RedFem

We respond to Labour MP Pat McFadden's suggestion that anyone wanting to be euthanised should pay for it themselves. We talk package deals, budget deaths, and spectacular deluxe send offs involving planes and assassination-style takedowns. We wonder how the bureaucracy around death will work? What will the safeguards be? Can there be safeguards around death?
Jen’s outlines her dark theory about why Kim Leadbeater is so interested in promoting death and Hannah explains euthanasia as a phenomenological understanding of Satan in cultural form. Plus, vapid progressivism, intersectional car crashes, consequences for the ‘euthanasia defence’, the unintelligibility of MPs to the general public and the unintelligibility of the general public to MPs, middle-class people’s denial around the state, and liberalisms obsession with the individual and the individual as the only point of analysis for the liberal.

The UK's Labour government has announced a proposal to introduce euthanasia for the terminally ill. We approach that in the latter 40 minutes of this episode, after a discussion of what it's like to be a feminist in public. Expressing feminist ideas in public can lead to encountering attention seeking tactics and subsequently becoming blackpilled. We also discuss the combination of radical feminist theory with socialist feminist practice, and men adopting feminist understandings due to novelty. The latter half of the episode is concerned with euthanasia, as well as the newly proposed Ozempic injections for the unemployed obese, and work coaches for mental health in-patients. Social constructionism requires state intervention, but this particular form of statecraft is being supported by Humanist organisations pretence that the UK's main opposition is an evangelical Christian contingent that does not exist and is not large enough to be a political force. Little reflection is taking place on how the slippery slope is built-in to euthanisia, leading to, for example, people in Canada with Alzheimer’s being signed-off for euthanasia by their legal guardian family members. Plus, the subjective nature of suffering, the feminist arguments against euthanasia, and the death of capitalist hedonism and its possible monstrous rebirth in euthanasia.

Jen tells the story of the 'racist kinky chair' that split a socialist group, a premonition of how the declining and dilapidated far-Left would increasingly operate in the Global North. Episode also features discussion of Lacan's famous line 'there is no such thing as a sexual relationship', Butler's justification of pornography through deconstructionism, misunderstandings of Wittig's 'lesbians aren't women', and how polyamory results in treating sexual partners like products. We finish on the alienation present in transgenderism and inside the neoliberal workplace, where people are treated as subjects to be commodified to the greatest extent possible.

We discuss the relationship between transgender ideology's tendency towards categorisation and the black and white concreteness of mind required to buy in to it. The more ambiguous, messier parts of subjectivity can cause a certain ambivalence, for which surgeries, hormones, and cosmetic procedures become a way to make concrete changes to oneself in the hope of splitting off parts of the self that don’t fit neatly into a core self-image or identification with a desired category. This black and white thinking has its basis in emotional maturity, which is partly why so many as mature 'detransition', having come to integrate all parts of themselves psychically as age.
Similarly, in regard to maturity and a lack of experience, it is remarkable how often it is that those with little to no sexual experience are the people most attracted to and highly fascinated by sexual categories or sexual politics. As if labelling yourself with three types of sexual identities, or obsessing over the social relations between the sexes, would fill a void of inexperience and lack of understanding.
Plus, transgender ideology’s curious rejection of social construction for the more concrete arguments of hard science, why sanitising and infantilising gay people through rainbows is a recipe for making us all look like pedophiles, and the value of seeing other women say “no”.

This episode focuses on the radical feminist idea of gender abolitionism and asks, could we really ever fully abolish gender? Gender, here understood as the ideological norms and social expectations of the sexes. We discuss what abolishing gender would look like, and also take a rather large detour into Critical Race Theory and Robin DiAngelo for the first half of the episode, before bringing it back to the question of gender.
Topics include 'white woman tears' as a form of feminine policing that appeals to authority, Lacan's understanding of being 'born into language' (and thus society, ideology, and culture), Foucault's conception that power, as dominance and submission, is inescapable, and how this lead to Derrida's deconstructionism as a kind of doomerism that necessarily forecloses liberationary ideas like gender abolition. Those three post-structural thinkers informed Judith Butler, who therefore accepted gender as immutable and unchangeable, and so attempted to instead reconceive sex as mutable and changeable. This, we argue, is a disastrous concession that reflects the turn away from meta-narrative structuralism, one that implicitly heralds the possibility of structural change and remaking the world, towards a pessimistic and individualistic deconstructionism (a pessimism that developed in part through disappointment at the failures of the USSR) where all that can be remade is the individual at a micro-level and in a very limited sense.
We also explore the framing that "all politics is, is what happens to a man and his family" in relation to divorce and secularisms impact on 'social reproduction' (a Marxist term meaning how society and cultures reproduce themselves). This leads to admitting, and scrutinising, the tension between the family as a unit of private social reproduction (socialisation in the home and through the family) and public social reproduction through the state (socialisation through schooling, universities, healthcare, and childcare settings).