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Welcome to the Quillette podcast, hosted on alternate weeks by me, Jonathan Kay, and by Iona Italia.

Quillette is where Freethought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for

heterodox ideas and fearless commentary. You are about to hear a free preview of this

week's episode. To hear the full episode, and to get access to all our podcasts and articles,

visit us at quillette.com and click the subscribe button. And speaking of heterodox ideas and

fearless commentary, if you've been following Quillette for a while, you'll know that through

the years, we've often covered stories involving professional subcultures

that get captured by fringe ideologues, who leverage their professional power to bully others

into ideological compliance, often on issues connected to race, gender, or the Middle East.

And a disproportionate number of these stories involve the arts, literature, music, theater, and in the case of the story you're about to hear, modern dance.

My guest this week is British dancer and choreographer Rosie Kay, who learned the hard way in the late 2010s and early 2020s that her progressive dancing milieu had little tolerance for women, such as herself, who

sought to reserve female dressing rooms for female dancers, as opposed to biological men

who self-identify as trans women or non-binary.

After enduring a period of cancellation, Rosie decided to do something about the problem she observed. Along with former government worker

Denise Fami, whom you'll hear more about during the podcast, Rosie started up Freedom in the Arts,

a group dedicated to studying and exposing the degree to which artists in the UK feel pressured

into towing the ideological line on sensitive social issues.

Recently, they published a report called Afraid to Speak freely, which details survey data

from hundreds of fellow artists. They did a similar survey back in 2020, and the trends

discussed are worryingly similar. In both cases, many British artists said they feel

...