Savage Minds

Tim McFeeley, former Executive Director of the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, DC (1989-1995), elaborates on the mandate of the HRC during his tenure and the overwhelming struggle in the face of the AIDS crisis. Detailing the struggles facing gay men in the 1990s, McFeeley discusses the HRC’s mission to secure healthcare for those living with HIV and AIDS, seeing through the passage of the Ryan White CARE Act (1990), which allotted federal funding to cities suffering the fallout from AIDS. Addressing the changing mission of the HRC during the Clinton presidency, McFeeley highlights the organisation’s work to secure HIV/AIDS funding during the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” (DADT) period, noting the rifts these competing narratives posed, diving many within the LGB community. Noting the exclusion of women’s voices within the HRC and underscoring the role of lesbians fighting alongside gay men during the entirety of the AIDS crisis, McFeeley considers some of the recent threats posed to women’s rights as a result of the promotion of gender identity current within the LGB community, where he notes the difficulty of the subject “because it’s a class of rights and it feels like for one to win, the other has to lose.”

In questo nostro primo episodio in lingua italiana, Marina Terragni, giornalista, scrittrice, docente universitaria elabora la situazione in Italia oggi affrontata da donne e ragazze alla proposta del governo del disegno di legge (Ddl) Zan e come questa proposta di legislazione, se fosse convertita in legge, sostituirebbe i diritti delle donne e delle ragazze nei settori dell'assistenza sanitaria, dello sport, della sicurezza personale, delle carceri, dell'aula scolastica e molto altro ancora. Terragni spiega qual è la posta in gioco con il Ddl Zan e perché tutti gli italiani di tutte le convinzioni politiche devono spingere i loro funzionari eletti a votare contro i cambiamenti proposti che confondono, quasi intenzionalmente, i diritti degli uomini e delle donne omosessuali con una lobby molto ben finanziata che cerca di ribaltare i diritti delle donne.

Tim Newbold, a senior research fellow in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London, talks with Julian Vigo about how biodiversity is changing around the world due to climate change and what this means for human societies. Newbold shares his and his team’s latest research, to include “A biodiversity target based on species extinctions,” addressing the declining populations of insects, birds, and reptiles due to the removal of natural habitats and other imprints that humans leave on the planet. Discussing recent research demonstrating that between one-fourth and one-fifth of species face extinction within the coming decades, Newbold covers his team’s work on biodiversity models addressing the widespread declines among bumble bee populations. Addressing the functions of natural ecosystems dependant upon biodiversity such as seed dispersal, nutrient cycling and pollination, Newbold notes that with the loss of species from ecosystems these important functions are also lost.

Donna M. Hughes, PhD, a professor holding the Eleanor M. and Oscar M. Carlson Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies at the University of Rhode Island who researches the trafficking of women and girls for sexual exploitation in the United States, Russia, Ukraine, and Europe, discusses the fallout of her article on 4W, “Fantasy Worlds on the Political Right and Left: QAnon and Trans-Sex Beliefs.” As a result of having published her piece, Hughes was mobbed through defamatory comments and other misrepresentations of her person made by both her colleagues and activists, some of whom have pressured her to resign from the university. Framing these attacks as emanating from a totalitarian body of neoliberal identitarians, Hughes outlines the underlying ideology of a movement that takes aim primarily at women, detailing the attacks over her research on sexual violence by colleagues who frame trafficking as “sex work”.

In this episode, Helen Dale, Senior Writer at Law & Liberty, elaborates on the differences between traditionalism and One Nation Conservatism, noting some of the similarities with socialism as she addresses the spectrum of political responses in the face of pandemic mitigation policies. Dale also discusses the refusal of those who voted against Brexit to accept the electoral results, “not giving loser consent” within a democracy, while underscoring this moment’s political parallels to the civil war in Lebanon and the Moral Majority in the US during the 1980s. Outlining the shifts in right-wing and left-wing politics, highlighting the right’s tradition of reading “across the aisle”, Dale notes that the left is not only not abiding by this ethical obligation, but she also links this critique to the predatory academic publishing industry and the appalling abuses currently within academia and media today, which result in an entanglement of ideologies that clash where the oppressor-oppressed paradigms are discursively reproduced in order to silence opposing voices

Dr David Bell was a consultant psychiatrist in the Adult Department at the Tavistock where he worked in adult services from 1995 until his retirement earlier this year. In his role as Staff Governor at the Tavistock, Bell was approached by a large number of clinicians who were working or had worked on the Tavistock Gender Identity Development service (GIDS). They raised very serious concerns about GIDS, and Bell wrote a report which was critical of GIDS in 2018. In this episode, David Bell discusses his report, the retaliation he has weathered from the Tavistock and the lobbies that are steering public institutions while terrorising clinicians with the tyrannical politics of gender identity. Bell also queries some of the reasons behind the sharp increase of adolescent referrals at the Tavistock, detailing the “penetration of the commodity form into everyday life” and the commodification of the self and the misogyny driving this movement.

Maya Forstater, a researcher, writer and advisor working on business and sustainable development and co-founder of Sex Matters, talks about having lost her job after tweeting and writing about sex and gender. She is the claimant in a landmark test case on whether the protected characteristic of belief in the Equality Act covers gender-critical beliefs. In this episode, Forstater discusses her case and the larger implications this legal challenge holds for the future of free speech and the rights of women and girls, pointing to the vulnerability of employees in the academic gig economy who are often targeted by institutional policies that are quickly replacing the age-old role of the church throughout history. Examining the structure of her legal case, which is based on the protection of a belief that impacts how the subject lives her life, Forstater postulates the social framework for disagreement or discussions about belief in an era where the presumed moral high ground of an employer can be the means for terminating one’s employment. Covering compelled speech and the institutional capture of gender ideology where women are forced to accept the personal and professional costs of free speech—to be polite or to save one’s job—in order to talk about what they see, Forstater discusses the legal system that has also been caught in the very paradigm her case addresses: ideologically driven. NGOs like Stonewall and Gendered Intelligence have pushed private and public institutional policies to adopt religious, anti-science beliefs which are also parroted by judges who instruct women within the courts to refer to men with a “gender identity” as “she.”

Saiph Savage, co-director of the UNAM Civic Innovation Lab, discusses the era of misinformation and the uses and abuses of bots within social media. Considering her Botivist experiment, she emphasises how the use of bots free up humans to work on more creative tasks while bots are delegated to menial chores. Savage also details some of the abuses of bots which, along with trolls, have the capacity to silence opposition and journalists specifically because, in part, Big Tech companies are not employing enough humans to review each submission or complaint. Addressing the dangers that trolls pose—especially to female users on social media, Savage addresses how social media currently enables dominant groups to reassert their control instead of opening up to heterogeneous content. Examining how the larger ecosystem allows for the repetition of older power dynamics since Big Tech is financially rewarded by investments that emerge from bots, Savage details the links between revenue and Big Tech, suggesting that tech companies provide audits and transparency as to why certain accounts are banned or demonetised.

Gina Rippon, Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Neuroimaging at the Aston Brain Centre in the UK and author of The Gendered Brain: The new neuroscience that shatters the myth of the female brain (2019), discusses the reasons behind the current of “neurotrash,” the populist (mis)use of neuroscience research to (mis)represent our understanding of the brain and to prop up outdated stereotypes. In this episode, Rippon tears through the regressive myths of the “gendered brain” elucidating how women’s biology has persistently been weaponised against them through the persistent recycling of historical tropes within science—from the myth of the inferiority of women’s brains from the 19th century to twentieth century science which focussed upon women’s hormones. Addressing the failure of science to find sex differences in the brains of men and women, Rippon elaborates the need for research in the twenty-first century to take up different questions to include more research into neuroplasticity which examines how circumstances and context affect the brain and how the brain solves problems while underscoring the need for science to confront the biological script playing out in a social stage that has a “much more profound impact on how the biological script plays out than we ever realised.”

In this episode Joey Brite discusses her article, “The Four Horsemen of the Gender-Critical Apocalypse,” which caused upheaval amongst various women in the “gender-critical” feminist movement. Detailing her grass-roots organising and activism within the jazz music and lesbian communities, Brite expounds on the class apartheid within the contemporary feminist movement where working class women’s voices are demonised and she recounts the recent attempts to shut down these women’s views. Highlighting the contradictory narrative where the “true tans” acceptance by some feminists is necessarily creating a two-tiered class-based scene for political activism, Brite critiques the bourgeois feminists who are platforming and prioritising men over working-class feminist voices while colluding with men who traffic in gender to advance exceptions to their gender criticism.