28 Comments

On the lightest of notes, I'm still laughing about MD's comment when said she was "part of the blond community."

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Julie Bindle’s total lack of empathy for fertility challenged women who desperately want to be mothers was so cold and harsh. She has obviously never longed for a child and apparently has no interest in understanding those who do.

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She makes up for her lack of empathy with her ample over-certainty and dearth of knowledge!

Clearly there's a lot to unpack and learn about surrogacy but it's not true that no one's looking into how it affects the children. Lots of studies already on that. Also the discussion of adoption (except for Meghan's additions) had a Reefer Madness vibe. Not to mention it's ghastly to generalize that kids who are adopted have to "pretend" the people who adopt them are their parents.. And ignorant! Lots of studies on adopted children too and a key positive factor is a warm family environment.

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Megan wondered who teachers are? I know a best & brightest applying for uni; application for our local uni Faculty of Education might indicate what happens from start to convo:

Date of Birth

Self-Declaration of Diversity:

The Faculty of Education welcomes diversity in its student body and encourages those from diverse backgrounds to seek admission. If you choose, please indicate if you belong to any of the following designated equity groups:

Indigenous peoples

Member of visible minority

Persons with disabilities

LGBTQ2S+

Section B: Statement of Intent

NOTE: This section is mandatory for ALL applicants

The Faculty of Education aspires to be a leader in anti-racist and anti-oppressive teaching, learning, and service. Please identify a situation where you, or someone you know, was advantaged or disadvantaged because of race, gender, socio-economic status, sexuality, religion, age, ability, indigeneity and other identity categories. Describe what you learned from this experience and how this will help you as a future educator. (150-250 words)

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Thank you for this interview. I'm a subscriber to both you and Julie Bindel and I love both your work. As a lesbian(sorry, had to say it!) and someone with an advanced degree in American education (fortunately, I earned another one in a Humanities field before imbibing that drivel), I believe that the rise of these new identities has less to do with platforms like Tumblr and more to do with how the U.S. education system tends to compartmentalize everything. Subjects like literature, sociology, and history are often reduced to boxes on graphic organizers or acronyms, stripping them of nuance. When I see identities on Tumblr—like gray asexual or alloace—I don't think the kids are rebelling but that they're slotting their thinking into the same rigid, sterile frameworks used in Ed, which, like some unfortunate exercise trends, seem to spread globally. There’s a tendency to simplify everything into a series of steps rather than engaging with the actual content, and this is reflected in the unimaginative, unnuanced ways with which many young people now approach gender and sexuality. It's not a surprise that the parents Bindel interviewed found themselves facing Body Snatchers rather than teachers. Beyond the issues Bindel highlights, what troubles me most is the lack of creativity. It’s not even postmodernism because postmodernists were at least aware of the sources they were blending and expected you to be in on the joke. This is just a shallow, context-free, paint-by-numbers approach to identity with some ultimately terrible consequences.

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What did you think of the interview Meghan did a few months ago with porn director Jacky St James who Julie Bindel loaths(says she is a pimp)?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXp0sE8HVVE

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I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet but I will! Thank you!

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Love and appreciate both of you so much. This conversation, once again, reminded me of the scene in AbFab when Eddie is so excited because she thinks her daughter is gay for brief moment.

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We all age, decay, and die. I think there is room for the choice of surrogacy as a worthy thing to do with your life. As for the children of surrogacy, many will share DNA with the payee parent so the idea that they will feel “sold” doesn’t make sense to me.

I’m curious what the full JK Rowling, Julie Bindel English vision for womankind looks likes. Are we imagining maidens in an English pastoral scene, free from worldly harm? I don’t think my 3 American sisters would be down. They are each violent in their own ways.

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I don't doubt that there are losses involved in surrogacy but I'm dubious a significant problem is that the children will feel "sold."

Also that whole "grim" story (felt straight out of the '50s to me) about how neighbors see a pregnant woman and then assume the baby died, then learn -- the child was grown for profit! You'd think the grim ending would not be that it lived.

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Finally listened. I thought Julie was great - though yes, she is a provocateur on issues like surrogacy and adoption without as much nuance as one would hope. We commentators can add the nuance! While I am not opposed to either practice, I get that the logical conclusion of both is not necessarily where I would want our society to be. (Just like I did not see working on gay rights would set up the gender madness.)

There is a very good Brazilian movie, Reaching For the Moon, about the poet Elizabeth Bishop and the architect Lota de Macedo Soares relationship. There is a heartbreaking scene in which Lota buys a baby from a poor woman for Elizabeth. The desperate mother didn't want to give up her baby, but she had many other mouths to feed. She felt she had no choice. This is the ethical dilemma out there. It's very similar to a poor person selling a body part - a part of a liver or a kidney - out of desperation. It's not the society I want or should exist. But, obviously, there are many examples of surrogacy that are not out of such desperation.

Here is a good article on thinking through surrogacy and its implications. https://mcrawford.substack.com/p/to-whom-do-children-belong?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1212250&post_id=151135959&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=7jeog&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

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I am one of the children who were adopted through international adoption (from China). Years ago, I participated in a Canadian documentary that featured other young adult adoptees (alsonvia international adoption). Among the 12 participants 2 of them had difficult childhoods, 1 of them began suffering from drug and sex related issues in early adulthood (after university), the rest of us were pretty well-adjusted, relatively succesful adults. Obviously, a small sample, but interesting nonetheless.

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Kind of ironic to see Julie Bindel on the podcast given Bindel thinks Jacky St James who was on a few months ago is a pimp. Can we get Bindel and St. James on at the same time?

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Meghan, how about you interview someone who has actually been part of surrogacy as opposed to a bitter theorist observing from the outside? As they say in The Hunger Games, “I volunteer?”

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To Meghan's credit she did have Jacky St James on who has totally different views about pornography than Bindel over the summer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXp0sE8HVVE

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So, is artificial insemination acceptable to Bindel?

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There is some cherry picking (pardon the racist phrase) between case studies trotted out between parents of trans kids and case studies of successful surrogacy.

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Wow. This is an interesting listen. I thought I had wondered from the Liberal leaning feminist camp, but Bindel gives me some food for thought.

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Covid jabbers = not cult.

Hasidic Jews = cult

... hmmmm

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Ive learned the last few years that some leftists who travel the road to heterodoxy still bring along old baggage. An antipathy to religion fits that description.

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Nuanced...? Seriously?

I've listened to most of your podcasts over the years (many of them several times) and really appreciated them. But i found little nuance in this one. At least regarding transgender issues (some of the other issues i have to little knowledge of to be able to weigh fairly). If you have to have such arrogant guests, with such tunnel vision, a bit more push back would be in order, i think...

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Julie's dogmatism and generalizations did sometimes give me "Andrea Dworkin circa 1990" vibes.

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Used to love when I was a kid and Rush Limbaugh would go on for hours ripping at Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon back in 90s to his theme song My City was Gone from the Pretenders.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfDqcKOh1hg

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I think Chrissie Hynde complained

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This will be good. I dichotomy between the UK where there is such a strong cohort of left feminist women (Hadley Freeman, Julie, JK Rowling, Stock, Moore, Hill, Hilton, Joyce etc) who have been yelling from the rooftops about the danger of the queer theory/gender lunacy for years and the US where all the "progressive" feminists like Valenti et al are full blown TRA, amazing. The only US one I can think of who gets it is Filopovic but she cant speak up

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I think another difference between the US and the UK is that conservative christians haven’t been such a big movement in the UK. Which is why young British women are discovering things such as waiting to have sex in order to vet a man, which is taking longer to gain traction in the US, b/c leftist feminists start screaming that it’s so regressive and something right wing Christians would do. This, of course, means it’s a bad thing. The whole demonizing the religious, which the left loves to do (except for Islam, for some reason) is short-sighted. Sometimes people on the other side of the aisle get things right once in a while, even if it’s for a reason you don’t agree with.

UK feminists don’t have to fight against that history of dealing with the religious right, so their trajectory is going to be different.

I am seeing some cross-aisle communication with regards to the trans issue, though. Some of the podcasts I listen to have had religious people as guests, and it’s been interesting.

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Liked 1000 times.

Mainstream feminists in the US are afraid to push back on even some of the most outrageous ideas, like men in womens prisons or surgery for adolescents. Reasonable desire to protect women's spaces gets you lumped in with the far-right MAGA crowd.

If you're a female classical liberal podcaster/writer who pushes back, you get accused of succumbing to "audience capture". Notice that this term only seems to apply when someone tacks even a little bit to the right on social/political issues, especially gender ideology. I repeatedly beg Meghan to stand her ground and not allow the far left to always set the boundaries of acceptable discourse. If the audience happens to be on the side of truth, then being captured is a badge of honor.

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My view is that the UK Labor Party getting involved in the US election behind Harris is going to bring about a crisis in British left feminism and will probably lead to Julie Bindel, JK Rowling, et all. leaving the UK Labor Party.

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