Vegetarian Myth, The: Food, Justice and Sustainability (Flashpoint Press)

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L – For solar panels and wind turbines, they will say – other things are more destructive as if that’s somehow ok that we would add an additional destructive industry. Of course we should be working to reduce all things that are causing harm. Not, we’re causing harm already to let’s destroy everything. It makes no sense as an argument. In the book, Jeffreys calls detransitioners like Russell “survivors,” and cites them as evidence that transgenderism isn’t immutable and thus doesn’t warrant radical medical intervention. (She considers gender-reassignment surgery a form of mutilation.) “The phenomenon of regret undermines the idea that there exists a particular kind of person who is genuinely and essentially transgender and can be identified accurately by psychiatrists,” she writes. “It is radically destabilising to the transgender project.” She cites as further evidence the case of Bradley Cooper, who, in 2011, at the age of seventeen, became Britain’s youngest gender-reassignment patient, then publicly regretted his transition the next year and returned to living as a boy. Jeffreys is especially alarmed by doctors in Europe, Australia, and the United States who treat transgender children with puberty-delaying drugs, which prevent them from developing unwanted secondary sex characteristics and can result in sterilization. BNT: Finally, as we move into an uncertain future, you state the importance of “inoculating people against future fascism” (p268) Why do you see this as crucially important? There’s 2 ways to look at the universe, one is that every single thing is another being with whom we can enter into a relationship with. When I look at paintings from the very first art works that were ever made, that’s what I see. I see an attempt to express what that life was like. We painted 2 things, the Megafauna and the mega females who literally gave us life. We painted the animals we were eating and women who gave birth to us. We’ve been doing the same thing for 8000 years and it’s not going to end any differently. You can’t keep drawing down and expect it to last forever.

You’re right, in my lifetime the same thing has happened to the feminist movement. Some of the worst things that are happening to women on this planet are now re-cast as something that is called empowering. So you have torture of women in pornography, prostitution and the industrialised sex industry, they will defend it as if it is a way to freedom. They would never suggest that brutal, body punishing, permanently damaging activities would be liberating for anyone else but somehow for women this is supposed to be the road to liberation. Baxandall, Rosalyn, and Linda Gordon. [1995] 2000. Introduction. In Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon, 1–20. New York: Basic Books. Beins, Agatha. 2017. Liberation in Print: Feminist Periodicals and Social Movement Identity. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

L – Well it’s happened over the course of my lifetime. The environmental movement has completely changed its focus.

We are on the biggest draw down and overshoot that could ever have been imagined, the entire thing has gone global. Up until very recently with genetic testing, you can’t be really sure in the way women can be sure that the child is theirs. It means that women have to be controlled and to control her fertility you have to control her entire life. Russell appears in Sheila Jeffreys’s new book, “Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism.” Jeffreys, who is sixty-six, has short silver hair and a weathered face. She has taught at the University of Melbourne for twenty-three years, but she grew up in London, and has been described as the Andrea Dworkin of the U.K. She has written nine previous books, all of which focus on the sexual subjugation of women, whether through rape, incest, pornography, prostitution, or Western beauty norms. Like Dworkin, she is viewed as a heroine by a cadre of like-minded admirers and as a zealot by others. In 2005, in an admiring feature in the Guardian, Julie Bindel wrote, “Jeffreys sees sexuality as the basis of the oppression of women by men, in much the same way as Marx saw capitalism as the scourge of the working class. This unwavering belief has made her many enemies. Postmodern theorist Judith Halberstam once said, ‘If Sheila Jeffreys did not exist, Camille Paglia would have had to invent her.’ ”Kedgley, Sue, and Mary Varnham, eds. 1993. Heading Nowhere in a Navy Blue Suit and Other Tales from the Feminist Revolution. Thorndon: Daphne Brasell Associates Press. By getting that into public consciousness, that was a positive thing but their demands were always – we need to switch fuel sources – instead of trying stop those industrial processes that are literally devouring our planet, they want to, instead, create a whole new set of technologies that are supposed to be clean and green so that we can continue to have industrialised civilisation.

At first, the book infuriated Russell, but she couldn’t let go of the questions that it raised about her own identity. She had been having heart palpitations, which made her uneasy about the hormones she was taking. Nor did she ever fully believe herself to be male. At one point during her transition, she hooked up with a middle-aged trans woman. Russell knew that she was supposed to think of herself as a man with a woman, but, she said, “It didn’t feel right, and I was scared.” Eventually, she proclaimed herself a woman again, and a radical feminist, though it meant being ostracized by many of her friends. She is now engaged to a woman; someone keyed the word “dyke” on her fiancée’s car. Keen’s appearance in Portland, Oregon, had to be cancelled on October 25 after credible death threats were received. Despite Keen’s absence, a small group of women carried out an unofficial demonstration in the event’s place as an act of resistance. What were some of the health concerns you experienced from consuming a vegan diet, and that your readers have shared with you? And should we be eating soy? Movement toward more sustainable food systems is growing", By Emily Shartin, Boston Globe Staff, July 26, 2006Allen, Pamela. 1970. Free Space: A Perspective on the Small Group in Women’s Liberation. New York: Times Change Press. Echols, Alice. 1983. The New Feminism of Yin and Yang. In Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, 439–459. New York: Monthly Review Press.