Feminist Current

Child marriage may be a thing of the past in many Western countries, but remains a reality for many girls in Mexico. While the law has changed, the practice remains, and one in four girls in Mexico are married before the age of 18. The persistence of this practice continues to have harmful impacts on Mexican girls, something Girls Not Brides: The Global Partnership to End Child Marriage is trying...

Milli Hill is a freelance journalist and author The Positive Birth Book , Give Birth like a Feminist , and a new book for preteens, My Period . She founded the Positive Birth Movement in 2012 and ran it until recently, when she was “cancelled” for defending women-centered language when talking about pregnancy and birth. In this episode, Meghan Murphy speaks with her about "positive birth," why bir...

One of the most common questions I receive from women is, "How can I take action?" So many women are concerned about the legislation and ideology being embraced by politicians, the media, and institutions, yet feel helpless to make a difference.  A new book — Practical Politics for Bold Women — is for women who want to be heard, but may not be sure where to start. I spoke with author and wome...

In this episode, Meghan Murphy speaks with The Famous Artist Birdy Rose , a UK-based artist from Essex who has been subject to an ongoing slander campaign on account of her advocacy for women and women’s rights. Find her online @artistbirdyrose.

While kids once would (perhaps awkwardly) learn about the birds and the bees in school, sex ed has changed suddenly and rapidly, without consultation with parents or consideration for the impact on kids. Today, students are no longer learning about sex, but about gender and gender identity. Many are concerned about the impact this will have on kids and their understanding of their bodies, sex, rep...

On Saturday, women gathered at Fraser Valley Institution, a prison in Abbotsford, BC, to protest the housing of men in women’s prisons. Since Bill C-16 passed in Canada, males who identify as transgender have been permitted to transfer to female prisons. Yet the Liberal government won’t address women's concerns about this. In this episode, Meghan Murphy speaks with Heather Mason, a founding member...

On June 17, Britain’s Royal Academy of Arts published a post on Instagram , saying: “Thank you to all those for bringing an item in the RA Shop by an artist expressing transphobic views to our attention. We were unaware of the artist's stated views, and their work will not be stocked in the future. We appreciate you holding us to account on this issue, and we would like to reiterate that we stand...

The transitioning of kids is ever more common these days, despite growing concerns about physical, mental, and social impacts of encouraging youth to identify as the opposite sex. A new documentary film, Trans Mission , explores the background, messaging, and consequences of transitioning kids, through conversations with doctors, experts, parents, educators, and detransitioners. In this episode, M...

A key concern for women, in terms of the impact of gender identity legislation, has been new policies being rolled out in various countries around the world, allowing males to compete with and against girls in sport. Beth Stelzer is a housewife, a mom, and an amateur powerlifter in Minnesota. She founded Save Women's Sports in 2019. She is currently traveling around the US, advocating for legislat...

Donna Hughes is a Professor at the University of Rhode Island (URI) in the Gender and Women's Studies Department. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Dignity : A Journal on Sexual Exploitation and Violence and has long conducted research on human trafficking, particularly the sexual exploitation and trafficking of women and girls. After publishing an article entitled, "Fantasy Worlds on the...

Social media has become central to most of our lives — even moreso as Covid restrictions have prevented us from meeting and organizing in person. But even before the pandemic, much of feminist activism had moved online. Hashtag movements were receiving wide coverage in the media and the idea of being able to easily connect with women all around the world and share our voices and experiences widely...

On January 20 2021, President Biden signed the “Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation.” Biden’s order chooses to interpret sex broadly as “sexual orientation and gender identity” but does not make any provisions for the physical category of sex, meaning that women and girls may no longer be a legally protected class once th...

Last month, on inauguration day, President Biden signed the “Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation.” Women across the United States and around the world reacted with anger. This meant, they feared, the erasure of women’s sex-based rights. But the language and impacts of the order are difficult to decipher, for a layperson....

Aileen Wuornos, often labelled America’s “first female serial killer,” was executed by lethal injection in Florida in 2002. Her life was one of endless trauma and abuse, beginning as a child and extending into her adult life, as a prostitute. The men she killed were said to be johns -- she insisted all these murders were done in self-defence. Phyllis Chesler recently published a book about Wuornos...

In 1979, Janice Raymond published The Transsexual Empire , the first and probably most well-known book articulating a radical feminist analysis of transgenderism. Little did we know, 40 years later, trans activism would become the biggest threat to feminism in decades. She warned us all, early on, and now we are living it: watching women’s sex based right be eroded in order to accommodate gender i...

On August 16, the Women’s Human Rights Campaign (WHRC) launched its United States chapter . WHRC is an international group of women dedicated to protecting the human rights of women and girls, and opposing the replacement of the category of sex with “gender identity.” The organization is gathering signatures on its Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights , the organization’s founding document. In...

The global women’s movement is a force to be reckoned with. The fight against the sex trade has been particularly successful in Israel, where feminists united to pass The Prohibition of Consumption of Prostitution Services Act, a law that imposes fines for consuming prostitution or attempting to pay for it. The law began being enforced in July, making Israel the tenth country to adopt the Nordic m...

Susan Hawthorne (Photo: Nick Walton-Healy) The word “separatism” may lead some to recoil. But what does it really mean, from radical feminist perspective? Susan Hawthorne is co-founder of Spinifex Press, an independent feminist press in Melbourne, Australia, and author of two novels, nine collections of poetry, four non fiction books, and numerous other publications. She first published In Defense...

University of Alberta associate professor Kathleen Lowrey was dismissed as associate chair of undergraduate studies in the department of anthropology in March. Kathleen Lowrey, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, was recently dismissed from her role as undergraduate programs chair. She was told students had complained about her views on gender identity ideology. I...

Credit: Stella Perrett Stella Perrett was a political cartoonist for the UK’s only socialist daily newspaper, The Morning Star , from 2015 to 2020. She had published cartoons criticizing capitalism, the police, Brexit, the American president, and more. It wasn’t until Stella drew a cartoon called “Endgame,” commenting on the impact of potential changes to the Gender Recognition Act on women’s righ...

Renate Klein, author of “Surrogacy: A Human Rights Violation” We hear about surrogacy routinely in the media, almost consistently in a celebratory way — a baby is gifted to a loving and deserving family. Celebrities announce they are “having a baby” via a surrogate and face almost no criticism. But what’s really behind the practice? Why are we so accepting of a clearly unethical and exploitative i...

The COVID-19 pandemic has been hard on everyone. But imagine if you were impoverished, a migrant, or living in close quarters with no way to socially isolate. What if you were a prostituted woman? A domestic worker? What if you were trapped in an abusive relationship, with nowhere to go? How have the pandemic and the lockdowns impacted the most marginalized among us? And how have exploitative indu...

Michelle Mara is a British-born survivor of the sex trade in New Zealand. She is a single mother of four who writes and speaks about her experiences in prostitution in New Zealand, including as a madam, during prohibition as well as after the trade was fully decriminalized. Michelle has been a refugee support worker for Somali women in Wellington, a foster parent for Native American (Lakota) child...

Vaishnavi Sundar Last month, a scheduled screening of Vaishnavi Sundar’s film , But What Was She Wearing? was abruptly cancelled. Vaishnavi was told, a week before the screening, that the event was cancelled because of her “transphobic” views. This was in reference, she discovered, to some tweets she had posted about gender identity politics online, including questioning whether males who identify...

Over a decade ago, Julie Bindel was the first to report on the so-called “grooming gangs” exploiting working class girls in a number of towns in Northern England. Thousands of victims were sexually abused and sold to adult men, yet the police and the media didn’t want to address it. Because the gangs were made up of Pakistani men, media and the authorities claimed they didn’t want to touch the iss...