WomenKind Collective

Link to Pre Order: Tackling Gender Bias in The Healthcare System. What Patient stories Teach Us About Implementing Systemic Change:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tackling-Gender-Bias-Healthcare-System/dp/1805018817

Series 16 Finale: Book Club Special with Ruth Newton, author of The Carrier
For our series finale, we're doing something a little different: a book club special. We're joined by Ruth Newton, writer, campaign producer, and author of the best-selling debut novel The Carrier, a dystopian story where women absorb other people's pain as a form of labour.
The Carrier has already picked up serious recognition: longlisted for BPA's First Novel Award, shortlisted for the Hodderscape x The Science Museum Debut Science Fiction Award, and winner of the Jericho Writers' Friday Night Live competition.

In this episode we talk to Ruth about how much of the real world shaped the invented society of Eudaimonia, why she chose to make her protagonist Vivian a true believer rather than a sceptic from the start, and why every carrier in the book is deliberately a woman. We get into the visceral extraction mechanism at the heart of the story, the role men play in the resistance and what it says about allyship, and where The Carrier sits on the spectrum between cautionary tale and reflection of something already happening. We also ask Ruth about Vivian's traumatic awakening, whether her tipping point changed during the writing process, and what she most wants readers, particularly women, to sit with once they've turned the final page.

We also discuss our favourite reads of the year so far, and there’s something in there for everyone!
Stick around for some beautiful inspiration to carry you through the week.

The first women only trail race in Switzerland - SWISS WOMEN’S TRAIL, 1st edition on September 12, 2026
Switzerland’s first women-only trail is a 100% women-focused event designed as a gateway to mixed-gender trail races and long-distance formats.
The SWISS WOMEN’S TRAIL aims to address challenges by providing a competitive, demanding, and supportive environment tailored to women’s specific needs.
Two accessible race distances will be offered: 19 km with 750 m elevation gain and 38 km race with 1,400m elevation gain.
Find out more here https://www.swisscanyontrail.com/en/pages/swt?srsltid=AfmBOoq58MrBhc_CT4t7_1-_aXu7MS5hlEIIx6TDPdy5Qj_nZiEUIV80

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💬 We love hearing from you, email us your ideas here Jinty & Lou @ womenkindcollective@gmail.com
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Ruth Newton:
Socials:
Instagram: @ruth.e.newton
LinkedIn: @Ruth Newton

Book: The Carrier. Ruth Newton. Transworld Digital. 2026. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Carriers-propulsive-page-turning-speculative-Severance-ebook/dp/B0FK346DWV

☕ SUBSCRIBE for honest chats on women’s health, feminist issues, sisterhood & smashing the patriarchy, one cuppa at a time.
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💬 We love hearing from you, email us your ideas here Jinty & Lou @ womenkindcollective@gmail.com
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Link to Pre Order: Tackling Gender Bias in The Healthcare System. What Patient stories Teach Us About Implementing Systemic Change:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tackling-Gender-Bias-Healthcare-System/dp/1805018817

This week we are Spilling The Tea with Nicky Denson-Elliott, a professional feminist, community builder, award-winning podcaster, and the woman asking a question that, once you hear it, you can't unhear it.
We're talking about the word hysterectomy, a word one in five people don't even realise means the removal of the uterus. A word rooted in "hysteria," a diagnosis used for centuries to dismiss and pathologise women, only struck from medical record books in 1980.
Nicky had a hysterectomy herself this year, and it crystallised something she'd already been thinking about as a feminist campaigner. She's now petitioning NHS England to retire the word "hysterectomy" in favour of uterectomy, clearer, more accurate, and free of centuries of baggage.
Today we're talking medical misogyny, language, and why the words used for our bodies matter more than we think.
We ask her about the petition and the moment that made her think "this word has to change"; how living through her own hysterectomy this year sharpened her view on the language; the real history connecting "hysterectomy" and "hysteria," and whether people actually know it; why a procedure that around one in five UK women will have has never had its language challenged before now; how she's finding getting the petition out there given the algorithm's treatment of women's health content (following our chat with the CensHERship Campaign last week); whether she's faced any opposition or the response has been entirely positive; and what NHS England and clinicians have said so far.

We also cover the new terminology for PCOS, now PMOS, and what this name change could hopefully mean for people living with it.
Stick around for some beautiful inspiration to carry you through the week.
☕ SUBSCRIBE for honest chats on women's health, feminist issues, sisterhood & smashing the patriarchy, one cuppa at a time.
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If you would like to, you can Buy us a coffee at Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/womenkindcollectivepodcast
💬 We love hearing from you, email us your ideas here — Jinty & Lou @ womenkindcollective@gmail.com
👀 Join us on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/womenkindcollective?igsh=ZmxmbGs2d3BjcXA1&utm_source=qr
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Nicky Denson Eliot
Petition: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/768726
Socials:
Instagram - @nickydensonelliot.
Substack: Nicky Denson-Elliot

☕ SUBSCRIBE for honest chats on women’s health, feminist issues, sisterhood & smashing the patriarchy, one cuppa at a time.
💛 Enjoying the podcast? Please share, leave us a review or comment!
If you would like to you can Buy us a coffee at Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/womenkindcollectivepodcast
💬 We love hearing from you, email us your ideas here Jinty & Lou @ womenkindcollective@gmail.com
👀 Join us on instagram here https://www.instagram.com/womenkindcollective?igsh=ZmxmbGs2d3BjcXA1&utm_source=qr
🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/womenkind-collective/id1557937820
🎧 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/42KniEtc5WGQhNvREsN1WP?si=e14a83c93a304bb3
And all your favourite Podcast Platforms
Thank you for Listening

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Link to Pre Order: Tackling Gender Bias in The Healthcare System. What Patient stories Teach Us About Implementing Systemic Change: https://www.waterstones.com/book/tackling-gender-bias-in-the-healthcare-system/louise-hockings-thompson/jinty-sheerin/9781805018810
The history of women's bodies is, in many ways, a history of what men decided women should and shouldn't know. From Aristotle's declaration that the female form was a "defective" version of the male, to Freud's wildly influential and wildly wrong theories about female psychology, medicine has long been shaped by shame and a striking resistance to progress.
Today, the censorship has simply migrated from the anatomy textbook to the algorithm: the word vagina can get your content suppressed, women's health ads get pulled without explanation, and gynaecological cancer campaigns get taken down.
This week we're joined by Clio Wood, women's health advocate, journalist, author of Get Your Mojo Back: Sex, Pleasure and Intimacy After Birth, and founder of wellbeing retreat company &Breathe together with Anna O'Sullivan,founder of FutureFemHealth, they co-founded CensHERship,an advocacy and research initiative tackling the censorship and bias affecting women's health online.
We talk about :
• The moment that pushed Clio to act, the compromises creators make (swapping "vagina" for a grapefruit emoji)
• Whether that reinforces the very shame they're fighting,
• The eye-opening data: 95% of the 150+ organisations they surveyed had experienced censorship in the last year.
• We also dig into the double standard between men's and women's health content,
• The real-world cost of suppressed information, self-censorship and body shame,
• Algorithms, and what's going on here
• Where CensHERship is actually seeing change.

Plus, Jinty's got a stack of fun fly facts that you can impress your friends with, and stick around till the end for some inspiration to carry you through the week.
☕ SUBSCRIBE for honest chats on women's health, feminist issues, sisterhood & smashing the patriarchy, one cuppa at a time.
💛 Enjoying the podcast? Please share, leave us a review or comment!
If you'd like to, you can buy us a coffee at Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/womenkindcollectivepodcast
💬 We love hearing from you — email your ideas to Jinty & Lou at womenkindcollective@gmail.com
👀 Join us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/womenkindcollective?igsh=ZmxmbGs2d3BjcXA1&utm_source=qr
🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/womenkind-collective/id1557937820
🎧 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/42KniEtc5WGQhNvREsN1WP?si=e14a83c93a304bb3
And all your favourite podcast platforms.
Thank you for listening.
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FURTHER INFORMATION:
Web: https://censhership.com/
https://andbreathewellbeing.com/censhership
Socials: Insta: @censhershipcampaignofficial
LinkedIn: @CensHERship
☕ SUBSCRIBE for honest chats on women’s health, feminist issues, sisterhood & smashing the patriarchy, one cuppa at a time.
💛 Enjoying the podcast? Please share, leave us a review or comment!
If you would like to you can Buy us a coffee at Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/womenkindcollectivepodcast
💬 We love hearing from you, email us your ideas here Jinty & Lou @ womenkindcollective@gmail.com
👀 Join us on instagram here https://www.instagram.com/womenkindcollective?igsh=ZmxmbGs2d3BjcXA1&utm_source=qr
🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/womenkind-collective/id1557937820
🎧 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/42KniEtc5WGQhNvREsN1WP?si=e14a83c93a304bb3
And all your favourite Podcast Platforms
Thank you for Listening

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Link to Pre Order: Tackling Gender Bias in The Healthcare System. What Patient stories Teach Us About Implementing Systemic Change: https://www.waterstones.com/book/tackling-gender-bias-in-the-healthcare-system/louise-hockings-thompson/jinty-sheerin/9781805018810

She was 16 years old, newly separated from her home country, when she received a diagnosis that would reshape everything she thought she knew about herself, her body, and her place in the world.
Natalia Shvarts was born with Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser Syndrome, MRKH, a rare condition affecting over 10,000 women in the UK, where the vagina and uterus are underdeveloped or absent.
It would take years, and a memoir, to find her way home to herself.
In this episode, we sit down with Natalia, solicitor, speaker, MRKH advocate, and author of I Don't Matter: In Search of Home, for an honest, unflinching conversation about what it means to be told, as a teenager, that your body is different, and to spend years rebuilding your identity from that moment on.
We explore the diagnosis itself, what Natalia was told at sixteen and how she made sense of it; what MRKH actually is and why it remains so widely undiagnosed; the profound question she found herself asking in those early years: "If real women bleed, what even was I?"; navigating vaginal dilation as a teenager, largely alone and without adequate support; where gender bias shows up in MRKH care and how the medical system fails women with the condition; the loneliness, secrecy and shame that surrounded her diagnosis and her family's reaction to it; entering the UK's first womb transplant trial and the moment she made the decision to withdraw; the link between her diagnosis, people pleasing, and finding herself in a relationship involving coercive control; her mental health reaching a crisis point and why she speaks about it publicly; and what reclaiming her identity and reaching acceptance has actually looked like in practice.

This episode also features our women's rights quiz and it makes for genuinely shocking listening.
And this week we have something quite special: a Jinty Joke to make you smile through the week.
Natalia's memoir is raw, necessary, and deeply human. This is the kind of conversation that reminds you why we spill the tea.

☕ SUBSCRIBE for honest chats on women's health, feminist issues, sisterhood & smashing the patriarchy, one cuppa at a time.
💛 Enjoying the podcast? Please share, leave us a review or comment — it helps more women find us!
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💬 Email us your ideas: womenkindcollective@gmail.com
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🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/womenkind-collective/id1557937820
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Thank you for listening.
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Further Information on MRKH:
Web: https://mrkhconnect.co.uk/
https://www.imperial.nhs.uk/mrkh/support

Books:
I Don’t Matter: In Search of Home. Natalia Shvarts. Independently Published. 2025.
Vagina Uncensored: A Memoir of Missing Parts. Ally Hensley. Whitefox Publishing. 2024

Socials:
Natalia Shvarts: @kiska115
MRKH Community: @mindovermrkh
Charity: @mrkhconnect
☕ SUBSCRIBE for honest chats on women’s health, feminist issues, sisterhood & smashing the patriarchy, one cuppa at a time.
💛 Enjoying the podcast? Please share, leave us a review or comment!
If you would like to you can Buy us a coffee at Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/womenkindcollectivepodcast
💬 We love hearing from you, email us your ideas here Jinty & Lou @ womenkindcollective@gmail.com
👀 Join us on instagram here https://www.instagram.com/womenkindcollective?igsh=ZmxmbGs2d3BjcXA1&utm_source=qr
🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/womenkind-collective/id1557937820
🎧 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/42KniEtc5WGQhNvREsN1WP?si=e14a83c93a304bb3
And all your favourite Podcast Platforms
Thank you for Listening

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Link to Pre Order: Tackling Gender Bias in The Healthcare System. What Patient stories Teach Us About Implementing Systemic Change: https://www.waterstones.com/book/tackling-gender-bias-in-the-healthcare-system/louise-hockings-thompson/jinty-sheerin/9781805018810

In this episode, we are joined by Fay Peace, a woman whose experience of navigating the healthcare system is both deeply personal and heartbreakingly familiar.
After visiting her GP in 2019 with symptoms she knew felt wrong, Fay spent nearly two years being dismissed, told it was probably the perimenopause, or perhaps a UTI before finally being diagnosed with stage 3 womb cancer in 2021.
Womb cancer, also known as uterine cancer, is the fourth most common cancer in women in the UK, with around 9,800 new cases diagnosed every year.
Incidence rates have risen by nearly 60% since the early 1990s. And yet it remains one of the least talked-about gynaecological cancers which is exactly why conversations like this one matter.
In this conversation, Fay takes us back to the very beginning: what her early symptoms were like, why they were so easy to explain away, and at what point she began to sense something serious was being missed.
She talks honestly about what it felt like to have her instincts dismissed, including the moment her surgeon told her it was stage 1 and "nothing to worry about" only for that to change.
She shares what it was really like to go through chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and brachytherapy, and what kept her going.
We list the main symptoms to look our for, the need for early detection diagnostics and the importance of primary care listening to a patients real concerns and symptoms.
Fay didn't stay silent. She channelled her experience into action, launching her campaign #CheckYouOut she’s on a mission to get the symptoms of all five gynaecological cancers (cervical, womb, ovarian, vaginal, and vulval) onto everyday product packaging. She's already secured a significant win, convincing Bodyform to redirect their QR code to The Eve Appeal and she's just getting started.

We also discover the surprisingly delightful origin of the word "berk," and close, as always, with something beautiful to carry you through the week. ☕
If you're experiencing symptoms you're worried about, please speak to your GP.
For more information on gynaecological cancers, visit The Eve Appeal at: https://eveappeal.org.uk/information-and-advice/gynaecological-cancers/ovarian-cancer/
You can folow Fay on social media https://www.instagram.com/cancercampaigner?igsh=aXVob3N2YXlzNWpo

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💛 Buy us a coffee at Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/womenkindcollectivepodcast
💬 Email us: womenkindcollective@gmail.com
👀 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/womenkindcollective?igsh=ZmxmbGs2d3BjcXA1&utm_source=qr
🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/womenkind-collective/id1557937820
🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/42KniEtc5WGQhNvREsN1WP?si=e14a83c93a304bb3
Available on all your favourite podcast platforms.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

☕ SUBSCRIBE for honest chats on women’s health, feminist issues, sisterhood & smashing the patriarchy, one cuppa at a time.
💛 Enjoying the podcast? Please share, leave us a review or comment!
If you would like to you can Buy us a coffee at Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/womenkindcollectivepodcast
💬 We love hearing from you, email us your ideas here Jinty & Lou @ womenkindcollective@gmail.com
👀 Join us on instagram here https://www.instagram.com/womenkindcollective?igsh=ZmxmbGs2d3BjcXA1&utm_source=qr
🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/womenkind-collective/id1557937820
🎧 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/42KniEtc5WGQhNvREsN1WP?si=e14a83c93a304bb3
And all your favourite Podcast Platforms
Thank you for Listening

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.