Savage Minds

Dr David Bell was a consultant psychiatrist in the Adult Department at the Tavistock where he worked in adult services from 1995 until his retirement earlier this year. In his role as Staff Governor at the Tavistock, Bell was approached by a large number of clinicians who were working or had worked on the Tavistock Gender Identity Development service (GIDS). They raised very serious concerns about GIDS and Bell wrote a report which was critical of GIDS in 2018. In this episode, David Bell discusses his report, the retaliation he has weathered from the Tavistock and the lobbies that are steering public institutions while terrorising clinicians with the tyrannical politics of gender identity. Bell also queries some of the reasons behind the increase the sharp increase of adolescent referrals at the Tavistock detailing the “penetration of the commodity form into everyday life” and the commodification of the self and the misogyny driving this movement. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Maya Forstater, a researcher, writer and advisor working on business and sustainable development and co-founder of Sex Matters, talks about having lost her job after tweeting and writing about sex and gender. She is the claimant in a landmark test case on whether the protected characteristic of belief in the Equality Act covers gender critical beliefs. In this episode, Forstater discusses her case and the larger implications this legal challenge holds for the future of free speech and the rights of women and girls pointing to the vulnerability of employees in the academic gig economy who are often targeted by institutional policies that are quickly replacing the age-old role of the church throughout history. Examining the structure of her legal case which is based on the protection of a belief that impacts how the subject lives her life, Forstater postulates the social framework for disagreement or discussions about belief in an era where the presumed moral high ground of an employer can be the means for terminating one’s employment. Covering compelled speech and the institutional capture of gender ideology where women are forced to accept the personal and professional costs of free speech—to be polite or to save one’s job—in order to talk about what they see, Forstater discusses the legal system that has also been caught in the very paradigm her case addresses: ideologically-driven NGOs like Stonewall and Gendered Intelligence have pushed private and public institutional policies to adopt religious, anti-science beliefs which are also parroted by judges who instruct women within the courts to refer to men with a “gender identity” as “she.” Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Saiph Savage, co-director of the UNAM Civic Innovation Lab, discusses the era of misinformation and the uses and abuses of bots within social media. Considering her Botivist experiment, she emphasises how the use of bots free up humans to work on more creative tasks while bots are delegated to menial chores. Savage also details some of the abuses of bots which, along with trolls, have the capacity to silence opposition and journalists specifically because, in part, Big Tech companies are not employing enough humans to review each submission or complaint. Addressing the dangers that trolls pose—especially to female users on social media, Savage addresses how social media currently enables dominant groups to reassert their control instead of opening up to heterogeneous content. Examining how the larger ecosystem allows for the repetition of older power dynamics since Big Tech is financially rewarded by investments that emerge from bots, Savage details the links between revenue and Big Tech, suggesting that tech companies provide audits and transparency as to why certain accounts are banned or demonetised. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Gina Rippon, Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Neuroimaging at the Aston Brain Centre in the UK and author of The Gendered Brain: The new neuroscience that shatters the myth of the female brain (2019), discusses the reasons behind the current of “neurotrash,” the populist (mis)use of neuroscience research to (mis)represent our understanding of the brain and to prop up outdated stereotypes. In this episode, Rippon tears through the regressive myths of the “gendered brain” elucidating how women’s biology has persistently been weaponised against them through the persistent recycling of historical tropes within science—from the myth of the inferiority of women’s brains from the 19th century to twentieth century science which focussed upon women’s hormones. Addressing the failure of science to find sex differences in the brains of men and women, Rippon elaborates the need for research in the twenty-first century to take up different questions to include more research into neuroplasticity which examines how circumstances and context affect the brain and how the brain solves problems while underscoring the need for science to confront the biological script playing out in a social stage that has a “much more profound impact on how the biological script plays out than we ever realised.” Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode Joey Brite discusses her article, “The Four Horsemen of the Gender-Critical Apocalypse,” that caused upheaval amongst various women in the “gender-critical” feminist movement. Detailing her grass-roots organising and activism within the jazz music and lesbian communities, Brite expounds on the class apartheid within the contemporary feminist movement where working class women’s voices are demonised and she recounts the recent attempts to shut down these women’s views. Highlighting the contradictory narrative where the “true tans” acceptance by some feminists is necessarily creating a two-tiered class-based scene for political activism, Brite critiques the bourgeois feminists who are platforming and prioritising men over working-class feminist voices while colluding with men who traffic in gender to advance exceptions to their gender criticism. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Michael Conroy, founder of Men At Work, discusses his training programme for professionals whose aim of is to support those working with boys and young men in understanding the social influences, values and beliefs which lead to sexism, misogyny and a range of harmful behaviours. In this episode, Julian Vigo discusses with Michael the influences that form young boys into men which legitimate certain learned behavioural patterns, to include violence wherein they discuss the harms of gender—masculinity and femininity—and how societies reward boys for certain types of social actions while punishing them for others. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Joti Brar, political activist, editor, deputy leader of the Workers Party of Britain and co-author of Identity Politics and the Transgender Trend, discusses the links between imperialist endeavours and worker exploitation while historicising the tradeoffs made by the western political elites who granted temporary advances to workers during the post-war boom, to include free education and council housing. Explaining how we inhabit a rawer version of capitalism today with no care for the needs of the poor or workers, Brar compares this period to the Victorian era as workers’ rights are being rescinded, poverty is quickly augmenting and aggressions on the working class are heightening. She also chronicles the fragmentation of working class organisation brought on, in part, by identity politics whose reactionary discourse is dividing the disenfranchised while the corporate world is now taking charge of the mandate of “human liberation” in what Brar deems to be a massive inversion of reality where the ruling class is reversing who is oppressing whom with industry leaders today “preaching at the workers about oppression.” Indicting victim narratives prevalent in the west where “fragile egos” and the focus on language have perfectly driven away any rational and scientific discussion of actual suffering, Briar highlights the real-life dilemmas that women face around the planet who need genuine “safe spaces” for their survival. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Dawn Paley, journalist and author of Drug War Capitalism (2014) and Guerra neoliberal: Desaparición y búsqueda en el norte de México (2020), discusses her research in Latin America drawing parallels between the historical destruction of communities and the present-day environmental and social destruction amassed by Canadian mining companies in Argentina. Noting that the problems within the extractive industries were only part of the problem, Paley elucidates how transnational companies in Mexico and Colombia take advantage of the structural problems created by the drug war to amass their fortunes while dividing communities, polluting the ecology and taking control of communal land inhabited by indigenous people, peasants, and the urban poor. Paley brings into the discussion the grassroots organising within Mexico which is fighting against the phenomenon of disappearance in the city of Torreón, Coahuila underscoring how disappearance is both a material and semantic removal of life. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, discusses his current lawsuit against 19 of his academic colleagues for libel and the neoliberal machinery aiming to take down anyone who does not espouse certain political views within media, powerful institutions and universities alike. Detailing the recent history at New York University where he experienced a “mobocracy” of various accusations over the course of 2020, Miller elaborates how last fall he became the focus of an “expedited review” of his “conduct” for having asked his students in a course on propaganda to question the science behind COVID-19 mask mandates. Contending that we look beyond propaganda stating that “propaganda’s obverse is always censorship” with the ideal of dominating the subject’s “heart and mind completely” without argument, Miller analyses how the neoliberal left today only recognises propaganda when it epitomises a narrative with which it disagrees despite its reach going well beyond the political binaries. Taking aim of the censorious academic climate today where the “hate speech” and “micro-aggressions and aggressions” of which he found himself accused, Miller elucidates how the left is couching disagreement as a quasi-criminal act as it carries out a Gleichscheltung in complete defiance of the basic principles of freedom of speech while advancing some extremely regressive notions of identity politics as “progressive.” Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Author and human rights lawyer Dan Kovalik discusses his soon-to-be-released book Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture while addressing the adjacent problems today within the left to include the ostensibly “progressive” policies around virus mitigation that dismiss the needs of survival for the poor and the working class. Citing longstanding problems within American politics, Kovalik analyses the Democratic party’s repudiation of the working class for several decades while noting its gravitation towards the wealthy and notes how lockdown perfectly materialises the class divide while sweeping aside all the economic issues of socialised healthcare. Devoting part of his discussion to the 1,000 strikes of workers across the United States last year, Kovalik notes how class is now a verboten topic both within the media but also within the foremost socialist organisation in the country which has focussed its energies on identity politics in recent years. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe