On April 19th, the Biden Administration released new rules "broadening the scope of Title IX," the 1972 law prohibiting sex discrimination in educational programs. The new rules add "gender identity" to the law, roll back regulations aimed at ensuring due process for those accused of harassment or assault, and effectively demand use of "preferred pronouns," leading many to view the changes as nothing less than destruction of women’s sex based protections in colleges and universities across America and right to compete on fair ground in sport, as well as forcing people to refer to men identifying as women as "she," and creating a system wherein anyone accused of harassment or assault can have their lives destroyed with little recourse.
In this episode, Meghan Murphy speaks with Julie Hamill, a child advocate, lawyer, and Palos Verdes School Board Member, about the changes and their impact.
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It's only recently that we are beginning to hear the stories of family members of men who have begun identifying as women, from the “trans widow” to, now, the children of transitioners.
Emma Thomas is the founder of the campaign group, Children of Transitioners, a group that questioned the University of Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust on their “perinatal care policy for trans and non binary people policy." Children of Transitioners inquired about “safeguarding concerns about the sexual and emotional abuse of babies and children of transitioners” and asked about evidence supporting the claim that the “milk” produced by trans-identified men after taking a combination of drugs is “comparable to that produced following the birth of a baby.”
Emma's own father "came out" to her as "trans" when she was nine. In this episode, Meghan Murphy speaks with her about her childhood, her father, and her concerns about protecting kids and babies from trans ideology.
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Sasha Ayad is Licensed Professional Counselor who has treated adolescents for over 13 years. She began feeling concerned about the trans trend reaching teens, and after learning about Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) so began looking into the “trans kid”phenomenon more deeply. Sasha became a founding board member of several organizations fighting for a more cautious, science-based approach, including Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine, The Gender Exploratory Therapy Association, and Genspect. She is co-host of Gender: A Wider Lens Podcast and co-author, alongside Lisa Marchiano and Stella O’Malley, of a new book called, When Kids Say They’re Trans.
In this episode, Meghan Murphy speaks with her about what’s really behind teenagers' desire to transition and what parents can do when dealing with a teen identifying as trans.
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The so-called "trans widow" has become the woman best able to reveal the truth about the trans trend. She is the woman who lost her husband to transgenderism, and often tells a similar story of porn addiction, narcissism, abandonment of family, and sometimes abuse. I spoke with one women, who is remaining anonymous for safety reasons, about her ex-husband, who she is calling "Dave," and how he went from abuser to trans activist, escaping any accountability.
Feminist Current is an entirely listener-supported show. Please consider supporting us with a donation or with a paid subscription on Substack.
Canadians have begun pushing back against gender identity ideology in schools. But it has not been easy. The first 1millionmarch4kids in Victoria, BC on September 21st was shut down barely after it began, the police determining it was too dangerous to continue. A second rally happened on October 21st, and this time a woman going by the name "Tara" was punched by a counter protester. In this episode, Meghan Murphy speaks with her about what happened.
Kajsa Ekis Ekman published Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy, and the Split Self in 2013 and has worked as a prominent and respected journalist in Sweden for many years. In 2022, Kajsa published The Meaning of Sex: Thoughts about the New Definition of Woman, within which she presents a Marxist feminist critique of gender identity ideology. She has since lost jobs, friends, and support from both leftists and feminists in Sweden. She has not given up on her work, though. This year, Kajsa launched Parabol.press.
In this episode, Meghan Murphy speaks with Kajsa about the situation with gender identity ideology and legislation in Sweden, her cancellation, and how she views the left nowadays.
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Helen Joyce is a journalist, editor, and the author of Trans: When ideology meets reality. Helen is also a founder of Sex Matters, a campaign group advocating for clarity about the two sexes—male and female—in law and in life. In this episode, Meghan Murphy speaks with Helen about new political developments in the UK around gender identity legislation and women's sex-based rights, why women's bathrooms matter, and her spat with Matt Walsh.
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Jennifer Bilek is a writer, a journalist, and an artist. As many of us struggled to understand the seemingly sudden onset of gender identity ideology and wonder how it took hold of institutions so quickly, Jennifer dug in and found the truth: billionaires, biotech, and transhumanists.
In this episode, Meghan Murphy speaks with Jennifer about her research and what she found about the roots of the transgender movement after "following the money."
Find more of Jennifer's work at the 11th Hour blog or on Substack.
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After women's rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen was mobbed and assaulted in New Zealand on March 25th, longtime feminist and socialist Jill Ovens decided she'd had enough. The following week, Jill resigned from the Labour Party and founded the Women's Rights Party, which states, on their website:
"We want a world that is safe and fair for women and girls
The Women’s Rights Party is a party of women and men who believe in democracy, equality, and biological reality.
Sex is binary
Human beings cannot change sex
Women are adult humans of the female sex"
In this episode, Meghan Murphy speaks with Jill about her political history and why she formed the Women's Rights Party.
Feminist Current is a listener-supported podcast. Please consider a donation to support our work.
In recent years, prisons across the Western world have been allowing men who identify as women to be housed alongside female inmates, leading to sexual harassment, sexual assaults, pregnancies, and complaints from women both in prison and among the general public. These complaints have been mostly ignored by governments and those with the power to do something. That said, the policy in the UK was changed in February in response to one high profile case in particular, wherein a rapist named Adam Graham began identifying as "Isla Bryson" in order to be reassigned to a women's prison in Scotland. The new policy prevents men who "retain male genitalia or have been convicted of a violent or sexual offence" from being moved to women's prisons.
The US and Canada, though, continue to lag on addressing this issue, and dangerous men remain in women’s prisons across North America.
In this episode, Meghan Murphy speaks with two women who are taking action: Amanda Stulman is the USA director of Keep Prisons Single Sex, and Jennifer Thomas is the founder of Free Speech for Women and runs an action group called "Get Men Out."
Feminist Current is a listener-supported podcast. Please consider a donation to support our work.
In February 2020, Laila Mickelwait, Exodus Cry’s Director of Abolition at the time, published an op-ed titled, “Time to Shut Pornhub Down,” bringing attention to the fact that Pornhub was hosting child pornography and videos of trafficking victims on the site. This sparked a petition and accompanying campaign, Traffickinghub. Then, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Nicholas Kristof, published a scathing exposé in the New York Times, titled, “The Children of Pornhub," leading the company to leap to action, deleting 80% of their content overnight — about 10 million videos. Visa, Mastercard, and Discover cut ties with the site. In 2021, Canadian parliament began to investigate the Canadian-based company that owns Pornhub, MindGeek and a number of lawsuits were filed against the company on behalf of survivors. NCOSE — the National Centre on Sexual Exploitation — filed several of these lawsuits, representing victims seeking justice against MindGeek. NCOSE was featured in a documentary released on Netflix last money, purporting to address the scandal, called Money Shot.
In this episode, Meghan Murphy speaks with Haley McNamara, Director of the International Centre on Sexual Exploitation in the UK and a Vice President at the U.S. based National Center on Sexual Exploitation, about the situation at Pornhub, the Netflix documentary, and NCOSE’s efforts to stop exploitation in porn.
The issue of prostitution in Canada has been left mostly uncovered. The debate in the public sphere tends to centre around questions of "women’s choices," and the left chants "sex work is work" in an effort to frame the problems in the sex trade as being limited to labour standards. Meanwhile, the men who pay for sex and exploit women in trade are ignored.
In this episode, Meghan Murphy speaks with Andrea Heinz and Kathy King, co-authors of a soon-to-be-released book, “When Men Buy Sex: Who Really Pays?”
Andrea Heinz is a Canadian feminist who spent seven years in Edmonton’s licensed and regulated sex trade. She is completing a University degree in Governance, Law & Management and is married with three young children.
Kathy King is a clinical social worker (BA, BSW, MSW) with over five decades of professional employment and volunteer advocacy. In 1997, her passion became personal when she lost her only daughter to drug addiction, mental illness, and exploitation. Her story is shared at MissingCara.ca
Porn and people’s relationships to porn has changed immensely since the advent of the internet — even moreso with apps like OnlyFans and other social media tools that connect consumers directly to women. Many argue these tools are a means to empower women — allowing them freedom, independence, and the ability to make a lot of money. But is that really the case? To learn more about the realities behind platforms like OnlyFans, Meghan Murphy speaks with Alix Aharon, Co-Founder of Partners for Ethical Care (PEC), the Founder of the Gender Mapping Project, and a porn researcher.
Robert Wintemute, a professor of human rights law at King's College London and a lawyer for the LGB Alliance, was scheduled to give a talk called called “Sex vs. Gender (Identity) Debate In the United Kingdom and the Divorce of LGB from T,” at McGill University in Montreal last week. The event never happened, though, cancelled shortly after it began as protesters stormed the venue shouting profanities and slogans like, "Trans rights are human rights," threw flour at Robert, and unplugged a projector he used for the event. Robert rightly called the protest “extremely anti-democratic.” In this episode, Meghan Murphy speaks with him about the protest, as well as how we came to a place wherein trans rights have superseded women’s sex-based human rights in law.
Scottish women suffered major blow in December when the SNP government passed a bill that will allow anyone to get a gender recognition certificate through self-declaration without a diagnosis of "gender dysphoria" or doctor’s assessment. They will need only to claim to have been "living as a different gender" for three months. Teenagers will become eligible to apply to change their legal sex on the day of their 16th birthday.
For Women Scotland was founded in June 2018 amid fear exactly this would happen, leading to an erosion of women’s rights. In this episode, Meghan Murphy speaks with director of For Women Scotland, Susan Smith, about the group's fight for women’s sex based rights in the country and what happens now that the Gender Recognition Reform Bill has passed.
Marissa Darlingh was an elementary school counselor with over a decade of experience working with students in culturally diverse public school districts when she was fired from her job at Allen-Field Elementary School in the Milwaukee Public School District.
After speaking at an April 23 rally in Madison against gender identity ideology in schools, a campaign was organized to get Marissa fired, and her supervisor began an investigation. Marissa was subsequently suspended, then received a no-trespass order. She received a letter of termination on September 30, and filed a federal lawsuit, arguing this was a violation of her free speech rights. Her attorneys also argued the district violated Darlingh's constitutional right to due process by not giving her sufficient notice before she was suspended from her job on June 14.
In this episode, Meghan Murphy speaks with Marissa about her work, her case, "allying with the right," and why she spoke out against teaching kids about gender identity ideology.
Two months ago, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini traveled from her hometown in the province of Kurdistan to the Iranian capital, Tehran, to visit her brother. She was arrested by the morality police getting off the subway for failing to cover her hair properly, in accordance with Iran’s Sharia law. Three days later, she was dead, beaten severly in the head. Iranian women said "No more," and launched an uprising. Protests and demonstrations have been ongoing ever since. In this episode, Meghan Murphy speaks with Maryam Namazie, a secularist, feminist, and human rights activist, about the uprisings, the history of Saria law and women’s rights in Iran, and how Western feminists can better support Iranian women in their fight for freedom.
Today, women only spaces are highly controversial. Thanks to gender identity legislation, “female only” has become practically obsolete. When Sall Grover set out to create a female only social network and app, she was trying to help — offering women a space where they needn’t deal with the predatory, sexist, harassing behaviour of men. She had no idea such an endeavour would make her a target. In this episode, Meghan Murphy speaks with the founder & CEO of Giggle about her experience trying to get the app off the ground, and about a case brought against her on account of a complaint lodged against her by a trans activist named Roxy Tickle, with regard to a tweet exchange between the two about the McIver’s Ladies Baths in Sydney and about the fact Roxy was kicked off of Giggle after breaking the rules on sex to gain access to the app.
Pornography has been wholly normalized in our society. It is expected that men and boys use it, is joked about, and is treated as a harmless pastime — synonomous with masturbation. But the industry is anything but harmless.
Benji Nolot is the founder of Exodus Cry, an NGO committed to abolishing sex trafficking and breaking the cycle of commercial sexual exploitation while assisting and empowering its victims. He recently produced a series called, Beyond Fantasy, which looks at the disturbing realities of popular genres of porn like "barely legal" and "hardcore," as well as the reality of coercion, violence, and health impacts like STIs on those on film.
In this episode, Meghan Murphy speaks with Benji about the documentary series and what we all need to know about what goes on on and off screen in porn. The truth is almost unimaginably disturbing.
Infighting is not new to feminism — who is doing things right, who is doing things wrong, who is toxic, who is good, who is a phony, a grifter, not an ally, too right, too rich, too academic, too old, or too pretty has always been up for debate, and potentially a reason to cancel women from the movement. Today, even within the already marginal "gender critical feminist" umbrella, women are expected to pick sides on party lines.
Women like Kellie-Jay Keen (Posie Parker) seem particularly divisive. Last week, Posie held a Speaker’s Corner event in Brighton, which drew the attention of trans activists as well as many women wanting to speak out about the impact of gender identity ideology on their lives and rights. But it also drew the ire of some feminists, who complained that Posie’s event (and her work, more broadly) was too closely connected to the right.
One response came from Katy Worley, also known as DJ Lippy, a London-based DJ turned activist, best known for her work with the feminist collective Make More Noise. She began organizing protests and publicity stunts to fight gender identity ideology back in 2020 and produces a weekly talk show called Wombs with a View.
In this episode, Meghan Murphy speaks with Katy about the controversy and whether feminists need to choose between left and right.
