Jess de Wahls on being ‘cancelled’ by the Royal Academy: ‘They’ve been wrong from day one’

Last week, the artist Jess de Wahls hardly left the house because of the messages in her inbox. “I had hate-mail, abuse,” she says. “There were no physical threats, but some of the messages sounded completely unhinged. People whipping themselves up into a frenzy. I’ve had people tell me, ‘I hope you kill yourself.’ I can laugh it off, but it makes me feel sick to my stomach.”

Within the space of a few days, 38-year-old de Wahls has gone from being a relatively unknown artist to becoming the centre of a major news story, following a public spat with the Royal Academy. The RA, who had been stocking de Wahls’s pretty embroidered patches in their gift shop, informed her last week that they were launching an investigation following online complaints about a blog de Wahls had written in 2019, in which she declared “I cannot accept people’s unsubstantiated assertions that they are in fact the opposite sex to when they were born.”

On Wednesday, the RA declared on Instagram that it never “knowingly supports artists who act in conflict with its values [of] diversity and inclusion”, and that it would no longer stock de Wahls’s work. “Eight people had complained,” she tells me on the phone from her south London home. “It was ridiculous. The RA told me they stood with the LGBTQ community and I said, ‘So do I.’ I told them it was insane to call me a ‘transphobe’ just because I understand biological science.”

If this sounds like a petty quarrel over whether or not a gift shop sells embroidery patches, think again. The dispute gets to the heart of the identity wars bedevilling our cultural institutions, in which an artist’s cultural worth is increasingly determined not by the quality of their work but by the outraged objection of online warriors to an artist’s opinions, notably on trans rights.

An increasing number of high-profile artists and writers are finding themselves caught in the crosshairs. In June last year, JK Rowling faced online calls for her books to be burned, and Harry Potter actors lined up to denounce her, after she took issue on Twitter with the phrase “people who menstruate”. Then, in November, the leading feminist writer Suzanne Moore left The Guardian after fellow journalists objected to her writing that sex was a biological classification, “not a feeling”. (She now writes for this newspaper.) And only last week, the Orange Prize-winning novelist Chimamanda Adichie Ngozi wrote of the backlash she faced after saying she believed a trans woman to be a trans woman (as opposed to simply “a woman”), and defended Rowling.

Due to their fame, the above three women have influence, but de Wahls has a smaller platform. Born in East Germany, and a hairdresser by trade, she moved to London in 2004 and only started dabbling in art after the Soho crowd with whom she hung out admired her self-drawn tattoos. In the years since, she has attracted a cult following thanks to her bold and playful feminist textiles, including a recurring series titled Big Swinging Ovaries, which depicts the female reproductive organ in a variety of guises, from cats to cacti. Other pieces target misogyny and groupthink.

In person, de Wahls is equally straight-talking; she describes herself as “mouthy” and is unafraid to use the word “bulls--t”. She is furious with what she has endured at the hands of the online mob, and by the actions of the RA. “It’s ideological capture. Cowardice.” There are rumours she might sue. “I’m taking legal advice on that. What I would like is an apology. They think, ‘Oh, she’s a little embroidery woman who’ll go away. Well, I’m not going away.’” (The RA have, at the time of writing, not responded to a request for comment.)

She believes a culture of silence has taken root in cultural institutions across the world, and likens it to the tyranny of fear that governed life in East Germany under the Stasi. “The majority are being silenced by a tiny minority,” she says. “Even trans people who don’t share that ideology are afraid to, for fear of being labelled ‘traitor scum’.”

It was in 2019, alarmed by what she considered to be a growing dogma among her peers, and the impossibility of being able to discuss it, that she wrote a 5,000-word blog-post called “Somewhere over the Rainbow, something went terribly wrong”. It was an attempt to articulate in words some of the ideas she was starting to explore in her art. She argued that the idea of sex as a construct rather than a biological reality had acquired a “fanatical” following and expressed her concern at the rise of “bigotry and hatred” directed at anyone who disagreed.

“I knew it would cause me huge strife,” she says. “I don’t say what I say because I want to hurt someone’s feelings. People can believe whatever they want about themselves. But I do think this ideology has significant impacts on feminism… There is nothing inclusive about calling a woman a ‘non-man’ or a ‘menstruator’.”

The response to her blog was immediate. “It’s been a continuous two-year campaign.” She has been forced to contact the police twice over the harassment she has endured, which includes one man expressing the desire to burn her work; she has also quit projects because of the abuse directed at those who’ve hired or collaborated with her. She used to run a hairdressing salon at Soho Theatre, but voluntarily left after the theatre was dragged into a “relentless” social-media campaign targeting them for “harbouring a transphobe”.

All of this, she says, “has stripped me of my ability to do good. With smaller companies, I get the pressure – that kind of online mob is scary. But for a large cultural organisation such as the Royal Academy to buckle like that is crazy. To me their reaction smacks of hubris: ‘Little embroidery woman, what can she do.’”

At heart, this is a debate about how we value art. Some commentators this week have accused the RA of hypocrisy: they display the works of male painters who lived controversial lives while they cancel the work of a young woman. De Wahls doesn’t think that’s the right argument. “There are people who argue that artists such as Caravaggio and Gauguin shouldn’t be in the RA – I don’t agree. Of course they should be there.

“But the comparison is ridiculous. I haven’t raped anyone. I don’t hate anyone. It feels as though it doesn’t matter how you behave, but think the wrong thoughts and it’s a hate crime. And women are held to different standards than men… I should be able to make art that you can then look at and go, ‘Well, that’s c--p’. Instead, we’re in a situation where you can look at the work of another artist and say, ‘Oh, what a b---h. She shouldn’t have a livelihood’.”

De Wahls doesn’t want to destroy anyone’s livelihood. She doesn’t like labelling people, and thinks everyone should be free to express themselves however they like. And this week, she’s starting to wonder whether the tide is about to turn. “I’ve been amazed by the number of people who have supported me,” she says.

“The RA have judged this wrong from day one. There’s no way I’m going to let it slip into oblivion.”