Feminist Current

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. Feminist Current has been an entirely listener-funded podcast for a decade. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider a donation!

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.  Feminist Current has been fully independent since 2012. Please consider a donation to support our work. 

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.  Please consider supporting the Feminist Current podcast with a donation. 

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.