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Love that you asked about current decision-making. The year after college, in NC, I was in a group, the Women’s Commmittee on Central America, with one of the collective’s original members, Trude Bennett, though I didn’t know her history at the time. I lived for consensus decision-making then, but years later found I had next to no tolerance for even, say, the comments portion of a PTA meeting. I thought that was because I’d just grown inpatient in general, preferring to act than talk, but this post makes me wonder whether I couldn’t stand it because the commenting people were not feminists and were over-entitled jerks. And now, having finished breast cancer treatment and about to start taking a fucking estrogen-blocker for five years, I’m going to the site to research vaginal moisturizers and see if they have anything on post-cancer sexuality. So, thanks for the post!

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Claire, thanks for this! It's interesting to know about the history of the book and what's going on now. This book was my sex information bible in high school and college.

I have a question if you have time to answer it. I have a good friend who unfortunately has become an anti-trans feminist. She posts about trans women raping cis women and about women needing to have "safe spaces" (presumably where a person with a penis who identifies as a woman would not be welcome). I don't know enough about this to counter her arguments, which I feel are mostly wrong (although I'm not sure how I feel about athletics and trans women competing and possibly having an unfair advantage).

If you could point me to some good resources on this I'd be grateful. Thanks!

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As a long time radical feminist I recall the coming out of this book (pun intended). It was a radical concept back in its early days and I must thank you and the original and ongoing collective that has stayed on top of this issue. Sexism is so alive and well still even amongst those women who were able to enter the medical and science fields thanx to that Movement. This is the one area of concern that this interview does not address--the conservative nature of many professional women who do not operate out of a political collective mindset. Too often their alleged feminism is all about their getting a piece of the white supremacist pie: it is very individualistic and corporatist. Too often they are the strongest supporters of that repressive ideology as they are too frightened, too conditioned and suffering from too much of what we called internalized sexism. My experience has been quite disappointing, actually angering and frightening, to see women who actually are betraying the very core concept of your work--the respect for self-determination by women for their own health care as well as their critical right to have real informed consent, a condition that the medical and pharma industries intentionally repress. This needs to be addressed as a progressive demand.

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