FiLiA

Valérie Pelletier (aka Legal Tender) is a militant abolitionist radical feminist from Montréal, Quebec in Canada. She is a survivor of prostitution, now a public speaker, a conceptual artist. a vlogger, a singer (jazz, country etc.) and the happy mother of 4 cat children. She is also involved at CAFES (Collectif d'Aide aux Femmes Exploitées Sexuellement).

Contact via email

Page as a militant artist (more English)

Activist project page (more French)

YouTube Channel

Afsana Lachaux is a policy specialist and an award-winning women’s rights campaigner on access to justice and violence against women and girls. This podcast interview highlights Afsana's legal struggle to obtain contact with her son Louis and the pitfalls of Sharia law in Dubai for women. Afsana writes about why a British court ordered her to pay her ex-husbands £94K legal bill here. She continues her battle as a mother to be reunited with her child, which so far has spanned eight years and three countries.

You can support Afsana by donating to her crowdfunder.

Find out more on Afsana’s website: afsanalachaux.com

Follow Afsana on Twitter @afsanalachaux and Instagram

Fair Play for Women is a campaigning and consultancy group which raises awareness, provides evidence and analysis, and supports policy-makers to protect the rights of women and girls in the UK.

Their aim is to facilitate the much-needed factual discussion about the need for sex-based policies for women and to provide policy makers with the guidance they need for evidence-based policy making that is fair for all. Fair Play for Women has earned a reputation, amongst the general public, policy makers, politicians and the media, for calm, rational, fact-checked, accurate information, statistics, and good-faith debate.

Fair Play for Women Guiding Principles

1) Biological sex exists, and in certain situations it is vitally important – objective truths are not bigoted or transphobic.

2) Sexism exists, it is endemic, and women and girls face structural inequality, male physical and sexual violence, harassment, reproductive injustice, unequal pay and so on precisely because they are members of the female sex.

3) Gender (or culturally determined roles, beliefs, and stereotypes) is neither natural nor innate but a socially constructed hierarchy borne of the dominant order that varies over time and between cultures; it is harmful to men and boys, but oppressive to women and girls. Sex and gender are not the same and must not be conflated.

4) Women and girls have a right to terms that are necessarily exclusive so that they can accurately name themselves and the injustice they suffer; a right to organise as a sex to address this injustice; and a right, in a democracy, to laws (and discussion of those laws) that protect them as a sex from this injustice.

5) Whilst we oppose all forms of bigotry and discrimination, trans rights do not exist in isolation and they must not come at the expense of another extremely vulnerable and disadvantaged group: women and girls.

FiLiA Spokeswoman Raquel Rosario Sánchez spoke with Dr Nicola Williams, the Director of Fair Play for Women. Dr Williams is a research scientist specialising in human biology. She has held a number of senior scientific positions within the pharmaceutical industry. She is now dedicated to her full-time voluntary role as campaign director and public spokeswoman for Fair Play for Women.

Dr Williams has an excellent working knowledge of the laws designed to protect women and the transgender community. As a professional scientist, she also offers a critical and informed view of current research necessary for evidence-based policy development.

You can learn more about the work of Fair Play for Women on their website. And connect with them through social media on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

You can also support the vital work of Fair Play for Women by donating to their Crowdfunding page.

Cherry Smiley is a feminist campaigner, artist, and researcher from the Nlaka'pamux (Thompson) and Diné (Navajo) Nations. She has worked as an anti-violence worker in rape crisis centres and transition houses for battered women and their children, as the assistant coordinator for drop-in anti-violence groups for Indigenous girls, and as a project manager for a national native women’s organization.

Cherry speaks locally, nationally and internationally on sexualized colonial male violence against Indigenous women and girls. She is also the founder of Women Studies Online, an educational platform which aims to recentre women in their academic field utilising consciousness-raising as a liberational tool.

She is a co-founder of Indigenous Women Against the Sex Industry and was the recipient of a 2013 Governor General’s Award in Commemoration of the Person’s Case and the 2014 winner of The Nora and Ted Sterling Prize in Support of Controversy. She is currently a PhD candidate at Concordia University where her research works to end sexualized male violence against Indigenous women and girls.

Cherry Smiley spoke with FiLiA’s Spokeswoman, Raquel Rosario Sánchez, about her work as a campaigner for the liberation of Indigenous women and girls, and as a researcher within the Canadian academic system.

You can read more about Women’s Studies Online on their website.

And you can read Cherry Smiley’s work as a writer on Policy Options, Medium and Feminist Current.

Mary Stolinski is not only a survivor of the sex trade but also a radical feminist thinker. She analyzes her personal story in the light of feminist and Marxist theories, and explains how a liberal, capitalist and misogynist society sacrifices women to the sex trade. Mary refutes the prevailing liberal beliefs about the sex trade and gender ideology.