Goldsmith University academic claimed to be transgender for four years

[RoyalCorgi]

Full story here:

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7659881/Goldsmith-University-academic-asked-students-call-Mx-Tippy-Rampage.html

Wow. This is incredible!
Need to find a non-Mail link to share more widely.

Mellor, who is referred to in the 2017 interview as 'her/she', said the reason behind her study was to explore social media as an 'echo chamber'.

She said: 'I began to see how the accounts could become a site of discovery during my own attempts at resistance to this echo chamber.'

In fact if she wrote about this, not all of us find "art" easy to interpret, this could be really interesting.

Did she at any point succumb to the echo chamber? How did she escape? Did she see how others were drawn into it?

It would be so much easier if we were "allowed" to talk about trans as being a set of beliefs real to those who belief but meaningless to those who dont. Like religions, or certain types of politics.

But of any of these, apart from instances of extreme fundamentalism, never demand that non believers be hounded and silenced.

This twitter thread is quite funny twitter.com/search?q=Mx%20Tippy%20Rampage&src=typd

It probably makes me some kind of bad buy, but I find the whole thing fairly amusing. Especially all the screeching.

Very interesting story.

I find it very amusing.

I went to art school and I don’t find the story all that pirrageous or surprising - one guy on my course told everyone he’d been in jail (he hasn’t) at our ‘tell us about yourself’ introduction they made us do. I’n fact quite a few of us made up nonsense to see how far we could go. It was bloody art school got goodness sake!

I went to Goldsmiths as a mature student and it peak transed me.

The world of Woke is creating new characters every day! Is it satire? Or is it Tippy?

How many trans and NB students did Mellor actually come into contact with anyway? I was on the course she tutors on in the early 2000s and there were none in my year, nor were there any in the 2 years above me or the 2 years below me.

Either the number of trans students Mellor has come into contact with in 4 years is minuscule or trans is a social contagion (in which case, are any of them ‘really trans’?)

TRAs can’t have it both ways.

wrongside’s post suggests the latter.

Why was there none on my course when I was at art school on the early 1990s? 🤔

I met my first non-binary person at Goldsmiths. I nodded politely he told me his pronouns (Xie, Xir IIRC). I saw a nice young man in a skirt and remember thinking 'Kids, eh?' as he talked.

That was in 2014. Who knew that all these years later things would have got even more batshit?

Ha ha

I don’t recall anyone identifying as trans or NB when I was in the art department there in the late 90s. It was full of posh kids trying to be radical.

I was recently on a course at St Martins - oh dear. Such drama llamas. Public strops and spats in the canteen. Couple of persons in skirts desperately trying for attention.

Maybe I’m not remembering it right - but in may day the major concerns were/ stretching your grant,
cheap beer in the union
lack of currant buns on the refectory of you were on a late lunch
How to get a variety of ink, paint and chemical stains out of your clothes.

Goldsmiths is pretty popular with people with such inclinations. Wasn’t the transwoman Labour woman’s officer a student there? I encountered Dawn a few times at art school late 2000s early 2010s, she is popular on the circuit for crits/tutorials. From what I recall, she was gay and as stated one of her interests is sexuality. As others have said, I do find it mind boggling that one woman’s exploration and blurred boundaries are considered so offensive and ‘wrong’. When everything is based on feeling, why can’t an artist explore that? FWIW art schools I know have many many many more queer artists making work (about themselves and their sexuality) now than when I graduated circa ten years ago. Identity politics- used to get slammed as self indulgent in crits but doubt that’s the case now. Saw a link to some new student group campaigning for free speech somewhere... very countercultural in this climate.

So she was doing claiming to be different wrong? i get why that might rattle some cages in woke circles. I mean if the non-special can go around pretending to be special then the really special won’t be so special themselves will they?

As someone upthread pointed out, Mx was pretending without a licence. Arf.

it's true that some genuinely interesting reflection could come out of this, looking forward to it, Dawn

I don't know what people are so mithered about, honestly.

Only this week, a lib fem from America exhorted an audience to 'be more bisexual, be less cisgender!'

Isn't that what this tutor was doing ? Playing with, performing gender ? It all seems perfectly queer to me.

yeah, but she wasn't playing enough
or, she was playing too much
one of those

I know many of you dislike Rod Liddle, but this made me smile today

^Mass bedwetting at my favourite university, Goldsmiths. A senior lecturer there has revealed that she has been pretending to be transgender for some four years and isn’t actually transgender at all.
Dawn Mellor insisted that students and staff refer to her as Mx Tippy Rampage. This was a fictional persona created by Mellor, who specialises in art about sex and violence (much as, in a very real sense, we all do).^

Cue online fury from the LGBTQ+ hordes. But in this modern age, what is wrong with her identifying as a transgender person and changing her name to something stupid? I thought that’s what it was all about?

Interesting points for the Goldsmiths students, once they have graduated, to ponder, in between asking customers if they want regular or large fries.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/when-two-tribes-go-to-vote-nothing-is-all-they-can-score-with-this-irrelevant-lot-6h89b97cn?shareToken=ac716bcdf2c551ffb3101a29d67a707b

It’s always been a thing in art to react against conformity and group think, and especially when that confirmity is expressed within the art created by other artists. So this is a traditional and I would say welcome, pushing of the envelope.
I think it’s interesting and to be expected that this challenge comes from a woman who is an artist working in the art world, which is known to be a misogynistic and class-privilege-ridden world.

There is no reason why gender stereotype conformity/political genderism shouldn’t be a topic for intellectual and artist critique, especially if it’s a topic increasingly informing art?

I think the university’s quote was spot on, we look after everyone but we support free speech. Yes.

And to the critics of this artist- What pretence or violation of fact has even been committed here? When the test for what’s true is only ever in the eye of the beholder- who can anyone ever know what is true or false? What applicable objective standard is there to meet, or fail to meet, when it comes to an identity that you choose for yourself in your mind?

Clue to the outraged: this feeling you are feeling is exactly why many people resist having to change policies and practices based on real material issues, to satisfy identity politics.

And also nobody here is taking the piss out of gender dysphoria or distress at living in such a gendered world as this is, this artist certainly has not done so by how she has identified (or not).

Gender dysphoria is a horrible thing for anyone to experience and needs proper professional mental health support, which hopefully will be made more available given the increasing numbers of (mostly) very young women affected by with this.

So I look forward to hearing this artist’s comment on it. I’d also like to hear Stonewall’s comment on it (since isnt anyone with a normal human personality under the Trans umbrella all the time anyway?)

If there is some kind of good faith test for authenticating self-identification which would include a way to revoke this approval for ‘fakers’, then can someone please tell the UK government? because apparently until very recently they seemed to want to change the laws based on self ID.

That felt like a radical art though experiment but unfortunately it’s a serious and dangerous public policy idea arising in substantial part from political lobbying to further male sexual entitlement.

So I am grateful to this artist for also pointing out (as many other people have already done) that the Emperor is naked.

Grayson Perry walks around dressed like a 1950s dolly and no one weeps into their bran flakes.