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As the second season of Feminist Professor launches, we begin a multi-episode and closer examination of Project 2025. In this first episode, we focus on the larger plan to regulate, obstruct, and ultimately end the provision of abortion services in the United States.

Featuring:

Dr. Tammy Birk

Show Notes:

You can find a PDF of the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership at https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

You can find the Project 2025 Tracker at https://www.project2025.observer/en

The mentioned article, ‘Education Policy Reforms Are Key Strategies for Increasing the Married Birth Rate’ (Jay Greene and Lindsey Burke) can be found here: https://www.heritage.org/education/report/education-policy-reforms-are-key-strategies-increasing-the-married-birth-rate

Podcast Available On: Apple Spotify

Featuring:

Dr. Tammy Birk

Show Notes:

In this episode, we discuss the important political and personal necessity of rest. Because we live in a grind culture that insists on incessant productivity and normalizes exhaustion, we have lost the capacity to define and defend rest. Thanks to Tricia Hersey’s work in Rest is Resistance, this episode describes how we are damaged by the ‘cult of urgency and busyness’ and how we might begin to reimagine the radical potential of learning how to rest.

Texts and artifacts mentioned in this podcast:
This episode relies heavily on Tricia Hersey’s thinking in Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto. You can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/Rest-Resistance-Reclaiming-Divine-Right/dp/0316365211

Podcast Available On: Apple Spotify

Featuring:

Dr. Tammy Birk

Show Notes:

In this episode, we are going to examine the shortcomings and liabilities of resilience. We will discuss the ways in which resilience—as a social expectation and psychological ideal—can obscure the need for structural change and block larger forms of resistance. Resilience can easily become accommodationist—that is, adapted to the survival, rather than elimination, of ongoing harm—and, as a result, work to reward the individual who persists in ‘bouncing back’ from intolerable situations.

Texts and artifacts mentioned in this podcast:
In this episode, I cited or relied on the following sources:

‘Bouncing Back: Vulnerability and Resistance in Times of Resilience’ (Sarah Bracke) in Vulnerability in Resistance. Eds. Butler, Gambetti, and Sabsay. Duke U Press, 2016.

‘Resisting Resilience’ (Mark Neocleous) Radical Philosophy 178 | March 2013.

“You Have to Show Strength’: An Exploration of Gender, Race, and Depression’ (Tamara Beaubeouf-Lafontant) Gender and Society, Vol. 21: February 2007.

In this week’s episode, I was fortunate to sit down for a longer discussion about trans athletes and gender in sport with Dr. Kristy McCray, a sports sociologist and Professor in Otterbein’s Health and Sport Sciences Department. This episode is twice as long as my solo episodes, but it is well worth the time (even if you have to listen in two segments). We discuss the many ways that sports work to reinforce (or challenge) gender norms, why trans women have become the locus of so much social anxiety, the history and context of sex verification testing, the distinction between a trans athlete and an athlete who is living with a difference in sexual development (DID), the importance of ensuring participation in sports for all persons, and the reason that Dr. McCray believes that female trans athletes have become a hot-button political and cultural issue.

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Featuring:

Dr. Tammy Birk, Dr. McCray

Dr. McCray mentioned Katie Barnes’s Fair Play: How Sports Shape the Gender Debates, a well-written and accessible text on the history and context of the trans athlete ‘debate.’ I highly recommend it.
She also mentions a short Vox video, ‘The Problem with Sex Testing in Sport,’ that you can watch at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiCftTLUzCI

This week’s episode looks more closely at the increasingly normalized ‘fear of gender’ and the many ways that it is leveraged to reinforce the ‘biological reality of sex.’ The fear of gender, in many ways, is the fear of gender self-determination, or the right of a person to decide their own gender identity rather than obey what a purported ‘biological truth’ has determined to be true and unchangeable.

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Featuring:

Dr. Tammy Birk

This episode relies once again on Judith Butler’s recent text, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, as well as legislative and political media sources that are easily traceable in any search engine.

In this week’s episode, we will continue exploring the assumptions that underlie ‘woke gender ideology.’ This particular episode will focus on the purported ‘biological reality of sex’ as defined by the Trump administration’s Executive Order ‘Defending Women from Gender Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.’ More specifically, we will explore how a scientifically inaccurate understanding of biological sex is leveraged in anti-gender and anti-trans political efforts.

Podcast Available On:

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Featuring:

Dr. Tammy Birk

In this episode, I referenced Executive Order 14168: Defending Women from Gender Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/defending-women-from-gender-ideology-extremism-and-restoring-biological-truth-to-the-federal-government/
For further information on the complexity of ‘biological sex,’ please see:
‘The Biological Reality of Sex and Intersex: A Response to the Executive Order ‘Defending Women from Gender Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government’ The Pediatric Endocrine Society, 2025. https://pedsendo.org/public-policy/the-biological-reality-of-sex-and-intersex-a-response-to-the-executive-order-defending-women-from-gender-ideology-extremism-and-restoring-biological-truth-to-the-federal-government/
The work of Anne Fausto-Sterling, especially Sexing the Body: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/anne-fausto-sterling/sexing-the-body/9781541672895/?lens=basic-books
‘Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes is Overly Simplistic’ (Claire Ainsworth and Nature magazine) Scientific American: October 2018 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the-idea-of-2-sexes-is-overly-simplistic1/
‘Biological Science Rejects the Sex Binary, and That’s Good for Humanity’ (Agustin Fuentes) Sapiens: 2022 https://www.sapiens.org/biology/biological-science-rejects-the-sex-binary-and-thats-good-for-humanity/
‘Here’s Why Human Sex is Not Binary’ (Agustin Fuentes) Scientific American: May 2023. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/heres-why-human-sex-is-not-binary/
‘How is Sex Determined? Scientists Say It is Complicated’ (Hannah Chinn et al.) NPR: March 12. 2025. https://www.npr.org/2025/03/12/1237991522/male-female-sex-science-human-biology

In this episode, we begin to discuss the new rhetoric of ‘woke gender ideology’ and the way that it is weaponized in the current political climate. We pay special attention to the concepts of ‘wokeness’ and ‘ideology’ this week; next week, we will focus entirely on the vilification of gender.  This episode also discusses how to allow for despair without falling into paralysis and what active hope might make possible.

Podcast Available On:

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Featuring:

Dr. Tammy Birk

This episode continues the conversation of last week, Preparing for Trump 2.0.  In it, eighteen speakers from the larger podcast community share brief and powerful insights into what they are doing differently or refusing to do in this volatile political climate.  

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Featuring:

Dr. Tammy Birk

Various voices from the community.

In this episode, we consider how we might differently approach the second presidency of Donald Trump. How can we guard against overwhelm and dysregulation? How can we direct our energy and attention to meaningful projects rather than fall into another extended outrage cycle?

Podcast Available On:

Apple

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Featuring:

Dr. Tammy Birk

Show Notes:
In this episode, I cited two pieces:
How To Live Under Trump II (Anand Giridharadas):
https://the.ink/p/how-to-live-under-trump-ii

Excerpt from Facebook post, November 6 2024 (Rebecca Solnit):
https://billayers.org/2024/11/07/posted-on-rebecca-solnits-x-account-nov-6-2024/

In this episode, we discuss the rise in trans panic, or the cultivation of widespread anxiety and fear at the very fact of trans existence. We talk about the ways in which trans panic serves particular political ends as well as underscores the phantasmatic nature of gender. Using gender affirming care as an example, we consider how much trans panic relies on fictitious stories about gender and ignores the lived realities of trans youth specifically.

Podcast Available On:

Apple

Spotify

Featuring:

Dr. Tammy Birk

Show Notes:
In this episode, I rely on Judith Butler’s thinking on gender ideology:
Who’s Afraid of Gender?
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374608224/whosafraidofgender/