Blood and Terf Podcast

YOR FACKIN NICKED: BnT & friends analyse Cop Twitter (ep 21)

A lighthearted and off topic epsiode recorded while E was off with covid earlier this year, where M, plus guests C and A talk about the british police, specifically why theyre so dreary, rabidly weird, and bad at posting.

This episode was mainly recorded in January and is hugely late due to various totally avoidable delays caused by war, pestilence, and laziness. Also sorry this one is so long!

Normal programming to resume in coming weeks.

Police violence including sexual assault and extrajudicial murder is discussed in this episode

Episode 20: Miss Informed Consent? Nope, never heard of her. OH, YOU MEANT-

In our last episode this year, we interview Doctor Liz Brown, an american medical practicioner, who practices gender affirming and family care in a west coast state fo the USA. The interview is intended to serve as an informed conversational comparison between UK  and US healthcare systems and how that affects trans healthcare in both places, whilst also being a deeper discusiion of helath materialism as a political concept

 

content warnings for this episode include the normal discussions of transphobic politics, but also reference to surgery, medical abuse, and various aspects of trans healthcare, and fuckups relating to that.

 

Music for the episode was by Marina Crustacean, and an anonymous friend of the show

Ep 19- Fear and Loathing at TERFcon part 2: The Sacred Band of Dweebs

Sorry for the wait! ... Again.

Anyway, true to our word we have now got all of our material out prior to the cranks over at LGBA, so here is our second epsiode on their conference and the weird goings on in it. Our previous episode was about the policy aims of LGBA and their apparent strategy. This one looks into their collective wriggling brainworms: we attempt to figure out all the weird tangled up ways in which theyve completely lost it. Basically theyve gone into Crank Mode full time and are essentially nothing but a collection of washed up liberals and middle aged alt right wannabes and i guess its up to us to report on this?? Somehow???

This episode contains discussions of the Holocaust, child sexual assault, violence against children, some discussion of sexual assault against adults, as well as extensive discussion of body horror, surgery, ablism, antisemitism and a variety of transphobic tropes and prejudicial speech, as well as audio clips covering some of these topics

 

Intro music is by Molly Noise

 

Music at the end of the epsiode is by John Kander and Fred Ebb. We are reproducing it in conjunction with audio clips of political speech its reproduction in this instance constitutes a transformative work.

Ep 18: Fear & Loathing at TERFcon part 1: the rise of Gender UKIP

On thursday 21st of October 2021, the political organization called “the LGB alliance” held a conference of 400 plus people, from across the transphobic political movement. Much of the reporting and public commentary on the conference has focused on a few shocking or comic high points: the terrible disco, the dire reputations of certain attendees such as Andy Ngo, clips of transphobes behaving weirdly and the generally odd vibe. However the actual contents of the conference, and its nature as a political event have not been delved into in detail by most commentators: most people think the event was a bit of a joke.

We think this is a mistake. Thanks to a friend of the show who attended and recorded the event, we’ve obtained a recording of the entire thing, and the stuff in the recording point in some very concerning directions. 

 

The next few episodes of ours will be covering this conference; those who follow our twitter will know how many hours of material and pages of notes M has been labouring on; we refuse to inflict 7 hours of our nonsense on anyone in one block. 

 

Much of the conversation at the conference  touched on various tropes similar to those found in fascims, including bodily essentialism and conspiratorial rambles about invading, encroaching, plotting forces. We’ve covered the theory around these in previous episodes; this is not going to be sports commentary of the same old plays.

 

But in between regular deployments of wildly bigoted tropes, slanders, and slurs, a theme was clearly hammered home to attendees: the LGBA has a clear strategy of destroying its opponents (Stonewall, we know, though other targets were discussed) and engaging in a multi front campaign across all the major institutions of civil society to roll back the trans rights movement, as well as modern intersectional politics in general. 

 

The LGB alliance seeks to be a sort of anti-stonewall vanguard, working within the higher institutions of british civil society, campaigning to totally change NHS, BBC and wider government policy with relation to gender and LGBT issues in a deeply reactionary direction. This has thus far been what most people familiar with the trans rights movement would have assumed about the organisation, but the depth of the reality needs to be seen and directly analysed.

 

We will be using audio clips from the conference where possible, and reading out transcripts where the audio quality does not allow for a good listener experience.

Content warnings for this episode include regular sound clips of highly transphobic political speech, including discussions of my common transphobic tropes. 

 

As ever, our music is by Molly Noise

Episode 17: Judith Butlerian Jihad

World reknowned feminist scholar Judith Butler has posted a new Hot Take, and now everyone is fighting! Its a guardian aritcle about how the "gender critical" ( transphobic) movement is a building block of modern fascism, and oh boy are people up in arms already. We thought we should join in the fun and get really red, mad, and nude with rage and excitement just like the rest of you.

Our episode on the LGBA conference is in the works but this was worth a ruch job cos the article is interesting in its own right

There are no major content warnings for this episode.

link to the article here:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2021/oct/23/judith-butler-gender-ideology-backlash

Ep 16: Duffields of Destruction

We return after a 4 month hiatus, to report on the Labour and Tory party conferences, as well as various issues growing out of them, and have a general chat about clout chasers, global political growth of state-fascism, and all other sorts of cool stuff.

Normal content warnings apply: discussion of transphobia etc. That said, this episode is a fairly light one.

sorry about the delay everyone!

Episode 15: Misinformation, from the Syrian Civil War to Mumsnet

Ok look this episode is really long, and its really weird, and the reason for that is that E is a big softy who allowed me to rant for like 2 hours about how the misinformation networks that evolved out of the media landscape of Syrian Civil war news reporting have to be understood if one is to understand modern fascist misinformation in general. Thats it. Thats the episode. Have fun. Im sorry ( I'm not sorry, except about the poor sound quality: we had a lot of technical problems editing this one). We will be back to slightly more normal content in episode 16 lol.

Content warnings include brief discussion of the effects on the human body of chemical weapons including Sarin gas and Mustard gas, as well as general discussions of violence and transphobia as per normal

Music for this episode was by Molly noise

Some sources on the misinformation campaign surrounding the chemcial weapons attack on Douma in 2018:

https://www.bellingcat.com/tag/chemical-weapons/

https://forensic-architecture.org/programme/news/douma-and-the-opcw-leaks

https://www.opcw.org/media-centre/news/2020/02/opcw-independent-investigation-possible-breaches-confidentiality-report

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2020/01/23/the-opcw-douma-leaks-part-3-we-need-to-talk-about-a-false-flag-attack/

https://theintercept.com/2019/02/09/douma-chemical-attack-evidence-syria/

https://theintercept.com/2018/04/20/russia-sows-doubts-chemical-attack-syria-aided-pro-trump-cable-channel/

Episode 14: Listener questions & general recap, featuring CultWatch!

No joke title this time! In this episode we take a few listener questions, recap the last several months of transphobic activities in the UK and US. We also discuss the importance of the Kill the Bill protests in the UK, and some of the current dynamics of progressive movements allied to trans liberatory politics, as well as examining the prospects of more mainstream political forces getting entangled in the transphobic reaction. We also catch up with Cult Watch, which has been neglected for so long that it was sort of overflowing...

As we arent discussing anything particualrly hardcore in this episode there isnt any specific trigger warning.

 

Music for this episode was provided by Marina Crustacean

Episode 13: Team America- Terf Police

Our premise for this episode is pretty simple: Rapidly proliferating transphobia in the USA is about to explode. All the reactionaries, from the cable news talking heads down to Qanon diehards, are searching for new horrid fascist narratives, and its pretty clear that one of the big ones is Trans Panic. Theyre trying to adapt in the post-trump era, and find profitable new battles to fight and we think that people need to act fast to counter this.

This recent shift hasnt gone unnoticed: a fair few leftist, LGBT or antifascist commentators have already remarked upon it. However, as in Britain, US based leftist organisations, including much of the antifascist movement, havent responded much. If youre in such a group, you need to ( in our opinion) put the pedal to the metal and begin mobilising against this rapidly. If patterns play out in the states like they did here in the UK, the religious right and their street fascist allies will use transphobia to make inroads into civic life in ways that will be hard to counter if not stopped fast.

 

This episode covers a lot of ground that regular listeners to the show will know already so if youre a regular then you might find a lot of this familiar: in many ways its a truncation of our normal content. we thought that itd be good to have a sort of "ABC's" episode for the purpose of turning peoples attention to the specific organisational requirements at hand.

 

We've recorded this as a sort of introductory/propaganda piece, so if youre already on side  please share it, particulary to anyone you know who lives in the states, and most particularly if they are already in, or are thinking of joining, a leftist or antifascist organisation.

 

No major content warnings for this episode other than the general subject matter of transphobia, conspiracy theories, cults etc

 

music for this episode was by Molly Noise

Ep12: A Magdalen Berns Night Supper- Transphobia in Scotland

In this episode, we’ve invited a guest on, in order to explain the weird and wild landscape of Scottish politics, and how it is bound up in a wave of transphobia. Dalm who is an organiser with the IWW , and is based in Scotland, has kindly agreed to come on the show.  with her help we have a general look at how Scottish politics has been shaped in a surprisingly reactionary mold, despite the country's progressive political reputation.

 

A note from M: This episode touches on a wide range of topics, including the rise of the SNP and the fall of scottish labour, the role of the Salmond scandal and how it has affected the internal political dynamics of the independence movement, and the historical legacy of various sources of conservative thinking in scottish domestic politics. I think that its a fairly good explanation of the broad strokes of scottish politics with relation to transphobia and eactionary strands of thought in scotland, but its by no means complete. We kind of dip our toes into several discussions, where each of them could easily have an episode devoted to them. For example the brief section about sectarianism and organised religion barely touches on the structural involvement of the Orange Lodge in Scottish political party organisations, and we dont even mention the long term cultural impacts of now relativley minor traditions such as Calvinism. Not to mention the hours of comment that could be offered on modern millenial progressive politics in Scotland post 2014! While editing this episode I found myslef getting a bit annoyed with myself in retrospect for not including more about this sort of stuff in the episode plan but you cant do everything! Future episodes about Scotland are entirely plausible, given that in many ways we barely scratch the surface in this one, and how important the SNP has become in mainstreaming radical transphobia, and  if and when we do them I hope to flesh out the stuff in this episode a lot more.

 

Our music for this episode is by Marina Crustacean

 

Content warnings: transphobia, discussion of sexual assault, religious sectarianism, eyewitness descriptions of transphobic organising in a cult like environment.

 

Many Thanks to Dalm, our guest for this episode.