Women's Voices – Details, episodes & analysis

After almost a year of organizing, Jaclynn Joseph and Neo Yao have founded Taiwan’s first gender critical, female-centric organization — Taiwan Women’s Association (TWA/Chinese 臺灣女性協會) — which has been officially recognized by the government.

Originally from Hawai'i and now based in Taiwan, Jaclynn Joseph is a university lecturer, Ph.D. candidate in the field of feminist philosophy, and the Taiwan country representative of the feminist organization Women’s Declaration International (WDI). A guest writer for Feminist Current, she was the first to shed light on the infiltration of gender identity ideology in Taiwan through her articles. 

Neo Yao was born and raised in Taipei, Taiwan. He has been a human rights and LGB activist for more than fifteen years, and a women’s rights activist for more than six years. He began focusing on Women’s sex-based rights in the past several years, and along with Jaclynn, formed the Taiwan Women’s Association in late 2022 as a founding member, where he currently serves as an executive council member. Some founding members of TWA, including Jaclynn, also work with an organization called No Self-ID Taiwan (NSIDT). NSIDT is the only website in Taiwan dedicated to pushing back against gender ideology and tracking changes in related legislation. 

Christina Ellingsen, a representative of feminist organization Women’s Declaration International (WDI) in Norway is being investigated under hate crime charges for tweets she made between February 2021 and January 2022.

The tweets in question were replies directed at Christine Marie Jentoft, a representative of trans activist group Foreningen FRI. Jentoft is a male who identifies as a lesbian woman.

Christina’s charges are centered around her questioning why FRI promotes the belief that men can be lesbians. While police are still investigating, if she is found guilty, she could face a prison sentence of up to three years.

Norway introduced “gender identity” into the hate crime paragraphs in January 2021. At the time, WDI Norway (formerly WHRC Norway) warned  that the introduction of the concept into law would result in persecution of women for stating biological facts.

Christina has set up a legal fund to defend women in Norway who are being charged with hate speech crimes for stating biological facts.

Caroline Norma and Emma Dalton discuss Dale Spender’s book Man Made Language as part of a series titled “Radical Feminist Perspectives”. Dale Spender is an Australian feminist scholar, teacher, and writer. In 1983, Dale Spender was co-founder of and editorial advisor to Pandora Press, the first of the feminist imprints devoted solely to non-fiction, committed, according to the New York Times, to showing that "women were the mothers of the novel and that any other version of its origin is  but a myth of male creation".

Spender's work is "a major contribution to the recovery of women writers and theorists and to the documentation of the continuity of feminist activism and thought".

The book Man Made Language (1980) is based on Spender's PhD research. Her argument is that in patriarchal societies men control language and it works in their favor. "Language helps form the limits of our reality. It is our means of ordering, classifying and manipulating the world."

This conversation took place as part of a webinar for Women’s Declaration International, a campaign that promotes awareness of women’s human rights and lobbies for their consideration in public policies.

Genevieve speaks with Roxie, a former dominatrix turned radical feminist. Roxie tells her story of how she was groomed into the sex industry and the connections between pornography and transgenderism, sissification, BDSM as a form of abuse, and the apparent increased prevalence of fetishes.

***Be advised that this episode contains explicit language and some discussion of violence in pornography.***

Genevieve Gluck and Jen Izaakson of Lesbian Labour discuss the ineffectiveness of the police to adequately address sexual assault and violence against women while simultaneously pursuing charges against women for social media posts; the platforming of child sexual abusers by trans organization the Sylvia Rivera Law Project; the phenomenon of men pretending to be lesbians and the harm this does to the lesbian community.

Elly Arrow is a radical feminist and prostitution abolitionist activist who works to raise awareness about the many harms of the sex industry. In this episode Genevieve and Elly discuss the unique health risks involved in prostitution, the impact that full decriminalization has had on women in Germany, the importance of discussing the role of male entitlement, and why it is not possible to separate trafficking from what sex industry campaigners term "sex work".

You can also find Elly Arrow's work on Youtube.

The École Polytechnique massacre, also known as the Montreal massacre, was an anti-feminist mass shooting at an engineering school affiliated with the Université de Montréal. On December 6, 1989, Marc Lépine entered a mechanical engineering class at the École Polytechnique and ordered the women and men to opposite sides of the classroom. He separated nine women, instructing the men to leave. He stated that he was "fighting feminism" and opened fire. He shot at all nine women in the room, killing six. The shooter then moved through corridors, the cafeteria, and another classroom, targeting women for just under 20 minutes. He killed a further eight women before turning the gun on himself.

I spoke with Kathleen Richardson of the Campaign Against Porn Bots about the increasing threat of deepfake pornography and the potential harms of the emerging VR pornography industry.

Full video available here.

An article I recently published, “App Fetishizing Forcible Transitioning of Kids Available on Google Play”, highlights a transgender pornography application that uses photographs of children. One of these children is a 14 year-old girl named Molly Russell, who committed suicide after viewing self-harm content on Instagram. As a result of my research, Kathleen Richardson contacted the family’s solicitor and the photograph has since been removed from the app, though the app itself remains available on Google Play and contains photos of other children, as well.

Jennifer Lahl is founder and president of The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, which, according to the mission statement, exists to “educate and inform members of the general public, thought leaders, lawmakers, and others on ethical issues in healthcare, biomedical research, and biotechnological advancement.”

Lahl has over 25 years of experience as a pediatric critical care nurse, a hospital administrator, and in senior-level nursing management. She has made several documentaries with a particular focus on exploring the exploitation of women by the assisted reproductive technologies (ART) industry, including Breeders: A Subclass of Women?, #Big Fertility, and Eggsploitation.

Her most recent film titled Trans Mission: What’s the Rush to Assign Gender? questions the ethics of medically transitioning children and reveals some of the harms, both emotional and physical, of childhood sex reassignment procedures and medications.

Genevieve Gluck speaks with radical feminist Natalia Shveykina about the challenges faced by women in Russia, including an epidemic of male violence, as well as female genital mutilation, the surrogacy industry, sex trafficking, and whether or not the Russian government will begin to incorporate policies which promote gender identity ideology.