A tax-funded national arts body is getting rid of all male and female pronouns, sparking outrage.
The words he/him and she/her will be purged from The Arts Council of Wales, an organisation that supports the arts on behalf of the Welsh government.
It will replace the words with the gender-neutral pronouns “they/them”, according to reports.
The decision has been slammed as “gibberish newspeak” and threatening to turn Britain’s art into a “woke monoculture”. Some people have also called for the organisation’s funding to be removed.
The changes come after the Welsh government launched its LGBTQ+ Action Plan for Wales earlier this year – promising to make sure public bodies were “sensitive to gendered language”.
Benjamin Jones, a spokesman for The Free Speech Union, told Express.co.uk: “If it isn’t bad enough that official documents will be written in this Newspeak gibberish, we know full well at the Free Speech Union how employees or members of the public will be treated if they object to this endless attack on common sense.
“We have several legal cases ongoing where we are defending men and women who have objected to this sort of language policing and been punished for it.
“These issues are particularly severe in the art world, which risks becoming a woke monoculture producing art and content that almost nobody is interested in.”
The Arts Council of Wales confirmed in a statement this move is part of their continuous review process, and they have stated that they will replace gendered pronouns with “they/them” if they come across them in their documentation.
The plan also specifically addresses the need to recognise non-binary and intersex people and ensure their needs are met within public services.
It is not confirmed whether external bodies receiving funding from the Arts Council will also be advised to adopt this pronoun purge, or if it will only apply to the Council’s own HR policy documents.
Feminist author Joan Smith an adviser to the group Sex Matters, said: “The Welsh government is completely captured.”
She added: “It is not the job of publicly-funded organisations to change the language when the public is so clearly against gender nonsense.
“What right does Arts Council Wales have to misgender all of us who use correct pronouns like he and she? It will make Arts Council Wales a laughing stock, as it should.”
Peter Whittle, founder of the New Culture Forum, tweeted: “Remove all public funding from such bodies.”
