Wahls’s embroidery after eight social media users complained about her views “betrayed our most important core value — the protection of free speech”.

In an interview with The Times published last night, the artist said of online abuse in the week following the decision: “It’s horrible. It’s really difficult for people to understand what this feels like who hasn’t had it. There’s nothing comparable in ‘real life’.”

She said today that she was delighted that the row had been “disinfected by daylight” and hoped that her experience would encourage others to stand up for their views on gender.

“There are going to be a lot more people like me who will not sit down and just take it. Enough is enough. It is totalitarian, it’s scary and I’m just so sick of it. Humans can’t change sex. Let’s get back to the facts and go from there. I really hope they learn lessons from this. There is always going to be someone who calls bullshit.”

De Wahls said that Axel Rüger, the Royal Academy chief executive, had called her to apologise. “He apologised, I felt sincerely so. He said this should never have happened, that it had been a great error of judgement and that they need to avoid something like this going forward. He said as an art institution, they should remain judgment-free.”

“I do think we need to get back to a level where opinions can be voiced and art can be made, and putting the patches back is a good gesture,” she said. “Institutions should look really, really closely at how they want to deal with social media. There has to be space for disagreement, in art institutions in particular. They have to make sure this doesn’t happen.

“To me, this was institutional capture. They need to learn to grow up. This is literally the internet running wild and people need to set boundaries.” De Wahl said that she was glad that her work would be reinstated, adding that she hoped other institutions were watching.

At the Glinner Update they cite a tweet from the RA's comms manager, Adam Koszary – "Google, define: performative" – which suggests that he at least views the apology as insincere. Perhaps the internal struggle continues… 

, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who has advised multiple US administrations on Iran. “I think the administration now has a heightened sense of urgency to revise the deal before Raisi and a new hardline team is inaugurated.”

US President Joe Biden and his team have made a US return to the deal one of their top foreign policy priorities. The deal was one of President Barack Obama’s signature achievements, one that aides now serving in the Biden administration had helped negotiate and that Donald Trump repudiated and tried to dismantle as president.

Despite Raisi’s impending presidency, Biden administration officials insist prospects for reaching an agreement are unaltered. They argue that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who signed off on the 2015 deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, will make any final decisions regardless of who is president.

“The president’s view and our view is that the decision leader is the supreme leader,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday. “That was the case before the election; it’s the case today; it will be the case probably moving forward.”

“Iran will have, we expect, the same supreme leader in August as it will have today, as it had before the elections, as it had in 2015 when the JCPOA was consummated for the first time,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said.

Oh dear. They sound desperate.

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There have always been conflicts within the LGBT+ community. But the recent capture of Western political and cultural institutions by a faction of radicalized transgender activists presents a more existential type of crisis. The backlash against this clique’s overreach, which we are already beginning to observe, won’t be felt merely by the LGBT+ movement in whose name these activists present their demands, but by progressive causes more generally. Gender supremacists (as I call them) seek to entirely replace sex with gender as a legal category, an unpopular project that is squandering decades of hard-won LGBT+ social capital; contradicts the arguments that led to our most important policy victories; alienates our allies (especially in the women’s movement); and redefines gays and lesbians in a way that effectively erases us out of existence.

To be clear: Trans people should have the same rights as everyone else to live openly, freely, and safely. Gender identity and expression deserve legal protection under human-rights and anti-hate-crime laws. I am not arguing that the LGBT+ community’s component groups and their progressive allies should stop co-operating in the fight for human rights. But that mission is compromised when our organizations and communications channels are used to bully and misrepresent anyone who refuses to go along with the most extreme formulations of Queer Theory. For those of us who have been with the LGBT+ movement for the long haul, this hijacking of our cause doesn’t just represent a strategic miscue, but also an act of betrayal.

Perhaps the most surreal and unpopular claim offered by gender supremacists is the idea that sexual attraction isn’t triggered by physical bodies. Instead, the theory goes, we’re attracted by someone else’s internally felt understanding of gender. Similarly, terms such as “man” and “woman,” as commonly understood throughout history all over the world, are being redefined by Western academic theorists to refer to gender presentation, rather than biological categories. To pretend that sex isn’t a defining category when it comes to identity and sexual attraction is to gaslight human experience. Further, it serves to marginalize the vast majority of LGBT+ community members, and makes a mockery of the rationale behind the Gay Liberation movement itself. The “progressive” agenda of gender supremacists is, in its effects, just as homophobic as the reactionary right-wing discourse we thought we’d left behind.

We used to snigger at the absurdities of post-modernism, and all the obscure sub-divisions that proliferated from the teachings of (mostly) French post-war philosophers that came to be known as Theory, and successfully came to dominate, in particular, English departments in American universities. Remember the Sokal hoax, where the full glorious fatuity of it all was made clear for everyone to see and laugh at? Or the bad writing contest, where the wilfully obscure pretensions of writers like Judith Butler were exposed? I wonder if this is the first real case of the effects of this nonsense – in this case Queer Theory and its ramifications – finally escaping the confines of the academy and making itself felt in the real world?

Well, we're not laughing now.

usly. Based on the available scientific evidence, inclusion will occur at the expense of fairness and possibly safety. Put differently, fairness cannot be guaranteed to biological females by the current inclusion policies.

Of course, as I say, we know all this. It's like a lecture on how we know that the earth revolves around the sun. But we keep having to point out the obvious in the face of all this sudden trans ideology.

Nor should transgender inclusion be "a thorny issue". It's really not an issue at all: it's obviously absurd. Why should all this effort and fuss be expended on the supposed sporting requirements of the tiny number of men who've decided to live as women? Who cares? What with the "inclusivity"? They can play all the sport they want, after all, but if it's competitive sport they want, then they compete in the right category – as men.

And of course it's not a transgender issue as such: it's a transwoman issue. We hear not a peep from transmen about inclusivity and their need for validation on the sports field, for obvious reasons: they'd lose. They'd be pummelled, battered, bruised, and humiliated. Transwomen, on the other hand, start with a huge built-in advantage. That's why they want to do it so badly. It is, basically, a scam.

Plus, you can't help thinking, there's the TWAW – trans women are women – mantra. If we don't allow trans women to compete as women in sport, then we're pointing out that, no, trans women aren't really women at all. And that would never do.

Update: see Graham Linehan – Laurel Hubbard and the triumph of the mediocre man.

A spectacular mural opposite Burgos cathedral in northern Spain:

A guardian angel in the form of a grey heron watches over an allegorical mural at Burgos Cathedral in Spain. Painted by Louis Boidron and Edouard Egea, who work as MonkeyBird, “Mymesis, beings and places” is an homage to the artworks and design of the church, which UNESCO designated a World Heritage site back in 1984 in part because it captures the evolution of gothic architecture: construction on the building began in 1221 and wasn’t complete until 1567, meaning it showcases the entire history of the style.

Translating many of the religious symbols and motifs found inside, the duo combines the cathedral’s profound history with its signature stenciled aesthetic and recurring monkey and bird creatures. The resulting mural is a dense display of ornate structural elements, airborne birds called papamoscas cerrojillo that typically nest in the building, and a gilded clock from the 18th Century. “Our intention was to offer an effect of complex depth and monumentalism, combining some of the most spectacular references of the temple, such as the main altarpiece, with its many details, the Golden Staircase, or the circular oculus in the center of Santa María façade,” MonkeyBird says.

[Images © MonkeyBird]

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d impose sanctions turned out to be just what was needed to break the deadlock. Witness, for example, the Abraham Accords.

Surely the election of the appalling Ebrahim Raisi will give the Biden team the kick in the pants they need to reassess where they're going with Iran. We'll see.

free from the pandemic. An incredulous statement from the Israeli Health Ministry said the vaccines delivered to the Palestinians are ‘Identical in every way to the vaccines currently being administered to Israel’s citizens.’

As ever, it is hard to know the real reasons behind the Palestinian Authority’s U-turn, but the health of its people cannot have been at the top of its agenda.

It never is.

Millions in the UK have benefitted from Pfizer’s gold-standard vaccine, even when the doses were close to expiry. My own first dose was administered some months ago in London, as the empty vaccination centre was closing up for the day. The doctor who swept me into her cubicle told me that three minutes later my jab would need to be tossed in the bin.

Israel says the short shelf life of the vaccines it was sending had been known to the PA when the deal was struck. The initial batch of 90,000 was the closest to expiry, with subsequent batches due to expire some weeks later. Perhaps the idea that this deal represented ‘normalisation’ with Israel was too much for some on the Palestinian side, whose reaction gave their leaders cold feet.

Aside from passing up the opportunity to vaccinate 90,000 people in the next two weeks –and over a million before the end of the summer – the PA may also struggle to allay fears of corruption in how it distributes its vaccines. Convincing people to be vaccinated will also not be easy. According to last week’s poll by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research, only 40 per cent of Palestinians are willing to accept a vaccine when one is available, and 35 per cent are unwilling to get vaccinated at all.

This is exactly the sort of deal that richer countries around the world are being encouraged to make. Redistributing surplus vaccines is essential if we are to help poorer societies out of the pandemic sooner. But that can only work if they accept the help when it is offered.

To accept the Israeli vaccines would entail some level of acknowledgement; some level of gratitude. They just can't do it – and to hell with the health of the people. 

The recent Israeli-Gaza violence provoked an outpouring of antisemitic abuse on social media. For women known for their pro-Israel views, though, the rhetoric was, as Emily Schrader reports, particularly personal and nasty:

That is not to say that male activists did not receive threats or harassment, but the viciousness of attacks against women on social media were of a different nature entirely. For one, I was targeted by Malaysians who tweeted over 100,000 times with personal insults about my appearance and dozens of poor-quality memes ranging from laughably absurd to deeply violent. Of course, I received dozens of Hitler pictures and calls to “kill the Jews,” but I also had multiple fake accounts made in my name, which were tweeting and tagging people who follow my verified account, saying, “I’m the real Emily Schrader. I’m a slut.”

In addition, my email was leaked, and I received multiple detailed death threats with sexually explicit descriptions of how they would attack me. There was a public call to hack my social media accounts and website. My Instagram DMs and Twitter DMs exploded with hundreds of messages calling me names, threatening rape, and making otherwise sexist and outrageous comments such as, “Go suck Netanyahu’s ball [sic] … Hey slut I will bomb your house.” Another stated, “Your vagina is so dirty and disgusting, I can assure that it was a rape of an Israeli dog [sic].” I share these vile comments not to give them attention, as some have counseled me not to do, but to draw attention to the larger problem: These comments are not out of the ordinary for a Jewish woman to receive on social media. Today there is no greater social media “crime” than being a Jewish or pro-Israel woman.

In the pro-Israel world, there are few vocal female voices. This, again, is not a coincidence. Personally attacking and threatening women is a method of silencing their voices, online and in real life, and deterring new ones from speaking up. “With women there are no boundaries … The most common comment I get is sharmuta (“whore” in Arabic),” said TikTok influencer Shai Emanuel Yamin. “I saw men also suffering from hate comments, but it’s never about how they look or what they wear.” Liora Rez, the founder and executive director of Stop Antisemitism, agreed that the online attacks against women are more personal: “From the most deranged rape threats to the doxxing of my parents’ information, antisemites have no boundaries when it comes to harassing female Jewish activists online.”

To be clear, it’s not just Jewish women being targeted. Yasmine Mohammed, an ex-Muslim and women’s rights activist with over 100,000 Twitter followers, has been the target of gender-based hate comments for years after speaking against antisemitism. In response to the Israeli-Gaza conflict, she tweeted, “I’m normally inundated with death threats, but these past couple of weeks, it’s been more vicious than ever.” In conversation, she told me, “The explosion in the intensity of hate that I receive when I speak up in support of Israel or against antisemitism … no one can ever get used to that. And some threats are even more vile than just death.”

Vicious sexist abuse goes hand in hand with antisemitism. Well who'd have thought?

at they did the right thing. It'd be fascinating to listen in to their internal debate.

Let's hope Jess de Wahls stays firm. I'm sure she will.

Update: Radio 4 interview.