Show Notes
🎙️ Peaked Tribe Over Truth in Taiwan Host: Róisín Michaux
🎙️ Episode Overview I have a daily Google alert for online mentions of the phrase "anti-gender movement" and a couple of weeks ago, I got an alert that the phrase had been used in a Taiwanese online magazine called New Bloom. Fresh off the Taiwanese boxing Olympic scandal, I was curious to see if it was being used in the context of noted bloke Lin Yu Ting's defeat over female boxers in Paris. An American expat called Jaclynn Joyce was mentioned in the article as one of Taiwan's "anti-gender movement actors". When I looked her up, I found out she's a feminist academic. She's written for 4W, just like me, and she's opposed to the erasure of women as a sex class, just like me. She's also a Substacker. So I contacted her to tell her she had been listed as a major player in the anti-gender movement of her adopted country, and it turned out it's a concept she had never even heard of. Fellow professional bigotress Genevieve Gluck then spotted that the article had been sponsored by a new-ish American NGO, spawned by nasty lesbian-fetishist Dave "Susan" Stryker (I don't know his real name but all transvestites are "Dave" until proven otherwise.) Stryker is a big wheel down at the gender factory. He wrote some important trans retcon canon that gets cited a lot. Also, in the early aughts, he teamed up with Wythenshawe's hardest-working lesbophobe, a lesbian called Stephen Whittle, and together they wrote up a piece of scholarship (scoff) that atempted to blend rabildly horny transvestites and Vichy lezzers into one big vague "transgender" puree. So what is the "anti-gender movement" that Jaclynn was unknowingly the ringleader of? It is (or was) a kind of catch-all term for anyone with conservative views of the family, reproduction, and sexuality. The term started to be used in the 90s when conservatives were confronted with feminists' use of the analytical concept of "gender" to talk about the causes of inequality between men and women. Gender was gradually being introduced in the context of the huge UN conferences that dealt with population "management" aka women's fertility, and the poverty that comes with failing to control it. The Vatican delegation to these conferences had been keeping an eye on family-wrecking feminists, and they called this newfangled idea "gender ideology". They came out firmly against it, claiming men and women were sorted by God and nature into Tarzan (capable, strong, rational, finds food) and Jane (little, quiet, simple, organises food into sandwiches) and the idea that anything about society was artificially constructed was laughable. Feminists, in turn, started to call the conservative protagonists "anti-gender actors". Which is weird, because you would think they would also be against gender, being as it is a set of suffocating and limiting stereotypes and expectations? It's complicated. Indeed, many people have wondered why feminists stopped talking about women and men and start talking about gender instead. One explanation I've read is that it was an effort to de-shrillify the discourse, and get taken seriously by the men in suits who had controlled the conversation since basically forever. Gender took the nagginess out of describing male dominance over women, in that it's very polite about the perpetrators of a problem. It would be like rebranding femicide simply "murder" because you don't want to nag the femicidaires. You wouldn't want to remind the master of the universe of his bitch wife, would you? ("I get enough of this from 'er indoors!" the men exclaim, filling the Geneva conference chamber with cigar smoke and spittle.) Whatever. It was a gradual takeover: the word gender appeared only once in the 1979 CEDAW convention (a kind of international bill of women's rights) — though in that instance, it seems to have been used to refer to biological sex. By 1994, the very important Cairo population conference declaration was gend
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Show notes (AI generated) Episode Overview In this episode of Peaked, Róisín Michaux speaks with journalist and author Jo Bartosch about the growing influence of online pornography on culture, politics, gender identity, and sexual behaviour. The discussion centres around Jo's forthcoming book Pornocracy, exploring how internet pornography has evolved into a powerful cultural force extending far beyond individual consumption. Together they examine pornography's relationship with gender ideology, autogynephilia, gynandromorphophilia (GAMP), online radicalisation, algorithmic recommendation systems, Reddit "egg" communities, fetish culture, masculinity, female objectification, and the changing attitudes of younger generations towards women. The conversation also explores the historical roots of cross-dressing, WPATH, Genevieve Gluck's investigative work, Scottish Government funding, Stephen Ireland's criminal case, and recent legal developments in France concerning violent pornography.
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There's no weekly newsletter this week because I've been travelling to Belfast and Amsterdam for TERF-related activities (see below), so here's an interview I did with one of Germany's fiercest warriors against the forces of gender irrationality, Rona Duwe. Rona was sued by a psychotherapist called Sabine Maur because she shared a video in which Maur could be seen telling fellow mental health professionals how to fiddle with insurance forms so that 'gender-affirming' mastectomies get reimbursed for women claiming to be 'non-binary'. While female-to-male breast removal is considered totally sane in Germany, breast removal for female-to-non-binary is not, which is bizarre, to be fair, because neither of these things is actually real. The Maur video was not originally shared by Rona, but she did share it once it was already online. Rona also made comments on Maur's dubious practices. Because she is a known (and much-hated) entity in German feminist/queer circles, Rona was the one who was pursued in court for this already-public video. In the interview we get into the details of what went down during the legal proceedings, and we also talked about Rona's strategy of being gloriously defiant. Like a growing number of women being hounded over this trans nonsense, Rona has decided to take on her detractors rather than slinking away in fear and silence. You love to see it. "Did you consider coming out in defence of those women?" Meanwhile, I spent 24 hours in Belfast on Tuesday in order to cover the Women's Rights Network Northern Ireland non-reinstated Féile and Phobail event. If you missed all that and you have no idea what I'm talking about, I recommend you read this article by Helen Joyce and my running thread of the conference content. Bonus: enjoy this awkward confrontation between myself and Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald, neo-Laundry Nun Ailbhe Smyth (prolific Irish prawn sandwich brigadier feminist), and even the brand new Lord Mayor of Belfast.
🎙️ Peaked — Episode 16 Host: Róisín Michaux Guest: Angeliqa Episode Overview In this episode of Peaked, Róisín Michaux speaks with Angeliqa, a Swedish-American mother who was convicted of defamation after warning parents in her local community about a man exposed by the Swedish watchdog organization Dumpen. The conversation explores Sweden's defamation laws, freedom of expression, child protection, media responsibility, and the tension between protecting reputations and protecting children. Angeliqa recounts two incidents that shaped her decision to speak publicly, including an earlier case involving a suspected child predator near her child's preschool and a later case that resulted in criminal prosecution after she shared information in local Facebook groups. The discussion also examines Sweden's migration policies, political culture, public attitudes toward controversial issues, the work of Dumpen, and the ongoing debate over whether Sweden's legal framework adequately protects children from sexual predators.