Friday 19 November 2021

The Wastrel Trans Minstrel Show

 

The Wastrel Trans Minstrel Show - aka Melbourne Fashion Week is over for 2021 in a triumphant explosion of tulle and sequins and us ordinary people can breathe a sigh of relief as the cleaners move in to sweep up the mountains of shedded glitter and clear the womens loo of discarded condoms.



Shame on Melbourne Fashion Week for all the womens fashion businesses and models who had their opportunities supplanted by the male poseurs who adopted trans or non binary identities. 

@melbfashweek would never acknowledge the existence of a hairy cave dweller like me, and nor would my lowly opinions be known to them, but I was hard pressed to find another image of a bloke in a dress featuring in subsequent images on Instagram after bagging them.(somebody responding to a comment I made on @melbfashweek jeered at me for being a craftsy farmers market wannabe)

The truly stylish who shop at Vinnies are glad to see the whole mincing display of mediocracy sashay back into the cupboard for another year. But without doubt the whole ghastly shebang will spring out of said cupboard next year for another discordant celebration of rampant consumerism. 

The festival of unsustainability and willful ignorance. Silly stuff for silly people. I'll be keeping a beady eye out for how many bearded blokes mince the catwalk in 2022.

And for those who still think they might they might be genuinely non binary heres 10 helpful tips

The Unicorn Test


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A podcast from Radio National

Greenwashing, what to buy for Santas Birthday (if you must)

For education about the waste, unsustainability and lack of ethics in the fashion industry here is an excellent Australian activist to check out.

ClarePress, Wardrobe Crisis

I don’t share Clares optimism that things can or will change. In response to her discussing recent contributions to an international think tank for change in the fashion industry I wrote (italics added by me) 

I totally agree with your first sentence to the comma (she wrote: Sometimes it feels we talk too much & do too little, but actually how we communicate about #sustainability is super important) After that I see well intentioned, idealistic people trying to negotiate with a business model that is fundamentally incompatible with sustainability. My cynicism is such that I believe activists (for sustainability and ethics in the fast fashion business model) are simply being mined for more clever ways to maintain a pretense that the fashion industry cares. Just like ladies who ask patriarchy nicely not to be so mean to them I don’t believe anything effective can, or ever will be achieved asking fast fashion nicely to behave responsibly. My answer has been radical rebellion, you just stop participating in the system and don’t buy anything new. Though I have made my first exceptions for 3 years to buy 3 teeshirts reading – TERF, My Pronouns are Hea/Then and one that must be written in code as it us so terrible Instagram will ban me for saying it – tra(i)ns women are men.

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This coat is a recent make by me. 100% upcycled fabrics consisting of tapestry table cloth runners, offcuts of upholstery fabrics, an embroidered cushion cover and doona covers.








The colour palette was inspired by this fabulous vintage embroidered cushion cover that was gifted to me by somebody who loves textiles.

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READING:

Recommended

One of the upsides of having recently dusted off my rusted 2nd wave feminist badge is diving back into reading my old rad feminist heroine Andrea Dworkin.

I’m dazzled that her literary oeuvre not only stands up to contemporary happenings in the world (trans gender identity ideology) but was really prescient.

Last Days at Hot Slit; the radical feminism of Andrea Dworkin

 


One of the reasons Dworkin became alienated from the clique of more popular late 2nd wave feminists was for her unrelenting damnation of how prostitution and pornography harms women. Not a very cool stance back then and hardly more so nowadays for women who feel shamed to be dismissed as prudes for not thinking that what gives men a stiffy isn’t necessarily the definition of the kind of great sex women lust after.

In 1995 I almost had the whole collection of Dworkins literary works but they ended up going to the tip during a house move. I tried to donate them to Vinnies but the ladies shook their heads dubiously at titles like “Woman Hating”, “Intercourse”, “Pornography” and “Our Blood”, probably in the fervent hope that the nice citizens of Kurri Kurri had no need for that kind of reading matter (and they must have been relieved I was leaving town). I look forward to collecting them all back again in digital format.


Not recommended 

Another little pamphlet I read lately was Alok Vaid-Menons little bit of pink fluffy propaganda

“Beyond the Gender Binary”.

At 64 pages it only takes an hour to read and you don’t need to have a vocabulary that has words with more than 6  letters in them.

It is essentially a sustained whine about how hard life has been for a femme gay boy. Nobody has been nice or very understanding, He has been laughed at, catcalled and shamed. Alok takes it all very hard and is infuriated at the unkindness of the world.

His whole tedious existence would have been easy to dismiss if he hadn’t taken out his revenge on the world by endorsing gender identity ideology.



The quotes surrounding Alok in the picture above were directed toward him by other trans identifying males.


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