The Sleepover Club: TERFs Are Ruining Feminism
The Polyester Podcast
The Polyester Podcast
4.5 • 533 Ratings
🗓️ 20 February 2023
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Following the death of Brianna Ghey, as well as an open letter penned by contributors of The New York Times condemning the publications reporting on gender, and the defence of JK Rowling that followed, transgender rights are once again under attack. For this week's podcast, Ione and Eden are revisiting an episode from 2020 in which we discussed the rise of TERF ideology, and how the media at large has fuelled anti-trans sentiment both in the UK and the USA.
In another special edition of The Sleepover Club, we're joined by Vice features editor Hannah Ewens to discuss her recent long read about how the debate over human rights for trans people came to dominate mainstream UK media and divide British feminists. A TERF is a trans-exclusionary radical 'feminist'. In this episode, Ione, Olivia, and Hannah discuss how TERF ideology has riddled British feminism, what cisgender feminists must do counteract it, and how representation / our treatment of transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people in the media needs to change.
Order Ione's book, Poor Little Sick Girls, here!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, Eden. Hi, Ioni. And hello to the listeners. Welcome to the Polyester podcast. I'm I'm Ioni and the founding editor-in-chief of polyesterine and the author of Poor Little Sick Girls. And I'm Eden and the managing editor of polyester and the co-host of this podcast. This is the Sleepover Club, a feminist pop culture podcast. We pull apart the hashtag discourse in the hope of making some |
| 0:21.2 | sense of it all before we get started please like rate with you and subscribe do we have any reviews |
| 0:25.3 | we do we do we do five stars love we need more witty and funny women-led podcasts like this that is by |
| 0:32.8 | isa by apple podcasts in the UK. Thank you, Issa. I probably said that wrong. I'm sorry. |
| 0:41.0 | So today is a bit of a different episode. We are re-upping a episode from 2020, I think it is. |
| 0:49.8 | Yeah. Made 2020, a lot of you lot are probably new listeners and maybe didn't hear this one before, |
| 0:55.9 | but the reason that we're re-upping it is because of all of the awful stuff that is happening |
| 1:02.1 | to trans people both in the UK and in the US this week. Eden, would you like to provide a little bit |
| 1:09.7 | more context? Yeah, so we decided to provide a little bit more context? |
| 1:14.2 | Yeah, so we decided to re-upload this podcast. |
| 1:18.4 | Mainly, I mean, you know, the whole shit show has been going on for a very long time. |
| 1:25.2 | But the whole story about the teenager, Brianna Guy, that was, I think that's how you pronounce her name. |
| 1:30.0 | I think there was someone, a few kind of tweets floating about where people were pronouncing her name wrong. |
| 1:33.7 | Who's a trans teenager who was murdered at the weekend. |
| 1:39.0 | She's 16 years old and she was murdered by two 15-year-olds in Warrington. |
| 1:41.3 | Just really, really horrible. |
| 1:49.9 | And it just seems like this, the disgusting way that people treat trans people, especially in this country, has just got so much worse in the past couple of years. |
| 1:55.6 | Yeah, and like death has kind of sparked lots of protests and lots of vigils and like renewed discussion about |
| 2:03.1 | the way that trans people are treated in this country, both by like the government and the |
| 2:08.0 | media and the wider general public. This episode in particular is an interview with the writer |
| 2:15.9 | Hannah Ewins, she did a long read about how, basically about how turf culture was cultivated by the |
| 2:25.7 | mainstream UK media and has divided British feminists. |
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