A prestigious art museum in London has prompted backlash after featuring trans-identified males in a historical exhibition of the women’s liberation movement. The Women in Revolt! exhibit is a first of its kind project offering “a wide-ranging exploration of feminist art” made by over 100 female artists during the period between 1970 – 1990.
While the exhibit purports to amplify the work of women, some female visitors to the museum quickly noticed that a number of trans-identified males had been slipped in among the displays.
One of the most disturbing pieces include archival copies of a publication created by men with a sexual fetish for pretending to be women, including one letter from a transvestite who complains of being jealous of his wife.
“Once I had admitted my true inner self to others I felt great relief, and thereupon decided to be myself all the time and live life as it suited me and not as the way I had been committed to live since coming out of the womb,” reads the letter, written by a man identified as “Julia.”
“Prior to this, my marriage (to a woman), had broken up and my wife was seeking a divorce together with the custody of the children because of my attitude to life, namely brought about because of my jealousy of her femininity and her ability to become pregnant and know true happiness within the straight society.”
The admission was one of several personal anecdotes contained within a magazine primarily catering to gay men called “Come Together.”
Information on the exhibit was first posted to X by women’s rights advocate @Sorelle_Arduino, who visited the exhibit yesterday and uploaded photos to her social media showing displays featuring trans-identified males.
One of the photos snapped by the user was an abstract painting by transgender artist Erica Rutherford displayed next to Monica Sjöö’s iconic piece “Wages for Housework.” In the display’s description of Rutherford’s painting, it states that he was inspired by being brought “face to face with the humiliations” of being treated as a woman.
“No cultural womens event can happen any more without men. Art has become a simpering pile of conformist junk,” one user said in response to @Sorelle_Arduino‘s thread on the exhibit.
“It would be bigoted to talk about women without talking about the ones that are men,” another quipped sarcastically.
Other displays featured articles from newsletters produced by the Beaumont Society, a group created in order to advocate for heterosexual crossdressers to be allowed to practice their sexual fetish publicly.
Among their goals, according to the group’s website, is to “promote and assist the study of gender.” The lobby organization uses as its namesake the 18th century French nobleman Charles Chevalier d’Éon de Beaumont, who would assume the identity of a woman named Charlotte, and was officially recognized as a woman by King Louis XVI.
The Beaumont Society, which currently advocates for the medical ‘transitioning’ of minors, was founded in 1966 by four male transvestites, one of whom was a leading figure in the fetish movement in the United States. Virginia Charles Prince, born Arnold Lowman, aided in creating the organization as a branch of a secret society of transvestic fetishists, who called themselves Full Personality Expression (FPE), located in California.
Initially, the group, as well as others like it which began to spring up in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia at the time, refused membership to homosexuals, presumably on the basis that prominent transvestites did not want the practice associated with sexual motivations. In one newsletter printed by Virginia Prince, who is credited with having popularized the term ‘transgender,’ he writes: “Some of the more narrow-minded of our sister TV’s [transvestites] see nothing good in anything that homosexuals do, but personally I am all for their success and would cooperate in helping them to achieve it where I could out of pure self-interest for our group.”
Prince has also openly discussed the sexual nature of the crossdressing fetish. In 1985 he appeared in an HBO documentary titled, “What Sex am I?”, where he commented on the element of arousal involved, saying that it was a “turn on” for “almost everybody” who participates.
“You have to grow past the stage of being an erotically aroused male in a dress, which results eventually in an orgasm. But when the orgasm is over, if you continue to stay in the dress, you begin to discover there’s this other part of yourself. You cease being an erotically aroused male, and you simply become a man who becomes to recognize that, gee, there’s something nice about girlness that I’m enjoying experiencing,” Prince, a co-founder of The Beaumont Society, said.
In recent years The Beaumont Society has become increasingly influential within the government and the medical establishment. The group is listed as an advisor to the National Health Service (NHS) in England as well as in Wales.
This is not the first controversy involving the Tate Museum centering trans-identified males, with multiple incidents occurring over the past year that have raised concerns amongst women’s rights advocates.
In June, a trans activist known for staging protests involving human urine was invited to read poetry during the Queer and Now LGBTQIA+ art festival. Jamie Cottle was dressed in women’s lingerie during the reading, wearing white panties that had the words “Sugar Money” embroidered into the crotch.
Though Cottle’s presentation was said to be for ages 16 and up, there were even younger children in attendance in the nearby area, with no boundaries set up to prevent minors from entering.