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 3^rd 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