Monday, 13 March 2023

Let Women Speak

This is a very long post that is more about my involvement in the Gender Critical movement than my textile art. I am including pictures of some recent work as I understand that is the main thing some people follow my blog for and I want you to enjoy that. At this point in time I'm getting increasingly leery about showing my work anywhere on social media, due to the complete lack of control I have over what happens to my intellectual property after that. Those of you who read the speech published further down here will find out that my Verified Merchant Shop was closed by Pinterest due to them intending to silence my support for womens rights. Trans Rights Activists mass complained about "poor shopping experience" with the intention getting my shop closed and affecting my income because they don't like my opinions.

The bitter irony is that Pinterest users have pinned images of my art 100s of 1000s of times. Now they won't be able to find my shop by tracing who generated those images. Pinterest feels perfectly entitled to use images of my work to make their platform a success but not to give me credit for publishing those images. Pinterest was also one of the social media companies that refused to recognise my copyright and remove images that ChicV International fraudulently appropriated. 


Those of you who've followed my blog for a while (and its been going 15 years now) would have noticed my posts have become increasingly political since the great kimono kerfuffle in 2018. 

Politics has always been a small part of my interests, but never so front and centre as it's become in the last 5 years. For most of my life I felt it would have been peculiar and unnecessary to discuss my personal politics in public. 

Around 2017 I started noticing odd conversations going on in the international sewist community. In one group I was a member of, the "Sewcialists", people were having discussions about men who called themselves women joining our sewing conversations and how some women felt comfortable with that and others not. There were people arguing that women sewists needed to change their traditional language and sewing terms to make trans women and non binary identifiers more comfortable. A prime example were those who advocated to stop using the words bust/breast, to be substituted with chest. 

A number of women in the Sewcialist group were fiercely defending what they felt was the right of a man who said he was a woman to participate in a Brassiere making challenge. Sewing challenges were a regular feature of the group, covering all types of garments that hobby sewists like to make, with the inetntion of discussing patterns that worked well or not, and sharing skills and knowledge. I personally felt very uncomfortable about men who had joined these groups. In the way they had online conversations I picked up that their real interest was in being validated as female, rather than improving their sewing. It creeped me out that these men needed brassieres becuse that had grown breasts due to taking estrogen of had had surgical implants.

By the time a few months later the Social Justice Activist Emily Ito started criticising non Japanese women for using the word kimono I knew that something uncanny was afoot in the world.



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I am proud to describe myself as an advocate for womens rights involved in the international grassroots Gender Critical movement pushing back against governments that have facilitated the legal fiction of "self ID". Self ID, which will shortly be legal in all Australian states except New South Wales, means any man can change his sex to woman by paying a small fee to Births, Deaths and Marriages. On gaining that documentation he is entitled to go into places that have been sex segregated, play in womens sports, serve a criminal sentence in a womans jail (yes, even for sexual assault, rape or pedophilia), apply for grants, jobs and scholarships that had been created specifically for women, enter womens refuges and rape support groups and so much more.

Kellie-Jay Keen is a British womens rights advocate I started following a couple of years ago and she is currently touring Australia to organise venues where women can come together and discuss their concerns about Trans Gender Ideology.

I attended the first rally in Sydney on March 11th and spoke. Below is the transcript of my speech and a link to a video of the whole #StandingForWomen rally.

Last words of my speech


Pearls speech at the Let Women Speak rally

I am going to speak today about how I’ve been cancelled on social media for talking about my views on trans gender ideology.

I am not here hoping to get sympathy for things that have been done to me personally. What I’ve experienced is happening right now, every day to all people that have dissenting ideas, and the silencing is going to keep happening and get worse if we don’t fight for our right to speak.

In all my life, and as a person who has always had a serious interest in following politics, this is the first time I have felt compelled to make a placard and join a political rally. And that is because…

Womens rights are under threat!

My question to you today is….why is a 64 yr old Australian grandmother being told what she can and can’t say in public? As a citizen of this country I’m in the most law abiding demographic segment of the population who are least likely to cause public nuisance or offence. Now it seems my opinions and words have become so dangerous I must be silenced. It is with the intention of silencing me that faceless ideologues half a world away are generating algorithms to moderate and expunge what I’m allowed to say in the internet public square. Why do they feel the need to surveille and control what I say if the words I express my opinions in aren’t anything that breaks the laws of my country?

I’m a wife, mother of 2 sons and grandmother of a 16 yr old who says she is attracted to girls so perhaps she’ll grow up to live her life as a lesbian woman. My granddaughter has been anxious and depressed during her high school years due to the bullying of peers and teachers who try to convince her to believe she is non binary or a trans man. It has affected her happiness and mental health and distracted from her focus on studying and doing well at school, which she always excelled at previously. Now I fear not only is her ability to matriculate well being negatively affected by the trans gender ideology radicalised environment, but she may be living out her 20s trying to negotiate her way in a community of same sex attracted women which has been devastated and traumatised by a forceful invasion of mentally ill, entitled men who designate themselves to be women with penises.

I am an artist and therefore part of a community of highly sensitive people with progressive values. People who are attuned to living creatively, people who frequently exist in imaginary worlds deliberately concocted. Nurturing this ability to dive deep into the unconscious and bring forth new ways of seeing to share with others has been a driving aspect of my life. But even in my personal devotion to bringing forth uncanny visions – I have been able to learn the difference between what is looking outward to the stars and what is looking inward into the heart of darkness to draw on nihilistic despair and paraphilias.

I have been expelled from The Surface Design Association, an international arts organisation due to “incompatible values”. Additionally I was blocked from following the Instagram account of the craft magazine Seamwork that I had a paid subscription to because they objected to me telling a woman who described herself as non binary; a woman who publicly discussed using chest binders to flatten her breasts, I told her that I would not swap using the technical word “bust”, used in sewing patterns instructions, to the term “chest”, on the basis she said it was offensive and harming her. It is a very sinister ideology with authoritarian leanings when artists and women who sew are being censored and deplatformed for non conformity to the zeitgeist.

From her 2022 Reith lecture the writer Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie warns

“This new social censure demands consensus while being wilfully blind to its own tyranny. I think it portends the death of curiosity, the death of learning and the death of creativity.”

I am banned from TikTok after a tranny reported me for hurting his feelings. He took offence when I told him my vagina is real and magnificent and that his cosmetic imitation is disgusting and fake. It offends me that he appropriates the word vagina to refer to his flayed and inverted penis. Men do not have vaginas – only magic could get them one because there is no cosmetic surgery that can create a thing that never existed. Men claiming they have a vagina is an affront to all women, we do not take pride in being called “people with a front hole” as trans activists suggest we should. Women are women and there is no subset of women that are men. Men can find another word for describing a hole surgically engineered in their male perineum, I suggest perhaps mangina.

I got banned on Twitter for saying men cannot turn into women. My first account was banned in mid 2022, then reinstated later that year after Elon Musk became boss, then it was suspended again on the first of January this year …so apparently he hasn’t flushed all the authoritarians out of the moderation unit.

I have had 2 warnings on YouTube, where I host a channel, meaning that a 3rd warning might result in my channel being deleted. The penalties were for making comments supportive of womens rights. The channel I host is about my art practise, its not a political channel devoted to discussions about trans ideology - but simply because I have links to womens rights issues that has put me in violation of their community standards policy.

I have been removed from Patreon for discussing feminist and child safeguarding issues.

On Instagram, I have had content relating to womens rights removed. I’m not permitted to start a business account because they say I have made too many comments that offend people who believe they have changed sex. Its apparent that my Instagram account is also shadowbanned.

At the beginning of March I had my merchant shop on Pinterest closed and this is why it happened

During the federal election of May 2022 I posted several messages on my Instagram account in support of Kath Deves, who was the Liberal party candidate for Warringah. This was rather surprising even to myself as until 2021 I had never voted for any political party other than the Greens, in local or federal politics for 40 years. Until 2018 I was a rusted on lefty progressive. However I have comprehensively turned my back on both Labour and the Greens since I discovered these political parties willingly gave themselves a lobotomy when they decided men can self declare themselves to be women. Essentially this means Women do not exist as a sex class. So how can these political parties make legislation for a class of citizens they do not believe exist? When any man can declare himself a legal woman there is no such thing as adult human females. Except of course, trans ideologues claim that adult human females must now be designated cis women and trans women are real women. How does that logically work? If a trans woman is a woman then why am I not a trans woman?

When I posted my public support of Kath Deves on my Instagram and outed myself as a woman who does not believe men can transmogrify into women I received many abusive responses and lost about 10% of my followers, that being about 100 people. In the text of my support message I urged people who wanted to find out more about trans gender ideology to search out my Pinterest account and go through the links I had saved on a board called “Gender Critical”, where I had amassed nearly 500 links collected over 4 years. All of that material was perfectly legitimate, there was nothing illegal or shonky, it comprised of links to newspaper articles, journals, podcasts Substacks, YouTube channels, TV stations, and such like. Many of the links were to well known and respectable academics and authors like Jordan Peterson, James Lindsay, Douglas Murray, Helen Joyce, Kara Dansky, Helen Pluckrose, Kathleen Stock, Abigail Shrier…all these people are published authors who have never had any of their books banned.

A week after mentioning this collection of Gender Critical material on my Pinterest the board was removed. Pinterest said it was due to infringing community standards and claimed that the content represented “hate speech”. I was warned if I did it again, even if saving links to a secret board that nobody else could see, the consequence would probably be having my acct shut down. How Orwellian is that, that this social media platform told me I can’t collate materials that nobody else can access?

Then in February Pinterest advised me they were closing my online store. They said it was due to multiple complaints, which they would not specifiy other than that I failed to provide something described as “quote- shopping experience quality” – unquote”. It amounted to a summary closure with no process for review.

It is chilling that a privately owned social media company feels entitled to censor users who accumulate content that is freely available on the internet and doesn’t contain anything illegal. None of the videos or journalistic items I collected have been banned or removed elsewhere and can still be searched out. My online store didn’t get cancelled because of any problem with my products, it was removed because Pinterest did not like my political views. The Gender Critical board had been started in 2018 when I took a deep dive in researching trans gender ideology and it had existed for almost 4 years until a trans rights activist was alerted to its existence through my Instagram message of support to Kath Deves. That activists distaste for my opinions overrode my right as a citizen of a democratic country to keep an online library of legitimate sociological reference materials.

It makes me wonder what this world of social justice that these activists believe they are bringing about will look like when the utopia is achieved. I cannot know the number of people who have lost their jobs or been cancelled or deplatformed by TRAs but I’m sure at this point it would be in the 100s of 1000s and growing daily. Then there are probably many more people who have seen the consequences of expressing views that aren’t supportive of trans ideology who let themselves be intimidated into silence, perhaps because they value their friends or can’t risk losing their job, and then, through being unable to question or say no, they are coerced further into compliance with things they don’t believe or feel comfortable about. Like coerced use of pronouns or having to share what were previously single sex toilets or change rooms.

I’ve experienced how cults work. As a young woman I lived for many years in one of New Zealands most notorious cult communities, Centrepoint Community. CP ran on principles that come directly from the same post modernist philosophers, sexologists and academics that are the foundation of what is now called Queer Theory. Queer Theory teaches that transgressive behaviours are required to dissolve boundaries as the way to make a better world. Some of the boundaries they intend to break down are what defines heteronormative relationships and the conventional family. The way this worked at Centrepoint resulted in undermining the normal instincts of women to avoid behaviours that were harmful to them and their children. In real life I saw how child safeguarding was dismantled bit by bit so that a within few years the sexual exploitation of women and children had become normalised.

Queer Theory is a trojan horse ideology pretending to be social justice that is a spearhead for malevolent forces that intend to exploit the vulnerability of women and children.

If trans ideologues achieve their definition of a social justice utopia – by silencing everybody who doesn’t support the belief that men can become women, by threatening people that they will lose their jobs or by cancelling and deplatforming dissenting voices on social media…when this society is achieved by force do they imagine it will function with goodwill and trust?

Part of what makes democratic societies flourish is that all citizens have equal freedom to speak and discuss how they want their communities to interact. Through free discourse we identify what are majority and minority views and try to find a way all community members can have their positions respected. Through open discourse it is communally decided the best way to instigate rules, laws, and codes of conduct to bring about what has been argued through that process of debate to be the fairest outcomes for everybody.

So I'm curious to know how its going to work when a portion of society, and from my observations I believe it would be more than half of the community, is actively prevented to speak freely and punished if they do so? This doesn’t sound like a social justice Utopia to me, but maybe more like North Korea, Afghanistan, Maoist China or Stalinist Russia. Societies that have to force their citizens to shut up about issues they don’t want discussed are on the slippery slope to authoritarianism. Surely there are people who support trans gender ideology who understand the importance of debate and if their beliefs are solidly anchored in reality and human rights, as they claim, why are they not welcoming debate and confidently outlining what their principles are?

However, the reality is….as you can see from the group of people who have come here today to yell at us, the idea of women being allowed to speak their views freely is being angrily opposed right at this moment. In democratic countries it is considered a right for citizens to instigate grass roots activism and to come together to march, rally, form groups to lobby the govt and get involved in other strategies to create discourse over political issues they believe need to be examined. But there is something sinister and deeply authoritarian about ideologically driven groups and businesses who use silencing tactics intending to oppose grass roots citizen dissent.

We gather here today to say it is our right as women, as members of our communities and as citizens of Australia to call for an open debate about how our lives are being affected by federal and local govts adopting the legal fiction that men can become women.

We reject this Queer attack on reality.

There is no such thing as a trans child

Non binary is not a real thing

Trans women are men.

Men cannot become women and we demand that this travesty be stopped.


Standing For Women rally, March 11, Sydney, Australia

Standing For Women Events in Australia and New Zealand, 2023

Sunday, 26 February 2023

Standing For Women rally



I will be attending the Standing For Women rally with UK womens rghts activist Kellie-Jay Keen in Sydney on Saturday 11th March at Victoria Park. Kicks off at 12pm.

All welcome, including those who don't feel they really understand what is going on with the spread of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and its evil twin, Trans Gender Ideology (Queer Theory), collectively and colloquially known as "Woke".

All women are invited to address the gathering to talk about how the infiltration of trans gender ideology into their workplaces, public/social lives and families is affecting them. I plan to give my own little speech outlining how I've been cancelled on social media and what my fears are as this pernicious ideology becomes more and more embedded into our daily lives.

The Standing For Women rally on 11th March  in Sydney will be Kellie-Jays first event and then she will go on to visit 6 more Australian cities. I hope to get the last in Canberra on March 23rd too,

List of Standing for Women events in Australia in March 2023

Scroll down to March, where the Australian dates and venues are given.


Sunday, 19 February 2023

Queens Speech Episode 32 - THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF STURGEON!


I love these guys and watch them every week on YouTube.

Here they discuss what happened to the Sturgeon that swam too far up shit creek. Hopefully Australian politicians will be taking note of the backlash when the public wakes up to getting sold down the river. For example, the egregious Attorney General of Queensland, Shannon Fentiman who has introduced the same self-ID legislation into Queensland. Women of the states of Queensland and Victoria be warned, its now perfectly legal for any bloke to say he's a woman and have this legal fiction be upheld. So next time theres a bloke in the change room of your local pool waving his whizzer around, think twice about complaining as you may be the one who gets in trouble for being a transphobe bigot.

In the last part of the video things get dark as they discuss a new book about to be published by British journalist Hannah Barnes who has done an explosive investigation into what was happening to kids under 18 at the Tavistock gender clinic who were referred for counselling.


Part one, Blue Ziggy

Friday, 13 January 2023

Lulu the Galah parrot embroidering



Inter species child labour. 
Another crime to add to my multi various sins against humanity - transphobe, racist, bigot et al...

Saturday, 7 January 2023

Bright Tendrils


Documenting the very early stage of making a textile for my next wearable art garment using multiple techniques

Thursday, 5 January 2023

Drat, foot in mouth...again

First...update on the current work in progress if thats all you come here for.



This dress will be finished today and then I'll do a close up visual tour and commentary of how its made published to my YouTube channel.

Pearl Red Moon Artist

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News from the CSJ battlefront

Uncancelled here

Last year I was banned from Twitter for saying trans women are men and that gender dysphoria is a mental illness.

That was in June and I appealed several times but each was denied and I was told the ban was going to be permanent and for lifetime. Astonishingly Twitter advised I couldn't even close my acct unless I had died and my will executor provided a legal death certificate! Its almost beyond parody.

I joined Twitter in 2012 and had never used the account until around March 2022 when I become active following the international Gender Critical (GC) community. It was a way to keep up with current affairs and share news. 

Between June to November 2022 I remained banned then was mysteriously reinstated without notice or explanation. My own interpretation of this was it was to do with Elon Musks proposed purchase and it was part of Twitters strategy to give themselves a bit of gloss by minimising bots and bulking up the mumbers of real human users.

Free speech didn't last long, on New Years Day 2023 I got another suspension. The notice is shown at the end of my last blog a few days ago. In that version of suspension Twitter required me to delete the comment they described as "hateful". It seemed a lovely New Years gift to be freed of Twitter for a while so I had no intention of doing so unless it suited me.

Strangely, about 8 hours ago I got reinstated again without notice or explanation and without deleting the comment that hurt somebodys feeling. 

Its wonderful to see a flood of GC people coming back onto Twitter in the last few weeks.

Below is an article from Australian journalist Edie Wyatt in which she also celebrates the GC voices who have been silenced gradually coming back into the cyber public square.

Twitters Free Speech Threatens Radical trans Activism

Edie Wyatt writes a really great Substack too, where you can stay updated with the CSJ tomfoolery and support a woman who is doing great work.

Edie Wyatt on Substack


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Cancelled here

I started my Instagram account about 3 years ago and thats been a weird trip too. I've had notifications from IG that my account is limited due to opinions I have that they disagree with. I've been refused to start a business acct unless I deleted a list of posts they showed me. I've written about this in previous blogs and noted their craven hyprocrisy after Instagram facilitated ChicV the Chinese mass manufacturing company to appropriate 14 of my artworks to defraud naive buyers. Interestingly they now censor my IG feed so I don't see what ChicV might be currently stealing from me. I guess if I can't see it then I can't complain about it and IG+ChicV can keep benefitting from my intellectual labours and content.

Pearl Red Moon Art

My follower numbers regularly collapse after I post anything supporting the rights, safety and dignity of women and girls. 

13 year old who had her healthy breasts removed to facilitate
her belief she can change into a male

Its apparent I've been shadow banned for around 8 months as I get more ex Army Veteran American Doctors following me than women interested in textile arts. The docs all have very flashy cars, fluffy little dogs and are lonely and looking for love. I regularly block droves of the doctors, probably 10 a week, whereas genuine followers grow at a glacial 3 weekly...

But its not about follower numbers. I truly don't care. I write this simply as evidence reflecting on how social media is a tool of the mad lefties in the culture war.


Sometimes though, I do feel deeply saddened by getting on the wrong side of somebody and this is one such person.

The Cat Who Knits

Fibrechats Episode 89

Broadsheet

Rebuilding Queerness  - 2022 Melbourne exhibition at Blak Dot Gallery

I started following @thecatwhoknits about 2 years ago - I can't give a link to him as he blocked me yesterday. 

The "Cat" is Andrew Chan who lives in Melbourne and he is an absolutely fabulous textile artist. I adore all his output and made many supportive comments on his IG posts. My impression was that Drew was an introverted gay man who had emigrated to Australia about 5 years ago. During covid lockdowns Drew posted often and was prolific in his wearable art output. 

When he was taking the plunge to work full time at his art and asked for commissions I was thrilled to ask for him to make me a garment and we had some brief chats through DM. Then before I could commit to finalising and sending the $$$ I lost my little baby Eclectus parrot Velvet that I'd hand raised from 20 days old and consequently spent weeks in a state of grief and devastation. I had barely enough energy to get dressed in the morning let alone go ahead with the commission at that time.


me and Velvet, the last picture, 12 hours later she flew 
out the front door and I never saw her again

During my brief chats with Drew I suggested sending him some pieces of my textile art that he could potentially incorporate into a collaborative garment. And I wanted to send a box of yarns and fibres from my own collection as I have collected all sorts of interesting stuff over the years.

Drew had an exhibition at Blak Dot Gallery in Melboune in August 2022 and I hope it was a great success for him, he deserves it. I would have gone if I'd heard about it in time. When I did hear about it it wasn't until December last year and I was surprised it was called "Rebuilding Queerness", which may in truth have put me off.





I was dismayed to see Drew recently posting stuff about "queer" on his social media and railing at passerbys on public streets for looking at him in a way he interpreted as a micro aggression. Its strange for people of my "generation" to hear young people taking up what was a slur against homosexual people for most of the 20thC. It alarms me too because the descriptor queer has its own particular meaning within the loose net of Critical Social Justice ideologies as it relates to "Queer Theory". The actual application of Queer Theory in contemporary society would be very harmful to women and children.

This is a definition of queer that was on top of the list when I googled it, and I hope this was the relatively benign version of queer that Andrew intends:

Genderqueer: Genderqueer describes a gender identity that is not defined as exclusively male or female. Genderqueer people experience their gender in unique ways. Their identity can include elements of the feminine, masculine, and nonbinary, or none of these. Identifying as genderqueer may be viewed as a rejection of associations or labels.

That kind of queer is just sort of cringey and semantically incomprehensible. I think it would include a great many people, including myself, quite comfortably.

It was whether he was alluding to the other kind of Queer that I was curious to find out about so I left a public comment on his IG asking if there was more info to expand on what he meant. I'd looked at his links in the bio and there was nothing describing whether his queerness was to the political ideology or just some sort of angsting to be interesting.




Drew has absolutely zilch obligation to answer my queries or to be polite or respectful to me in any way whatsoever, so when I didn't get acknowledged that was of no consequence. Then a couple of days ago he posted stories about "white" people looking at him in a way he didn't like and I responded in a way he obviously didn't like too....and got blocked.

I really regret this has been the outcome. I wish I'd been able to eventually renew my commission and have bought one his garments made for me. I would also loved to have sent some pieces to incorporate in a collaborative work along with a carton of some unique fibres. 

It seems that none of things will happen now because I was too curious and my curiousity got interpreted as aggression.


 



Monday, 2 January 2023

New Year, same old kimono


Sometimes I wish I was a post modernist performance artist!

I've been having visions of making a special tribute kimono for Emily Ito to display in my upcoming exhibitions of wearable art this year. I visualise it as a costume of extremely coarse fibre embroidered with golden luxury beliefs. Soaking wet with tears of people whose feelings have been hurt. Every colour will be celebrated except white, as that is the colour of the devil. The Ito Kimono will be affordable for elite individuals who've had tertiary education and induction into the upper echelons of the Critical Social Justice warriorhood. 

Readers may recall my blog from the17th of December describing my fracas with the Surface Design Association and how they kicked me out for not aligning with their values and code of conduct (otherwise known as getting revealed for not being in the cult of Critical Social Justice ideology).

Despite the SDA board director denying they were going to publish a transcript of the Zoom meeting "Holding Space: Unraveling Appropriation in Fiber Art "  it has appeared on their website and is now available for the general public to enjoy. During the live event on December 3rd the moderator Karen Baker intentionally removed me twice me so I couldn't participate.

                                                      work in progress, January 2023


Now that I've been able to listen this is my response.

Overall, I had to admire how moderator Baker maintained her sincere belief that appropriation is a real and significant problem and kept working hard to get the three presenters to find examples. The presenters, Japheth Asiedu-Kwarteng, Meghan O'Brien and Emily Ito, didn't discuss real, specific examples of appropriation but felt it adequate to cite "personal experience". Their personal experience evidence is that because they feel hurt it proves appropriation has occurred. Asiedu-Kwarteng and O'Brien didn't point out any examples of appropriation, as none seem to have happened to them personally or to the ethnic groups they identify as belonging to, other than vague references to colonisation and things "white" people did in the past.

(An aside, don't call me white, I find it racist and offensive. "white" is a reference to my skin colour. White is not a national or ethnic group. 

 (Even the President of Ghana hates the world referring to "Africans" while not recognising African people are many different nationalities, ethnic groups, religions, beliefs, values, et al. Ghanian President shocking comments on African Americans)

Any person dismissing me as white intends to imply that my skin colour is a package deal of ethics, values, beliefs and world views that I have no control over or choice. They see me as a stereotype white coloured human that unavoidably holds specific ideas because my skin coulour is white (unless I can prove otherwise by finding a BIPOC blood relative)

Ito, is an old hand at seeing appropriation everywhere who has been dining out on her fare of stale crackers and stinky tripe for about 5 years now, so she had her pre packaged mincemeat sanger with pictures ready to go. Despite Baker referring several times in the opening comments to the outstanding quality of the artists who were going to present, Ito is not any sort of fibre or textile artist. She admits to barely knowing how to sew. At 41.20 in the video she denies even being an activist, asking to be regarded as a person who is "activated". Apparently her expertise on appropriation is mainly centered around her pride in haranguing children what they are allowed to wear for Halloween. In the video go to 42.00 - 43.22 to appreciate that I'm not kidding she is proud to be teaching elementary school kids Critical Race Theory, maybe she shows the Pyramid of White Supremacy to the kids so they are educated how scary white people are...?(...mmmm, isn't Halloween appropriated from a Scots tradition "All Hallows"....?)

Another interesting segment is around 44.00 when Ito pauses to spruik for a publisher for her memoirs. Although only in her mid 30s she must feel she has some notable accomplishments. A Netflix special next, perhaps? Something along the lines of a Meghan Markle martyrship and struggle expose?

Sadly, its apparent her angst over people using the word kimono will probably never be assuaged as people all over the word continue to call robes kimono and many, many people cannot make sense of why she finds it offensive. Quite probably, more of the people who won't stop saying kimono are not even white!

The fact that the SDA finds Ito a credible commentator on appropriation in textile art points to the debasement of its own credibility as an arts organisation now that it is promoting lightweight propaganda devoid of genuinely academic critical analysis. Itos most compelling argument is that it hurts her feelings that non Japanese people call some garments kimonos so somebody should pay attention and make her pain go away. Beyond that....there is nothing. Despite pedalling really, really hard for many years, and having to tone down or excise some of the more ridiculous things she started out trying to legitimise, its hard to prove there is a problem....when there is not. 

One of the most annoying things Ito made us look at (apart from emotionally loaded family pictures, especially the one of her and little daughter Koto holding up placards at a political rally, protesting their oppression?) was this...



(my apology for the crap quality of this image. I've just upgraded laptops and haven't installed a program for editing yet, so this is a photo of the screen. On the actual video talk, Ito presents this at 48.10)

She has used this pyramid before. Some time back on another platform I made a response about it that was probably deleted. 

Pictured is piece of nonsense described as "The Pyramid of White Supremacy" 

Pyramid of White Supremacy

It was generated from a 3rd rate University in the USA in 2018. It is tool of Critical Social Justice agitprop intended to impress the credulous. It may be trying to resemble Maslows Hierarchy of Needs.

The Pyramid has no academic credence whatsoever. Its not a visual tool to illustrate facts or data. It is based on speculative assertions about "white supremacy". It illustrates someones THEORY, and isn't evidence of anything. Nada. 

I suggest the SDA should remove Karen Baker from being on the committee for Equity, Access and Integration. Futher I think the SDA board should consider Bakers academic competence to present the Holding Space seminars and the likelihood that Baker is making the SDA seem an organisation of questionable academic calibre.