TERF War Comes to Tate Britain

As transactivism gains ground in the British public arts, Alexander Adamsexplores the struggle over female artists.

It has been reported that Tate will be using the pronoun ‘they’ in reference to a female artist who worked in the early twentieth century. Marjorie “Marlow” Moss (1889-1958) was a British sculptor and painter. She was part of the London-based abstract artists, including Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, and Ben Nicholson, who worked under the influence of Piet Mondrian and Parisian Modernism. Moss had a modest reputation during her lifetime and has been a posthumous beneficiary of the wave of feminist historiography rediscovering “neglected” female artists since the 1970s.

Moss adopted a male appearance by cutting her hair short, wearing male-style clothing, and using an ambiguous nickname in preference to her given name. She was apparently a lesbian. Tate, the national museum of British art, owns a collection of Moss’s paintings and metal sculptures. Tate staff have put out a written statement excommunicating Marlow from womanhood, saying, “Perhaps if Marlow was alive today, the artist would identify as transgender, which means that your gender is different to the one that the doctors or midwives presumed you were when you were born, or non-binary, which means that neither the word ‘boy’ nor ‘girl’ are a good fit for you.”

Capitulation to Trans Activism

The seemingly open “perhaps” in that statement is disingenuous ambiguity because Tate staff have already decided on Marlow’s behalf by using ‘they’ in their discussion of her. This includes its children’s guide to the artist. This capitulation to trans activists will come as no surprise to those who remember that Tate has form in this respect. Tate supported drag queen story hour activities by hosting a controversial event in February this year.

By retrospectively claiming Moss as transgender, Tate is following a trend led by gender activists who have been combing the historical record in search of precursors to the modern transsexual. Yet, there is no evidence that Moss thought of herself as transgender or intersex. The fashion for women wearing male clothing became a fad during the immediate period after World War I. This can be seen in the case of film star Marlene Dietrich, who wore a tuxedo and top hat in the film Morocco (1930). The craze became so widespread that in Paris during the interwar period, transvestite women became known as Garçonnes (female boys).

I researched this subject for my book Women & Art: A Post-Feminist View (Academica Press, 2021) and was surprised to find many examples of women artists acting atypically but none conceiving of themselves as other than female. The nineteenth-century nature painter Rosa Bonheur used to wear trousers when she tramped across muddy fields to paint cows. She had to acquire a licence from the police to do so because cross-dressing was considered socially disruptive in nineteenth-century France. Czech artist Marie Čermínová used the single name ‘Toyen’ as her brand, but she never considered herself as anything other than a woman, something I have covered in a previous article.

In claiming their first historical scalp through the prestigious Tate Gallery, trans activists have reversed the tide of feminism. After all, if we are to take Tate’s authority at face value, Moss is no longer an overlooked female artist but no woman at all. If this current continues, the canon of female artists, built up arduously over the last half-century, is due for depletion. Who is next? British painter Hannah Gluckstein (1895-1978) took up the moniker ‘Gluck’ to escape the label “woman painter.” Surely, she will soon be claimed by transgender activists. Perhaps French Surrealist Claude Cahun will follow.

Pruning the Feminist Canon

Every lesbian or woman painter who donned trousers or a boiler suit could soon join Moss in a retrospective rush to posthumously develop a new canon, one which will necessarily reduce the feminist canon. Feminists have debated whether or not they should even propose an alternative female-centred canon. Second-wave feminists argued as to whether any hierarchy—even one composed of women—is a structure of oppression and exclusion, therefore inimical to the Marxist basis of feminism. 

We can find the two strands of feminism in current art events. The pro-canon group has made a good living in academia and publishing. The tsunami of women-artist-centred books and exhibitions may not be truly reflective of the market, as many buyers of books and art use public (rather than personal) money; auction reports show that art by women still sells for lower prices than that by men, despite half a century of promotion. 

The other, anti-canon strand, can be detected in the promotion of artist collectives, where individual female artists are subsumed into collective efforts. This demonstrates a hostility towards individual excellence and the “outdated” idea of personal genius. According to Marxist feminists, exceptionalism is only a matter of privilege and opportunity, not due to inherent abilities or character. In 2021, the Turner Prize exhibition (organised by the Tate) featured only artist collectives; no individual artists were named. 

To be sure, Tate is not lacking in old-style feminists (including its director, Maria Balshaw) but the decision to apply trans ideology by nominating Marlow Moss as transgender is a victory for trans activists—one that the feminist curators at the Tate, who encouraged such stereotype-challenging ideas within the organisation, may yet come to regret.