Feminist Current

Phyllis Chesler is a best-selling author, a longtime feminist activist, and a retired psychotherapist. She has organized political, legal, religious, and human rights campaigns across the world. Yet she, like so many other second wave feminists, is being erased by mainstream media, academia, and third wave feminism. The author of 18 books and a central figure in the women’s liberation movement of the 60s and 70s, Phyllis has never played it safe. She has always been, as she calls it, “politically incorrect,” hence the name of her new book, A Politically Incorrect Feminist: Creating a Movement with Bitches, Lunatics, Dykes, Prodigies, Warriors, and Wonder Women. In this episode, I speak with Phyllis about her experiences in the movement, her perspectives on today’s feminist politics, and the repercussions of being “politically incorrect.”

Women’s bodies are complex — our hormones, our fertility, our periods, the way our bodies function and change depending on what point we are at during our cycles, as well as throughout our lives, as we go through perimenopause and menopause. All this can impact our health, energy, sleep, libidos, mood, and more. Yet many of us know so little about our own bodies and cycles, as well as the way all kinds of things can impact our hormones, cycles, and periods — from the birth control we use, to what we eat, to things like the chemicals in cosmetics and plastics. In order to learn more about all of this, I spoke with Nicole Jardim, also known as “The Period Girl” — a health coach and all ‘round expert on women’s hormonal and reproductive health, over the phone this week, about everything from ovarian cysts to PMS to menopause and more.

To learn more about Nicole’s work, visit her website at nicolejardim.com, and check out her podcast, The Period Party, on iTunes. To learn more about Essure, as mentioned during this episode, visit Dr. Shawn Tassone’s website: tassonemd.com.

In 2017, Dawn Wilcox founded Women Count USA, a national database and femicide census of all women and girls murdered by men in the United States. The numbers are shocking. When I spoke to Dawn in July, she’d counted 805 women killed by men since January 2018. As of today, the number has reached 1037.

Too often, when men kill women, we hear that “it was an isolated incident” or that a man “snapped,” when, in reality, these murders are more often connected to ongoing abuse and are premeditated.

A domestic violence and sexual assault survivor herself, Dawn now teaches other women how to identify and challenge the misogynistic and victim-blaming narratives we see in reporting on violence against women, and does the very hard and time-consuming work of tracking femicide in the US in her spare time, on top of her job as a registered nurse.

I spoke with her over the phone about her work and what she’s learned through tracking these murders from her home in Texas.

To follow Dawn’s work, follow Woman Count USA on Facebook or on Twitter.

Earlier this month, a number of media outlets published pieces about a new “lesbian-run church” having been officially recognized by the IRS as 501(c)(3) organization and a church, giving it tax exempt status. But the news wasn’t only of interest to the media for tax purposes… At Forbes, Peter J. Reilly explained that the Pussy Church of Modern Witchcraft was controversial on account of an ongoing “conflict” between “radical feminists and the transgender community.” Other sites, like the Advocate, Pink News, Them, Pride, and Reason outright labelled the Church “transphobic,” “anti-transgender,” and a “TERF church” on account of their female-only policy.

Their website explains:

“A Woman is an adult female human. A Girl is a minor female human. The Pussy Church serves Women and Girls only. Males are not permitted to participate, regardless of how they identify. We expressly reject the concepts of gender identity, transgenderism, and gender as being meaningful to defining what a Woman or Girl is.”

In this episode, I speak with Sister Dandelion, a co-founder and trustee of the Pussy Church of Modern Witchcraft. Sister Dandelion is a poet and priestess, she has been practicing witchcraft and reading the Tarot for 25 years. She honors Z Budapest, Starhawk, and Susun Weed as her witchcraft mentors and foresisters. As a radical feminist, Sister Dandelion has organized and collaborated with women on issues such as male violence, reproductive freedom and women’s health, lesbian liberation, and the creation of woman-loving culture in the context of a woman-hating system.

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Many people are rightly horrified by the Trump administration’s recent move to begin separating children from their asylum-seeking parents when they cross the US-Mexico border. Recently, the US government also determined that domestic violence and gang violence no longer qualify as grounds for asylum — a change that has particularly harmful impacts on women in Central America, who are subject to extremely high levels of violence. But beyond fighting for change in the US, what can Canada do to help?

To learn more about the impact of these policies and what Canada’s role is in all this, I spoke with Jaymie Heilman and Maria Walker, who recently published an article here at Feminist Current titled, “If Justin Trudeau really cares about keeping refugee women and girls alive, his government needs to rescind the Safe Third Country Agreement.â€

Jaymie Heilman teaches Latin American History and the History of Illicit Drugs at the University of Alberta. Maria Walker has an MA in Latin American Studies from Stanford University and volunteers at an immigration detention center on the US-Mexico border. I spoke with them over the phone this week.

The Liberal Party of Canada recently introduced Bill C-78, which proposes a number of changes to Canada’s Divorce Act, including better addressing what is referred to as “family violence,” changes to terminology like “custody” and “access,” and encouraging parties to use family dispute mediation services as an alternative to court.

Divorce law has always had particular impacts on women, and though it has improved enormously in the past few decades, it remains important to consider the role power under patriarchy plays in divorce and custody battles.

In order to better understand the proposed changes and their potential impact on women, I spoke with Susan Boyd. Susan is a Professor Emerita at the Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia, where she held the Chair in Feminist Legal Studies from 1992-2015. She was also Director of the Centre for Feminist Legal Studies for many years. Susan is a long-standing member of the editorial board of the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law and a board member of the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF). Her book, Child Custody, Law, and Women’s Work, remains one of the few feminist treatments of child custody law in Canada. Her latest co-authored book is Autonomous Motherhood? A Socio-Legal Study of Choice and Constraint. I spoke with her over the phone from her home in Vancouver.

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A decade ago, Serah Gazali escaped Saudi Arabia, leaving behind a life where her every move was monitored and controlled. She acquired refugee status while in Mexico, based on her sex, and her application set a precedent in Latin American UNHCR case law. She is now living in Vancouver, and has not had contact with any of her family members since she left. Serah is an MA graduate student in the Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia, worked at the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Mexico, as well as with the Women’s Economic Council, and was a senior counselor for the Syrian refugee project in Canada.

In this episode I speak with her about women’s oppression in Saudi Arabian, the guardianship system, how she escaped, and how Western feminists can support the women’s movement in Saudi.

The notion that sex matters, in terms of the law, is a fairly new one. It wasn’t until recently that discrimination against pregnant women was considered to be discrimination against women, specifically. In 1974, an American court case, Geduldig v. Aiello, determined that differential treatment based on pregnancy only distinguishes between a group consisting of “pregnant women” and a group consisting of “nonpregnant persons.” In other words, this type of discrimination was considered only to be discriminatory against those who are pregnant, rather than against those capable of giving birth — i.e. females. “Nonpregnant persons,” is, of course, not sex specific…

We know today, thanks to the work of feminists, that women have been discriminated against in a myriad of ways — notably in the workplace — on account of their assumed ability to become pregnant, regardless of whether or not they actually were pregnant, at that moment. In her paper, “Pregnant ‘persons’: the linguistic defanging of women’s issues and the legal danger of ‘brain sex’ language,” Andrea Orwoll addresses the danger of linguistically erasing women as a class from the law, all the while incorporating sex stereotypes into it. She writes:

“The language of the law should acknowledge and constitutionally protect real, biological sex differences precisely because they are real: because they are based in the body — the only plane of reality that the law can effectively govern—and because they have historically imposed, and continue today to impose, material consequences on women. At the same time, the law should refuse to participate in the ages-old practice of stereotyping and disenfranchising the female sex based on assumed mental capacities.”

Andrea is a first-year attorney and an alumna of William S. Boyd School of Law (magna cum laude) and Whittier College (summa cum laude). In this episode, I speak with her about the history of women-centered language in law and why it still matters.

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As the debate around gender identity intensifies, it seems more and more people are asking questions about the impact of transgender ideology and legislation on women, children, and our understanding of gender under patriarchy, more broadly. At the same time, those who do speak out or challenge the ideology behind the concept of transgenderism (or connected policies and practices) are being punished for doing so.

Heather Brunskell-Evans is a Senior Research Fellow at King’s College in London and was the National Spokesperson for the Women’s Equality Party Policy on Ending Sexual Violence until recently. After appearing on Moral Maze — a BBC Radio 4 series — she was removed from the position of Spokeswoman for the Party. Students at Heather’s university also no-platformed her, cancelling a scheduled talk on pornography and the sexualization of young women supposedly because her views on “transgender health… would violate the student union’s ‘Safe Space’ policy.â€

All this came as a result of Heather challenging the idea of so-called “trans kids” and the practice of transitioning young people on the basis that they are “born in the wrong body.”

Heather is a co-founder of Resist Porn Culture and co-editor of a new book called Transgender Children and Young People: Born in Your Own Body. I spoke with her over the phone from her home in London.

We often point to nature in order to defend our own behaviour and patterns in human society. People will defend everything from violence, to rape, to male dominance by pointing to animal behaviour. But maybe instead of looking to defend patriarchy by looking to nature, we should look to nature for alternative structures and behaviours that challenge our own social norms.

When Caitlin Starowicz headed off to the Kenyan savannah, she found matriarchal and matrilineal societies that humans could certainly take cues from. Indeed, the king of the jungle may in fact be a queen.

Caitlin is co-director of a fascinating new documentary called Mommy Wildest, which follows female-led and female-centric lion, elephant, and baboon families, challenging the notion that male dominance is either the most natural or functional family structure.

In this episode, I speak with Caitlin about the documentary and what she learned from her time on the Kenyan savannah.