The Tate transes Marlow Moss

[ArabeIIaScott]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12096405/Tate-gallery-changes-pronouns-late-British-artist-assuming-identified-trans.html

'Tate gallery changes the pronouns of celebrated British artist who died 60 YEARS AGO to become gender-neutral'

At first, I found only this interesting essay/biography on Moss:

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/marlow-moss-1671/essay

And then I found that the latest transing of Moss is actually on the Tate's kids' site:

https://www.tate.org.uk/kids/explore/who-is/who-marlow-moss

Quote:

'Wait - why did you say their voice? Was Marlow male, or female? Or neither?
The short answer? We’re not totally sure.'

Moss was female, you fucking lying bastards. They've erased a lesbian artist's sex.

Yes, indeed. What is lacking in her paintings is definitely an overlay of the Progress Pride flag. Probably why she isn't better known.

Did I read something today pointing out this only applies to the children's texts in the Tate and not the general blurb for the public?

Apologies if I've misunderstood. But somehow the inconsistency is worse?

Yes, as I posted in the OP. Well, the online page for Tate has a long essay that refers to Moss as a woman. The kids' page has transed her.

How dare they do that to her. Who the heck do they think they are?!

I wonder if she has any relatives and what they think about this.

The essay is much better.

I do think it is legitimate to say 'due to x, y and z, Marlow Moss had a masculine persona'. Also an academic perspective on why she very clearly was not a transman in the modern sense, and what has changed in medicine and the culture since then, would be interesting.

Maybe it offends me because it's so stupid. Like saying Oliver Cromwell was a Marxist or something. It flattens the whole of culture and history into a single ahistorical evenly lit scene.

She’s a butch lesbian. Lots of women presented in that way in that historical period. It was fairly standard.

I posted on another thread about Marlow where she was being used to prop up a ‘trans people have always been around’ argument. She was used, as was James Barry, and some women who fought in the Civil War (USA) under men’s names.

This retrospective transing of women escaping negative sexist discrimination really has to stop.

I think that kind of approach to historical figures is becoming more common. There has always been some of it, the "Jesus was really a hippy" kind of stuff, but I'm seeing it more in what I'd have thought would be grown-up settings with more nuance.

I think maybe it's in part enabled because so many people do have a poor understanding of history, they make crude comparisons but don't know enough to make better ones. And pop culture is very heavily pushing certain historical narratives even when they are clearly anachronistic or even simple ahistorical. Many people seem to think this is the right way to understand history.

Apologies! Was flitting between here and Twitter and may have seen similar on there too.

I didn’t know about this artist. An old Guardian article is interesting:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/aug/25/marlow-moss-cornwalls-forgotten-art-maverick-tate-britain

perhaps we should all write letters to the Director of Tate, Maria Balshaw, and the Chair of Trustees, Roland Rudd, or other trustees, c/o Tate Britain, Millbank, London, GB SW1P 4RG

you can see list of other Trustees here: https://www.tate.org.uk/about-us/board-trustees

Great article from Nicole Lampert about this here: https://thecritic.co.uk/the-transing-of-marlow-moss

She points out that Moss isn't the only woman who the Tate has done this to:

A brief glance at the Tate online shows that Marlow isn’t the only female artist who have been “deadclaimed”. Claude Cahun, an androgynous French photographer and artist who assumed a variety of male and female performative characters but always referred to herself as “elle” is also given “they/ them” pronouns.

This is a portrait Claude Monet - he has long hair and no beard.
He must be non-binary.

oh no I forgot it's only women that are not allowed to step outside the social norms.

Any number of very young trans kids in portraits from earlier eras. Here's the future James II, second from the left, four years old and not breeched! Obviously the only possible explanation for this is that SHE knew her gender forcibly assigned at birth was at odds with her inner identity. Nothing whatsoever to do with cultural norms, oh no. God save Queen James!

[Nurse! The screens]

As someone whose brother, as a teenager, carefully explained to me that women were incapable of great works of science and art, as testified to by their absence in history (he has fortunately since changed his mind), all this is so typical and upsetting.

I had a job once where I was researching women in early 20th Century Ireland, covering the War of Independence and I found that more and more women disappeared from the accounts as the years went past. Thus, in the earliest accounts of the Easter Rising, women abounded but by the time my dd was in school, only Countess Markievicz had survived.

Interesting, and confirms similar observations I have made about what happens to female authors and, quite recently, to female activists. They tend to disappear slowly from the records, the way old photographs fade away. Not right away, but after a generation or two, perhaps when those who are writing of the events did not witness them but apply other methods of deciding who mattered.

It will be fun to do some research on which famous men we might merit posthumously transition! Must get to it right away, so I can contact Tate (for painters and sculptors) etc.

Here's Charles Darwin with his oldest child, William Erasmus Darwin. I believe it is the only known photo of Charles Darwin with another human being. William married but died childless (although not because he was trans and had been sterilised, for what it's worth!): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Erasmus_Darwin

Can the Tate trans their namesake Andrew? Could be one way to dismantle his fanbase...

Women are barely evident through most of our cultural history. As you say, nepeta, they seem to fade, or become 'anon' or now, as we can see here, be retrospectively transed.

It's as if history and women's names are largely immiscible.

“Do women have to be men to get into the museum?” to paraphrase the Guerrilla Girls

Is religion based on biology?

😔

Tits out or tits off, I guess is the way the trans sorting hat works now, Apocalipstick.

And of course, if we no longer count these women as women as they have posthumously been declared trans/nb the incredibly low numbers of women artists shrinks to almost nothing.

So again when we look for inclusion where it may not exist we exclude an underrepresented demographic.

Slow hand clap.