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

It is not yet possible to force an individual to employ another individual

You just reminded me that one of the other two on that BBC 98 Women list got there with a campaign to get 1% of jobs reserved for the trans population.

I am now putting that idea together with this thread, and I think it’s a bad idea.

Apparently Rosie “denied that a trans non binary person can exist”

I don’t know what Rosie’s opinion is, but I am puzzled. If you are trans you are transitioning from something to something else. So you already have an identity that you don’t want to be and want to be something else. I am clear what this means if you are transitioning from m to f or from f to m. But if you already have a gender identity which you recognise as real how can you then say you are transing to a non gender identity, because by acknowledging that you have a gender identity is it possible to say that it is also possible to have a non gender identity. How do you obliterate in your mind the reality and experience of your previous gender identity, let alone deny the physical reality of your body - which if you are a dancer has been your obsession for most of your life.

Answers on a postcard please.

Quite, viques. Have very much noticed non-binary types fully positioning themselves as having a trans identity recently. Must admit I previously hadn't considered NB as such. All of the oppression with none of the effort, I suppose.

@viques

Apparently Rosie “denied that a trans non binary person can exist”

I don’t know what Rosie’s opinion is, but I am puzzled. If you are trans you are transitioning from something to something else. So you already have an identity that you don’t want to be and want to be something else. I am clear what this means if you are transitioning from m to f or from f to m. But if you already have a gender identity which you recognise as real how can you then say you are transing to a non gender identity, because by acknowledging that you have a gender identity is it possible to say that it is also possible to have a non gender identity. How do you obliterate in your mind the reality and experience of your previous gender identity, let alone deny the physical reality of your body - which if you are a dancer has been your obsession for most of your life.

Answers on a postcard please.

I am so weary of the "x does not exist" trope. Of course people exist and if they insist on having bespoke identities, that is their business. But forcing other people to indulge them in their beliefs is coercion.

@chilling19

Students meet the real world. Universities are not doing students any favours in encouraging them to think that the real,world won't tell them to do one. They obviously thought they could bully their employer and get their way. It didn't cross their mind that they wouldn't and would end up out of a job.

I wonder if the publisher's gonks who thought they could prevent the publisher from producing a book by JK Rowling are still employed there...

What I find infuriating about the students' behaviour is their palpable lack of self respect. If I thought my boss was in the wrong, and I went and reported them, and they got sanctioned for it and spoke out in the press against me I wouldn't cower and cry that it was 'unfair' for them to talk about what I had done. I would own it. I would be like 'yes, I reported on my boss because I thought he was wrong for x, y, z reasons, and I would do it again.' These students have no self respect because they cannot own the consequences of their actions. They want to get their boss in trouble with impunity, but also expect her to just shut up and not react at all.

And one more thing about feeling 'unsafe' at her house, and the imbalance of power. There is absolutely a problem with, say, a professor taking a young undergrad to his house and being creepy and imposing. But I've noticed more and more students saying that the mere fact a senior person takes them to their house is 'inappropriate' and dodgy because of a 'power imbalance'. I think this is a real pity. I saw it as a great honour when my academic supervisor invited me to his home for meals. Soon, people in senior positions just won't bother to invite the juniors round anymore in case they randomly decide they feel unsafe.

I find it almost impossible to believe Kay would say something as ridiculous as all trans women want to use women's toilets to attack them. I'll stand corrected if I'm wrong. But it just all sounds like a wilful misunderstanding once they'd smelled blood.

Well, given that they assumed Ms Kay's mention of The Female Eunuch was a reference to a female non-binary dancer as a eunuch, and that they'd not read Orlando I think you're pretty safe in your assumption here, @BraveBananaBadge!

They appear to be ignorant arrogant snow flakes.

I think the fact that nine of them felt they were placed at a disadvantage is simply weird. They outnumbered her by quite a lot.

“ They want to get their boss in trouble with impunity, but also expect her to just shut up and not react at all. ”

The students complaining about Professor Stock seemed to be of a similar view. They were allowed to publicly criticise her but if she responded, there were cries of bullying and abuse of position.

I think the fact that nine of them felt they were placed at a disadvantage is simply weird. They outnumbered her by quite a lot.

Ah, but she was in charge of how much pudding they'd get.

Carrot patch is looking good!

@AskingQuestionsAllTheTime

I think the fact that nine of them felt they were placed at a disadvantage is simply weird. They outnumbered her by quite a lot.

But she did really threatening things like making sure there was food that met their dietary demands, lighting candles in the garden, showing them her child’s room! She was so scary, it must have made some of them feel almost as though, you know, she was,like, their mother or something. OMG how weird must that have been, then she starts banging on about some book written in the dark ages that she said was famous but no-one had even heard of about people changing sex but it wasn’t real life ffs it was a novel from before even your grandmother was alive so hardly relevant, and then some other book about eunuchs. I mean , these were creative, intelligent,woke, aware,adult dancers, not kids doing AL English..............

No wonder they felt threatened and scared. Like a total nightmare.

viques, you are just so right! How could I have been so insensitive to their feelz. I'm so sorry.

@viques

viques

You know what? I'm 90% certain it was probably as you say.

But even if it wasn't, even if she got right fucking pissed off about women's rights, their spaces, their need to call themselves women, and to expect an explanation of what bloody non-binary even means, especially in a feminist context, or a ballet, it should be completely acceptable, nay totally normal, to do so.

It's not normal to expect people to pussyfoot around an ideology that they absolutely think is one hundred percent detrimental to them, not to mention contrary to reality itself.

This blog appears to be the full text of the open letter by the dancers.
medium.com/@Co-Choreographers-Romeo-Juliet/open-letter-dancers-respond-to-rosie-kays-article-in-the-times-b1f5479a4dd7

These are the grievances from the blog
"These grievances included the following statements she made during a work social:
“Identifying as non-binary is a cop out”
“Can you just confirm that you have a penis, and you have a vagina? Your mothers know that you’re a boy or a girl because they gave birth to you and saw you had a penis or a vagina”
“Transwomen are a danger to actual women in toilets and only want access to female toilets to commit sexual assault”
“Allowing trans people to take hormone blockers is creating eunuchs”
“There is no such thing as non-binary, you are one or the other and if you believe that you are non-binary then you are insane” "

Yeah, I think most people with experience can translate that drama/ shock jock language into what the original statement may actually have been.

@Artichokeleaves

Yeah, I think most people with experience can translate that drama/ shock jock language into what the original statement may actually have been.

Most people who have met entitled young adults, anyway.

I once said "I'm really glad I collected charity money in envelopes so that I couldn't have seen how much anyone gave even if I had wanted to" and was immediately accused of wanting to pry into people's charitable giving. I am not joking. Given that experience, I take the sort of accusations shown above with a shovel of salt rather than just a pinch.

I have to look at the probabilities, and I think it improbable that she actually said those things as they are given, because on the whole, real people don't. Anyone informed enough to say such things would be informed enough to know that they were not accurate. Only the figments of the paranoid are so baldly unpleasant in such a generalised way as a rule.

And what, in the name of whatever deity you feel like, would be the motive of the leader of a dance company (or whatever it is properly called) to sabotage her own dance company in such an extraordinary way?

@Manderleyagain

These are the grievances from the blog "These grievances included the following statements she made during a work social: “Identifying as non-binary is a cop out” “Can you just confirm that you have a penis, and you have a vagina? Your mothers know that you’re a boy or a girl because they gave birth to you and saw you had a penis or a vagina” “Transwomen are a danger to actual women in toilets and only want access to female toilets to commit sexual assault” “Allowing trans people to take hormone blockers is creating eunuchs” “There is no such thing as non-binary, you are one or the other and if you believe that you are non-binary then you are insane” "

If that's what she said, she's right.

Yes, but who would say all these things at once to a group of people they were trying to get to be a coherent whole rather than a disorganised bunch who were not working together? Really?

Her object was to get these people working with her and working together. Why would she go to all the effort of eg finding out what they could all eat and so on, then deliberately say a lot of things she would have known would raise their hackles and make them detest her?

She was trying to pour oil on troubled water, and one or more of the group lit a match. I doubt that she was the arsonist.

Hmm they certainly don’t come across any better in their own words than in the version Rosie told Janice.
I particularly like the bit where they say ‘we’re not young people! One of us is 40!’
It’s like your child going ‘I’m not little! I’m six!’

showing them her child’s room!

I mean, how terrible of her to show them her house when they'd asked her for a house tour. SO oppressive I can't even -

If they think that letter paints them in a better light...

"We insisted on an apology, she gave us an apology, it wasn't a good enough apology but now we can bully her further because, look, she apologised! Obviously we don't accept her apology, because it wasn't written exactly the way we dictated, but we can further browbeat her, because by giving the apology we demanded, and didn't accept, we have proof that she should have apologised. And she should have apologised, and she did, but it wasn't quite right."

FFS

What is wrong with saying young people are inexperienced? I fully understood that, when I graduated,I was inexperienced. Training from childhood doesn't mean you are an experienced adult dancer or have experience as a paid employee who has to perform for paying audiences.

It annoys me that young people demand the same respect as people who have earned through years of work. Earn your stripes.

In terms of the rest of the letter... it cones across that they hate her. They hate her beliefs and they are determined to correct her and anything she has said.

I don't know if I would repeatedly question someone about their genitals. It isn't appropriate at all.

Their letter reads like she sat them down and rambled at them. She sounds like it was a drunken group conversation where exception and offense was taken. The reality is most likely somewhere in the middle.

But oh, they don't have respect for her and want her head.