Museums should encourage children to explore gender identity says new trans guidance

[IwantToRetire]

Museums should be places where children can explore gender identity, according to new guidance advising cultural institutions on transgender inclusion.

Academics at the University of Leicester have devised guidance to help museum and gallery bosses deal with “confusing” new legal protections for <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.ph/o/qIWop/www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/11/feminists-want-trans-women-to-show-passport-to-use-lavatory/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">gender-critical beliefs and “awkward” conversations about women’s rights.

Cultural attractions should be “places not just where trans kids can go, but where they want to go”, according to the 44-page guide, which has been endorsed by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the largest provider of grant funding for the UK heritage sector.

It adds that signs and flags allow children to feel museums are places “they can explore self-expression without fear of reprisal”, and advises that they “should be provided with access to the toilets and changing rooms of their choice”.

Balancing the push for trans inclusion with legal protections for gender-critical thinkers - those who believe humans cannot change sex - can be “confusing” for museum bosses, according to the guide.

It warns of a “climate of fear” as sceptical voices in the gender debate have “become increasingly bold”, and claims that “outspoken objections to trans content frequently intersect with homophobia, misogyny and racism”.

A section on dealing with hypothetical scenarios within museum management offers advice on what to do if someone refuses to use preferred pronouns or if “a member of staff at the museum has been expressing gender critical beliefs in the staff room”.

The guide is supported by a raft of cultural sector organisations representing “thousands” of museums, gallery and archives, including the International Council of Museums UK, Association of Leading Visitor Attractions and the Museums Association.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/12/museums-trans-guidance-gender-identity-university-leicester/

Quite a long article, so have picked out few bits, but worth reading all of it. Behind a paywall, but can be read by going to https://archive.ph and pasting in the Telegraph link above in the box provided.

Earlier this month, the University of Leicester published guidance on trans-inclusive practice for museums. Denise Fahmy and Audrey Ludwig say it is, at best, misleading and may be discriminatory.
https://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/magazine/article/trans-inclusion-guidance-museums-high-risk

Thanks for this thread. Very informative but shocking bias in the so-called guidance.

I worked in a LA museum where they fully would have used this to suggest staff were ‘transphobic’.
I’m dismayed at the poor interpretation of objects in seeing already at this. Desperately trying to make some non existent link to a trans person, it’s an embarrassment.
Personally I wouldn’t take my children in if they heavily pushed this. If it was actual real objects that’s fine (I worked in one museum where some items were collected from a Transformation business 20 years ago, fine). But pushing an agenda, nope.
Why do adults have this idea it’s their job to school other peoples children. What if a museum pushed a religious to make them all believe in a certain religion, would people stand for that?

Why do adults have this idea it’s their job to school other peoples children.

Education is part of a museum's role. But there's a porous boundary between education and indoctrination. Sometimes it's about challenging previous indoctrination - from "here are artefacts we collected from those savages" to "here are artefacts from a culture and technology different from our own". But sometimes it's just imposing a new doctrine.

Yes exactly- schooling something that isn’t actually based on fact, just feeling. Again is like pushing religion.

If I'm going to go to all the bother of taking my children to a museum I want them to be exploring the artefacts and exhibitions in front of them, not their own inner sense of self. They can do the latter when they're on the loo.

If anyone can be bothered!

The team behind the recently published trans-inclusion guidance for museums and galleries has responded to criticism of its approach.

The report was developed by Suzanne MacLeod, Richard Sandell, Sharon Cowan, and E-J Scott, who have now issued a statement in response to critical media coverage.
In joint statement, they write: “We took the decision as a team early on not to respond to articles that misrepresented the guidance or sensationalised the issue.

However, recent suggestions that the guidance is flawed and contains outdated information need to be addressed so that cultural organisations can continue to use the Guidance with confidence.”

https://advisor.museumsandheritage.com/news/authors-of-trans-inclusive-museum-guidance-respond-to-criticism/

recent suggestions that the guidance is flawed and contains outdated information need to be addressed so that cultural organisations can continue to use the Guidance with confidence.”

If you're going to educate, better make sure what you're saying is true, eh?

Stupid women

We never achieved anything ourselves.

Right to vote, strikes for equal pay, wearing non conforming clothes like trousers, cycling, fighting in wars, right to own money when married, right to get divorced.

All thanks to our brave trans comrades. While the womenly women did womenly things like staying in the kitchen.

Good job we have museums to re educate us

Oh, education, that's another thing womenly women can thank trans for.

I’ve said this a number of times on various threads but Richard Sandell - one of the authors of this 'guidance' - seems to be the main driver behind all of this in the museum world. He's Professor of Museum Studies at Leicester University yet all things LGBTQ, with a very heavy emphasis on the T, appears to be the focus of his work. And he is all over everything once you start looking.

This is a (fairly random) example of his name popping up after a very quick google, at a museum symposium at Hillsborough Castle in N. Ireland in 2020:

The keynote was delivered by Richard Sandell, Professor of Museum Studies at University of Leicester, who has worked on UK-wide LGBTQ+ heritage projects like the National Trust’s Prejudice & Pride public programme. His paper, ‘Unconditionally Queer’ utilised powerful examples of international museum activism to galvanise those in attendance to pursue a practice that can truly effect change in the societies we serve.
The panel sessions explored the reinterpretation of objects within museum and heritage collections using a queer lens with speakers from National Museum of Ireland, National Gallery of Ireland, Historic Royal Palaces, National Museums Northern Ireland and the National Lottery Heritage Fund. This was followed by presentations from LGBTQ+ community groups who have partnered with museums in the past and have been actively involved in the advancement of LGBTQ+ rights in Northern Ireland. These included TransgenderNI, the only dedicated Trans resource centre in the UK; Cara-Friend, a LGBTQ+ community group that has been supporting queer people in Northern Ireland since the 1970s and Outburst, an annual queer arts festival dedicated to LGBTQ+ activism.
Following the presentations, a workshop led by Doctoral Researcher Kris Reid, exploring the concept of ‘queering the object’, used some of Hillsborough Castle’s handling collection to encourage participants to reinterpret their meaning. Finally, we finished the day with a LGBTQ+ tour that utilises over 300 years of history to explore the royal, political and social stories of Hillsborough Castle.
The symposium highlighted the need for museum engagement with not only LGBTQ+ communities, but global human rights and social issues. As one speaker said on the day “history should be a stimulus for creativity and change.

In other words - this movement is going to impose its own ideology on the past whether you like it or not.

Reinterpreting and Queering our Collections/Stories - basically making stuff up to fit an agenda. It all reminds me of that push to make Joan of Arc ‘trans’. Sadly I do know someone who has jumped on this idea but it’s only in talks, not in the galleries.
I don’t know how a profession is meant to have any respect if we get to the stage you can just not just interpret, but wildly make things up.

There are much bigger issues for museums at the moment, particularly local authority ones, they would do better getting as many people on board than alienating their audience.
The local authorities near me are in serious debt. I spent years fighting off councillors about selling off collections, we always used the argument of how much funding we were bringing in. Now there are no staff and they bring in pennies. They’re selling off council assets as fast as they can, I can’t see why collections aren’t on that list soon. Some places there are virtually no one looking after the collections, let alone reinterpreting them.

Aaaaand yet again it's all about making pink and sparkly unicorn children feel welcomed and wanted and catered for, while booting out the boring old children from different faiths, cultures, disabilities, traumas, life experiences, who can with their mummies just shut up and accept that their characteristics are ugly and stupid and make them wrong people, and that the world is no longer for them.

But this is what happens when you let an extremist religious movement with a major prejudice against others write your guidance, and you neither have a brain nor the faintest scooby about actual inclusion and diversity, nor apparently any ethics. Because you'd think it wouldn't take that much capacity for thought to be able to think 'we actually need to care about all children equally and provide for them all instead of pick the winners and spit on the losers'.

We may think we’re enjoying a day out at a museum to find out more about the past and how lives were lived. But no: according to one of Sandell’s enthusiastic collaborators (and his one-time researcher), Serena Iervolino, it’s about this:

Curators and critics have drawn on the disruptive energy of queer theory to unsettle traditional binary thinking and heteronormative modes of representation around sexuality and gender prevalent in exhibitions (Levin Citation2010, 6; Levin Citation2012). Sandell (Citation2017, 67) labels ‘queer perspectives’ those queer theory-inspired interpretative approaches employed by, for instance, artist-curator Matt Smith to challenge binary accounts of sexuality. Tyburczy proposes a ‘queer curatorship’ consisting of ‘an experimental display technique’ that creates alternative configurations between objects and bodies to construct ‘new epistemological frameworks for understanding and exhibiting sexuality’ (Citation2013, 108). Focused primarily on the representation of sexuality, arguably these curatorial and interpretative strategies, devised by queer-identifying curators/artists, have often been conceived as scholar-/artist-led endeavours. These initiatives differ sharply from those implementing co-curatorial approaches advocated by some (Scott Citation2019), which privilege the lived experiences of community members, rather than exhibition-makers’ curatorial/artistic vision.

This sort of thing is in large part why an old friend of mine, who’s worked in a well-known national museum all her life, decided to slip quietly away into early retirement. It had become intolerable.

Whenever I go to the Pitt Rivers museum I like to visit the witchcraft cabinet - a highlight is a ‘witch in a bottle’ (just a bottle with a story attached). The bottle is now overshadowed by a huge pink and blue sign explaining that witchcraft is all about the ‘lgbt’, who have been marginalised as witches blah blah.. NO MENTION OF WOMEN. I find it so offensive and hypocritical that they have appropriated and ‘erased’ the mass slaughter of women so blatantly. Imagine the outcry if that was done to any other group or historical mass killings. Salt in the wound that they love to go a-hunting of the terven and the karens who don’t fall into line with their luxury beliefs.

https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/beyond-the-binary/witchcraft

Incidentally, that gem above 👆 is from a paper about the Science Museum’s notorious ‘What Makes my Gender?’ exhibition, and is illustrated with photos of a ‘hard packer’, binder and ‘a pair of worn-out breast enhancers belonging to a young trans curator’.

Focusing on sexism and stereotypes limiting women’s and men’s opportunities should be more appropriate. Also the problems with biological facts eg childcare and body strength defining job opportunities

I got about twelve words into that quote and then all I could picture was that Magdalen gif, 'oh FUCK OFF', on repeat.

What a load of absolute steaming shite.

@teawamutu HA! Yes, exactly! Magdalen 😥 ❤️

ALL witches were LGBT?

Just wtaf?

There were no straight witches at all? Ever?

I keep thinking of the Marie Rose nit comb and how it was relevant to trans history because trans people often have hair. 🙄

That‘s the level this shit comes down to. Everything through the lens of the trans agenda. Never has a persecuted minority been so glorified.

Yup. It's just completely unneccesary.

But they have to keep pushing this agenda onto children because otherwise they might start thinking about where the next biscuits are coming from or playing football or riding bikes or picking scabs off their knees or wondering if they their favourite is chocolate ice cream or raspberry ripple or how do planes fly, instead of generating internal angst about whether they have been born in the ‘right’ body.

They can all just FOTTFSOF with their queer theory.

Oh FFS.

They are not the witches, they are the ones who want to burn witches.

This is utterly depressing. I'm visiting Austria soon and now I fear I need to "examine" their witch museum. Might find a blue and pink mark of the devil ;)

I'm still stuck on how outraged those poor women would be that they not only suffered at the hands of the evil bastards who tortured and burned them, but now they've been appropriated and used by another political movement with no interest in them or in rational truth, just in how they serve the purposes of those using them. How on earth are those many happily married women supposed to be 'LGBT'? Have they added 'was burned for witchcraft' somewhere into the + without telling anyone?