Women Like Hunting Witches, Too
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I'm Barry Weiss. This is Honestly. And as a warning, today's episode gets a little bit explicit. Thank you. First of all, before I even start, I want to say that I'm rich and famous. And the only reason I say that is because the last 17 months were hell. And I cannot imagine what everybody went through. But I'm happy to see you. And I'm happy you're well. And I hope everyone you love is okay. Thank you.

In his latest Netflix special, Dave Chappelle went hard. He made jokes about Black people, Asians, molesting preachers, lesbians, celebrities, the Me Too movement, Jews. Space Jews. But what would actually get him in trouble was the subject of gender. And now we get to the core of the crisis. What? What is a woman? What is that in this day and time? Is there even such thing as a woman or a man or anything? Hmm.

Hmm. Seems to be a question nowadays. And specifically, what got Dave in hot water was talking about something called a TERF. They've canceled people that are more powerful than me. They canceled J.K. Rowling. My God, J.K. Rowling wrote all the Harry Potter books by herself. She sold so many books, the Bible worries about her. And they canceled her because she said in an interview, and this is not exactly what she said, but effectually, she said gender was a fact.

And then the trans community got mad as shit. They started calling her a TERF. I didn't even know what the fuck that was. But I know that trans people make up words to win arguments. So I looked it up. TERF is an acronym. Stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists. This is a real thing. This is a group of women that hate transgender. They don't hate transgender women, but they look at trans women the way we blacks might look at blackface. It offends them. Like, this bitch is doing an impression of me.

In that riff, he actually says that he's on team turf. I'm team turf. I agree. And then he makes a joke that felt like he was daring a more sensitive audience not to laugh. I am not saying that to say that trans women aren't women. I am just saying that those pussies that they got, you know what I mean? I'm not saying it's not pussy, but that's like beyond pussy or impossible pussy. You know what I mean? What?

Tastes like pussy, but that's not quite what it is, is it? It's not blood, that's beet juice. Oh, buddy, I'm in trouble now. Within days, people, including people at Netflix, were saying that Chappelle's jokes were violence and that the jokes would lead to the murder of trans people in real life. I'm out here because Dave Chappelle

is harming our kids. He doesn't realize that the speech that he's putting out there is harming

And then last week, activists gathered outside of Netflix headquarters here in Los Angeles. They are promoting and causing hate conversation and also allowing people to think that it's okay to discriminate against those trans and non-binary individuals. And they said, among other things, that trans people are in the middle of a holocaust. Our lives are not comedic soundbites or moments for boardrooms and employees to funnel minds

funnel money into the harmful content that negatively impacts our communities. In one particular video that went viral, you can see one of these activists attacking a guy holding a sign that just says, We Like Dave. I don't know why all the hate. I just love Dave. And shouting in his face, repent.

And so with all of this TERF talk at a fever pitch, I reached out to my guest today, Julie Bindle. Julie has been physically attacked. Activists have tried to have her work banned. Bookstores have boycotted her in the name of safety, all because of the accusation that she is a TERF. What Julie actually is, is a longtime feminist writer and activist.

She joined the radical feminist movement in the 1970s as a 17-year-old working-class girl and lesbian from the northeast of England. She's traveled all over the world exposing and campaigning against violence directed at women, against female genital mutilation, domestic violence, rape, human trafficking. She's fearless and she speaks her mind, and she has a new book out called Feminism for Women, The Real Route to Liberation, which got an endorsement from none other than J.K. Rowling.

I have to say, I was really surprised when I read it. I have always considered myself a feminist in that I've always believed and advocated for women having equal rights, for having the same dignity, the same pay, for the same job, and so on.

But Julie's version of feminism is much more radical than mine, so much so that by the end of the book, I wasn't even sure if I was a feminist. All of which made me excited to talk to her about the latest culture war. Because Julie Bindel isn't new to this fight. She's been on the front lines of it for over four decades. And naturally, at the moment, she is right smack in the middle of this raging debate between TERFs and SWERFs and feminists and second wavers and all manner of misogynists.

So whether you knew what a TERF was before you saw the closer or not, Julie Bindel is here to make sense of it all. Stay with us. Hey, guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer.

Julie Bindle, welcome to Honestly. Thank you, Barry. I'm so thrilled to be here talking to you. So happy to have you. So, Julie, I've identified as a feminist from the time I was 12 or 13 years old. And for as long as I've identified as a feminist, I've also been aware that there is a ferocious and relentless debate about every aspect having to do with feminism. What feminism is, who is a real feminist and who isn't, and if we even still need feminism or not.

And to that last point, you know, you look out into America at least compared to where we were in the 1950s and there's the pill, there's no-fault divorce. Women are in every industry and often at the top of those industries. Women are outnumbering men on college campuses. I mean, by so many metrics, it seems the fight for equality has been won. And yet, on the other hand, I look at the reality of what it is to be a young woman in America today.

And there's TikToks and OnlyFans and Instagram and all these apps that we know are sort of infecting young girls' brains. And you have the CDC unable to say the word woman. Instead, they're saying birthing people. And you have the ACLU posthumously revising quotes from Ruth Bader Ginsburg to make sure she doesn't use the pronoun her. So it's this very strange paradox that we're in.

And I think you're the perfect person to help me understand what's happening because you have been a feminist, not just in word, but in deed, for decades. You've been there as a feminist activist every step of the way since 1979 when you were 17 years old and you first began identifying as a feminist. So what drew you to the feminist movement? I'd grown up in a very working class community in a town in the northeast of England called Darlington.

I was expected to marry. I was expected to have children, to work in a factory or a store, to have no aspirations whatsoever, to certainly have no proper education beyond school. And I mean bad schooling. And just be satisfied with my lot. And my first job in a factory when I came of age at 16 was marking on women's blouses where the buttons should be stitched.

And I cannot tell you how I lost the will to live every single day when I went into that factory. I was a lesbian. I had fallen in love with my best friend at school. It wasn't reciprocated. I was heartbroken. I felt completely out on a limb. I felt different. I was told I was a freak. I was told I would never amount to anything because I was so bad at school. I was bullied. I rebelled. Things were really desperate.

And I decided to move away, go and stay with a relative a little bit further south. And there, there was a gay bar. I couldn't believe it. There were all kinds of drag queens and camp gay men and really butch lesbians. I mean, lesbians so butch they could kickstart their own vibrators. I mean, really kind of scary looking women. And I was this quite sweet, naive girl who, you know, could have been eaten alive. But the community was so...

together. It was so cohesive. There was a real sense that we were all kind of oppressed by the same forces. We might have had different life circumstances and backgrounds, but we would take care of each other. And it was then that I happened to meet the feminists when I moved to a city called Leeds. And that was because in those days,

Feminism and lesbianism were pretty indivisible. The sexism and misogyny that girls and women in that era, especially working class girls, experienced when we came out as lesbians or when we were outed as lesbians was like misogyny on steroids. It was the kind of double whammy of not only are you a female with a low status in this society,

but you also have sexually rejected men and you've rejected the control and protection of men. So all bets are off. There's no chivalry. There's no patriarchal kind of good manners system here. You're just bitches and witches and you're out of our league. So when I met the feminists, I just thought, wow, this all makes sense. We are told we're freaks and we're treated as scum.

because of something called patriarchy, which is men's power that they have as a class in the way that it can be argued that the ruling classes have, people of colour experience in some kind of racist white societies have.

But I'd never thought of it as a system before. And the reason why is because of heterosexuality. Because we are the only oppressed group required to love our oppressors, to have sex with our oppressors and to give birth with our oppressors.

So it was a very difficult dynamic. Women didn't want to look across the breakfast table at their husband or father and think, you're an oppressor. And so it was really tricky to say, men, you are the problem. But that's what those women gave me while I was still in my teens, the confidence to think that and to say it. You know, given the way that feminism is talked about now, with girl bosses and shattering the glass ceiling and all of that,

I think the way that you're expressing how you understood feminism will feel, feels really radical and really different. So help me understand how you understood feminism at the time. What were the specific things that the women that you met in Leeds were fighting for? When I first moved to the city, I was really quite uneducated. I'd never read anything.

book about feminism. Had you even heard the word when you were growing up? I had because when I was about 14 years old, I watched on one of our popular TV channels, a dramatized series about the suffragettes and the suffragists. It was called Shoulder to Shoulder. And they were

We saw them in hospital and in prison being force-fed for their digression. We saw them chaining themselves to railings. We saw the dramatised, you know, the very dramatic moment when one of them threw herself under the king's horse, of course, to fight for the vote and the emancipation of women in general. So I had heard the word, but...

Something extraordinary was happening when I moved to Leeds and it had been happening across the entire north of the country and through to the Midlands. Over a period of six years, all of these women were murdered by the same man. A serial killer who we were later to discover...

was called Peter Sutcliffe. 13 families' lives torn apart by Peter Sutcliffe. Was killing women with impunity and getting away with it. Sutcliffe murdered 13 women across Yorkshire and the north-west of England between 1975 and 1980. He was also convicted of the attempted murder of seven other women. Mainly, in the beginning, he was targeting street prostitute women. He was dubbed the Yorkshire Ripper.

Like his Victorian predecessor, Jack the Ripper, he mutilated his women victims. Or women who, as the kind of Northern parlance goes, are no better than they ought to be. In other words, women who go out on their own, enjoy sex with men outside of marriage, drink too much, go to public houses on their own. And it was so very scary because what was happening...

was that the streets weren't safe for women when already the home wasn't safe for women. So what these women told me in the meetings that we had to protest the police inertia about these murders, but also the misogynistic reporting in the press,

where they were talking about innocent victims as opposed to women. And this was the silent kind of thread who actually deserved what had happened to them. These women who were raped, mutilated, murdered, left in parks, in public spaces as a warning to women. So if the home wasn't safe and we had, you know, two women killed every week as a result of domestic violence in England and Wales, and we didn't have the streets,

Where the hell could women go? Now, when people say, oh, that must have been a really scary time. You must have been terrified of being attacked by this man. Actually, it was the opposite. It meant that I overcame my fear because I knew that we were fighting to end a situation that

where we grow men like the Yorkshire Ripper, where we grow men who think it's okay to beat their wives and abuse their children. So we were resisting that violence. And so what feminism looked like to me through the women I met was grassroots activism. We are not having this. We would campaign on the streets. We formed Reclaim the Night marches, which you call, I think... Take Back the Night.

See how polite ours is compared to yours. Reclaim. Let's reclaim the night, ladies. And you've got take back the night. Right. But it's hilarious because you're talking about women who are resisting terrifying violence.

And when I was exposed to Take Back the Night, it was on the campus of Columbia University, you know, on the Upper West Side where, you know, the radical march, you know, went for 10 blocks and then people gathered together with snacks and bottles of water to sort of share their stories. It was just such a far echo from the kind of thing that you're describing. Yeah.

Yeah, which is how feminisms ended up. So these feminists that you were connected to who were fighting against forces that they felt were oppressive, which at the time also included prostitution, what were their views on other social issues that affect women, like porn? So at that time in the early 80s, as well as reeling from the revelations of the botched police operation in looking for Peter Sutcliffe, we also were aware that

pornography was becoming more easily accessible. It was no longer your father's playboy. It was no longer the magazine that I once found under my brother's bed, which, you know, was tits and ass, but there was very little sexual violence. By then, by the time that I started campaigning against sex cinemas, for example, they were screening some pretty violent stuff that gave the message to men that women are bad,

I suppose, dehumanised objects for penetration, for one-sided sexual pleasure, that women enjoyed pain being inflicted upon us and that there were no consequences for men that did that. In fact, sexual violence and women's pain and humiliation was entertainment. And this was abhorrent to me because, hey, listen, have as much sex as you want with whoever's consenting. Normalising and sexualising the torture of women where women are clearly...

really in pain. Why are we teaching our boys and men to respond to that? I didn't think it was natural or innate and it certainly wasn't good. So the first action I ever joined against pornography was a sex cinema in Leeds. And we decided to go in. We found a way to get in without buying tickets. And what we did was we took some liquid concrete and we poured it down the toilets. And

to block the toilets, and we threw eggs at the screen. And we figured that, yeah, we'd probably get arrested, but we didn't care. We were young and we didn't think we'd ever have real jobs anyway. But that we would make a mark and that we would get in the local press and we'd be able to then be interviewed and say, this is why we object to porn. We don't object to porn because we're anti-sex. In fact, radical feminists don't.

Those of us that campaign to end male violence, we said to women who were heterosexual, you should demand sexual pleasure. You shouldn't just accept to lay back and think of England and just he have his pleasure. You know, this is about women's sexual liberation to have sex outside of heterosexual marriage and to choose to be lesbian or celibate or whatever floats your boat.

So we wanted to explain to the press and the general public that we are pro-sex and it's because we actually like sex, good sex, that we don't want it subverted to what pornography was starting to show in the mainstream.

So, Julie, how did feminism go from throwing eggs at the screen at a sex cinema and pouring concrete down the toilet to by the time that I arrive in college in, you know, 2002 –

As the norm, the feminist norm, the feminist consensus was, you know, seeing sex work as possibly empowering. Porn is totally OK. The words like slut were being reclaimed. You know, it was no longer about a specific set of policies and a specific set of personal choices that made you a feminist. It was rather any choice that any woman makes.

is a feminist choice. Right. I see the transformation of feminism as sort of, like, your version of feminism is very morally clear.

In certain ways, I don't know if I agree with it, but it's very clear about what it believes about the world, who women are, who they aren't, what a feminist is, what it isn't, what is good for women, what isn't. And the kind of feminism I encountered was sort of imbued with this sort of anti-Western, culturally relativist position. How did that happen? How did we go from what you're describing to what I encountered?

I mean, that is the question of the century, isn't it? And I think that what we have to do is look at the way that feminism became co-opted by very privileged university students and taken away from its grassroots original home. Part of that is because so much of it went online. But look, the Internet's been great for feminism. It's globalized the women's movement. It's fantastic.

But I think so many just thought, do you know what? We'll just talk online and we'll write, we'll send petitions around and we'll sign open letters and that'll be it. And the cultural relativist stuff, which I've railed against for decades, you know, began way back in the 90s. I remember going for a job as a press officer once.

in a northern town. I was living in London by then, but I really wanted to work on this big international conference. It was the beginning of the globalisation of the anti-male violence women's movement, because it was held in Brighton, just outside of London. It was in a huge conference hall. We had about 60 countries and states represented there. And when I went for the job, I was really surprised to get it because there was huge amounts of competition. And

And I asked the organizer, the kind of midwife to the conference years later, why did you give me the job? And she said, well, we threw a question in there.

which was about a scenario that I turn up for my first day being press officer for this week-long event, and there's a group of African men and women protesting outside saying, hands off our girls' bodies. And the protest is against female genital mutilation because, of course, the conference took a line that female genital mutilation is an abhorrence. And to hell with it being described as a tradition.

or a culture, the only culture and tradition it relates to is patriarchy. And when I was asked, what would I do if I saw that baying job as a white woman, I said, I would just say to them, FGM is child abuse. It should be criminalised. Please stand out of my way. And that's how I got the job. And this relates to all kinds of things. A lot of white liberal men and women are

will support the kind of ideology that really harms women and girls, and they call it feminism. It's funny that you mention female genital mutilation because I remember very clearly, again, going back to college and just sort of encountering versions of ideologies and words that I thought I knew the meaning to, but actually the meaning was all of a sudden really different. So I grew up with an idea that feminism was about

And I remember getting into a conversation with two other students, friends, who identified as feminists. And the conversation was about FGM. It was about female genital mutilation. And they were basically all about FGM.

offering an apologia for it. They were basically justifying it in the name, again, of cultural relativism. We need to, you know, respect other cultures and other practices. And I walked away from that genuinely confused because I didn't understand how someone could identify themselves as a feminist and take that kind of

let's be generous, like, you know, limp position with regard to profound violence against young girls. So that's what I encountered. I thought it was exceptional. I was like eight to 19 years old. And I think, Julie, and I'm wondering if you agree, it seems to me that that brand of feminism has won. Not yet. It hasn't. Not on our watch. I mean,

I remember the first time I ever heard the term cutting. Cutting? What do you mean? Cutting. A Cambridge senior academic referred to female genital mutilation as cutting in order to destigmatize it. And it's been referred to as female circumcision a lot too, to destigmatize it. Which is absolutely appalling. Language really matters. You know, it's no mistake that that language has been used. And there's a, you know, the...

academics in this country, many of them are so scared of being branded as bigoted in any way, shape or form by particular groups that they will literally apologize, as you've just said, for the agonizing procedure of female genital mutilation, which anyone listening to this podcast, just look it up. It's the worst, worst act of

sadistic brutality I think I've ever, ever heard about. And I know survivors of FGM.

women from Sudan, brilliant women such as Nimco Ali, who has changed hearts and minds and laws about this, and who rails against white liberal cultural relativists who buy into this nonsense. And my view is it's the same kind of sanitized language and approach as is sex work. So I know that we use the term sex work in order to dignify the women, but

But I would never call women in prostitution prostitutes. I would say that there are women who are in prostitution or who are prostituted or who sell sex. I would never label a woman a prostitute. But if you start talking about sex work, it sanitises what actually is happening to the vast majority of women caught up in the sex trade. And I do think that this is how we've ended on a slippery slope where all kinds of things that are bad for women...

are now rebranded and repackaged and sold back to us as feminist. Well, actually, if you really unpick who benefits from prostitution, it's the men. It's not the women. Whatever individual experiences some women have who say they're happy within it, great. But we don't base law and policy on a tiny number of individuals.

who make up a minority. We just don't. I think the thing that I find so strange is that the same feminists who are basically saying, you know, who are we to judge FGM?

Right. Right.

making apologies for giant macro aggressions in the world. Right. How do you explain that? Oh, I mean, I suppose I could tell you just a brief story about something that happened to me in order to kind of look at how far down the rabbit hole this kind of politics has gone.

In June 2019, I went to give a talk on how to counter male violence against women, rape, domestic violence, femicide. And I was with other human rights activists, including a renowned law professor and other experts. And we were talking to the University of Edinburgh, to their students and to some of their staff. And because there was one

Speaker, who had also decided to focus her talk on why we have to keep our sex-based rights as women, how some things like rape crisis shelters, refuges for domestic abuse victims should be kept women only and prisons, of course. Naturally, the whole event was deemed to be transphobic. It's such a narcissistic movement. Everything is about them, the extremists.

And we're talking about half of the planet and the prevalence of violence against women, which is just significant. So I came out of the talk and I was going to get a taxi, a cab to the airport. It'd been a big protest, the usual blue and red fringe brigade beforehand. The signs, you know, trans women are women. Blowjobs are real jobs.

Julie Bindle's a TERF, etc. The usual. We'll get to all of that, but yes. Indeed. And I came out and I was with my law professor colleague and a trans identified person, a man who was identifying as a trans woman, came running at me, screaming the most horrendous things at me, very violent kind of

manner. I knew he was about to punch me. And that punch would have really connected because his fist was flying through the air when three or four big burly security men managed to get hold of him and pull him off. And eventually further down the line, he was charged and he was given a community sentence. I didn't want him to go through the prison system. He clearly was mentally unwell. But that was a violent attack. And I

The headline in the Guardian newspaper, the newspaper on which I cut my journalistic teeth, that I had written for for decades. The first headline was about how I was a transphobic speaker who had claimed I had been attacked.

Now, as soon as the editor of The Guardian saw that, she realised that the victim here was being blamed, a woman who had campaigned all her adult life to counter male violence, and they made the newsroom change it, but not before many people had seen it. And in the meantime...

I got a publication called Pink News, which is supposed to be about the LGBTQQI plus two spirit, blah, blah, blah, community, had the story there about my attack, which, as I say, was reported to the police, was about me misgendering a trans woman because I had tweeted that a man had attacked me outside of Edinburgh University. I mean, wow. Wow.

Just unbelievable, not just hypocrisy, but as you say, these so-called microaggressions and dog whistles, a term I've come to really detest, being given precedence over actual violence against women. The words are seen as violent.

And the act of actual violence is explained away. That's what we're seeing, obviously, right now with the whole debate over the Dave Chappelle special on Netflix, where his words are being classified as violence. You had...

I believe it's now Joey Soloway, the creator of Transparent, talking about how there is a holocaust, a genocide against trans people. They're just a total inversion, it seems to me. So an actual attack on you is not classified that way. And in fact, you become the perpetuator of the violence. Yes. And words like holocaust,

being bandied around by trans activists who themselves are using really offensive analogies such as Holocaust is really starting to wind me up very, very much. For example, there's this myth that trans women are being murdered in their droves, no doubt killed as a result of my writing in The Guardian or wherever.

And we haven't had, thankfully we have not had, one murder of a trans person for being trans in a number of years. But at a conference I was at at the weekend on feminism, there was a huge group of the usual protesters outside. And they were holding signs, some of the signs said, suck my dick, you transphobic cunt.

So there they were protesting about our anti-trans violence and bigotry because we were talking about the need for women-only spaces and sex-based legislation. And in the meantime, we're indoors talking about real issues that face women around the world. And these idiots were actually taking the knee.

outside of the conference hall in commemoration of murdered trans people, of which there were none. That is the stark difference we're talking about between reality and some Orwellian craziness that has become almost normalized. Okay, there's an optimistic way to look at all of this, I'm realizing, which is in order to see words as violence, in order to see you, Julie Bindle...

As a threat. In order to see Dave Chappelle's special on Netflix as, you know, worthy of weeks of attention, you have to be living in an unbelievably safe, secure, prosperous, and privileged world. So in a way, isn't this all like the fact that people have the luxury of seeing you or Chappelle or, you know, Margaret Atwood or J.K. Rowling as a threat?

Isn't it a sign actually of how far things have come and what a progressive world we do live in? Could you see it that way?

You could. And the good thing is that feminism is the most optimistic movement on the planet because we don't believe that boys are born innately bad or programmed to oppress or abuse or sexually exploit women and girls. And therefore, bad men can change. Men that do bad things aren't necessarily bad men. And actually, they can choose not to do bad things. Women can choose not to wallow in victimhood and fear and get out there and march on the streets and demand change.

I agree with you on one level about the kind of level of privilege that has to be present in these people's minds to get themselves wound up about women in a conference talking about maintaining sex-based rights or women talking about how we don't like to be referred to as womb havers or cervix havers or birth givers.

But you see, this is the problem with what passes for feminism today. It's the kind of elite university feminism that's had all of its kind of drive taken out of it. It's feminism for the rich. I mean, because, of course, the other way of seeing, you know, the protests outside Netflix or the protests outside public libraries where you're speaking is that

Feminism is no longer the kind of feminism that's trying to lift up the woman working in the factory or the woman working at McDonald's for minimum wage.

It is just a kind of luxury, like almost like a designer handbag that a very particular group of women like to cloak themselves in. But it's completely disconnected from the reality of the lives of the majority of women and girls. That's the darker view of it, right? The optimistic view of it is –

wow, things must be really great if people are debating Chappelle jokes. And the darker view of it, of course, is this is a movement completely unmoored from the actual lives of women and girls as much as they talk all day about lived experiences. And it's really just, you know, a luxury movement for a luxury class. Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know,

I'm not interested in the glass ceiling, but I'm more interested in the women in the basement, the women who are at the bottom of the ladder. Feminism is for all women, but we have to prioritise. Feminism benefits all women, but why the hell should we prioritise wealthy women who look down their noses at those of us doing the grassroots work? And yet they're the women that often reject feminism, when actually, you know what? Male violence is the great leveller.

Because your privilege might protect you to a degree from some forms of male violence, but it really doesn't protect you from misogyny when you're out at night, when you're in a bar, when you have your drink spiked, when your daughter gets prostituted because she ends up with a really nasty drug habit and she's had the misfortune to meet a pimp.

So although class is really crucial when we explain how women are vulnerable to male violence, it's not the end. It's not the full picture. You know, I write in the book about going on a story for The Observer magazine to a village called Umoja in Kenya, where I'd heard about a group of women who had escaped slavery.

forced marriage, childhood marriage, FGM, domestic abuse and rape by the British Gurkhas that were stationed there. They couldn't take the violence anymore. They weren't being schooled because this was not what their community would allow an extremely patriarchal, brutal culture to

And I went to visit this women-only community that had been built by local women in order to help their girls thrive. That these girls can go to school, that they can be kept safe from being married at 11 in exchange for a cow by her father, that they can escape being forced into polygamous marriages with men.

older men with dozens of children and loads of wives where her life is nothing but slavery so anyway I went there and had the best trip of my life meeting these women did a good story story went viral it was picked up by loads of journalists which was a real you know how it goes Barry a real honor to have other journalists looking at your story and following it with their own take

Except for the Australian faux feminist, in my view, Clementine Ford. Sorry, did I almost call her fraud? Clementine Ford. She picked up on my story about these amazing women and decided that I was transphobic for writing about a women-only community. Do you hear me, Barry? These were women that live in mud huts that they build.

With their own hands. They have a stove and they cook dried beans. Their girls walk two kilometres to get water in the morning and she's talking about it being trans-exclusionary. What the fuck? I honestly could not believe what I was reading.

Just the disconnect of these women sitting in their ivory towers, writing this bullshit, not even picking up. You have to ask yourself why, though. I don't know who this woman is that you just mentioned, Clementine, but what's in it for her? She's an Australian columnist. Right. She's an Australian columnist. So what's in it for her? It's not that she actually is wondering where are the trans women in the mud huts in this village. It's her way of signaling to her audience that,

I'm not Julie Bindle. Julie Bindle's a baddie, but I'm a goodie, right? Totally. That's exactly right. What made it even funnier was that the day before I left the country and I've gone for my yellow fever jab and my editor who commissioned the piece, a really lovely guy, said,

who knew that the slurs of transphobia had followed me around at that time for over a decade. And he said to me, Julie, I've got some bad news for you. The village elders have said that they can't receive you in Umoja because of your transphobia. And it took me seconds before I realised he was having me on. He was joking. So that happens. And then Clementine Forge writes a piece which was beyond parody. Yeah.

the hell do you rationalize this? You're right. It is. I'm not Julie Bindle and I am one of the good ones. I'm trans inclusive. Let's get to sort of trans issues and TERFism in a bit, but I want to focus on the

Real policy matters that are affecting women's lives here in the West. So let's start with prostitution or sex work as it's often called. And there's two bills right now that are working their way through New York state legislature to decriminalize sex work. And there was a recent op-ed in the New York Times by a trans sex worker that put it this way. I'm going to read it to you.

We knew that the best way to help sex workers was not to decriminalize only their actions, but also those of their clients. The legal pressure that clients face is absorbed by sex workers. A smaller client base means lower wages and poorer working conditions, with clients who are more likely to act in ways that make sex workers' lives more difficult. We believe criminalization of either side of the sex trade—

does not help protect sex workers but merely perpetuates the social stigma that treats sex work as an inherently harmful activity, a stigma I have long worked to eradicate. Now, you, Julie, do believe that it is an inherently harmful activity. And I'd like you to make the case for me because I have to tell you I am sort of drawn to the idea similar to

abortion debate that, you know, sex work's going to happen anyway. It's happened since the beginning of time, pretty much. And it's going to happen whether we regulate it or not. So we may as well make it as safe as possible for the women, mostly women involved, but for all sex workers. Tell me why that's wrong. Tell me why it's an inherently harmful activity.

I mean, I have worked with and interviewed now hundreds of women in the sex trade, including many that have exited prostitution.

And in fact, I conducted what remains the biggest piece of research on the barriers and opportunities of getting out of the sex trade. And I think it's key. We need to if we're going to criminalize the Johns and we're going to decriminalize the women, we can't just leave it at that. We can't just decide, well, that's OK. They're not going to be arrested and their lives are going to be just fine because the social exclusion, the poverty and the violence and coercion will still remain in their lives forever.

But the example I'm going to give is when I visited a brothel in Nevada. One of those brothels run by the late Dennis Hoff, thank God he's dead, really horrendous human being. And Nevada, as you and your listeners will probably know, has a number of counties across the state where legal brothels are permitted.

And it's become a big tourist attraction. And as a result of these legal brothels in Nevada, everybody thinks that the entire state is legalized, is decriminalized, is the Wild West. Hence, when I first visited and went to my hotel in Vegas, I was immediately offered an 18-year-old Russian prostituted woman to my room. I mean, they don't care whether you're a man, woman or beast. That's what's on offer.

Anyway, so I was doing some research in these brothels and Dennis Hoff had clearly chosen, handpicked the women to speak to me. And they had said, yes, they would speak to me. And I went to speak to one woman who we'll call...

Yvette, who was selling sex from the room in which she was living for six months solid. These women do long terms in these brothels and then take home the money. And we're told it's a lot of money. So she prostituted from the room. She lived in that room. She slept in that room. And the first thing I noticed when I walked in was a picture of

of her in a pornographic pose. And then the second thing I saw was a video playing pornography of her with Johns on a loop. So she said she was happy to talk to me and we chatted and I said, look, you know, I don't come to this with a blank slate. I campaign to eradicate men's entitlement in prostitution. She said, well, I disagree with you. She

You know, you can't tell me what to do with my body. And it makes me angry when feminists say this. And we talked and it was amicable. And I listened. And of course, I didn't challenge her assertions and her points of view. I heard her. And so I said, so are your Johns, are they nice men? Who are they? I'd met some of them in the bar. And trust me, they're the biggest walking advertisement for lesbianism that I've ever seen. But anyway, yeah.

So I said to her, okay, so what are your johns like? And she said, they're nice. They're good looking. They smell good. They treat me well. Hey, I even enjoy the sex. So I said, thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it. And then I took another look around the room and I said, do you know what? My

My bedroom at home, I've got books on the side. I've got a coffee cup from the night before. I've got loads of shoes on the floor. I've got letters. You know, my room reflects me. Yours is so clinically neat and tidy. Do you have any personal effects here with you, bearing in mind you're living here for months on end? And she slowly opened the drawer.

next to her bed and took out a framed photograph of a beautiful little girl, probably about eight years old, I think, showed me this picture, but holding onto it and said, this is my daughter. She said, but I don't leave it out for those dirty bastards to see. I don't want those John's spermy hands touching my little girl. And that told me everything I needed to hear.

And I think the harm sometimes is not the broken bones. It's not the dead body. It's not even the HIV infection rates or the unwanted pregnancy or the drug and alcohol abuse. It's the psychological splitting of the self that so many women in prostitution have told me they have to do, that they can't kiss their own children because of what's been in their mouth that day. Something's been in their mouth they didn't want to have in their mouth.

They separate from their intimate sexual relationships with non-Johns because it just gets into their head and they feel, as one woman told me, it's like paid rape.

So it's in gradations and all women have different experiences, but the harm is so visible if you know what you're looking for. As you're speaking, I'm thinking about a brilliant woman who I interviewed recently for the podcast, and she's enormously successful in both porn and sex work through OnlyFans, but also through in-person sex work. And, you know, she's

used to work in a factory like you did. And like you, she hated it. And she talks about the work that she does now as being just so much better, so much more in a way dignified. She's her own boss. She decides her hours, what she will and won't do. And she's on track to retire long before you and I ever will. I think she would hear what you're saying and say, well, look at my life. What was more harmful to me? Having

relentless hours in a windowless factory where I was essentially working as a robot in a broad machine, we're doing this. What would you say to that? I would accept her personal experience.

And I would believe her. You know, it's not up to me to say that women are deluding themselves or that women don't choose this or that they are the problem because they promote prostitution. My perspective on this is, of course, she exists. Of course, there are women with that experience. We can argue till the cows come home about whether or not she's in a tiny minority or a sizable minority or whatever.

What we do know is that the vast majority of women in the system of prostitution are the most disenfranchised girls and women. And they're the ones that we have to actually consider when we devise policy and legislation, support and protection or deterrence for the johns. My point of view is this. Prostitution isn't inevitable. The world would not collapse. No one would be harmed if prostitution were not to exist tomorrow.

Men's penises would not drop off if they couldn't have the kind of sex that they wanted, when they wanted, with whom they wanted. It would be fine. Men can go and get a real date or use their right hand. The arguments about disabled men not being able to get a real date is offensive and inaccurate. So I want to look at why we have...

a prostitution system that is so normalized that we're told we'll never get rid of it we'll never eradicate it we don't say that about child poverty we don't say it about rape even and yet we seem to accept that this will always be with us and i think if we if we ended male violence if patriarchy no longer existed the sex trade would die a death it would be starved of oxygen

And when I was in a university, I launched my book on prostitution in 2017. I was with a brilliant sex trade survivor, Sabrina Vallis, who campaigned for blanket decriminalization of the sex trade in New Zealand, in her native New Zealand.

And then when it came in, she realised it only helped the johns and the pimps and the managers. The women were still treated as badly, if not worse than before, because the police weren't involved at all. It was just seen as a job. Rape in the job became an employment tribunal issue, not even a criminal act. So Sabrina came with me to talk to these students. And the first thing I heard was a male student who said...

I've just done a shift in McDonald's to top up my student loan. So I'm working through my college course. I was burned by hot fat. I was verbally abused by the manager. It was a gruelling shift. Why is sex work any worse than a shift in McDonald's? You get paid more. Sabrina's answer to him was...

OK, see that man sitting next to you. You don't know if he's showered. You don't know what his status is in terms of HIV. You've no idea about his hygiene. Take his dick in your mouth now and then take the one next to you up your ass, because that is what prostitution is. And he went, yeah, I think I'd rather work in McDonald's.

After the break, Julie and I take a deep dive into what exactly a TERF is and why she thinks fighting with some trans activists is worth all the trouble. Stay with us.

Julie, several times in this conversation so far, the phrase TERF has come up. And this is a topic that seems to be tearing the feminist world apart from within, and in fact has exploded into the broader culture. Let's start with a simple question here. When did you first hear the word TERF? I think it was around 2008 or 9, but I'd already been...

labelled as seriously transphobic. And when I heard TERF, I thought it was really interesting because a lot of men are violent towards trans-identified people, outwardly, visibly trans people, in the way that they are to visibly gay people or lesbians such as myself. We often have the same attackers.

And so therefore, when trans people are murdered or harmed, it's bigoted males. Almost every single case we've heard of are violent, bigoted, homophobic, perverted.

anti-trans males. All of a sudden, we've got an acronym for the first time in the history of trans activism, which has the words radical feminist in there. So suddenly, radical feminists, the ones that

have a theory about male dominance and women's submission, the ones that campaign to end rape, that set up the first domestic violence shelters. The ones like you, in other words. Yes, feminists like me. All of a sudden, we are in the acronym. We are it. Radical feminists. So let's define what a TERF, what does TERF stand for, Julie? Trans-exclusionary radical feminists.

So how it came about was that feminists had said, look, come on, we want trans people to have all the dignity and human rights that we are fighting for as women. We will stand with our trans sisters and brothers in the face of any violence, abuse and discrimination. That goes without saying. Of course, feminists are concerned about other oppressed and marginalised people. We always have been.

But we said, look, there's a problem here, guys, because there's a clash of rights. So when feminists in the 1960s and 70s fought to bring about legislation that would mean we could have women-only provision to protect us from male violence, yeah, of course, most men aren't violent, but enough are violent for it to be a concern in changing rooms, in prisons, in hospital wards, and, of course, refuges.

So we said, let's build refuges with no funding. Let's build rape crisis centres. And we're sorry to our trans sisters, but you're going to have to build your own refuges because we can't accommodate natal males. However you live, even if you live as the opposite sex,

because women will recognize you as males unless of course they've lived in the opposite sex for decades they've had every single medical and hormonal intervention and we wouldn't necessarily notice right but they are few and far between that end up in those situations so we said this is a clash of rights we need to maintain our sex-based legal rights and our refuges and

And they started saying, you are transphobic. You are a bigot. You don't mind when trans women are being raped and murdered. You won't even share your refugees. And we said, hey, build your own and we'll show you how to. And we'll give you every bit of advice to do that. And this is the debate that has sort of ripped apart women's only spaces like I think about Lilith Fair, you know, the famous feminist...

music festival, but also, you know, women's sports, high school sports, college sports, professional sports. I mean, this is the debate, the question about whether or not trans women are women, whether or not trans women should be accepted in female-only spaces. And

I think it's a very complicated issue because it really pits two virtues against each other, one being the virtue of inclusion, but also it pits inclusion against the question of fairness. And I'm just wondering, Julie, as someone who has been

herself, someone on the outs as a feminist, as a dyke, as someone from the working class. How do you understand that movement in the most generous way possible and its desire to sort of be accepted somewhere? So this is a key question. And how I would answer it is by saying that trans people are

wholly separate and different in terms of their demands and their attitude and their behaviours as our trans activists, most of whom aren't even transgender. And I suppose how I would approach the issue of anti-trans bigotry is, as I said earlier, to defend and protect trans women as a discriminated against minority and to say trans women are trans women.

Third spaces are really important in this discussion because the trans activists are saying... What's a third space, Julie? So at the moment, what we have is women-only spaces, refuges and the like. Then we have mixed spaces. And I don't mind going into a mixed-sex bathroom in a bar, in a pub, in a restaurant, so long as men watch their hygiene. Why should I care?

But a third space would be for trans people to choose if they wish to use that facility.

In other words, they have a refuge, they have a rape crisis centre that we as feminists have long suggested we help them build, that we help them design, that we give them support to maintain. And of course, the extremists, the activists don't want that. But the majority of trans women that I speak to, some of whom are my friends, that's exactly what they want. That's exactly the solution that they think we should be moving towards. And the other solution would be this, Barry.

You have trans women who have raped and abused women in female prisons on prison wings here in the UK. I've interviewed two of those women who were raped by convicted male sex offenders who decided to transition during their time in a male prison. The classic line in the Guardian newspaper when one of these rapes was reported was about a trans-identified male called Karen White. The line being...

The women could see her erect penis protruding from her stockings. Now,

As an Australian colleague of mine said when I did my book tour there, when I read out that line, her erect penis, she said, the only time the phrase her erect penis should be used is if a woman has castrated her rapist and she's holding it up as a trophy. So, OK, I wouldn't necessarily go that far, but she had a point there.

So, therefore, what I would do as a lesbian, as a feminist, as a humanist, is say to trans women, we will help you, we understand, but it's a clash of rights. Right, it is a clash of rights, and it's hard. But here's what I hear you saying, let's put erect penises in stockings to the side for a minute. Yeah.

You're saying, I think, that women are women and that trans women are trans women. And that's okay because diversity is a good thing. And no good comes from papering over difference or pretending that we're all the same. And let's fight for the rights of this group as this group. Is that what you're saying? That's exactly what I'm saying. When I was a young lesbian in that working class community with men

all of the people, none of them had benefited from a further education or liberal values. And I was called a pervert and a freak. And I was asked constantly, was I a man? I wasn't a real woman because of course I was attracted to girls and not boys.

So I kind of have an inkling of understanding about how my trans sisters and brothers feel because they're on the margins of society. What I really want is for the pressure to be on men in male prisons, not to kick the heads in of trans women when they're in those prisons. I don't want women in our prisons who are the most disenfranchised in society to

to have to be at risk of rape. I want the trans women in men's prisons to be treated with courtesy not to be raped, not to be beaten up by anti-trans male bigots because they're in no danger in women's prisons, but women are in danger from convicted sex offenders that claim to be trans women and that is not acceptable. So Julie, you've obviously been branded as a TERF.

And that's come with serious social costs for you from being disinvited from college campuses. You've been physically attacked. People claim all kinds of untrue things about you.

But sometimes I joke that all of England is a turf island. You know, you have obviously J.K. Rowling who blurbed the cover of your book. Over here we have Margaret Atwood who's getting, you know, dragged right now for calling women women. But, you know, there's also lesser known women whose lives are getting...

really unravelled by being branded as TERF. So I wanted to take the case of Kathleen Stock, which is a story that's being covered in the British press, but really hasn't penetrated over here. Kathleen Stock has attracted protests over her views on gender identification. And last week was the victim of a poster campaign at the university's campus in Brighton, accusing her of transphobia and suggesting she should be sacked. Posters have been put up around Sussex University calling for Professor Miss Stock

to be fired. She's a philosophy professor at the University of Sussex. She has a new book out called Material Girls. And she has sort of been ringing the alarm on the risks of self-identification. In other words, you know, the notion that anyone can claim they're a woman and enter women's spaces, which is what we've just been talking about.

But this month, it kind of really boiled over at her university. Protesters on campus rallied together. They called for her job. They handed out leaflets calling her a transphobe. They said, fire Kathleen Stock. Until then, you'll see us around. And what's astonishing about this story, although maybe it shouldn't be astonishing at this point, is that Stock's own union, instead of protecting her from this harassment, is

They sent a letter, her own union, to the university asking the school to take a clear and strong stance against transphobia at Sussex, to undertake an investigation into institutional transphobia. In the meantime, the police have told Kathleen Stock that she should install security cameras at her home and she should avoid her own campus for her safety.

Why does a powerful union bend a knee to the will of, as you put it in a recent op-ed, a collection of pound shop antifas? Why isn't the union doing its job? Why isn't the university saying, stop? You know, this is the place more than any other in a culture where we should be protecting free speech rights, where we should be protecting freedom of conscience, where

You know, why aren't her fellow professors going on Twitter and writing, you know, stop? Instead, they're writing shame on Kathleen's stock and her transphobic ilk rather than saying enough. What is going on here?

Part of it is fear and cowardice because they've seen what's happened to me. They've seen what's happened to other women that have been targeted in this way. And that serves as a severe warning. I'm lucky enough not to have a job. As my mum's always saying, when are you going to get a real job? I'm a journalist and I don't have a staffer job. So they haven't been able to help me out of my job. But there have been other consequences as

But the likes of Kathleen has to go on campus and teach. So part of it is fear, capitulation and cowardice. But the other part of it, I think, is as worrying. And it's this.

progressive men, men on the left that have learned over the decades that it's not cool to be outwardly misogynistic. It's not cool to make rape jokes. It's not cool to talk about women's physical appearances, call us too ugly to rape, whatever. They leave that to the more blatant sexists.

But they've been kind of quite hemmed in because they resent the women making demands. Not all of these men, by the way, but the misogynistic ones wearing the cloak of respectability and progressiveness. And they have been really curtailed in terms of their sexism. This has given them a golden opportunity to be able to call us witches and bitches and worse. And of course, all under the banner of turf and still be seen as the good guys.

Or as the journalist Owen Jones said, the right side of history. But Julie, what do you make of the fact that a lot of the people, you know, protesting Kathleen Stock, trying to push her out of the school, or to use the example of Suzanne Moore, your old colleague at The Guardian, who was essentially pushed out of the paper for similar reasons, a lot of the people doing the smearing and the shaming and the trying to get people deplatformed are themselves saying,

young women, young women who no doubt identify as feminists. I think those women can identify as feminists if they like. They're not. It's not feminist to hound women out of a job for saying that sex is real and that women's rights must be protected.

and Women Who Speak Out Against Misogyny, which Kathleen Stock has, Suzanne Moore. Kathleen Stock is a very mild-mannered, quite liberal academic philosopher. I know Kathleen quite well. She thinks my book's too radical. I think her book's too liberal. We're great friends. It's a brilliant position to be in because we can tease each other with where we think we've gone wrong.

And we talk and we debate and we do that really old-fashioned thing. Do you remember this, Barry? Disagreeing and still being friends? Yeah, that's the word. Yeah, that's how I felt when I read your book. I'm like, oh, I really disagree with Julie way more than I thought, but I love talking to her. Well, and I feel the same about you, but you probably disagree with me a bit more than I do with you. But either way, you raise a really interesting, crucial, in fact, point about young women and

Being really at the helm of this, when I first started researching my book, I got to talk to loads of young women, some of whom had deplatformed me, some of whom had been part of the gang at university saying, no turf like Bindle on our turf. She's a transphobe. She's a swurf, which for your listeners is insane.

sex worker exclusionary radical feminists. So turf and swerve, it sounds like a bad meal in a diner, doesn't it? But anyway, I was called a whorephobe. Some of those women now come to me and say, hey, I'm sorry I did that. I was wrong. I believed it at the time. But they were in these feminist societies where they were being drip fed a faux feminism that was a feminism for men. It's why I called my book Feminism for Women.

because it was all about pole dancing for exercise and sex work being empowering and choking and slapping and being spat at during sex was really erotic.

And I think that they had just realised that this kind of feminism wasn't going to liberate them. And so those women on campus, I think the other issue is what's happening with our universities right now is there's barely any kind of material reality being addressed by the academics. It's all free-floating, postmodern queer theory.

And now because it's so expensive to go to university here, there are barely any working class students. And the very quite privileged, wealthy students are seeing university as a service, as a business, as opposed to a privileged place of learning where they're very lucky to have a higher education. And so they really are holding the strings when it comes to what happens in universities with certain conditions.

lecturers and tutors and they're telling the university upper echelons who they want and they want tutors and lecturers that don't tell them anything that's going to trigger them

Don't teach them about rape, for example, without a trigger warning on the text. Don't teach them about racism and colonialism unless you remove all of the nasty words and subvert the actual historical facts. And it's the same with the transphobia thing. Kathleen has been very badly let down and it should come as a warning to every single person working not only in universities...

but working in the media, working in any job where they can be hounded out by these privileged, unthinking individuals that have never had a critical thought in their head. And I'm absolutely bereft for them because they haven't been taught how to think critically about anything. People are pandering to their every need and their every viewpoint.

One more break and then more with Julie Bindel on how to make feminism relevant once again to the working class. Stay with us. I'm thinking about...

Earlier in the conversation where you talked about going to the sex cinema and throwing eggs at the screen and putting concrete in the toilets, like, do you think that there's going to need to be sort of direct action and protests of that sort? Or are people just going to kind of keep rolling over as good people or hounded out of their careers?

I think the answer to your question is yes, we need to return to direct action, although the days of being able to throw eggs at cinema screens and put concrete down toilets are probably gone. But anyway, either way, there are different forms of legal direct action that we can do. You see, you mentioned J.K. Rowling, who is stratospherically world famous. I also interviewed Chimamanda Ngozi, who's been called a TERF and a white feminist, despite the fact that she is a black African woman.

because she refuses to capitulate to the trans women and women ideology. Also, the tennis legend Martina Navratilova, again, she used to be a great ally of trans people, of lesbian and gay people. She was outed in the early 1980s. She was the first lesbian icon for those of us of my age, I'm 59,

who saw for the first time a really cool person who was out as a lesbian, who was doing great things and who was world famous and revered in her profession. And she's become a good friend. And the second that she started talking about the unfair experience

situation of putting natal males in competitive sports with women. She was cast asunder as a bigoted TERF. So of course there's no redemption. You can never not be a TERF once you've been labelled one. Kathleen will never not be a TERF amongst that crew once you've been labelled. So what I say we need to do is this.

Kathleen is not world famous, but she's very well known in my country now. And she's a sterling academic. But there are women whose names we will never know, who don't have university professorships, who are in mundane jobs, who cannot afford to lose those jobs. They've got children to feed. They've got rent to pay.

They are under threat of losing their jobs. So what those of us that can must do is stand up and say, I agree with Margaret Atwood. I agree with Kathleen Stock. It's not bigoted to say that trans women are trans women. It's not bigoted to say keep our female prisons closed.

mail free. That isn't bigoted. All of those academics that refused to speak out on Kathleen Stock's behalf when the union sold her down the river and did the opposite of what they were supposed to do. Shame on them, because they should stand up and be counted. They can't sack us all. And that, I think, is the key message.

Julie, we talked a little bit about Chappelle before. And, you know, I keep watching these videos on repeat of, you know, highly educated, grown adults, well-paid with amazing health care and parental leave and stock options. I'm here because Dave Chappelle is harming our kids. He doesn't realize that the speech that he's putting out there is harmful.

Marching with little signs outside of Netflix. They are promoting and causing hate conversation and also allowing people to think that it's okay to discriminate against those trans and non-binary individuals. Because of a stand-up special. Yeah. You don't have to be mean when you make jokes. We will not stop until those demands are met. We want you to know that...

To me, the broader point, and this was made by a smart friend of mine, that it's a little bit like, it reminds him a little bit, he said, of Hunger Games. Like it's the fashions of people in the Capitol. It really bears no relationship to reality, to actual victims. It's LARPing. It's live action role playing. It's sort of fakery. But there is still, as we've been obviously talking about in this conversation, a

room for a muscular vision of feminism that actually focuses on the lives of women and girls. So if the feminist movement had its head on straight, what would the goals of it be? What would the top three issues be if the feminist movement was run by Julie Bindel and co.?

Well, first of all, sisterhood and solidarity. That's really important because what we've been hit over the head with this past couple of decades, maybe a bit more since postmodernism invaded the academy and leaked out into wider society. So the kind of theory which is very abstract where they deny material reality per se, not just about women's biology. The thing that's happened is we've been told women have nothing in common. Women are divided by everything else.

that white women are crying white tears when we're raped or when we're addressing male violence, which in turn somehow affects trans women and somehow affects women of colour. We've been told that

Wealthy women don't need feminism at all. We're also very well aware that the poorest women in society are left to their own devices when we ignore things like prostitution and the kind of systems of exploitation that eat up the most vulnerable women. So we have to find a solidarity and we have to recognise that

The only movement on the planet that centres women and girls is feminism. But unfortunately, and here's the rub, we're three and a half billion. That's a big group of women to say that we have something in common with, right? We're never going to do it. We're never going to have a movement where we pretend, and nor should we, that we have so much in common. But we do have one thing in common. So here's my second thing. Mm-hmm.

male violence against women and girls and the fear of male violence against women and girls. Now, that is the only thing on the planet that unites all women and girls. There is no other thing. We don't all have children. Some of us are poor. Some of us are educated. Some of us are heterosexual. Some of us are not. Some of us have different life experiences in the extreme. But we all have understood that

That lesson that we grow up with. We all understand what it feels like having a bit too much to drink, coming back in a cab on our own and just wondering, just wondering if something bad might happen or taking a different route home than through the park.

Or feeling sick to our stomachs when we're in a lift with a man and the lift suddenly stops and we think, okay, anything could happen. Men don't have to fear that. And so many of us. I mean, I think pretty much all of us.

But isn't that just inevitable? Meaning, when I was reading your book, the thing that struck me, and this is where I think you genuinely are radical in the truest sense of that word, is you seem to believe that all differences between men and women matter.

from socialization, that there isn't some kind of fundamental male and female nature. I'm not saying that men are rapists by nature or sexual assaulters by nature and that women are meek by nature, but that there are things that are the result of evolutionary history and biology and DNA that does make us inclined in certain directions and that there is always going to be some amount of aggression and violence

violence in men that is different to what is sort of the natural inclinations of women. And I hear you writing in your book, and I really wanted to ask you about it, that no, that's just the result of socialization and anything that doesn't, any argument that doesn't acknowledge that it's just the result of socialization and the way we are socialized in a way is apologizing for this bad behavior.

That's a fair point. And I think that possibly I put that too simplistically. And reading Carol Hoeven's great book, Testosterone, which is so informative and educational, and whether or not you kind of agree with all of her arguments, my God, did I learn so much from that book.

I mean, I really wanted to take a hit of testosterone, you know, just to have that. We can easily procure that for you right now. I'm sure the internet is a great thing, isn't it, Barry? But no, you're right. You're right to pull me up on that, I think, simplistic kind of explanation of there being no differences between men and women. There are differences. There are biological and physical differences. Testosterone, as does estrogen, plays a part in the way that we respond to each other in

it doesn't explain or excuse, of course, sexual violence towards women. I mean, men do fight. Men might even fight each other for the kind of best looking woman. There's all kind of mating rituals that we go through. And I think that there can be, you know, a rich kind of understanding of the differences between men and women without going down the route of explaining it, explaining sexual violence. I think, you know, and we have evolved. And I think

Perhaps I want to put it like this. We mustn't excuse male violence because there isn't a need or an inevitability about it. We can live in a world without male violence, however much testosterone or not somebody has coursing through their veins. And I do think I've looked and looked and looked as a feminist over four decades for anything else that bonds women and girls. And I think we need to come together on the basis of need. And that need for me is,

is to combat male violence so we can all live as free citizens. And actually that men would benefit from having relationships with women as friends, as colleagues, as lovers, as sons, without that kind of sense that they could get away with it if they wanted to. Maybe this is something to try. I also have to ask, you know, when reading your book, I...

Asked myself a few times, am I a feminist? Because I've always identified as one. My life is the result of feminist progress, but I'm not a utopian.

And I am very, very skeptical of utopian movements. And you talk about in the book how feminism for you is not about the fight for equality per se. It's about women's liberation from the patriarchy. And you write explicitly it's a utopian movement. So tell me, Julie, am I a feminist if I don't identify myself

If I don't think of my feminism as being about a sort of utopian vision of toppling the patriarchy, eradicating hate and total women's liberation and a matriarchy, am I a sufficient – am I sufficiently feminist enough if I would be willing to settle for, I don't know, you know, lack of violence against women and equality in all the places that we want to be and work and the sort of dignity and respect that's accorded to males?

Of course you're a feminist. In any movement, we have radicals and we have others that have a different role within the movement and that practice feminism and that advance the cause of women through different means. And that is the way that I see it. There are anti-feminists who are calling themselves feminists in order to speak about issues with authority, but they're not feminists. They're anti-feminists. Whereas the feminism that you subscribe to

You and probably the majority of women in the US and the UK that describe themselves as such, you may not have a utopian vision, and I hear what you're saying about the problems with that, but you absolutely want the liberation of women from particular atrocities, from a system that curtails our lives and our freedoms, our role in the workplace, wherever. And there's room for hundreds of types of feminism everywhere.

Julie Bindle, thank you so much. Thank you, Barry. It's been really great to talk to you. Thanks for listening. And thanks so much to Julie. If you've got story tips or guest suggestions, visit us at honestlypod.com. See you soon.