When I was a teenager and I was spending time on my own I liked nothing better to do with that time than to go to the Tate Gallery as was. I had my list of favourites that I visited in the gallery every few months or so. Some of my favourites included Stanley Spencer’s ‘Resurrection at Cookham‘, John Martin’s fantastical eschatological and historical paintings and the work of the insanely talented and definitely insane Richard Dadd, whose painting ‘The Fairy Fellows Master Stroke’ is so detailed that I found something new in it at each new viewing of it.

I walked into the Tate back then like a pilgrim entering a temple, in awe of the results of the artistic talent on display. The memories of walking through the doors of the Tate Gallery on a hot and loud August afternoon in London and coming into a cool, quiet gallery of pictures created by those with the sort of talents that knocked me back, will be something that I will always remember and cherish.

But that Tate Gallery of my youth is now no more. It has succumbed to the desire to be seen as ‘relevant’, ‘diverse’ and ‘outward looking’ and all the other similar descriptors that to me merely signify a great and wonderful institution deciding to dumb down.

But worse than merely dumbing down with their presentation of pictures or the description of them is the fact that they’ve gone all loony troony and have held a ‘child friendly’ trans pride event in the gallery complete with kids noisily chanting the approved slogans throughout the gallery.

The Twitter user Mr Menno in a long series of Tweets outlined how the Tate had basically sold itself to various types of gender woo including a fair bit of gender woo aimed at children. The thread has been saved to Threadreader but the original thread can be found here.

Mr Menno said:

1 / Gender woo in full swing yesterday at @Tate’s #QueerAndNow2023

A ‘transwoman’ with scrotum on display and a focus on ‘queer / trans’ children. They even used kids as props in this bizarre parade with adult women chanting “We’re so queer!” The kids were totally bewildered

2 / This happened while a panel were discussing….(what does a gender queer museum look like)

3 / The parade suddenly barged in, making noise and two women chanting “We’re so queeeeer!” The one leading it, like a Pied Piper, had a ‘they / them’ pronoun badge on. The parade made its way through the room, disrupting the panel discussion and leaving people wondering “What

6 / Elsewhere there was an area where you could read children’s books.

All peddling #genderwoo

Read the rest of this interesting and infuriating thread via the links below:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1667887384074104833.html

and

https://twitter.com/MrMennoTweets/status/1667887384074104833

I can’t understand why parents would take their children to stuff like this. I really cannot see any positive benefit from it. It’s full on indoctrination in an ideology that is built on foundations of shifting sand. Shame on the Tate for putting this guff on.