Choreographer Rosie Kay forced to resign from her own company

[peonyred]

This is a share token so you can read the story. Another Janice Turner article. Simone suggested Crowdfunding for her new company.

Rosie Kay: I resigned from my own dance company after I was accused of transphobia

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/3935bc4a-5858-11ec-a3f7-65d2d47c7fea?shareToken=d4efe0ddb11ede84d52835a0a02d70e3

A few years ago there was a big fall out in the circus community, one recognised leader if a large online group was ostracised for his terf views.

I remember seeing a victory dance posted on line by a naked bar loose pants pre op trans woman. With much applause.

When I recently re visited large open fb groups it's seems the trend to get mastectomies if you're a female performer and call each other xx and xy.

Why does this matter?

Circus groups rely on a lot of funding for educational workshops in schools and also run a lot of after school and holiday clubs. It's their main source of income.

The arts council will give grants But the arts council also runs school accreditation in the arts, where you need to prove your schools commitment to the arts, including working with practitioners. There's also arts awards which go from ks1 right up to gcse and actually is a recognised qualification. The core aim is to engage with and work within arts settings and with artists of all backgrounds, which could actually include circus.

There's also the sexual health circus 🤡

sexualhealthcircus.co.uk/

Sorry, off on a tangent there....

But the arts are very captured as rosie's experience horrifically demonstrates.

Off to garden...

I am very happy for everyone who lives outside gender ie sex role stereotypes that are imposed on us, because they are oppressive by definition. But none of us can escape the sex we are born with. So I feel very worried for Rosie. What’s she said apart from that? She’s stood up for women’s rights (no crime). What did she do wrong except for use reality-based language? Still unclear apart from causing some subjective offended feelings in the eyes of the offended, what she did to merit any kind of investigation or punishment?

Obviously some of the company subscribe to magical thinking, whether it’s the possibility of humans being able to magically move between the two states of binary biological sex reality (female or male), or humans magically changing to a third, entirely subjective new individual state of being. (Outside the sex binary)..Or maybe they just wish to be seen as believers? OK fine.

But other people can’t then be punished for not believing that a person has reached an only ever imaginary, literally unachievable new state of being. It’s the only rational response that anyone could make to such a claim. How much scarier if people do really believe that magical thinking, or an irrational belief, has somehow become the truth.

As a global population we’re seeing real social or medical harm caused by exploitative disinformation and misinformation and lies around things like Covid vaccines, or previously in the UK, Brexit. I think most people accept that a lot of people are still being manipulated online by political camps. This new form of gender identity politics seems just as manipulative and consciously divisive by trying to turn everyday facts into blasphemy. With the heaviest impacts of that on vulnerable people, women and kids. It’s a men’s sexual rights campaign.

@ChattyLion

I am very happy for everyone who lives outside gender ie sex role stereotypes that are imposed on us, because they are oppressive by definition. But none of us can escape the sex we are born with. So I feel very worried for Rosie. What’s she said apart from that? She’s stood up for women’s rights (no crime). What did she do wrong except for use reality-based language? Still unclear apart from causing some subjective offended feelings in the eyes of the offended, what she did to merit any kind of investigation or punishment?

Obviously some of the company subscribe to magical thinking, whether it’s the possibility of humans being able to magically move between the two states of binary biological sex reality (female or male), or humans magically changing to a third, entirely subjective new individual state of being. (Outside the sex binary)..Or maybe they just wish to be seen as believers? OK fine.

But other people can’t then be punished for not believing that a person has reached an only ever imaginary, literally unachievable new state of being. It’s the only rational response that anyone could make to such a claim. How much scarier if people do really believe that magical thinking, or an irrational belief, has somehow become the truth.

As a global population we’re seeing real social or medical harm caused by exploitative disinformation and misinformation and lies around things like Covid vaccines, or previously in the UK, Brexit. I think most people accept that a lot of people are still being manipulated online by political camps. This new form of gender identity politics seems just as manipulative and consciously divisive by trying to turn everyday facts into blasphemy. With the heaviest impacts of that on vulnerable people, women and kids. It’s a men’s sexual rights campaign.

ChattyLion What did she do wrong except for use reality-based language?

Apparently she showed her child's bedroom to these easily-affronted Young Things, which was clearly unforgivable and deliberately intended by her to upset them.

I am still trying to work out just what the hell was so wrong with that. Was the room decorated (by the child?) in a clearly binary way? (How?) Was it just incredibly untidy, such that her showing it to them was an implied slur on their deservingness? What? Enquiring minds need to know.

I am still trying to work out just what the hell was so wrong with that. Was the room decorated (by the child?) in a clearly binary way? (How?) Was it just incredibly untidy, such that her showing it to them was an implied slur on their deservingness? What? Enquiring minds need to know.
Madness, I know. To me it sounds like, just as in witch hunts of yore, they just cast around for anything to add to their list of complaints and objections. Any mud that might stick.

One of the articles I read said that Rosie initially went to the chair of the company (or trustees?) and asked her to speak to the dancers because there was so much hostility since the party. I expect she hoped she'd do some informal mediation type thing so they could work together (my guess). The chair took it on herself to treat it as a formal hr issue, and got the dancers all to make statements. So they were pretty much invited to complain rather than instigating it. I expect that's why some of the allegations are trivial (eg the bedroom) because they were asked to state what happened at the party, and so included everything. I expect the dancer found being let into the child's room uncomfortable because it felt like an invasion of privacy. It's certainly not something anyone should start making formal complaints about, but it's a reaction someone could have.

I find "boy steps" and "girl steps" a bit cringe as a turn of phrase. But it's obviously referencing the male and female repetoirs of dance moves. It's such a low bar for complaining formally. If they had auditioned for female and male roles, did they really think the language around that would be changed for them? Were they expecting the characters they were portraying to change to nb too?

But we don't have the dancers' side if the story, and don't know what they were trying to achieve.

Boy jumps and girl jumps. Technical terms for particular movements. Complaining about someone using them during instruction is as silly as it would be to complain because an art teacher referred to black and white.

I find "boy steps" and "girl steps" a bit cringe as a turn of phrase. But it's obviously referencing the male and female repetoirs of dance moves.

Yeah, in a professional company class in a ballet company the terms would tend to be "ladies" and "gentlemen" in referring to the dancers. Contemporary trained dancers might be more likely all to do the same thing, but it's undeniable but most male dancers are going to look different from most female dancers, even when they're doing the same steps or choreography.

I thought Ms Kay's comment about the dancers being mostly quite inexperienced was interesting - for some of them, this contract was their first professional job. Entitled & a bit snowflakey maybe.

Bbc report that there's been a letter signed by a number of the dancers in response to Rosie's times article :

Rosie Kay: Dancers write open letter to choreographer after gender row www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-59584638

Maybe they should do a piece on this like Rashomon.
Rosie’s view
The non binary’s view and and another dancers view and see how they all differ.
It must be great to invite everyone over as your employer and then deliver views to your employees that you know will have implications upon your employees and how it will affect them.
And then not liking the outcome and abuse of your own power as employer of your own company when the employees feel that you have abused your position and your employees.

Imagine that and who do you turn to when your boss is being out of order.

The dancers are complaining that she went public as it could be detrimental to their careers. So let us tell you what to think and what you’re not allowed to say, hound you out of your own company but don’t say anything because it’ll make us look bad!!

@AskingQuestionsAllTheTime

foxgoosefinch But the idea that we quite literally have to pretend they are not actually male or female is insane.

I caught most of an interesting programme on the World Service the other day in which a child called "Baby John Musamba" was described as literally having no developed genitals. Brought up as a girl because it was simply easier, she came out as unusual when she was twenty-six.

A rare case of someone who really was neither one nor the other.

I definitely wouldn't believe it to be the case when two people out of nine claim it, though! Not unless it were some situation in which the unsexed had been actively recruited.

Biological sex is about more than genitals. They could have tested the chromosomes to establish XX or XY.

[Kay] added the only talk about "eunuchs" was a reference to Germaine Greer's feminist text The Female Eunuch.

It’s all rather horrible but I laughed at this. They hadn’t read Orlando, and they thought that by referring to to one of the most famous feminist books ever written, she was calling trans people “eunuchs.”

And they signed, presumably with their names, an “open letter” in which they complained she was damaging her careers - but she hadn’t named them. (This part is confusing. An “open letter seen by the BBC”? The letter itself didn’t show up when I searched for it.)

Oh dear. The dancers are discovering that being marked as self obsessed bullying troublemakers isn't great for their careers. Welcome to the real world.

Silly things. In what industry does bullying look good?

The bloody WPATH have now said eunuchs are a gender, despite the fact that it's clearly a form of sexual assault in history and even now.

There was a ring of male eunuchs in India prosecuted for kidnapping and forcing sterilisation on young boys.

Contained in this is some disturbing content around historical cults that physically removed all primary and secondary sexual characteristics; essentially non binaryism

genevievegluck.substack.com/p/castrating-children-in-the-service

@OwningAllMyMistakes

Maybe they should do a piece on this like Rashomon. Rosie’s view The non binary’s view and and another dancers view and see how they all differ. It must be great to invite everyone over as your employer and then deliver views to your employees that you know will have implications upon your employees and how it will affect them. And then not liking the outcome and abuse of your own power as employer of your own company when the employees feel that you have abused your position and your employees.

Imagine that and who do you turn to when your boss is being out of order.

I worked as a person with a vagina in construction many a year so I do know how it actually is when you have no power.

But what is it Rosie said that is 'abuse of [her] own power' exactly?

"Iona McGuire, a non-binary dancer at the centre of the row, said: "We weren't striving to cancel Rosie. I was hoping for acknowledgement of her blatant transphobia and an apology for her constant refusal to use my correct pronouns."

So RK apologised, sent a letter apologising, apologised some more BUT IT WASN'T ENOUGH. She wasn't the right kind of sorry, she wouldn't comply and utterly and totally fall into line and performatively acquiesce to the ideology.

Absolutely flipping terrifying.

And why is is so not ok to refer to a person's genitals sometimes (as stated in the article) and yet we have a whole generation of school children being told to say "person with a vagina/penis" instead of boy/girl. The demands are nothing if not inconsistent.

When I read between the lines Rosie's crime was to slip up on the pronoun stuff which is phenomenally difficult in highly pressured situations as she describes.

We've been using / exposed to singular pronouns since birth. Saying they when it's really a she when directing a dance piece must be extremely grammatically confusing.

You'd be using they when referring to groups of dancers. You'd be instructing and guiding the dancers on how how respond to her and "when she does this move, you do this move" etc. Using they or them would literally be directionally nonsense.

Saying him when you've obviously got a female in front of you, and dance relies on sexed biological strengths would also be challenging and forced speech.

I imagine directing a whole ballet uses more pronouns and "them/ they's" than other professions. it's certainly my experience when directing primary school plays.

IN her own home...... she she invited them into......AS THEIR WORK SUPERIOR.

Now....... let's have a serious conversation that if it'd have been a male that had invited people into his home ..... people who's careers he held in hand so to speak....... and then started banging on about his views on gender and sex etc... knowing some of her co- workers felt the opposite. and how it would be seen. It'd rightly be seen as some sort of bullying in the workplace. Why is this any differfent just because the antagonist is 'she' rather than 'he'?

I've just read the most recent BBC article, which gives the dancers' account. I have to say, I would never start discussing my GC beliefs, unprompted, in a conversational setting, with colleagues who I knew held polar opposite views. What reaction was she expecting? And I especially wouldn't start by interrogating two colleagues about their genitals. To use a mumsnet phrase, it does sound a bit "goady".

I think it's crucial that people challenge gender ideology when it comes to policy etc, but quizzing individuals at a dinner party doesn't sit well with me. But of course I wasn't actually there.

I have to say, I would never start discussing my GC beliefs, unprompted, in a conversational setting, with colleagues who I knew held polar opposite views.

I'd tend to follow that myself, actually about any beliefs.

But then TRAs and NBs like this always start discussing their beliefs, unprompted, in a conversational setting, including pronoun demands and sex denial.

What's that, if not "goady"?

What is wrong with some of these young people?! Dh politely but firmly recently asked a young couple to move as they were sitting in our booked seats. They did so but ran off and reported Dh to the transport police who stormed in to tell us off! Fortunately numerous other passengers stood up and said Dh had been perfectly polite to the pair if anything they were aggressive. I pity anyone dealing with these young over sensitive nutters! And it’s surely a plain fact you can’t change sex!

If they believed it they’d stand by it.

We do seem to have an issue where people just want to drop the fart and run away. Own it...