Women's Liberation Radio News

Edition 104: The US Presidential Elections with aurora linnea, Lola Bessis, Sekhmet SheOwl & Katherine Acosta

First up, hear the greeting by Thistle before listening to Mary O'Neill deliver WLRN's world news segment. Then, enjoy Thistle's original song Sticky Red Egg before tuning in to aurora's commentary on the US Presidential Elections cycle. After aurora shares her views, it's on to Lola and her take on the American electoral political scene. Finally, our oldest member Sekhmet SheOwl weighs in with her powerful words before our special guest, Katherine Acosta gives us her analysis of this last election cycle and what it means for women. You can check out more of Kathy's work at https://katherinemacosta.substack.com/. Thanks for tuning in to feminist community powered radio, WLRN! #WLRN #presidentialelections #Kamala #Trump #elections

Duration:: 51m
Broadcast on:: 05 Dec 2024
Audio Format:: other

WLRN Edition 104 in 3, 2, 1. I will stand for my liberation, sisters rise again, I was born, woman, off my knees I will stand for my liberation, rise and rise again. Greetings and welcome to the 104th edition podcast of Women's Liberation Radio News for this Thursday, December 5, 2024. Wow, not much left of 2024, sisters. Happy holidays to all of you. This is the sole founding member of WLRN and resident folk singer. This month's edition focuses on the US presidential elections and what several of our members have to say about them. Plus, we'll have a special guest commentary from Katherine Acosta from She's Right You Know. It's great to have Kathy on the show. My contribution to this edition is a 2007 recording of my song Sticky Red Egg about my experience protesting the two-party electoral political system in 2004 with the Democracy Uprising March. We'll hear it a little bit later on. The song comments on the absurdity and dangers of the political system operating in the United States. Technology has replaced grassroots organizing, disguising itself as grassroots organizing. How many political texts did you get? Do you continue to get in post-election polling? I never gave money to either party yet the incessant texting from both of them invaded my privacy, insulted my intelligence and disrupted my peace. I reported every single text as junk but they just kept coming. I even got pictures of my voting location sent to me several times with warnings that who I vote for is a secret, but whether I vote is a matter of public record. Incestant texting is not democracy. It's manipulation. I feel frustrated with electoral politics every four years and place my hope in the female sex and our ability to give life in the face of the patriarchy's obsession with political conventions, wars and destruction. The song starts out with the sound of a jet engine landing in the USA and concludes with the listener refreshed at not hearing a sound because she has planted her roots far down in the ground in local efforts to create democracy in our everyday lives post-megapolitical systems collapse. The song describes the DNC to RNC Democracy Uprising March of 2004. This mobile event lasted for 28 days and 258 miles between Boston where the Democratic National Convention was held to New York for the RNC. I hope you like the song. It'll be played later on in the program before the commentaries from WLRN members Aurora Linnea, Lola Bessis, Segment Shiawel and from our special guest, Katherine Acosta. The team at WLRN produces a monthly radio broadcast to break the sound barrier women are blocked by under the status quo rule of men. This blocking of women's discourse we see in all sectors of society be they conservative, liberal, mainstream, progressive or radical. The thread that runs through all of American politics except for separatist feminism is male dominance and entitlement in all spheres. To start off today's edition here's Mary with women's news from around the globe for this Thursday, December 5, 2024. Thanks, Thistle. Spoke in court before many of the accused. While her husband has admitted to the drugging in rape, most of the other 50 men have refused to do so. Pelacot said, "For me, this is the trial of cowardice. There is no other way to describe it." The Pelacot's son requested that the court punish their father severely and declared that he was dead to them too. The Pelacot's daughter believes their father drugged and sexually assaulted her as well. In Chad's displacement camps where refugees from Sudan's civil war have fled, women and girls say that men who work as humanitarian workers and in local security forces have sexually assaulted them, sometimes offering money or access to aid in jobs. A psychologist who spoke with women and girls shared that they agreed to sex out of desperation and some have asked for help after becoming pregnant. A 19-year-old girl who lost most of her family in the Darfur region last year and lacked the resources to provide for her mazes and nephews became pregnant after her boss pressured her into sex following her request for a raise. When he found out she was pregnant, he left. She said, "If we had enough, we wouldn't have to go out and lose our dignity." A Moscow military court sentenced a 43-year-old woman to eight years in a penal colony for her anti-war online posts. In several, she called for the assassination of Vladimir Putin, according to Russian news sources. She now joins many women who have been sentenced for their sentiments against the Russian invasion in war in Ukraine. One woman, a 68-year-old pediatrician, was sentenced for saying that the Russian army in Putin were waging genocide against the people of Ukraine. In a recently released report, the UN Human Rights Office has declared that close to 70 percent of the fatalities in Gaza are women and children. The UN Human Rights Chief said that these deaths were a direct consequence of the failure to comply with fundamental principles of international humanitarian law, namely the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precautions in attack. President-elect Donald Trump named Matt Gaetz as his Attorney General Pick. Gaetz was under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, among other allegations. But after he resigned following Trump's announcement, the investigation was dropped. Gaetz was previously subject to an investigation by the Justice Department over allegations of sex trafficking a teenage girl. Gaetz has since removed himself from consideration. A German law enabling people to change their name and sex on official records came into effect on November 1. As women protested around the world, UN Special Rapporteur Reem Al-Salam said, "The Gender Self-determination Act lacks the needed safeguards to prevent abuse of the process by sexual predators and other perpetrators of abuse and violence, including in single-sex spaces." Germany neglected to take their concerns into account. UN Women released a report that shows that, in 2023, one woman was killed every 10 minutes at the hands of their partner or close relative. In Africa and Asia, women were more likely to be killed by family members, while in Europe and the Americas, they were more likely to be killed by their partners. God O'wally, Executive Director of the UN Office of Drugs and Crime, said the new femicide report highlights the urgent need for strong criminal justice systems that hold perpetrators accountable while ensuring adequate support for survivors, including access to safe and transparent reporting mechanisms. U.S. representatives Seth Molten of Massachusetts has been criticized by his fellow Democrats for saying, "I have two little girls. I don't want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete." But as a Democrat, I'm supposed to be afraid to say that. In a later interview, he said that backlash to his statements proved his point and that, "I've never heard more people, parents, and by the way, a lot of LGBTQ community members reach out to me and say, 'Thank you for saying this.'" Some of them believe the trans movement has gone too far. It is imperiling the progress we've made. Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina introduced a resolution to prohibit lawmakers and House employees from using single-sex facilities of the opposite sex. Reporters asked if this resolution was a direct result of the election of Sarah McBride, the first trans-identified man to be elected to the House of Representatives. Mace confirmed that it was. That concludes W.L.R.N.'s World News segment for Thursday, December 5, 2024. I'm Mary. Share your news stories, announcements, and tips with us by emailing info@wllrenmedia.com and letting us know what's going on. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] That was me with my song, Sticky Red Egg. Next up, we'll hear commentaries from W.L.R.N. members Aurora, Lola, and Segment, along with our guests' reflections on the U.S. presidential elections 2024 from Katherine Acosta of She's Right, You Know. First up, we have Ms. Aurora Linnea, who just released her book, Man Against Being, Body Horror, and the Death of Life, published by our sisters at Spinifex Press. Please do take note of the title and order your copy from the Good Women at Spinifex today. Take it away, Aurora. On November 5th, 2024, our task as citizens of the United States of America was to signal our preference for one of two faces of the capitalist patriarchal war machine, which would least offend our sensibilities. The bluntly fishistic face, swaggering, and raucous in its loud-mouthed appeal to the aggrieved, or the token female of color collaborator face, singing out the usual retinue of hollow promises as it simpered blandly down from the corporate sponsored stage. Both were brought to us bought and paid for by billionaire donors and lobbyists, both support colonial genocide, both endorsed misogyny as state policy, be it the "your body, my choice, bombast of manosphere, creeps, or the fashionable woman-hating, underlying transgenderism." Both trade not in substantive platforms, but in platitudes, cheap shots, and contempt for the other side. Both assert a moral high ground as heroic defender of good old-fashioned mega-church values or a sanctimonious guardian of the marginalized that neither have claimed to, since both are, in fact, morally bankrupt shills. No face of the capitalist patriarchal war machine, whether it's shown red or blue blazing through our screens on November 5, offered any hope of an improved existence for women, the poor, the racialized, the non-human, or life on earth in the broadest possible sense. Neither could promise anything besides a quickening race to the nader, with sprawling vistas of slaughter and desecration to gaze out upon as we, the citizenry, hurdle along, locked by our rulers into a self-driving robo-car speeding straight for collision with the concrete wall of mass extinction. So, indeed, I'm troubled now to see women fighting amongst ourselves about the sorry decision we had to make, as if a feminist case might be made for either imperial figurehead. How could we be anything but disgusted by our options? It warrants mentioning here, as an aside, that we did, in fact, have more than two choices, but that we were, as we are, every election cycle harassed out of seriously considering them. To throw your vote away on a third party impossibility is irresponsible, naive, or scolded. Being an adult means learning to settle, so grow up and pick your poison, the red file, or the blue. Take a swill of the blue and shore, you've got a woman president, a woman of color, to boot. But a female in power is not a feminist by default. More likely, she's simply the new mask the regime has dawned to dupe and distract its captive studio audience. Dip into the red and the guy at the top proclaims proudly to know what a woman is, but he and his cronies are equally certain where a woman's place should be and where to grab her to put her there. This is some severely entry-level analysis I'm laying out here. Doubtless, there's nothing I've said that you haven't heard or thought through for yourself before. Why, then, are we squandering our breath, arguing with one another about whether red or blue was the best bet for women? Spare me the lesser evil excusals, all that supposedly strategic self-sabotage? There was no feminist option on the ballot, no feminist choice to make. What we do well to glean from our predicament this election cycle, goaded as we were to hitch ourselves to either a jingoistic sex offender or a cipher-sister in a corporate power suit, is the thunderous confirmation that partisan politics has precisely nothing left to offer women. There will be no top-down solution to the crises of male dominion. The patriarchal state isn't going to self-correct from within. That ship sailed and sank into the abyssal vortex long, long ago, helpfully leaving us with a clearer look at the Leviathan. It's red and blue both, a pivalled, chameleonic, man-made monstrosity, many headed and many faced, and our work as feminists is to fight it, always, never to contort ourselves frantically trying to find the comfiest fit in its clutches. That's the reality and what a relief. For now we're free to shift our energies in the knowledge that they'll be better spent elsewhere. The appeal of electoral politics is not lost on me. Like most things people buy into, it's easy. It requires very little of us. Little thought, beyond selecting one's signature hue, little action beyond committing an hour to getting a ballot, filling it out, turning it in. How easy to choose your leaders and entrust them to act as proxies in your stead. What a comforting abdication of responsibility. You voted. At the very least you get a sticker, you can wear it on your lapel, and whether your team wins or loses you've done your part, so now you can rest. Load by the warm unction of triumph or wallowing and disappointed defeat. The problem is that whoever gets voted in, whatever color they're sporting, whatever rhetoric they're dribbling, the machine they're charged with manning is preset to plunder and to destroy a can-do-nothing else. Like any machine, the capitalist patriarchal state does what it was engineered to do, plunder, and destroy, to further the infinite growth of its male masterclass engineer's power. Given the irredeemability of this system, it is harder than ever to pretend our vote counts for much. We feel hopeless because we're trained to sell ourselves short. Presuming the only way we can affect change is to put some professional change maker up there to do it for us, and when that proxy inevitably flops, we're desolated. It seems nothing we can do makes any difference. Electoral politics hinges on a deferral of responsibility by its nature conducive to despair, and despair is immobilizing. The immobility that it produces is no accident. It is a demobilization built into the system to depoliticize the populace. My humble advice is that we detach from the parasitic middleman. We are responsible for ourselves, and we are responsible to one another, and our responsibility is to act. What action we take is up to each of us to decide. In consideration of our own varied abilities, talents, passions, fears, each act executed in contribution to the collective action of resistance is valid and invaluable. I have no prescription to dole out dictating what we do next, exactly, but as long as we are acting in solidarity with women and with life on earth rather than in half-hearted, a fearful passive deference to a deathly regime will at least have begun the work of digging our way out of the pit. If investment in the horse race spectacle of electoral politics signals a slackening of personal responsibility and political will, it also reveals a failure of the imagination. In capitalist realism is there no alternative. Mark Fisher writes of the listless visionlessness that sets in when people are convinced by their overlords that the oppressive system is natural, eternal, inexorable, that one must be realistic and pragmatic and resign oneself to it, or else be scorned as daydreamy. Possibly a deranged idiot. The intelligent thing to do apparently is to give up, to go along and get what you can from a bad deal. To me, this sounds like living death. Vision is revitalizing. It is revolutionary vigor's source and tender. Without vision we slump, we buckle, we find ourselves dispiritedly quibbling over which of two evils we should concede to. I have nothing to add to that sad, boring argument. Instead I propose an emergency resuscitation of feminist vision to release ourselves from such futile drudgery like deep in the mire, like the white horse lost to the never-ending stories swamp of sadness. You have to try, you have to care. The boy tearfully pleads with his sinking horse. Mire is the same. Please. Can't we care enough to try harder than deliberating over what costume we'd like male dominion to wear this term and instead imagine a more peaceful and livable world for ourselves and all creatures. And then we ask ourselves what we can do, individually and collectively, to kindle that world's creation. How can we live out our lives as a process of creating it? Feminism has always been a visionary project for what else could it be. Those who have been unfree under male dominion for eons have only dreams of freedom to drive us. What a shame it is to betray those dreams now. And please, let's never permit desperate delusional or reactionary attachments to the patriarchal state in any of its many forms to embit our us against other women, cleaving our movement along man-made lines. It has been men's method to conquer women by isolating us from one another, cooped up in the father's home or the husbands in men's nations and their tribes, female energies and sympathies siphoned to bolster the boys as we stand by our man, the sidelines, taking up his projects as our own, despite how rarely or barely they benefit us. It may feel safe, huddled inside Daddy's house, but we're never better than detainees there, and anyway, the house is a squalid wreck. Capitalist patriarchy has no face worthy of our admiration or allegiance. I do not believe the corporate state, nor US Empire, nor male dominion is worth salvaging, and I won't waste another moment trying to make it work for me somehow. The lesson of this election is that it is past time for women to shake off our paralyzing loyalties to man-made systems and to declare ourselves divorced from the men who rule us, who sap our energy, who squelch our vision, and make it our life's work to move on. Thanks, Aurora. Moving right along, we'll hear from our youngest member, Ms. Lola Bessis, about the elections this year before rounding off WLRN's commentary segment with Segment Shialel's perspective. Take it away, Lola. The world has started to see the United States as a joke, a bad joke, one that makes people uncomfortably chuckle and leaves an eerie feeling in the room. I wasn't surprised by the results of the election. Trump has branded himself as "the man." He embodies a certain type of masculinity admired by men across generations. He's tall and rich, and he spends his time golfing and eating McDonald's. Every American man can see himself in Trump. And I suppose relatability is a priority when voting now. No one takes the US seriously anymore. Neither the right or the "left." Trump is a clown, but the Democrats' over-acceptance of trans has also caused them a global ridicule. Is this the downfall of American hegemony? Are we finally moving into a multi-polar world? I hope so. Trump is not a unique case. Rather, he's the American manifestation of a global phenomenon. A shift towards alternative, right-wing, masculine politics. I'll use Argentina as an example, where, in December of 2023, Javier Gerardo Mille was sworn into office. Mille likes to portray himself as various Hollywood heroes, like Terminator, Superman, again playing on this socially constructed ideal of manhood. Mille brandishes a chainsaw and vows to tear down "woke culture" and get rid of the "Marxists." He, like Trump, walks his fine line of being perceived as a politician, a pop culture icon, and a social media influencer all at once. Mille, like Trump, surrounds himself with a few select women who are "antifeminists" and who, for example, on International Women's Day, take down all of the paintings of women in the Argentine White House to replace them with those of men, and rename the space "The Patriots Room." Now, who is to blame for Trump's victory? Do we blame men who are misogynistic enough to look past his predatory character? Or do we, like many Democrats, blame white women? Or maybe we should blame the working class? Was it the TERFs? Is it the fault of social media? Should we blame third-party voters for, quote-unquote, wasting their vote? Or worse, those who did not vote? I've read and heard all the arguments, and frankly, I'm not convinced. I'm surrounded by international people who did not grow up in the US, but who have the passport. A lot live in the country now, and could vote, none did. Why not? I kept asking them, but I know why. There is a feeling of hopelessness, of powerlessness. Who do you vote for as a Palestinian American, or a Syrian American, or Argentinian American? None of the candidates appealed to them. Israel's assault on Gaza would continue to be funded by the United States no matter who won. We all grew up in countries where abortion is illegal, so although we support a woman's right to choose, it wasn't a motivating enough point to push us one way or another. I don't think any one category of people can be to blame, and I think people are wasting their time trying to do that. What I know is that we need to try and reach across the political boundary. Identity politics and the strong divide between the right and left helps no one. Especially as feminists, we need to be able to work with anyone who will aid us in furthering our female-centered goals, like the banning of pornography, or of gender surgeries on minors. Perhaps I'm a pessimist. I like to think of myself more as a realist, and the reality is we have to work within the system. I love grand theories of revolution. I love imagining a future where no woman is subject to male violence. But we live in the real world, right now, a world that hates women. Radical feminism has made it particularly clear to me that women hating is a core aspect of manhood. And yes, that includes my male friends, my brothers, my father, my professors. So, as a radical feminist, I am disgusted that a sexual predator is the President of the United States. That he won the popular vote. But, as a radical feminist, I am not surprised. As a professor rightly told me one day, in the confines of his office, after I went in a particularly angry rant about the lack of care for women's issues, he said, "No one gives a shit about women." He's right. "No one gives a shit about women, so I will, so we will, we have to." Amidst the culture where openly disrespecting our sex is celebrated, we have to get angry. In this extremely divided time, we must find common ground as women who want to help women and come together. Because no one gives a shit that over 100 women are killed in private every day. No one gives a shit that rural women in the US have no access to maternity care. No one gives a shit that over 90% of women are sexually assaulted on college campuses. No one gives a shit. So we have to. Work on the small. Work on the big. Let your anger fuel your activism. Women around the world need you now more than ever. Thank you Lola. Our final featured perspective from the WLRN team is from our oldest member besides me, the one and only Sekmet Shiel. Preach it, sister. I've been deliberately disconnected from mainstream electoral politics in America for a long time and I don't expect that will ever change. I don't actively watch or read coverage of current events. I don't pay attention to who the politicians are or what they claim. The last several elections I voted Democrat down ticket simply because the Democratic Party is a buffer against the Republicans, not because I care anymore about their empty campaign claims. I have not voted for president at all. That changed this year. I did vote for Kamala because I couldn't find a good reason not to, though I knew she was unlikely to win and didn't expect anything beneficial from her. I would not have voted for Biden because I refused to help sexually predatory men succeed. I don't fault women who voted for him in 2020 to prevent Trump from winning reelection, but I also don't apologize or regret not voting for Biden in 2020. The bottom line is I have no faith in electoral politics whatsoever, especially not at the federal level. I know that most of my own policy goals will never be realized, regardless of who takes office federally. And I don't expect the quality of life for the average American to drastically improve through federal law. I believe there are plenty of reasons Kamala lost to Trump and sexism is obviously one of them. Her loss made it clear to me that America will never elect a female president in my lifetime. I didn't feel that way in 2016 when Hillary lost, though I was never a fan of her and had none of the emotional investment in her campaign that a lot of liberal women did. But now that America chose Trump a second time, again, over a qualified woman, I feel sure that a woman in the White House isn't in the cards within the next 50 years. If I'm wrong, I think it's far more likely that the first woman elected president is a Republican who gives the most public performance of right-wing handmaidenry this century. Men are half the population, and they're all sexist and misogynistic. The Democrats know less than the Republicans. That will never change. Kamala wasn't even chosen properly as the presidential candidate by the voters. She replaced Biden only because she was his VP. The only two women to ever manage securing the presidential nomination for the Democratic Party did so with significant ties to powerful male politicians, and they still lost to Donald Trump of all men. We have to face up to the fact that not only is the United States a deeply conservative country at heart, but that it's just as woman-hating as every other country out there. That said, I don't think the improbability of a woman president in the 21st century is any reason for American women and girls to feel depressed or discouraged. Too many liberal women care more about representation than they do about policy when it comes to electing a female president and other female politicians. While women do stand to benefit from a heavier female presence in government, representation has never been a guarantee of improved conditions for women. Electoral politics is not the entertainment industry. Feeling good about seeing yourself reflected in the movies is one thing. Feeling good about seeing yourself as a woman represented in government shouldn't be anywhere near the top of your priority list when it comes to electoral politics. There are Republican women in Congress actively cooperating with their male counterparts to make life more difficult and dangerous for American women. They aren't loyal to womankind, they're loyal to their preferred flavor of patriarchy, and for that matter, so are the female politicians in the Democratic Party. The ones advocating for violent men in drag claiming to be women to enter women's prisons, and for the American war machine, and for policies that further empower corporations to get away with underpaying poor and working-class women. If the women of the Democratic Party in Congress would vote to protect the porn industry and against universal health care and housing price regulations, why should any woman feel good about the fact that they're the ones who have those seats instead of men? And if a female Democratic president would sign off on laws harming women and girls and veto laws that would help and protect them, why should we be happy she's not a man? I've said it before and I'll keep saying it. Women's liberation from male oppression was never going to come through the government. It was never going to be achieved through legislation. Laws can help, but they can't set us free, because you can't legislate males into seeing women as human beings, into feeling genuine respect and empathy for us, into treating women and girls as their true equals in any and every context. We aren't going to change who men are, and even if we could, we wouldn't be able to do it with a system they designed and control. I don't know how bad things are going to get over the next two to four years in the United States under a Trump-led Republican federal government. I'm not going to pretend that we as women are in a good situation. We aren't. But I'm also not going to panic in advance because that won't change anything. What I do know is that the female experience of misogyny remains largely unchanged no matter who wins elections. Patriarchy has no political party, just as it has no particular religion, or race, or economic class, or generation, or ethnicity. Patriarchy is men. Not a certain group of men, but all of them. When we think about how to participate in the feminist struggle effectively and efficiently, we can't see one man, like Donald Trump, or one group of men, like Republicans, as the enemy and obstacle to liberation. Nor can we count on female politicians to be our true allies in the struggle simply because they're women. Nor can we forget that male domination and oppression of women pervade every level of society, culture, and the individual experience, including all the contacts that government doesn't directly affect. We can't control who takes office in Congress or the White House or what they do with their power. But we can control the way we live our lives as women, how and how much we interact with men personally, and how much we allow men to affect our thinking and self-image. We need to use the power and the agency we have and keep our eyes on the real prize, which is not a woman president or even a government that's exactly half female, but a world where all women and girls are self-loving, healthy, free, and safe from male violence. Finally, dear listeners, and thanks for staying tuned. We have a special guest commentary from Katherine Acosta of The Feminist Blog and Podcast Called. She's right, you know, take it away, Kathy. This is Katherine Acosta, feminist sociologist and writer. For an expanded version of this essay, check out She's Right You Know on Substack. As soon as it became apparent that adjudicated rapist and lifelong sexual predator Donald Trump was about to be reelected, his sexist and racist followers let their woman-hating freak flags fly. On election night, far-right provocateur Nick Fuentes led the charge among maga men with a rapey tweet, "Your body, my choice, forever." His fellow misogynists picked up the battle cry, with boys deploying the slogan to taunt schoolgirls and female teachers. Others ordering women to "get back in the kitchen." This bare-knuckle misogyny is of a piece with the brutal outcomes for women of the first Trump administration. His appointment of three far-right justices to the Supreme Court overturned abortion rights at the federal level through the Dobbs vs. Jackson Women's Health decision. The ruling has resulted in injury for numerous women, and the death of at least three, who were miscarrying and denied timely medical treatment, as well as hardship for many women seeking abortions for reasons other than medical emergencies. During his next term, we can expect further assaults on women's reproductive rights and bodily autonomy. Although Trump lied during his campaign, claiming ignorance of Project 2025, he is now hiring contributors to the project, including key architect Russell Vote, to head Office of Management and Budget. Project 2025 is the latest in a series of mandates for leadership, produced by the Heritage Foundation, with the first published in 1981. Then, as now, the mandate called for ending programs to increase diversity and equity, then called affirmative action, for women and racial ethnic minorities. The continued backlash against women's rights is part of Project 2025's overall plan for authoritarian government. To consolidate power in the hands of the executive, to dismantle much of the administrative state and regulatory agencies, and to impose a far-right social agenda. As Gloria Steinem stated in a 2021 discussion on NPR, controlling reproduction has always been the first step in any hierarchical or authoritarian government. To that end, Project 2025 recommends restricting access to mythic grindstone by requiring in-person dispensing and, ultimately, revoking the Food and Drug Administration approval of the abortion medication, reviving the 1873 Comstock Act that prohibits mailing anything intended for producing abortion and potentially birth control, prohibiting health care providers who receive Title X funding from providing abortion referrals, rescinding the Biden administration guidance on the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA, issued after the DAWS decision overturned abortion rights. The guidance affirmed that women who needed emergency abortion care were entitled to it under federal law, even in states where abortion is banned. Project 2025 also calls for all current Department of Justice litigation against states that have violated EMTALA to be withdrawn. Expanding religious exemptions from contraceptive coverage to make it easier for employers, including corporations, to exclude such coverage from their employees' health insurance plans and replacing comprehensive sex education with abstinence-only curricula. Project 2025 co-author and likely incoming OMB Director Vote told undercover reporters during the campaign that a Trump administration would implement a national ban if he were re-elected. This despite claims by Trump and other GOP stalwarts, the DAWS was intended merely to return abortion legislation to the states. Everywhere citizens have organized to institute abortion rights in their state, the GOP has mobilized to thwart the will of the people, demonstrating again the anti-democratic nature of the movement. Though fascist regimes aggressively promote childbearing, those children are children for the state, not for the family. Producing children is the patriotic duty for the benefit of a country or society. In a remarkable contemporary parallel, several U.S. states have filed a lawsuit seeking to restrict access to abortion medication in their states due to population decline. The attorneys general of Idaho, Kansas, and Missouri seeking to establish the state's standing to challenge federal government's liberalized rules for medication abortion Claims that expanded access to the abortion pills is causing a loss in potential population and that decreased births were inflicting a sovereign injury to the state itself. Incoming Vice President J.D. Vance has voiced similar responsibility to society arguments in support of mandatory childbearing. He has described women who are not mothers as "childless cat ladies" who are "missurable with their own lives" and "all childless people as sociopaths" who don't have a direct state in this country. Parents, Vance suggested, should have a greater say in the society by giving children votes and allowing parents control over those votes. Project 2025 calls for "restoring the family" asserting that "families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children" are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society. A prescription that does not bode well for lesbian-headed households. If the next Trump administration pursues long-standing far-right goals of repealing the Affordable Care Act and cutting Social Security, women will be disproportionately adversely affected. The ACA prohibits health insurance companies from charging women higher insurance premiums than men. Due to, on average, lower lifetime earnings than men, Social Security forms a larger proportion of women's retirement income compared with men. For unmarried women, including widows, Social Security comprises 51% of their retirement income, compared with 39% for unmarried men and 36% for couples. For about a quarter of women, Social Security is their only source of retirement income. Many women who are justifiably angered and frustrated over gender identity policies that allow males who identify as women or girls to compete in female sport, as well as access to female spaces such as locker rooms and restrooms, and to be housed in women's prisons, have cheered Trump's reelection. They expect that, at last, the female category in sport will be preserved and restored. But what will women's sport look like once there is no Department of Education and the Trump administration dismantles programs to promote equity. Recall that Title IX was created to remedy sex inequality in educational institutions, not specifically for sport. At the time, women were subject to different college entrance requirements than men at many institutions. Professional degree programs such as medicine and law routinely limited the number of female students they would accept, and girls were kicked out of school for becoming pregnant. Title IX was intended to remedy these types of inequities. As it happens, sport is embedded in educational institutions in the U.S. An unintended consequence of the legislation was equitable funding for male and female sport. A principal role of the Department of Education is to prohibit discrimination on the basis of race and sex in schools that get federal funding. Thus, the department oversees Title IX implementation. If the department is eliminated, what body will oversee Title IX implementation? And will there be any incentive to ensure equitable distribution of funding for men's and women's sport? Independent Women's Forum, a Project 2025 Coalition partner, which now presents itself as a champion of women's rights and campaigns for the female category in sport, previously argued that Title IX was unfair to men. When the legislation was implemented, one of the three prongs by which an institution could prove compliance was the proportionality rule. Male sports directors agreed to a division of funding between male and female sport based on the proportion of male and female undergraduates at an institution. At the time, women were a minority among undergraduates. Once barriers to higher education were removed, the numbers of women seeking college degrees increased dramatically. By the year 2000, they had become the majority, about 57% of undergraduates. Now, athletic directors lobbied Congress for a change in the proportionality rule, in particular requesting that football be exempted. Rather than share the lavish funding football enjoys, athletic programs began cutting minor male sports such as wrestling and telling men it couldn't be helped because they had to give money to women athletes. Independent Women's Forum took the side of men in the dispute, an issue to position paper arguing that, due to greater levels of testosterone, men were naturally more interested in sport than women. The point here is that, yes, fascists understand what a woman is, but it doesn't automatically follow that they will support sex equality, quite the opposite. Women's overt oppression and restriction to childbearing and family roles is a hallmark of fascist regimes. Although US women have made great strides toward equality in the last century, we are vulnerable as a class, in part because we have not been explicitly affirmed as citizens in the Constitution. Both political parties appear unwilling to publish the Equal Rights Amendment, which has been fully ratified since 2020. But we have advantages women in earlier fascist regimes did not. In the contemporary US, more women than men, 39% have college degrees. Most women have access to paid employment. We have more resources and a base from which to launch a defense, and ultimately full expansion of our civil rights. This is the urgent task before us now. You are listening to WLRM. Thanks for listening to WLRM's 104th edition podcast on the US Presidential elections. WLRM would like to thank our members and guests this month for sharing their views. Thank you so much Aurora, Mary, Lola, Segment, and Kathy Acosta for expressing your views on the airwaves of WLRM. Until next time, this is Thistle signing off on another WLRM podcast. And this is Aurora. Before I sign off for today, I want to let you know that on Sunday, December 15th, I will be appearing on Women's Declaration International's Radical Feminist Perspectives to chat with Spinifex publisher Renata Klein and Susan Hawthorne about my new book, Man Against Being, Body Horror, and the Death of Life. I would so love to have you there. That's all from me for now. Our monthly podcasts are always crafted with tender loving care and in solidarity with women worldwide. Thank you for your constant support. We would love to hear from you, so please share, like, and comment widely. 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You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Spinster, Over It, and Sam Cloud in addition to our website. Stay strong in the struggle, and thanks for listening. But how will we find our way out of this? What is the antidote for the patriarchal kiss? How will we find what needs to be shown? And then after that, where is home? Tell me where is my home? ♪ 'Cause gender hurts ♪