Hello and welcome to Women with Bulls, where I, Kate Laude Balls, talk to today's trailblazers.

My guest today is a radical feminist, journalist and activist.

Rowing up in Darlington, she left school and home at 15 and moved to Leeds in search of, in her own words, scary-sounding feminists. As a years went on,

her voice became stronger, fighting against male violence, prostitution and pornography. In the 90s,

she co-founded justice for women, a law reform group which helps women who have been prosecuted

for killing violent male partners. More recently, she has taken centre stage in the gender-critical

debate amongst other radical feminists such as J.K. Rowling and Suzanne Moore. As a result, she has

faced no platforming at several universities in the UK. My guest has offered a number of books,

including straight expectations, the pimping of prostitution, and feminism for women, the real

route to liberation. She says, if men aren't threatened it anyway by your feminism, then we're

doing something wrong. My guest today is Julie Bindle. Julie, thank you for joining us today and for

coming into the office, which we always love for a guest. On this podcast, we always tend to begin

by asking, would you describe

yours as a happy childhood? I mentioned in the beginning that you left home quite young.

My childhood was very happy, but it wasn't without difficulties. And that was because we were

raised in the northeast of England, which has usually almost always been ignored by politicians and by

those in the rest of the country in the UK. And my father worked extremely hard. He was a steel worker.

He worked shifts. He worked extra shifts for money for the three children. And it was tough tough grueling work. My mum worked all the way

throughout our childhoods and we were quite hard up but very well looked after, always had

holidays and our parents were extremely loving. My two brothers,

one older, one younger. We fought like cat and dog, of course, as you're supposed to. And life

was sometimes hard. So why did you decide to leave home so young? Well, I was bullied in school.

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