nf1091: anyway so there was Professor Guillebaud and he was explaining that er 
the contra-, and see well again he wasn't being terribly well understood 
because er Humphries had a set of questions he was supposed to ask this 
unfortunate man and he was going to ask them regardless of what it turned out 
this guy had actually been saying so it went in the usual way of try the guy's 
trying to make point A and Humphries is asking question X and there's just no 
way that point A and question X can be got into the same ballpark and what 
Guillebaud's great idea was he actually said i mean it's just like doctor speak 
he is a doctor i might say er he said well you know most people try to be good 
but they don't always succeed so we're going to try and help them take care of 
things when they're not being so very good most pe-, we're going to help them 
be careful was what he was saying and i thought how on earth do you decide that 
er in order to be good you have to resist the constant pressure to 
sexual activity in this society in what way is it good to resist it the agenda 
is actually do it but he's still got the idea that you're good if you don't 
it's like people who say that the baby was very good when what they mean is the 
baby was very silent possibly dead [laughter] er which is not my idea of good 
at all so and there was all of this stuff and he said er that most of the 
people in the world were born by accident which isn't true either we know the 
proportion of accidental conceptions more or less from er the endless surveys 
that women are so good as to supply data for and it's somewhere about it's 
still too high it's about a quarter i think but it's certainly not all or even 
most so there was all of this going on and what is his contraceptive of the 
future his contraceptive of the future is an implant that will be put in 
adolescent girls so that they won't get pregnant and i just nobody identified 
this as a gender issue and there's only 
me in the car shouting [laughter] across Hertfordshire saying why don't you 
caponize the fucking boys why have you got to caponize the girls why is it 
always the girls the thing is i kind of know the answer as well because it's 
the girls who have been programmed to desire sexual intimacy at any cost it's 
the girls who can't ask for a condom to be used who don't feel sufficiently 
desirable or in control or anything to be able to er demand or impose 
conditions to sexual intimacy so i kind of knew the answer but i wanted 
somebody to say to him er you know have you never heard of chlamydia have you 
never heard of human papilloma virus do you really not care about herpes in 
young women er do you consider as a member of the Family Planning Association 
that you have a duty to protect the fertility of young women so that they have 
the option of planning a family instead of exposing them to sterilizing disease 
because of your hidden agenda which is to 
stop them having any children whatsoever as far as i can see so having failed 
to identify the extraordinary gender bias in this or however the way in which 
Guillebaud's attitudes were completely unregenerate er so that it's er and of 
course who did they put up against him they put up a defender of family values 
who i may say did not a bad job of defending feminist values er but would have 
been horrified to have been told that that's what she was doing and she said 
you know er we're turning these girls into sex objects i thought you might as 
well s-, you know acknowledge where this notion comes from this is making them 
and i think that's right i mean it's making them think that their their primary 
their primary social function is to be involved in penetrative sex that without 
that they might as well be dead and so and she had a real point and she made 
her points fairly well i thought er but what was interesting to me is that the 
people d-, dealing with this 
issue just could not see the gender aspect of it and yet they want to tell us 
that feminism has nothing to teach them they were literally and they sa-, if 
they say feminism is dead i'm prepared to agree because it's dead in their 
heads there wasn't a fizz there wasn't a button marked gender on their keyboard 
and so there was no way they could actually understand the the discourse they 
were having so then we got to and i was asked to be in this ridiculous is 
feminism dead debate and said that er no [laughter] didn't explain just said no 
and so it was Kathy Lette instead another gabby Australian gets sat in the hot 
seat [laugh] and the editor of cosmopol-, [laughter] and the editor of 
Cosmopolitan said er which is still the best selling women's magazine in 
England so if feminism is dead we'd better galvanize it and frankenstein it and 
get it back on the road if that's still the case er so she was saying oh well 
you know women have achieved all the things they want to 
achieve more or less and the thing that i can't bear is all this ranting on 
about men and all this assumption that men are the enemy er and you know it was 
so terrible in the late sev-, somebody always identifies a time when feminists 
told you what to do it was and in the late seventies and early eighties it 
seems is the time when feminists kept telling people what to do [laughter] 
which i thought was really funny because every time i hear it it's a different 
set of years apparently we've always been telling people what to do [laughter] 
and they've never done any of it [laughter] as far as i can see and Kathy Lette 
was very funny the so that er Kathy was asked are you still kicking and 
screaming and God bless her she said well i am but then of course she made it 
entirely a matter of pay inequality er so that the whole dimension of misogyny 
which is what really preoccupies us the most i think er so that it was all done 
in the Natasha Walter frame of careers and how we can have it all 
in a career as if careers are the point which of course they're not the point 
is a life worth living not a career necessarily so that was that was 
interesting because Kathy's instincts were all in the right place but it was 
very apparent to me hurtling along the A-five-o-seven that what was needed was 
some new slogans and some new awareness of where the the hot spots are where 
the punto dolente as Italians say where the painful points are er because Kathy 
wasn't anywhere near angry enough er i mean even though she's well aware of 
what happens to the birthing woman and what happens to the rearing mother and 
so forth er that she didn't think that that was part of it because it was 
already couched in that term and i've already had my say about it was all in in 
the rhetoric of equality which to me becomes really without substance after a 
while because it's not even a question of of pay equality there was also there 
was m-, er other stuff too of course about er mothers and 
teachers and the child care sector and so on but again not identified as a 
feminist issue or indeed a gender issue okay so that's my proem now please 
could i have a question you're all sitting i was going to go like this though 
[laughter] 
sf1092: oh right you keep talking about this gap i think you know we've all 
felt this gap between academic feminism where i think feminism's very very much 
alive 
nf1091: mm 
sf1092: albeit threatened at at points and whatever and popular feminism which 
seems to be a very different kind of species can you do you see any way of 
bridging that gap or is it that we all have to frankenstein our discourse i 
mean how can we get the debates that have been conducted in the academy for the 
last thirty years somehow into the public realm because the questions of things 
like the what you've been talking about such as equality and sexual difference 
have been very much burgeoning debates 
nf1091: mm-hmm 
sf1092: within the feminist 
academy for some time but they don't seem to have made any impact at all on the 
public if that's a workable distinction 
nf1091: well i think it is a workable distinction and i think some of the 
reasons are are very well set out by namex in the stuff that you have written 
for i can't remem-, the handbook er because it's true that academic feminism 
has to follow certain models of academic discourse and they are controlling 
models and they're also debating models so they don't allow much er room for 
recasting ideas and behaviours they they almost insist upon well they do insist 
upon a measure of detachment and this comes into conflict with the whole 
feminist insistence on first person evidence and of what it actually feels like 
now i mean i would justify what i have done in writing The Whole Woman as an 
attempt to bridge that gap but also i mean what will actually happen is what 
happened to me before which is that the academic feminists will ignore me it 
will be as if 
the book had never been written and they'll get a lot of their student intake 
because of the existence of the book but it will not be discussed seriously and 
in fact i mean it has actually happened in the past it works both ways this gap 
that what i write is er interpreted by academic feminists as it was interpreted 
by the tabloid press they take on board the tabloid press caricature of the 
argument so they they talk about er you know The Female Eunuch being er a sex 
manual it's not a sex [laughter] manual at all the fact that it's sometimes 
talked of in that way er is something that you would think that a feminist w-, 
would be aware of that she'd be sensitized to the possibility of a book that 
actually claimed that women were sensu-, sexual beings might be interpreted as 
er a sex handbook or you know a a and er you as i get serialized by people like 
Cosmopolitan in a way i've deserved it and [laughter] if n-, i mean this was 
the whole point about the er the 
interaction with things like Playboy i mean one er Playboy made me journalist 
of the year which i think is hilarious [laughter] because they were trying to 
buy respectability all they managed to do was to purchase for me an a certain 
amount of disrespect or unrespectability so and the same thing is going to 
happen again i'm horrified by the hype that is going to be given to this book 
er just because i don't like hype and i just think of myself as a reviewer i 
would go for the jugular i would read this book looking for all kinds of 
hypocrisy and self-serving and so forth and everybody else is going to do 
exactly the same i think or certainly all the people who i would think of as my 
my native allies will go to town on it which will cause me a good deal of grief 
but you have to do it because there'd been lots of good books published that 
had that would have had an effect upon the level of feminist discourse in the 
public arena but the but the public never read them the public 
never even knew that they existed they weren't reviewed they weren't 
foregrounded at all and so here am i you know in bed with The Daily Telegraph 
which er i can assure you my bed is one place The Daily Telegraph has never 
been [laughter] er and i cannot read the paper for embarrassment i feel soiled 
after i've read a Daily Telegraph editorial and there i'm going to be in all my 
glory er but still er preaching to the unconverted which is a good place to be 
er i don't get the money from the serialization it's nothing to do with me and 
i can remember weeping and wailing to David Hare on at an airport that i 
couldn't i just couldn't bear the thought of March because the book is going to 
be given away on railway stations they're going to give people chapters to read 
on the train and he said God can you imagine how happy i would be if that had 
ever happened to any of my plays don't you [laughter] dare complain but you 
don't understand i'm going to feel so shafted by the 
whole thing i spent all of Monday pretending to be myself for a photographer 
who kept saying shake your fist look angry i thought oh [laughter] [laughter] 
'cause they want to have you know the demented picture [laughter] there she 
goes again rave rave rave well i don't really care all that much they i don't 
they can they'll i don't know what they'll do we'll see i mean it will be an 
exercise in in er media manipulation to see how they present this thing but the 
exciting thing is that the very few people have read it because of the embargo 
and the exciting thing is people do feel excited by it they feel energized by 
it and that's really what i'm trying to do i'm trying to galvanize this 
discourse i'm also trying to make people realize God you know my hysterectomy 
is a feminist issue it's not just something that happened to me er and that 
maybe we should start talking maybe instead of all sitting there you know in 
the outpatients department of the of the national health hospital 
we should all start talking about what we're actually going through here and 
just how this ordeal is presented to us as a privilege okay 
om1093: may i ask a question 
nf1091: sure 
om1093: er to the audience would it be all right if i put the camera on the 
audience if if you're going to be asking a lot of questions is that okay 
ss: 
om1093: yeah okay thanks very much 
nf1091: they're a bit cross because some of them are a bit cross because they 
didn't get a chance to g-, have their hair done [laughter] i'm even crosser 
'cause i had a chance to have my hair done and didn't [laughter] p-, and people 
say how could you let yourself be photographed i think do you realize these 
people arrived at ten-thirty in the morning and stayed until seven-thirty at 
night and i needed to get dog food [laughter] so i had to invent food for the 
dogs at seven-thirty at night and after a while you just don't care after a 
while you just they just say stand here do this do that and they made me put on 
clothes to go out they said 
wear what you would normally wear in the garden and i said i am wearing what i 
normally [laughter] wear in the garden they said oh we want you in a long 
flowing coat i said you're going to tell people i garden in a macintosh 
[laughter] they're going to think i'm completely mad and i think the aim is to 
make me look completely mad [laughter] this woman is a New Zealander that may 
explain it [laughter] so if you see these weird pictures in The Daily Telegraph 
[laughter] they i think they've been set up in order to be extremely weird okay 
namex's question next 
nf1094: no no i'm going to pass 
nf1091: okay next 
sf1095: i'm passing as well 
nf1091: [laughter] oh no 
sf1096: i haven't really thought about one but i've read Natasha Walter's New 
Feminism lately 
nf1091: mm 
sf1096: which i didn't enjoy at all and also er Fay Weldon's made some quite 
kind of extreme you know expressed some quite extreme opinions that i've also 
found quite shocking so in a way is The Whole Woman a kind of reaction against 
what's happening to feminism in popular 
nf1091: well yes of course it has to be er i'm i must say i'm puzzled about Fay 
because Fay wrote you remember The Fat Woman's Joke which was the first really 
feminist novel and it it predates practically everything and it just appeared 
chunk this transgressive bad girl book and she's been wonderful ever since 
until about five years ago when she started saying that feminism had gone too 
far i just don't see how you could ever say that but if you actually looked 
about you and saw the f-, the fate whether you look at the world's women 
whether you look at the feminization of poverty whether you look at 
reproductive politics whether you wherever you look you will see that women are 
powerless and this is er to me it's very clear for example that women surge 
into the parliamentary Labour Party at exactly the moment when power ebbs out 
of the even the executive into the hands of the oligarchs who've now got a kind 
of mandate to 
run it as if as if it was a Chinese government of the twelfth century because 
somehow people understand that if you if you actually discuss things openly all 
these mad women i mean God knows what they might say i don't know if anybody 
does think like that but i think they are very homosocial these people er and 
they don't re-, and the women that they've got close to them they have 
extremely difficult relationships with if you think of Clare Short and Mo 
Mowlam er so it seems to me that instead of saying see see all these women have 
got into Parliament i mean anybody with half a brain must realize that we have 
never had such silent back-benchers these back-benchers are mute and we're 
doing all sorts of insane things without a mandate from the people or from the 
U-N or from anyone and still this silence er and the three monthly attacks on 
single mums there are single mums sitting in Parliament what is going on so i 
didn't understand what Fay was up to but one of my 
problems as deciding to be the person who stands on this like the Colossus at 
Rhodes with one foot in the academy and the other foot in the popular media is 
er that i kee-, i have always to support another woman let alone feminist in a 
public debate i will not mud wrestle for the media with occasional startling 
exceptions like when i lost my temper with Suzanne Moore and smacked her about 
a bit i think senior feminists can clip people round the ears occasionally 
[laughter] it'll do them nothing but good er [laughter] but so that i can't 
although i really would like to say to Fay oh i don't doubt at all you know 
that men are suffering masculinity is a terrible system but why do you think 
it's women's fault how do you get how do you get your mind round to that 
position i mean even if you say look women used to support men any man no 
matter how beaten up by his trade union or by his employer or by the police 
could rely on a supportive little woman who'd 
put a hot meal meat and two veg on the table in front of him and tell him he 
was marvellous er and now she's saying er excuse me but i want something for 
myself this is the fantasy that that's what's happened i mean a lot of what's 
happened is women saying listen i've got to go out to work 'cause otherwise we 
don't pay this mortgage goodbye er your tea's in the oven or y-, indeed your 
tea's in the freezer er and so that but somehow even if you could say that 
women have withdrawn their support of men and therefore men are in free fall 
then it just goes to prove the justice of the women's case that the entire 
system was resting on their backs they were the tortoises that were holding up 
the elephant and the tortoises walked away and the elephant has fallen over er 
and of course it's painful and difficult if that's what's happened but i don't 
think it's what's happened i think the way in which the argument about men's 
malaise their suicide attempts their successful suicides 
their unemployability their level of criminal activity and alcoholism and so on 
the way this discourse is couched it just ignores factors that are really 
important like poverty like er unemployment we know that unemployment is a 
cause of of disease i-, and we know that poverty is a cause of disease but for 
some reason if we see a disproportionate reaction to a change in fortunes by 
men we'd sort of look towards women and say that must be your fault which is i 
mean it's so gratuitous it's amazing and every time you actually deconstruct 
the language of inculpation of women er you see how gratuitous it is and you 
also see how it goes from guarded statements to absolute certainty in the 
course of a single discussion thus didst thou er and i don't understand quite i 
mean i have occasionally i say darkly that it must be the effect of H-R-T 
flooding the brain er because Fay is on H-R-T Fay has had a facelift and Fay 
does have a new husband all these things can be guaranteed 
to turn a girl's brain i think [laughter] so i'm waiting for her to come to her 
senses [laughter] and i don't want to have been so terribly rude about her in 
the interim that i [laughter] can't we can't have any further dealings and as 
for Natasha Walter i i th-, i think Natasha Walter has no idea what it's all 
about er th-, that's another thing as well i mean her the there is a conviction 
in this country that feminist discourse occurs in the newspapers er and that 
that's it that there er so that Natasha Walter didn't bother to bone up on 
feminist theory or gender theory er she just sort of wrote about an idea of 
feminism as a kind of grim puritanical era sometime in the past from which she 
as a butterfly had just emerged and could s-, go from flower to flower in her 
her er nice dresses and strappy sandals [laughter] made by child labour in 
south-east Asia which isn't going to cause her a moment's er malaise or anxiety 
so yes it w-, i was probably the new feminism that did it 
because i just couldn't belie-, it was like it was like reading it was like 
reading the inside of a pumpkin or something it was just a space enclosed by 
words there was nothing there that i could recognize not about the lives of my 
god-daughters or my nieces or my sister or my mother or it was all conducted in 
the Groucho as far as i could see 
sf1097: yeah er my my question er you've referred to transsexuals a few times 
nf1091: mm 
sf1097: during these sessions and i wondered if you could say a bit more about 
your general view on transsexuality 
nf1091: well perhaps i should i-, i thought that i might have in fact given 
this last lecture on sexuality er all of this is such a difficult area for 
feminist academic and other because of the ambiguity between ideas of gender 
sex and sexuality and sexual orientation it all becomes a tremendous muddle and 
this is partly because of a really wrong habit of thought again a tabloid idea 
that er w-, s-, women who 
love their own sex are masculine that they're an intermediate sex somewhere and 
that men who love their own sex are feminine they've become an intermediate sex 
as well now i think that's wrong i think er homosociality and homosexuality are 
extreme forms of the cultural entity call-, that i call masculinity they're 
actually hypermasculine there's not they're not gender free they're actually 
gender intensive and they in the case of male homosexuality gender 
relationships are acted out in a very power oriented way now i take the Dworkin 
line although you've got to be very careful with this 'cause it alienates 
people very quickly that penetrative sex is a power relationship that that's 
part of its grammar er and you can't until we actually completely transform 
relationships you can't get rid of that that's there it's right inside the idea 
as long as you can say to somebody you don't like get fucked or bugger you 
you're actually endorsing this destructive view of 
penetrative sex er and i don't think that penetrative sex can redeem itself 
from this association it's too closely bound up so if i take wo-, women lovers 
of their own sex it they're seems to me they're not part of a raw sharp lot 
with homosexu-, male homosexuality in fact it's always struck me as a really 
difficult relationship between male homosexuality and if i may use the term 
female homosexuality they just don't match they don't even have the same view 
of relationships they don't have the same set of priorities it's a very awkward 
relationship but it's typical of women that they would actually work harder for 
H-I-V and AIDS than they do say for cervical cancer they're very willing to 
understand what is in fact in large it's actually a very strong expression of 
misogyny but we pardon homosexual misogyny or we ignore it or we don't 
understand the profoundly nuanced nature of the kind of relationship that we 
have with the homosexual er s-, er stylists you know the 
lifestyle theorists but all of this is really for me difficult and interesting 
because as i say in my book i haven't given up hope of meeting the woman of my 
dreams and loving as i have never loved before because if i look at the story 
of so many gay women they have actually been through real transformations to 
become active as gay women whereas a homosexual man is more likely to be out 
very young and t-, if he's in the closet to be er faking heterosexual life 
women tend to have actually lived heterosexual life and then to make a choice 
or some essentialists would say that the real her has come out i think that the 
real her connects the two things the heterosexual her and the homosexual her er 
that she h-, and she may have changed indeed she may have grown up in the sense 
that she has finally rejected the patriarchal paradigm wanting to love her 
father and she is now loving someone of her own generation she has at last come 
into spiritual equality and equilibrium 
with herself i don't think these things are innate i do think they are cultural 
i think looking for differences in the cochlea or the you know the anterior 
something or other fissure of the corpus cavernosum and so on that all this is 
fascist nonsense er and we have the right to be gay and the possibility of 
being gay as women with men it's slightly different because there is such an 
extraordinary set of power relationships revolving within gay culture itself er 
so this then brings me to the whole question of transsexuals now if we think 
about my gay friends my gay friends get terrib-, men i mean get terribly angry 
about transsexuals they say they're just gay men who can't come to terms with 
the fact that they're gay and they have and and that they desire men sexually 
so they have to have themselves mutilated and make themselves into fake women 
this is a very hard view er but i don't think it should be automatically 
discounted because for me the core of this is 
in the mutilation of the body as i've said to you i i take the body as a 
repository of feminist value because we build it the things you see around you 
have all been built out of one out of a woman's bodily substance whether 
they're male or female or tattooed or pierced or transsexual or whatever er and 
that all the things that technology does to them are in some ways an attempt to 
prise to prise away the maternal principle and to devalue the maternal 
principle er the patriarchy although we're being told we've got equality what i 
think has happened at as we approach the millennium is that patriarchy is 
triumphant and it is triumphant in the sense that it has managed to bleed all 
the meaning out of maternity we don't have matriarchy so there's no point my 
even using the term it's managed to bleed the significance out of it to 
criminalize it and marginalize it as a kind of survival kind of evolutionary 
survival that we can improve upon we can improve 
upon it with er forced contraception for fourteen year olds er we can i-, we'll 
make them sterile even though they're not you know we'll keep them like that 
and ma-, and they'll be totally in our power totally dependent on us then when 
they come to bear children we'll first of all we'll vet them then we'll 
genetically counsel them and then we'll scan them and so they go on all the 
time and what is being borne in on them is that their bodies are unsatisfactory 
that without the technology they don't function at all so it's become really 
important for me to say they do they s-, they function better than any of the 
substitutions that all the effects of the technology are dubious now one of the 
most crucial points is this one of treating o-, of in first of all of arriving 
at a malady called gender dysphoria now i reckon all women suffer from gender 
dysphoria but the problem isn't in as it were their sex it is in the 
construction of gender that denies so many 
aspects of their corporeal reality that the problem is not the body the problem 
is the gender and i would say that for casualties of the masculinizing system 
the same thing is true that what they should be doing is revolutionizing 
masculinity rather than attacking the body and destroying it destroying healthy 
tissue 
sf1097: can i just say what what partly what is your opinion of female to male 
transsexuals 
nf1091: isn't it it's very interesting again there's a terrific contrast if you 
look in any phone booth in Soho you will see that half the people working as 
prostitutes in Soho are transsexual male to female transsexual there is not a 
single one there who is female to male a female to male transsexual does not 
call attention to her own state one of the interesting dialogues that goes on 
with male to female transsexuals is that they demand the right to describe 
their condition but they won't let anybody else mention it there's this sort of 
tremendous censorship you have to pretend that you haven't noticed anything and 
then they get a chance to tell you and to give you their text about it female 
to male very few phalloplasties very very few the the the operation really 
doesn't work and one of the things the surgeons say to women presenting for 
phalloplasty is that they may never have an orgasm again because of course it 
destroys the structures of the clitoris er so you've actually got a group of 
people first of all very many fewer than the men and the other thing is they 
nearly all have some adrenal dysfunction so that they are actually physically 
intersexual usually they have polycystic ovarian syndrome so they're short of 
oestrogen so that already they are masculinized and probably sterile if they 
have these adrenal condition 
sf1097: now how do you know that though 
nf1091: because they're all 
sf1097: how do you how do you know they're syndromes 
nf1091: well there's endless 
papers written on it there are some people who work on nothing else and they're 
forever i mean they publish hundreds of papers on vulvovaginoplasty 
sf1097: i mean i'm i'm i mean i would be fairly sceptical sceptical about that 
really 'cause i would want to know how many female to male transsexuals they er 
did tests on to find that information out i mean i would like i mean i would 
like to place a bet that there would be more female to male transsexuals that 
have no er you know no no such physicalities really 
nf1091: well we can only talk about the ones who actually put themselves in the 
hands of the of the medical establishment who are actually seeking surgery 
sf1097: mm 
nf1091: about e-, er other groups we know nothing 
sf1097: mm 
nf1091: er but it's also interesting that er what male to fe-, what female to 
male transsexuals most want is to be able to pass as men in the sense for 
example they're very anxious about being able to urinate standing up that's one 
of their reasons for coming for some form of of 
genital surgery er but the the other thing is that er they're very much less 
exhibitionist too and one it would seem very much less sexually active they're 
completely contrasting group and their problems and their ways of defining them 
are very different now there are there are the people like Mark who has written 
his story er but they are very rare whereas the er male to female transsexuals 
who have told their story er publicly are very common 
sf1097: mm 
nf1091: and you see there's lots the the research is awful the if you really 
want to give yourself a a nasty turn all you need to do is have a look at the 
Journal of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery to look at what they're 
constructing as vaginas and they make you feel absolutely giddy er and then er 
nowadays of course they're diag-, they're diagnosing now think about this from 
your own position if it was a child of yours they're diagnosing gender 
dysphoria in sixteen year olds and putting them on hormones as a preparation 
for 
surgery and they're carrying out surgery younger and younger i mean at a 
certain point i think we have to stop and say no hang on surgery is not the 
treatment for this problem what you're creating you're actually destroying this 
person's fertility the papers are very odd i mean the papers say things like 
there is no higher index of psychiatric disorder after surgery than there was 
before but that's all they can say they can't say they cured anything you see 
and there's been lots of there's lots and lots of research Johns Hopkins have 
published several papers on their single operation er paradigm for sex change 
er which has turned out to be something like three-point-five operations 
they're difficult operations to do and they're not justified on health grounds 
they're not therapeutic unless you really believe that there's something called 
gender dysphoria and unless you believe that er creating a sterile female in 
place of a fertile male is the treatment for gender 
dysphoria in ordinary hippocratic terms it really shouldn't be er and then of 
course they make things really complicated by making no distinction between 
transvestites and transsexuals or between the sorts of transsexuals who work in 
the sex industry in Latin countries who have breasts and have hips that are 
pumped up with silicone oil and also have penises and are expected to bugger 
their clients i mean the whole thing is a nightmare but in terms of 
intellectual respectability the whole field i think is pretty pretty crummy and 
then there's the other aspect which is when somebody like Janice Raymond writes 
seriously and thoughtfully about it the er People For Change web site says 
things like er she had better invest in flameproof underpants i don't think 
that that bears out their case very well i mean it's so sadistic and so 
genitally fixated when it comes to thinking of a punishment for a woman who's 
spoken out of turn i think it indicates that certain 
things haven't changed at all so i think this is m-, my own feeling about all 
the sex change operations that are happening now and you have to understand 
that there's a pathology attached to them as well they're terribly expensive 
they are part of a polyoperational syndrome because it's not enough to have 
vulvovaginoplasty you then have er breasts chin reduction nose reduction a nose 
job is said to be more important in a sex change m-, male to female than the 
phalloplasty because it's what changes the contour of the face you can have 
your cheeks plumped out you have your hairline electronically altered you have 
h-, fifty sixty sessions of el-, electrolysis and a lot of people work in the 
sex industry because they're trying to pay the cost of all these operations so 
in terms of of the ordinary therapeutic discourse it's time someone took a 
really hard look at what is being done to these people er and i see them as 
victims of the same system of gender injustice that affects every woman 
who has to think about her body in this same u-, distrustful way and who is 
encouraged to think of it as something that surgery could fix you know what 
i've got i've got heavy bleeding get it out you know the whole cut me open and 
i'll be better idea which is something i think that we've we're losing the 
battle against i mean one in f-, one out of every two women in California will 
be buried without her womb it will have gone west somewhere along the line and 
it's i think it's all part of the same thing that the problem is about current 
pieties there's a you can't say this is pathological behaviour stop and look at 
what you're doing stop and think and the the five Dutch doctors who make the 
prettiest vaginas that is to say the least horrifying ones are gods and they're 
all need i tell you male so it's a tricky discourse i know and i'll get hate 
mail but there's nothing new about that [laughter] 
sf1098: well i have problems with women i 
have [laugh] problems with this notion that that there's there's some kind of 
natural woman who exists the the womb thing 'cause you you've brought your your 
er publicity material i understand is that right 
nf1091: no i didn't 
sf1098: 
nf1091: we have got it here today they're here 
sf1098: yeah that's what i said 
nf1091: they've just come today [laughter] yeah 
sf1098: 'cause i i mean i'm not sure what kind of message we're sending out 
especially if we're thinking about generational difference and such like if 
we're locating women as some kind of natural womb carrier and that's what we're 
are that's where we're located so maybe you'd like to talk a bit about that is 
that the political stand that we need to take is that the box that we stand on 
to place ourselves in the world 
nf1091: well now this is what the first talk i gave was really about er the 
whole problem about what a woman is er i mean there's there's really difficult 
problems for feminists all along this parameter er men are able to say they 
exist as the sort of 
generic human being we are it er but in fact it turns out that men define 
themselves as people with penises and we have found this out because of what 
happens at the level of boys born with insufficient evidence of presence of a 
penis they get surgically changed into women so i have to reject the definition 
i think of a woman as a person without a penis er i am not just a non-man this 
is why we rejected the term woman or tried to er what i try to say is look the 
X-X chromosome is the the whole one the X-Y chromosome is the damaged one i 
mean every biologist knows that er 
sf1099: but it's not as simple as that is it we're not just X-X or X-Y we're X-
X-X-Y X-X-X-Y Y-X or i don't know 
nf1091: well not very many of us it's 
sf1099: i think a lot of people are 
nf1091: but but i think oh well that's not true 
sf1099: but 
nf1091: er but it is 
sf1097: we're not tested are we we're not all tested 
sf1099: but you 
rely a lot on science this is what one of the things that bothers me is you 
rely a lot on science knowledge that 
nf1091: well 
sf1099: that can well my friend the scientist comes in a lot and tells me that 
this is right and this is wrong so we have a kind of good science that follows 
the stories we like and a bad science that follows the stories we don't like 
well we all do that we're selective about what we pick 
nf1091: mm 
sf1099: so you kind of you seem to me to want to have the authority of the 
argument but throw away the products of it except in those cases where it's 
easily fitted into a kind of division that's maintained there are men on this 
side and women on this side men have willies and women have wombs and that's it 
and that's what people are 
nf1091: but i didn't but i didn't s-, actually say that what i actually said 
there's lots of women are still women and don't have uteruses 
sf1099: and you can't oppose a uterus against a penis like you were to a yeah 
and i want to i want to kind of foreground this body instead of this body but 
doesn't that just kind 
of lock us in that conflict all the time how are we going to escape it 
nf1091: well i don't think we can you see i think the conflict is a real one er 
it'd be nice we've we've talked about the world as if it's post-gender but 
actually it's not and er tricking us into talking about it as if it were means 
that we there's no way we can defend our own interest we have to agree that 
there is no interest so if i point out to you that the womb is actually a locus 
of misogyny that it is e-, women's own misogyny is expressed through their 
attitude towards their wombs and appendages then that seems to me a point that 
has to be made that it interests me that women have no imagery of themselves as 
potently sexed creatures that they are being presented to themselves as if they 
had in their if you think of Barbie Barbie has no genitals at all i'm told that 
Ken has something he has a bulge of [laughter] some sort er Barbie has these 
peculiar tits i've met my i met two Barbie dolls on 
Monday Tuesday whenever er and very strange they are too i i'm amazed that you 
can't stand them up [laughter] they've got to be carried at all times er so 
[laughter] no i don't i don't want to i don't want to say that you are your 
womb but on the other hand i don't want to say that women are not real you see 
it seems to me that as long as femaleness was a marker for inferiority it was 
recognized when we said femaleness is not a marker for inferiority er then it 
was denied okay you don't want to be a marker for inferiority you needn't exist 
at all we'll have men and we'll have non-gendered people we'll have men and 
we'll have this big grab bag in which we put all the other people who aren't us 
and we won't trouble our heads too much about whether they're genetically or er 
chromosomally intersexual or not that's all unimportant we don't care now i 
realize what i realize the essentialist risk in this discourse but it seems to 
me that even if you're a if you're a girl 
born without a womb then this is a partic-, is is a a destiny and this is 
you're a female a wombless female just as a boy born without a penis is a 
penisless male somewhere along the line if i'm to protect my subject at all i 
have to say that i consist in something and what i arrived at was this notion 
of X-X chromosome now there are there are lots of interesting things about it i 
was fascinated to see that all the first I-V-F babies were girls and they did 
seem to be very much more viable than boys at that level there is a big 
difference in being a creature that is organized to nourish other creatures and 
a creature that isn't there's a huge contrast there er i don't like the the 
sociobiological arguments that say that all men are in reproductive competition 
therefore they're going to be promiscuous and therefore they're going to be 
warlike and so forth as these strike me as being very oversimplified and i 
don't want to apply them at that level but then i do have to 
look at how women live and how for example homosociality is not possible for 
women because they bring up boys they live they're the ones who live in an 
enforcibly heterosexual environment whereas men choose a homos-, a homosocial 
environment so i see i'm i'm very well aware of that danger but it's because i 
think women are being oppressed through their female bodies and through the 
denial of those bodies and that is still that was the argument of The Female 
Eunuch you see er what i say in this book goes further in the sense that i say 
look femininity is better done by transsexuals they're more feminine than we 
are they've got what you want they've got no hips you've decided that hips are 
disgusting er and they've got hard breasts you've decided that soft breasts are 
ridiculous you see when you hear i hear my god-children saying you know i ran 
along the beach the other day and the boys were all laughing because they said 
my breasts slopped up and down this is a sixteen 
year old because Baywatch tits don't slop up and down they stay firmly anchored 
on the ribcage so you've got to say to her y-, y-, what i need to do it's part 
of my crusade is to reinvest that body that leaky incontinent smelly hairy 
hippy body with beauty grace and dignity because the price of post-gendering it 
so that Dana International is more beautiful than any woman built woman in the 
world is being paid by our children and i am horrified at the misery of little 
girls which is much worse than anything that it wh-, that it was thirty years 
ago we have a report from again a gen-, a a gender issue that wasn't dealt with 
in this morning's news the report that te-, er twenty per cent of children are 
suffering mental disease of one sort or another and ten per cent of them are in 
need of clinical help what are the diseases they're suffering from depression 
and anorexia you know the figures girls more likely than boys by nine to one to 
suffer from anorexia and four times more 
likely to suffer from depression that was a gender issue but it was presented 
as this post-gender er category of of 
sf1099: it's also a class issue also a class issue and a race issue as well 
isn't it 
nf1091: sure 
sf1099: the the there's the there's always the problem when you take a 
political stand which universalizes that a good proportion of the people 
probably the majority of people speaking don't fall into the category that 
you're trying to attract you're trying to address you know 
nf1091: i'm not i'm not very worried about that i mean 
sf1099: well you know that er i think it's one in twenty-two if we're going to 
use statistics one in two-hundred-and-twenty-two girls in a comprehensive 
school are likely to be anorexic one in fifteen in a private school one in 
fourteen if they go to a dance school it's very culturally defined 
nf1091: you know i don't agree with that figure i gave prizes in a state school 
sf1099: mm 
nf1091: three weeks ago and two-thirds of the girls 
in the top er at the top A er level of the er of A-levels so ones who got 
starred As and so on two-thirds of them were emaciated 
sf1099: mm i've i mean you can you can bandy figures from personal experience 
nf1091: mm 
sf1099: well i'm just saying it's probably not as not as straightforward as 
simply saying well we're there are women and we're like this 
nf1091: i'm well aware of that 
sf1099: and a 
nf1091: but the point is if you that my argument is about gender i am not 
qualified to to to take the race issue on for example 
sf1099: why 
nf1091: because i'd have to argue it from the point of view of of a white woman 
and that and racism is not my problem 
sf1102: s-, it's everybody's problem 
sf1103: 
nf1091: well but you under-, what you understand the meaning of what i'm saying 
here 
sf1099: no i don't 
nf1091: well look you could i-, it's it's this is the sort of thing that 
happens to feminists all the time you know i'll be asked why i'm not writing it 
from 
a vegetarian point of view and why i'm not writing it from a green point of 
view and why i'm not writ-, because that's not what i'm writing about i'm 
actually writing about gender here because i think gender's an important issue 
and i think this the presumption of post-gender gender freeness is simply 
denial of femaleness and denial of all kinds of female functions 
sf1099: mm 
nf1091: so you know now we don't have mothers we have parents except that when 
you look at those parents they turn out to be mothers isn't that strange and it 
goes on like this all the time you know er now we talk about the nursing 
profession as if it was unisex very interesting the nursing profession you know 
the complaints against nurses are up by five-hundred per cent or something and 
n-, fifty per cent of the complaints are against male nurses likewise if you 
actually look at although they're only one in seven of the intake or something 
like that if you look at who sits on the boards and who speaks for nurses 
they're disproportionately now male er we cannot presume a post-gender world 
sf1099: i don't 
nf1091: we don't have one well neither do i and and what i've actually written 
about is the disguised gender issue to be sure this is not to deny that other 
issues exist but i can't one of the things that's happened to feminism is that 
it fights on all fronts at once so you find 
sf1099: because you can't fight on a single front any more because the it's 
shifted 
nf1091: mm well 
sf1099: that ca-, 
nf1091: i'm going to have a pretty good go with this book 
sf1099: mm 
nf1091: that's what this book is doing it's not all books it's not the only 
book 
sf1099: mm 
nf1091: it's not your book so go ahead and write your book and i shall read it 
with interest 
sf1099: okay 
nf1091: but in this case this is the argument i'm making because i think people 
are just being blind about gender they are they're taking the easy way out 
they're denying gen-, the gender aspect of of situations that actually cause 
women visceral pain and physical harm so this 
is where i go right back to stand on my own flat buniony female feet saying we 
are real we are here and we are hurting and we are hurting because of the 
attitude you take to the aspects of our reality that you find revolting and i'm 
going to push them in your face so that every girl with a big bum out there 
suddenly feels that maybe there is a battle she could join instead of feeling 
that she's got to keep herself a-, out of all human contact whatsoever and that 
may sound excessive but i do know of at least one case of a girl who wouldn't 
come out of her room because of the breadth of her hips about which she could 
do nothing didn't matter if she starved herself to death she still had hip 
bones which are anathema okay another question 
sf1104: i haven't got one 
nf1091: no 
sf1105: i ha-, i can't think of a good enough one but i keep thinking about the 
fact that when you talk about young women and and i keep going back a bit 
further and thinking about young people in infant playgrounds and about how 
they play and how all what what you've talked about today is so set in by then 
all the behaviours and all what's happening and all the stuff that you're 
talking about young girls it it's happening much earlier as well and i wonder 
what you think about that and how come you know how come it's you know you're 
talking to fo-, five and six year old girls will say all this stuff you know 
who relate to Barbie dolls boys relate to violent Ken dolls 
nf1091: mm 
sf1105: i mean it's so powerful er and scary 
nf1091: and i'm belong to the generation of women who tried to bring their 
children up without any gender streaming at all so that my god-child who was 
born in my house always wore trousers never had a doll 
sf1105: mm 
nf1091: mind you every time her grandmother came to see us she said how 
terrible the poor little thing hasn't got a doll and i said well she's got a 
rabbit it's much more interesting than a doll and in the end it became 
a question of her civil rights and so the doll appeared there was a very funny 
moment because i found the doll soaking wet at the foot of the stairs with no 
clothes on and i said i found myself saying oh namex look at poor [laughter] so 
i just picked up dolly and sort of got her off the stairs and thought that was 
a close shave [laughter] and little namex when she fell over er if she cried we 
did-, didn't react much but if she was very brave we reacted so we got to the 
stage where poor old namex would fall over and go [gasp] hup come on namex 
[gasp] hup and i think oh namex i'm sorry you are allowed to cry but it was it 
was really 
hard and i'm we failed completely because the peer group er culture was so 
strong and then you think about at what we're coming up to Valentine's Day just 
have a look at the cultural aspic of Valentine's Day of infantilized women and 
silly fetishistic toy talk and so on where did it come from they didn't learn 
it in school er they learned it from the ambient culture which means more to 
them than school or parents er and then but then there's the other thing i mean 
i've mentioned this a few times because it i'm so struck by it the numbers of 
studies that have been done on the behaviour of w-, mothers with children 
according to their perception of the gender of the child so they're given a 
bundle they're told it's a boy and they actually treat it quite differently 
than they would treat the same bundle if they were told that it was a girl and 
you know this business of being gender blind one of the things that always 
cracks me up about vet programmes is the first 
thing they find out about an animal when it comes into the surgery is whether 
it's a little boy or a little girl and then they mir-, they meticulously call 
it her and him when they might just as well call it it because somewhere out 
there the great public has communicated that they don't like itifying animals 
that the animals have got to be gendered which as they are not gendered in 
their social behaviour to anything like the same extent that humans are if you 
think of cats male and female they don't sort of have sharply contrasting 
behaviours er it's it's kind of weird it it's reminding you that gender 
consciousness is not something that can be outlawed if you outlaw it it gets 
stronger it doesn't get weaker but i am interested too i mean at at what stage 
is it true i-, is it still true that mothers breastfeed crying boy babies in 
inverted commas if they think they're boy babies more readily than they 
breastfeed girls breastfeed them for longer interpret all 
utterances by the child as utterances for food and subconsciously or 
consciously expect girls to wait longer and to feed less can this be true and 
if it's true where the hell did it come from because most of us only have one-
point-four babies or whatever it is we don't get a chance to actually form 
ideas of how boy babies might be different from girl babies but then people who 
do have both will tell you that they're different from the very beginning but 
i'd i mean i would be sufficiently post-gender to not believe that that you 
would have lusty demanding girls who fed robustly but i wish i had a shilling 
for every time a breastfeeding mother has told me that her girl doesn't feed 
properly and fiddles about and wastes time and so on and we've got we would 
have to do a lot more work to find out how that all happens er and i'm not too 
sure that i want a lot more of this scrutiny in the sense that it's a it's an 
oppression for the people taking part in it but 
it looks as if gender typing happens at a very vulnerable stage but you see the 
other thing is that now we're being told mothers having become a thing called 
the uterine environment intersexuality is now our fault because we're flooding 
the fetus with sex hormones in utero and affecting development so if we have 
feminized boys it's 'cause we produced the wrong juice in utero which is er 
it's all entirely speculative so who knows it's certainly true that boys are 
more violent in playschool and hit little girls over the head with instruments 
pick things they seem to think that the the purpose of anything remotely stick-
shaped is to hit somebody with er some little girls are like that but really 
not very many so i think we will find that there are some residues but we're in 
terms of talking about cultural behaviour we're a long way from those residues 
so i don't think we need to cons-, to convince ourselves that they're immutable 
next 
sf1100: er i'm interested in 
what you started off talking about about the Radio Four about teenage 
conceptions i was just wondering er put in its kind of wider context it seems 
to me that er the situation where the rate of teenage mothers can actually have 
dropped off in the last twenty-five years and has actually come down to some 
extent but seems to be to me er seems to be a real focus on one point right at 
the moment just in the last week or so er and generally sort of during i was 
wondering whether whether you agreed with that or you've got your s-, whether 
that had changed at all er would you so do you have any comments on that 
nf1091: the whole thing i think is terribly painful there is so much suffering 
involved in all of these i really could not believe that anybody even Jack 
Straw could start talking about pressuring young women to giving up their 
children which is what he was actually talking about now one of the reasons i 
can't believe this is that after the Australian Aborigines mounted their great 
attack on the Australian on Australian society for taking their children away 
because they were considered 
unfit parents because they were inverted commas savages that after the 
Aborigines did that for us all the young the women who had given away babies in 
their teens in Australia suddenly realized that in the Salvation Army which was 
the worst offender and the other religious homes they had never been given the 
option of going it alone even though state support existed for unsupported mums 
they weren't told about what was available they were simply given the 
impression that they'd be unemployable unhousable destitute in the gutter with 
their children and so with the usual anguish they gave their children up so 
they could go back and work they are now demanding or they have demanded and 
got but it's typical they didn't ask for compensation they have demanded and 
got an apology in Australia this same Natural Parents Association notice 
they've degendered their own name have come to England to do the same thing for 
the English women who were forced to give up 
children thirty forty years ago er and they've just begun their campaign and in 
the middle of the beginning of this strong campaign which is really the mothers 
wanting to say to the children they gave up we loved you we would have kept you 
if we could which is why they do it i mean they're not doing it 'cause they 
want to be their heartache to be paid for er they actually want their children 
to know which i think is a very typical sort of attitude and in the middle of 
this they started it a month ago or something and Jack Straw stands up and says 
we're going to make the same mistake all over again because we think most 
teenage girls can't cope with children well h-, where where where's the 
evidence well the evidence is you know we have children in care we don't want 
to take them into care yes we don't want you to take them into care either 
because you bugger them all the time for Christ's sake er amazing stuff and the 
they're they're now telling us they're worried about 
children in care but they're worried about children with their natural mothers 
even more i mean it's just so wrong-headed it's unbelievable but it's it's part 
of this attempt to assuage middle class consciousness that er this new 
government is not going to be easy on crime and the causes of crime which are 
of course poverty are they going to let poverty get even worse [laughter] and 
the disaffection and grief and misery it's i i couldn't believe it i was 
astonished i mean i just wished they'd say that er they'd earmark a significant 
portion of the revenues for the support of mothers married or otherwise er if 
we don't do that we're going to have a a society composed entirely of poor 
children which is just stupid because poor children cannot cope in a society 
which requires such a high level of education and preparation even to exist to 
survive so and they talk about social exclusion and at the same time they're 
actually they've actually invented it as a 
concept there's no such thing as social inclusion society is people but they've 
decided that there's society and then there's excluded people ah it's it's all 
s-, i think it's all done in such bad faith it is so cynical so manipulative of 
the electorate i'm ashamed of this Labour Party 
nf1091: i've always found it really interesting that at the time when the 
family the elder generation starts to fall apart the burden naturally falls on 
the shoulders of the menopausal female the older sister or whatever the 
daughter and then at a very difficult time in her own life when she's having to 
come to terms with the endings of things and er and no new beginnings she's 
also having to embark on this stressful business of shepherding her parents 
carefully and comfortably out of the world if that's what she can do and 
there's an aspect of this which i find very interesting and i h-, i daren't 
discuss it in a loud voice because it's going to cause a bit 
of a sh-, scandal that in those cases that i know of where a sick parent has 
agreed that she wishes to end her life er she has chosen her daughter as her 
accomplice and that part of the battle between the doctors who now want to take 
it over and do it is actually again a concealed sort of gender battle we can't 
just it's like women controlling the birthplace and then suddenly says well 
Christ they're also controlling the deathplace we can't have that get in there 
get in there now we should be deciding when these people end their lives we 
can't just have this you know saving up your your narcotics for the big bang 
and and your daughter coming and holding you in her arms and n-, and so 
whatever it is that you've decided to do so there's this you daren't talk about 
this of course it'll be a tremendous fuss if i did but i find it very 
interesting and i it's terribly hard to find out about because like so much of 
what women do like abortion used to be we don't talk about it 
a daughter who has just killed her mother is not going to sit on the bus stop 
and say oh by the way last week i knocked my mother off i mean it's [laughter] 
you hear about it in very privileged circumstances and it's a very privileged 
discourse so i'm thinking as i always think because this is why i write at all 
women don't know that what's happening to them is happening to everybody else 
so they have a Caesarean and you say why did you have a Caesarean and they say 
oh well the baby was labouring and blah blah blah and so forth and i'd been in 
labour for two-and-a-half hours and whatever and you say oh really er and she 
believes that her her Caesarean is totally necessary and then you look at the 
figures and realize they can't be totally necessary how can the healthiest 
women in the world be needing so many Caesareans so you have to go back but the 
statistics can never be made to fit cases and everybody takes advantage of that 
gap and the same 
thing is happening now i think with the question of women in the deathplace so 
that we haven't even realized that maybe there is a relationship and a function 
to be protected here like there was in the case of abortion er it is still 
interesting to me how much of our lives is secret from other women even other 
women who are quite close to us and that we still haven't managed to foreground 
this er and if we did it would be transgressive just like black culture we they 
would decide that what we had been doing was transgressive and we couldn't do 
it any more er and if you actually if you then think ab-, of the nanny crisis 
in terms of this what are we what are we saying about the nannies not that 
parents kill children much much much more often than nannies do that is 
amazingly rare we're saying we want more system of control of nannies we want 
nannies to be X-rayed fingerprinted tattooed you know we want to be able to 
track them day and night we want closed-circuit television 
on these murdering nannies just think they're bec-, and what actually that all 
means is that the issue is control women are to be controlled any way that we 
can and we will put them through one system of control after another but most 
of that control in the late twentieth century is directed at the female body 
which is transgressive in essence and this is my argument okay well we've got 
lots more time if you want to 
sf1101: i wanted er 
nf1091: or are you getting hungry yet what is it in my i'm probably i've been 
given this watch 
sf1106: quarter past one 
nf1091: quarter that's what i thought it hasn't got proper numbers on it so i 
sometimes get it wrong [laughter] 
sf1106: well i'll just say i i i er agreed with some of what you were saying 
about er children and single mothers er wholeheartedly and i think it's very 
contradicting that on the one hand children get constructed as a private er a 
private space a private cost a private benefit if you like when actually i 
think they are they have to be of social consequence of 
social benefit but then that isn't very telling because the state intervenes in 
all sorts of interesting ways and of course we know that it doesn't intervene 
with all parents in the same way so that there are class issues and race issues 
and et cetera i think i had a question which came out of your first talk er and 
it it might just be a too big a question i don't know i i understood you to be 
saying that that you would like to keep the sex-gender binary and that er what 
happened with kind of a a Judith Butler take on that is there's a confusion 
between sex and sexuality but you didn't have a chance to to go into that and i 
wondered if you wanted to pursue it er i mean yeah [laughter] 
nf1091: well i mean in a gen-, my idea is and has always been and may one of 
these days be seen as immensely archaic er that there is a thing called male 
and there's a thing called female there's the strip in between which m-, may or 
may not be highly populated or not but what i-, is extrapolated from both these 
things is masculinity as a cultural entity on 
the one hand and femininity as a cultural entity on the other er and neither of 
these has to do with er the way you express your sexuality which is a a 
separate question er they have to do with the way that you perceive your they 
have to do with the cultural structures in which your life makes sense to you 
so that the m-, the male cultural structure is one which is er hierarchical er 
which is has a number of cementing and bonding mechanisms and that are not well 
understood by people outside or even necessarily by people inside but the 
people notice you know that men er joke all the time rather than speaking 
seriously that they don't really confide they don't have real conversations er 
and that they share certain kinds of transgressive behaviour er and that they 
are very quick to create leaders and then to line up behind leaders and then to 
compete for positions of greater closeness to leaders or indeed to replace 
leaders and so on and so forth and that they're capable 
of building these structures in all sorts of circumstances in prisons in the 
street in playhouses in in er nursery school and so on but this these 
tendencies agglomerating tendencies of men men in groups are important i mean 
this has been argued for a long time that feminists needed to understand them 
to defend themselves er because they have ways of dealing with marauders that 
we still haven't quite understood so they reform and regroup in e-, ever more 
arcane locations er where the problem about being women is we don't have those 
structures we've never had them historically that and so i argued that maybe we 
should look at segregated societies to see how women construct er how they make 
social cohesion within the female group or indeed if they make it may be that 
they don't but i think they do and they do around the figure of a senior woman 
and so on er but when i mean the connection with sexuality is is one that has 
that that has to be made i 
think with er delicacy because of this habit of thought that takes 
transgressive forms of sexual expression by which i mean not the regulation 
heterosex er as indications of transsexuality or transgenderism when they're 
not indications of anything at all er of anything of the kind i should say 
they're actually expressions of relationship er which make themselves new all 
the time or one would hope that they did but the whole idea of being you know a 
sort of cyberborg or something and suddenly being a machine rather than a body 
this is presented occasionally as a desirable outcome i don't find it desirable 
at all but i may very well be in a huge minority there may be lots of women 
looking forward to being cyberborgs cyborgs but i am what i in what particular 
aspect of this travailed relationship are you interested 
sf1106: well i i mean i don't know the debate terribly well but it just it 
wasn't something that i remember thinking while i was reading that so i just 
wanted to hear a bit more and i think i've got and i also got from namex's 
question some of the stuff that you were saying then i think i can see some of 
the connections 
nf1091: yeah i mean it's a problem for me i don't want to see women defined as 
wombs but i don't want to see the womb denied all the time either because i 
really think there's an attack on it er and it's exp-, there has been for 
hundreds of years that it's a dark region like Africa and they want to colonize 
it they want to get it under control and the result is going to be something 
like Africa you know an absolute er social disaster from the point of view of 
the people struggling to live there what with you know social dislocation 
outwork prostitution AIDS the whole thing i mean that they've got the same 
attitude to the unseen part of women that they're busily denying that it's 
there and i've i am cynical enough to think that at such time as they they can 
grow babies outside the uterus they will and that when they do that there'll be 
even 
less reason for women to exist and they won't put up with our changeability or 
they've already criminalized the menstrual cycle i mean i don't even talk about 
this in my book at all er but it's very remarkable to me how that has happened 
so that everybody i mean people this high know about something called P-M-T and 
that have to tell you that your behaviour which they disapprove of is actually 
mediated by your menstrual status i mean that's a very obvious case they don't 
un-, they've never understood the well woman they don't know even know what 
menstruation is for and it's just now people are beginning to say that maybe 
it's to protect the sloughing womb from infection maybe menstrual blood has a 
naturally disinfectant function so instead of being filth that's being sloughed 
off it's actually the cleansing medium all of these words don't mean a lot all 
you have to do is flip a switch and think about it that way but remember that 
i'm still the feminist who's 
being s-, sneered at because i read in the Guardian i told women i told women 
to drink their menstrual blood [laughter] and said that if they if they didn't 
do it they weren't feminists [laughter] what i [laugh] what i actually said was 
if the idea of tasting your menstrual blood makes you sick then you've got a 
long way to go because it's just one of the expressions of body hatred that 
women have to deal with and we are encouraged to think of menstrual blood as 
excretion and it's so disgusting it's as disgusting as shit you know you sell 
toilet paper and babies' nappies and women's sanitary napkins by pouring blue 
water on them [laughter] my i don't have blue water [laughter] i don't know 
about you but it to me it's really interesting and when the P-M-T you the P-M-T 
discourse is very is about is quite a lot later than The Female Eunuch and i 
can remember thinking oh my God not knowing whether to laugh or cry i mean here 
we are trying to trying to understand the cycle trying to understand m-, m-, as 
it's an aspect of health how does it work i mean we're in the same position as 
a motor mechanic who d-, had no idea of how the internal combustion engine 
worked we're sort of looking at our bodies and as we didn't know how they went 
we didn't know when there was anything wrong with them and so this is the 
discourse that developed around menstruation we didn't know what it was for so 
we were forever finding it disorders involved in it and blaming it for things 
that i think probably it had very little to do with and then feminists began 
saying well maybe menstruation is problematic because of women's problematic 
attitudes to menstruation which have been culturally mediated so then you have 
to ask you know h-, oh hang on in societies where there's segregation for 
menstruating women maybe they've got really bad P-M-T in them because 
menstruation is so unclean doesn't follow necessarily because 
it also gives you a source of power and if you're working as an unpaid kitchen 
menial for twenty-eight for twenty-three days a month and spending five days in 
the company of other women because you're menstruating it may be a holiday it 
may be the nicest time of the month for you and you also might be damn glad to 
see it because you weren't necessarily going to be pregnant for the next nine 
months and so on er we're still when if you think about the whole business of 
our understanding of menstruation we're still very little better off than we 
were thirty years ago because although we keep being told that everyone's 
interested in the well woman they're not interested in the well woman at all 
the well woman hardly exists as an idea i'm going to close now because i can 
see people are getting a bit weary but i want to tell you a story of what 
happened yesterday this is a real namex story it's very funny i was going to 
the supermarket and i always park in the 
chemist's car park 'cause it's next to the supermarket i can get out faster 
you're not supposed to so i went into the chemist's shop to buy some shampoo 
but just to excuse my being in his thing and there was this huge sign in the 
window saying er test your risk of osteoporosis and it was literally a third of 
the window this big blue thing so i went in with and i got my shampoo and then 
i sort of took a deep breath and i said er what's this D-I-Y test for 
osteoporosis and the girl said and it said at the bottom it said ask at the 
medicine counter [laughter] so there i stood at the medicine counter and i 
asked and the girl said what osteo what [laughter] and i said you've got this 
bloody great sign in the window telling me to test my rist for osteo-, risk for 
osteoporosis so she went and asked somebody else she said oh i don't know 
anything about it said i'll i'll just get the pharmacist out came the 
pharmacist and i said you've got this thing in the 
window for a D-I-Y test for osteoporosis he said i know nothing about it i said 
look it's a sign in your window [laughter] you've got women coming in off the 
street to find out about this here's one of them [laughter] so he went outside 
it's just amazing [laughter] as if to say oh went outside and looked at it and 
he couldn't deny that it was there because it was this big and he came back in 
and he said well now he said now osteoporosis is and i said er and there i'm 
standing in front of him six feet tall nearly and er he said er yes well this 
is this is a test that you do to find out if er if you're er likely to suffer 
from osteoporosis [laughter] he said if you if you see that your shoulders are 
getting a little humped i said well that'd be a bit late wouldn't it it's the 
risk [laughter] of osteoporosis i'm talking about not the presence of terminal 
osteoporosis and it never occurred to him that i might know something about the 
subject he 
just went straight ahead into absolute disastersville so i said well er i want 
to what is involved in this test er he said well i don't know i said well 
[laughter] i i was told to ask so i'm asking what is involved in the test so he 
went out of the room and he came back with this bag which i could see had a 
plastic cup in it [laughter] and he sat down on a seat and he carefully read 
the pamphlet then he put the pamphlet back in the bag and he came out and he 
said to me well er what you do is you pee into this plastic cup [laughter] and 
you send it off to this laboratory and they will tell you whether there's a 
certain er substance in your urine so i said what a metabolite of calcium or 
something he said no i think he said it's a sort of protein so i said oh well 
they're testing bone resorption aren't they not not bone density and he said oh 
ah i suppose they are so i said well that means that all you find out from 
having this test is that you need another test [laughter] which i said can't 
you just get the other
test by asking the doctor for it the bastard was totally blank at this state 
[laughter] so then i said er er i was going to buy the test just for in-, just 
for information 'cause i do that just keep it you know so i can talk about it 
somewhere else so i said how much does it cost to have this test to find out if 
you need a test [laughter] and he said nineteen-pounds-ninety-nine [laughter] i 
said there's nothing new under the sun now this is just a naked attempt to 
exploit women's anxiety to the best of my knowledge what they are testing as 
far as i could see was er one of the substances associated with osteoclasts and 
there could be lots of reasons i guess 
why you are pissing those out and as far as i know and i'm my research is not 
that old there's no proof that they actually strongly related to osteoporosis 
at all anyhow i promised you these [laughter] now the problem is i've only got 
twenty because they're all been given away to er Richard Branson and people i 
don't know [laughter] well i they're given away by the publicity people and 
they've got the dreariest idea of who counts 
sf1107: on the train with one 
nf1091: [laugh] [laughter] so what i'll do is er i'll stand here and if you 
want one i'll give you one as you come out