Talia and Emma discuss one of the worst-written books they've had to cover: Judith Butler's Gender Trouble. It is considered a landmark text of the so-called third wave of feminism, but is it all it's cracked up to be? Given that it kicked off queer theory, it certainly got a few things wrong. Join us as Talia walks Emma through the good, the bad, and the paradigm-shifting aspects of Judith Butler's seminal work.

Sources:

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 1990

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Emma and Talia are once more joined by Isaac (he/they/ze) to ask a straightforward and simple question: what went wrong after the Trans Tipping Point? How did we go from an optimistic, promising future of shifting cultural tides and legal victories to the embittered, vicious, and cruel reactionary backlash to trans existence? To find the answer, they must look as far as three decades back, trying to grapple with years upon years of anemic advocacy, liberal apathy, and epistemic neglect. Cracked Ivory premieres season two by laying out a roadmap for future episodes on the topic of the third wave of feminism, and how it failed.

Sources:

The Trans Dandy, The Anti-Trans Tipping Point

The Trans Dandy, The Trans Policy Crisis

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Talia and Emma make a podcast about their podcast. They discuss the trials and triumphs of season one, talk about the planning and production process, answer listener questions, and go over future plans for season two.

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For the season one finale, Talia and Emma are joined by a very special guest: Julia Serano, transfeminist and author of Whipping Girl! They discuss the pervasive problem of orientalism and transmisogyny in academic disciplines, the history of discomfort with trans healthcare being laundered through pseudointellectual rationalisation, and the recurrent discourses that have tried to pit conformist "transsexuals" against radical "transgenders".

Sources:

Serena Nanda, Neither Man Nor Woman, 1990

Serena Nanda, Gender Diversity, 2000

Julia Serano, Whipping Girl, 2007

Talia Bhatt, Trans/Rad/Fem, 2025

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Talia locks Emma and Beth (she/her) into a call so she can ramble at them about lesbian feminism and feminist history for hours (again). She goes over the history of Michfest, the sin for which all lesbians must now answer, whether or not we attended the bloody thing or were even in the US while it was happening. In discussing the transfem-exclusionary policy of only admitting "womyn born womyn", the three of them reckon with the politics of separatism, class, race, and why it's important to not fuck the people you're protesting against.

Sources:

Michelle Tea, Transmissions from Camp Trans

Minnie Bruce Pratt, S/He

Jocelyn Macdonald, Setting the Record Straight About MichFest

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Emma and Talia bring you an interview with the one-third of the bestselling author of The Hades Calculus Maria Ying, about lesbian futurism, not-so-feminist Greek myth retellings, and how the past is a foreign country (so you can be orientalist about it)! They are joined by Callisto Khan (she/her, @callistokhan.bsky.social) to discuss the Gunmetal Olympus series and the upcoming The Persephone Effect, out this January!

Pre-order the sequel to The Hades Calculus, The Persephone Effect here or here.

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Initially, this episode was intended to be exclusive to Patreon. However, given its subject matter, we decided to instead release it to early access and then publicly. Happy holidays!

For the Patreon companion episode, Emma, Talia and Lucy dive into Max Robinson's misguided nostalgia tour of the second wave's worst offerings. Robinson attempts to pen a sequel to Janice Raymond's The Transsexual Empire that talks about how we can choose to escape patriarchy if we all just try hard enough, how people transition because they think "FTMs" are taken more seriously than women, and how to run a detransition cult.

Sources:

Max Robinson, Detransition: Beyond Before And After, 2021.

Ky Schevers, Statement about Lane Lloyd - https://kyschevers.medium.com/statement-about-lane-lloyd-1f8d4d67137b

Sarah Hoagland, Lesbian Ethics: Towards New Value, 1988.

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In this very special episode of Cracked Ivory, Emma traps Talia and Lucy Kartikasari (she/they/he, luckartikasari on TikTok) on a call and subjects them to Abigail Shrier's opinions on transition, teenage sex, and race. Irreversible Damage is a fear-mongering screed combined with a how-to child abuse guide aimed at the parents of young trans children, a manifesto stating plain that children owe their parents not merely their lives and future earnings, but their very bodies and sex, neither of which can be tampered with under the heterosexual regime. We examine how this misbegotten suburban tantrum dehumanizes trans and detrans people alike, treating us as surgically mutilated sterile wretches rather than humans with dignity and free will.

The most distasteful part of the episode starts at 54:09 and ends at 1:00:56.

Sources:

Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Crazy Seducing Our Daughters, 2021

Talia Bhatt, 'Racebending' and 'Womanface': Discussing Social Constructs

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