Janice Turner Interview with Rosie Kay

[Igneococcus]

Rosie resigned from her own dance company after accusations of transphobia:

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/3935bc4a-5858-11ec-a3f7-65d2d47c7fea?shareToken=b7d8e07dfee7cb3f54df6487999e9a82

I'd never heard of her, but she sounds amazing.

What gets me is the ingratitude of it. She gave fantastic opportunities to those dancers and they turned on her. Very similar to the over-privileged little twats Watson, Radcliffe et al who would be absolute nobodies without JKR.

I would hope that Rosie will come through this and find another vehicle for her talents. She may be more wary who she cedes control and employment to in future.
The sheer viciousness and spite of the'wronged' party here is quite breathtaking and the spineless capitulation all round - her board should be ashamed.
In a nutshell how destructive and selfish people can be..

@EmbarrassingHadrosaurus

“My lawyer advised me, ‘You are not going to win. They will find you guilty of transphobia, smear you — and that’s the end of your career.’ But I was just talking about women’s material reality and I am not going to go quietly. I am determined to put my head above the parapet.”

I wonder why the lawyer was so pessimistic that the Forstater ruling would be of no help. Because it was HR rather than an employment tribunal or similar?

several male dancers shouted that she was a bigot and a terf.

Of course it was led by the people with no skin in the game.

Why does this always read as same old (internalised) misogyny and just different clothes and justifications?

Spacey, so many #MeToo men are all back in public roles - many of them are denying now that they ever had a problematic pattern of behaviour.

Women are the boy in the crowd trying to alert the rest of the populace and they're being disappeared from public sight and invisibilised as the makers of their own creativity and works. No resentment of 'bad mothers' there at all, definitely not.

I wondered about that too.

If the company was set up as I think it would have been, she'd be an employee of the company (albeit the highest level employee). It's perfectly possible for a temporary member of the company to use the company policies to raise a grievance (as it should be) which is why this would have gone down an HR route.

So the policy process should have been followed - investigation by the Trustees as Rosie would have been the highest level member of the organisation, evidence gathering, etc. That would not have necessarily found her to be 'guilty' of anything, and if she was, the sanctions could range from a written warning to dismissal. I do wonder why she didn't roll that dice.

But then it could have been set up really badly with terrible Trustees who didn't do it properly, leaving her no option but to resign and go public.

If PM really wonders why more women don’t stand up against this - this is why, they risk losing so much.

Yes, he said Janice was a "honourable exception". I hope he read her column today.

This has made me very, very angry. I work in the Arts, and while the small company that I am part of has no truck with any of this nonsense we can see it lapping around the edges of what we do.

There have always been vicious little shits in the creative industries but this stuff is a whole new level. It's actually stifling genuinely creative people.

I agree about the NB incoherence. It's a smokescreen for creative banality and dangerous.

Fuck's sake. I need to go and buy wine.

This link is the trustees, some connected with other organisations,

register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/sector-data/top-10-charities/-/charity-details/5079863/trustees

I’d never heard of her (luddite over here when it comes to the arts) but I find it fascinating (troubling?) that even as a gender non-conforming woman and a victim of sexual assault, still her views counted for nothing with those she was offering such an incredible opportunity to.

My lawyer advised me, ‘You are not going to win. They will find you guilty of transphobia, smear you — and that’s the end of your career.’ But I was just talking about women’s material reality and I am not going to go quietly. I am determined to put my head above the parapet.”

I wonder why the lawyer was so pessimistic that the Forstater ruling would be of no help. Because it was HR rather than an employment tribunal or similar?

Yes odd. But it sounds like they thought it would be a kangaroo court and had no trust in it. There was one investigation which exonerated her and then got complaints. This is the second investigation. (From her crowd funder). The relationship and trust has obviously completely broken down.

There is s bit more detail about the investigations on her crowdfunder if you search for that. Try searching Rosie Kay fighting to protect women's rights and freedom of expression.
There's more detail about what's gone on and what she wants to do.

So the charity doesn't own the IP on any of the shows that Rosie has created? So they won't be able to perform those. What are their assets? Money in the bank I guess.They could hire new choreographers and produce new shows but it would be quite dishonest to continue using her name.

My favourite bit was how none of these spoilt brats had even read Orlando.

Yes, I thought that was a nice pointed dig!

Pronouns in the profile/signature = I am in the Stasi, I have power, I will take any opportunity I can to destroy you.

We're told that pronouns are harmless or a matter of politeness or kindness, but whenever I encounter a pronoun person now I consider myself warned. I find it sinister and chilling. It's not about politeness, it's about a vicious and controlling use of power. These people only destroy, they never build and create, but wrecking things and people gives them pleasure.

Quite.

Awful. Where are the men this is happening to? This is sexual harassment in the workplace, she is being bullied and harassed out of her job. I believe if you want to do a little gardening over Christmas You maybe able to.

What an impressive woman. I love that story of her soldier ballet.

Such a contrast with the fragile little shits accusing her of harassment for saying the word “vagina.”

That feels like two worlds running smack into each other. A total generational shift that has left a chasm of understanding.
Exactly this. Terrifying.

I read something recently by the authors of the cuoddling of the American mind. I think it helps to understand what's happening here. One thing is that instead of working out problems, clashes and disagreements between you, younger adults want to call to a higher authority. They use HR or whoever as a stand in for the teacher or parent to sort our the argument (ie tell the other side they are wrong). We really haven't managed to pass down those important skills and have failed them really. HR departments and trustees like this are continuing to fail them by going along with this. It's a difference of perspective, opinion and understanding. It didn't even sound like a clash if personalities, it was just this one topic. It shouldn't be an HR issue.

The terrifying thing isn't so much the completely different ways of seeing sex & gender, but the nb young person's inability to see and acknowledge that the other human being, who is not them, sees things differently. That Rosie holds a different perspective. That's not morally right or wrong, it just is what it is.

That's just appalling. Thanks to Rosie for speaking out and Janice for shedding the light on it. 5 Soldiers sounds wonderful.

Can these people hear themselves? What on earth do they think they are doing? The impact this silly thinking is having and will have on the arts just chills me.

I also have a background in the arts, but now work at the edges (eg freelance, not for an organisation). There's a lot of nervousness from trustees about appropriate behaviour from arts leaders following the Me Too movement, and specific cases of appalling behaviour from people such as Kevin Spacey and Max Stafford-Clark. So I can totally see why trustees felt they had to take this sort of complaint seriously. However, I can't see why they didn't seem to follow any sort of appropriate process and why her lawyer didn't give her better advice. What's really sad is that all regularly funded Arts Council organisations (NPOs) are about to enter the process of re-applying for funding for the next three year period, and they'll quite clearly find that incredibly difficult to do without an artistic leader. So, the likliehood is that they won't get funding, the company will close and that will be one less opportunity for dancers.

That has made me so angry this morning, how fucking dare they?? Bunch of spineless board members bowing down to a bunch of self centered ungrateful little shits.

I'm sure there would have been dancers who would have given anything for such an opportunity. These twerps are so emboldened they outright lied about what she said and then claimed penis and vagina were harassment? And they knew didn't they, they fucking knew they wouldn't be laughed out of the room, that they'd make her answer to them or be out on her arse. And of course it was the males who led the bigot cries

And also the insinuation of her being untoward because she showed them her childs bedroom on a fucking HOUSE tour!! and it made them 'uncomfortable'. Throwing anything they can at her to make sonething stick. Do they have any idea how frightening it is as a mother to have your children used to attack you, that underlying threat that they'll be taken away?

She probably showed them the toilet as well, where they would have had to get their penises and vulvas out to use it, so how they didn't faint from the shock there and then I'll never know!

Absolute disgrace.

@InvisibleDragon

Really not impressed with that lawyer. I hope she gets better legal advice soon!

So many London law firms have been 'educated' by Global Butterflies.

They could do with education on the Equality Act, but where is that?

I’m reminded of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and her giving her time to young people and them turning on you. Particularly this, where they say one thing to one audience and behave completely differently to another -

When the company reconvened, the non-binary dancer in the female part had quit (an older dancer had to learn the part in two days) and had filed a further complaint about the party, saying Kay’s use of the words “penis” and “vagina” amounted to sexual harassment. Kay was so upset she collapsed. An Instagram post by the dancer still says: ”Cannot wait to be back in the studio with [X] and the rest of the Rosie Kay Dance Company.”

She’s got an allotment if anyone wants to help her by doing some digging.

Like all of you, I'm outraged by this. I have little knowledge/experience of the world of the arts and had never heard of Rosie. I was intrigued by the '5 soldiers' concept so looked it up.
It's incredible. What a talented woman. What imagination. She is a peerless pearl before the woke swine

I too will dig for Rosie.

I’m reminded of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and her giving her time to young people and them turning on you.

YY. And JKR.

At least in the CNA and JKR cases, it was people who had been helped by them in the past turning.

But this mob seem to be actively sabotaging their current careers, which is a whole new level of bonkers fundamentalism. Are they so caught up in their in-group dynamics that they lose track of the fact they're blowing the infrastructure they're currently using?

(Got so be some sort of Chris Morris farce material here - they seem like the clowns in Four Lions).