Woman's Hour - Nanogirl, Tory leadership, Kenya sex law, Emilie Pine

Episode Date: June 12, 2019

We look at the prospects for the two women in the race for the Conservative Party leadership. Is there a chance the UK may see its third female Prime Minister? We hear from Rachel Sylvester, the award winning journalist who has interviewed them both and from Jessica Elgot, chief political correspondent for the Guardian about the view from the parliamentary lobby as MPs make their minds up ahead of the first ballot on Thursday. You don’t need qualifications to teach your children about science. The science blogger Nanogirl, aka Dr Michelle Dickinson, who set up a nanomechanical testing lab in New Zealand has created a cookbook to teach children about cooking and science at the same time. Michelle talks about the significance of nanotechnology and easy ways for non-scientific parents to get their children into it.Emilie Pine, an associate professor at University College, Dublin has written her first non-academic book, Notes to Self, a collection of essays about what it is to be a woman. She talks to Jenni about the taboo subjects she explores including infertility, miscarriage, menstruation and the effects of alcoholism in a family.Kenya's High Court has ruled against campaigners seeking to overturn a law banning gay sex. Gay sex in Kenya is punishable by up to 14 years in prison, although it is not clear whether there have ever been any convictions. Two women talk about the impact of this ruling on them and other queer women in Kenya.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2. And of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme. Peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, Jenny Murray welcoming you to Wednesday's edition of the Woman's Hour podcast. Now, campaigners in Botswana have succeeded in changing the law banning same-sex relationships. A similar campaign in Kenya has failed. What does the decision mean for the LGBT community there? An award-winning memoir of startling intimacy, the Irish writer Emily Pine describes her stories as bleeding onto the page. And Nano Girl, also known as Dr Michelle Dickinson, and a book for parents who are not scientists to help their children experiment.

It's called The Kitchen Science Cookbook. Now today it's Boris Johnson and Sajid Javid who will be putting themselves forward as potential leaders of the Conservative Party. They're the last of the ten hopefuls to make their pitch. Only two of the ten are women, and they made their presentations yesterday. They're Andrea Leadsom and Esther McVeigh. Esther first with Piers Morgan. And that little exchange between Piers and Lorraine Kelly.

Oh, no, I have got the votes for today to hand my form in at 10am. And will you last till the next round? I don't know. I mean, I am the outsider, but I'm used to being an outsider. Being a Conservative on i am the outsider but i'm used to being an outsider being a conservative on mersey side i'm used to being an outsider so we have to see what happens esther thank you very much lorraine kelly's here do you remember esther from her gmtv days yeah yes i do okay coming up after half past so you got on with esther then lorraine i didn't remember i don't remember love i don't remember, love. I don't remember at all. I really don't. It was an awful long time ago. Oh, I've looked at the girl and she thinks me under.

Over the last three years, politics has failed dismally. It has failed to deliver on the biggest democratic decision in our history. Fulfilling that democratic decision is now urgent and vital. It cannot and will not be put off any longer. Leaving the EU on the 31st of October is, for me, a hard red line. Well, what chances do either of these two women have of becoming Britain's third female prime minister. Jessica Elgott is the chief political correspondent for The Guardian. Rachel Sylvester is a political columnist and interviewer for The Times. Rachel, why so few women coming forward?

Well, I think there definitely is sexism at Westminster. So I spoke to one MP who told me that one of the supporters of another candidate said, oh, we can't possibly have another woman because Theresa May made such a mess of it all. And, of course, Dominic Raab has talked about feminists as obnoxious bigots. And there was a rather depressing scenario a few months ago, well, a few weeks ago, actually, where everyone was discussing who would be the running mate, which female MP would be the running mate of various male candidates. So you heard Bamba was going to be Boris Johnson and Amber Rudd. So at least I'm pleased that two women are running and putting themselves forward. Why do you think so few, Jessica? Well, I think there are individual reasons why the sort of big beasts currently in the cabinet,

who are women, who might not have run. Amber Rudd has been leading the charge, the kind of pro-European, pro-compromise force within the cabinet who are women who might not have run. Amber Rudd has been leading the charge, the kind of pro-European, pro-compromise force within the cabinet. She would have been expected to run apart from probably because of that she'd get very little support within the party. I think it's more interesting why someone like Penny Morden didn't decide to run, someone who was the first female defence secretary, someone who was a leading light of the Vote Leave campaign, so you'd think would get some credibility from Brexiteers for that.

But yet she's decided to fall in behind Jeremy Hunt after a long kind of wobbly decision-making period where she clearly felt that she couldn't get enough support. And Liz Truss, as someone who's been putting herself around the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, really been on the drinks party circuit, championing ideas about free markets. She was one of the first to kind of throw her weight behind Boris Johnson. So these endorsements of women have been very valuable to some candidates. But it is a bit depressing that they've decided not to run themselves. Rachel, I know you interviewed Andrea Leadsom when she stood in 2016, rather famously,

it should be said. Your interview may have influenced the outcome when she talked about being a mother, which of course to be the may was not. What did you make of her at the time? She was rather brittle at that time. At one point in the interview, she burst into tears. And after the interview, when we published the story in the interview, she tweeted very late at night saying it was gutter journalism and appalling. And I think there was a lack of political wisdom that she had at that time. In fact, I found out afterwards that she'd been coached by an American debate prep coach in the build up to the European referendum debates who had said to her, talk about yourself as a mother to humanise the Brexit issue. So she was meant to say I'm

supporting Brexit as a mother. Giza Stewart, who was another of the Brexiteers was going to say I'm supporting Brexit as an immigrant. And there was an attempt to humanise this rather dry, Eurosceptic argument. But I think she had then not had the kind of political judgment to realise that this was a new context. So she was trying to appeal to the Tory family values activists, but she hadn't kind of twigged the emotional side that Teresa May had very sadly talked about her inability to have children but I think actually interestingly since then she's rather she's learned and she's she's had she's got a lot more experience she's been rather a good leader of the commons she she is thought Jessica to have been a strong performer as leader of the house how strong would you say her backup is?

In terms of the leadership, I think, you know, she's far behind a lot of the candidates who are billing themselves as the true Brexiteers, people like Boris Johnson or Dominic Raab. But I think that she's certainly one of the things that she can, you know, you can say about her in this leadership contest is she seems to be enjoying it more. She's addressed a sort of group of journalists over lunch yesterday and she said that her husband sends her out every day and says just have fun with it and he and she looks like she's she's having more fun and a more experienced performer and she's she's got a legacy as leader of the commons which is something that you can't really say for many members of this government she's managed to push through the restoration renewal renewal of the House of Commons.

She's overhauled bullying and harassment rules in the House of Commons. I mean, there's certainly, I think people would say there was more work to be done on that, but she's certainly made a start. And she's introduced proxy voting for women on maternity leave, MPs on maternity leave. So she's made material change in that role. And, you know, it's hard with Brexit sucking up so much of what's happening in cabinet, then there's few ministers around that table who can really be said to have that. Rachel, I know you interviewed Esther McVeigh earlier this year, she had left cabinet and she'd founded Ladies for Leave. what struck you most about the influence that she has she's a very tough cookie

um what was most fascinating to me was when she was talking about her childhood so she was taken into care as a baby and when she was four she went back to her natural parents having been fostered out with bernardo's in her earliest. And she said she still remembered the day she went home. That evening, she packed up a little doll's suitcase, walked down the front garden and went to the bus stop. And her dad, who she hadn't seen since she was born, came and got her and said, look, come on, come on, Esther, come home. We'll go to the bus tomorrow.

And she still remembers that moment. And I thought somebody who's been through that, she talks about blue collar conservatism, but she also exemplifies it really. She's had a, she had a very tough childhood. She talks about, you know, you can't take anything for granted. You can't, you know, you've got to work your way up. She talked about how, you know, Jacob Rees-Mogg might have had a nanny, but she had to peel potatoes and polish the shoes every Friday afternoon. So she is she is a kind of very different kind of conservative to some of the other public schoolboy candidates. Jessica, she does run a group championing blue collar conservatism. What do the other MPs who will be voting in tomorrow's ballot make of her?

I think it's interesting to see who, you know, some of her main endorsers are. One of them is Ben Bradley, who's the new Tory MP for Mansfield. That is, you know, a seat that the Tories won from Labour against the very much against the odds in 2017. A kind of working class leave voting constituency, which the Tories, you know, had been aiming to seize from Labour. And I think that, you know, there's something right about what Esther McVey

is prescribing for the country. She says she's very, very right wing on Brexit, but her economic policies are more to the left. She talks about investment in public services. She talks about public sector pay.

She even talks about improving relationships with the trade unions. And there is a kind of electoral sweet spot there of right wing on Brexit and left wing on economics, which feels like maybe she's getting, she's in touch a little bit more with where middle England are, rather than say, some candidates who are talking about tax cuts for people who are earning over £50,000 a year. Both women resigned from Cabinet over Theresa May's Brexit polity. So have Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab. How much will that help them, Rachel? I think it would be very hard for somebody who wasn't seen as a committed Brexiteer to win in a way. And I think

that is a bonus with the Tory grassroots, who are overwhelmingly in favour of a hard Brexit, actually. The problem then will be when it comes to winning in the country. I think it's something like two thirds of Tory activists want to leave with no deal, but less than a third of voters across the board do. So there's this mismatch. So in a way, their purity on Brexit, which led them to leave the cabinet, may help them get elected to the leadership, but may not help them longer term. Jessica, first ballot tomorrow, they need more than 16 votes each to go through. What will happen? I think if I was to put a bet on it,

I would guess that neither of them would make it through the next round, although both of them suggest that they have enough support to get through. But we are dealing with, I think one Tory advisor put it to me as the most duplicitous electorate in the country. A lot of people are promising their votes

to a lot of candidates. They may be promising their votes to more than one candidate. So we'll see. I think that because Tory candidates need to get at least 16 votes from their colleagues to go through, at the moment it doesn't look to me like either Andrea Leadsom or Esther McVey have that support.

It'll be interesting to see who they back once they're out. I think Jessica's probably right, but it's all quite unpredictable. Rachel Sylvester, Jessica Elgott, we'll find out tomorrow. Thank you both very much indeed for being with us this morning. Now, Dr. Michelle Dickinson is a nanotechnologist working with very small things. She founded something called Nano Girl. She's the author of a kind of recipe book for parents and children called The Kitchen Science Cookbook with instructions for making edible earthworms, candy crystals and unicorn noodles. First of all just tell us how do you make

an edible earthworm? Oh joyously that is how. So edible earthworms is a beautiful recipe that teaches you about how things go from solids and liquids and how things change phase and basically you stick some jelly and preferably some red jelly so strawberry or cherry you put a little bit of green food coloring in so they go brown you stick them into a straw you let them set overnight and then you squeeze them out like a big juicy spot and bendy straws are the best because then they get the little ridges on the neck where the earthworm would and it looks like an earthworm and the kids love it because they're running around pretending they're eating worms and they've learned about cross-linking and solidification and all the cool science stuff too. Now what does a nanotechnologist actually do?

Yeah, so I'm an engineer by training and as I've gone through my career, I've started to work on smaller and smaller things. So it's just a size scale. So if you have a metre and then a centimetre and then a millimetre, if you go all the way down, you have a nanometre. And if you look at the width of your hair right now, if you can see the width of your hair right now if you can see the width of your hair that's about 100 000 nanometers wide so i build things that are 100 000 times smaller than the width of your hair and where might we encounter them everywhere everywhere the thing with nanotechnology is it's invisible to your eyes um and so you can't see them but

they're in all of your smart devices they're on most of your surfaces are probably on your glass windows at home they're literally everywhere providing a function that you probably didn't even know existed and so they're making your smart devices smarter in technology a lot of windows now have a coating on that means that they just use the rain and the sun to keep them clean as opposed to you needing to clean them and they're in your sunscreen they're in your makeup they're literally everywhere. Now you didn't do well in science at school so how did you develop a really rather high-flying scientific career? Yeah it's weird so I wasn't very good at school and and I didn't realize at the time that it's because I'm a kinesthetic learner. That's a very

long word that nobody seems to explain to children. But I learn with my hands. And so I'm a good tinkerer. I'm a good builder of things. And so I was great at woodwork and shop and those subjects that tend not to be, you know, academically celebrated. But I wasn't very good at writing essays. And I wasn't very good at multiple choice questions. And so although I loved doing science and tinkering and building things at home, I didn't do very well in my exams at school. And I didn't think I was going to go very far in life because the academic system seems to celebrate if you can regurgitate something and pass an exam, then this is, you know, this is your career path. So I got two D's and an E at my A levels, which is not ideal. Didn't get into university and thought, well, that's the end of that then. And I don't have academic parents. So my parents didn't graduate high school. So there was no real guidance for me as to what to do next other than go work,

you know, in a job. My mum was a barmaid and I knew bar work was a was a career um and then somebody said to me do you know that there's this thing called clearing and I said what's clearing they said it's where riffraff like you might get into university and so luckily for me clearing existed and allowed somebody like me who wasn't academic in the traditional sense, but actually was a great engineer, to get into the University of Manchester, to do a degree in materials engineering, to thrive because it was so hands-on. And I built all of these amazing things.

And then to learn about the system and to learn about how to do exams and how to, you know, for me, I built a lot of 3D models at home to try and understand what the books were telling me. So what prompted the Kitchen Science Cookbook? So I've been an engineer now for 20 years. I've worked for some of the top companies in the world in Silicon Valley. I've worked, you know, Apple, Intel, Microsoft. I've been really living in the future around technology and every engineering team that I've led and been part of, I've been really living in the future around technology and every engineering team that I've led and been part of, I've been really frustrated about the lack of diversity. So that's lack of women, lack of people from lower socioeconomic, lack of people from ethnic diversity. And as a person who tends to be the minority in the room, I always find that sometimes I have a different perspective on things just because my life experience has become different. And without those perspectives, I don't feel that engineers

are building solutions that perhaps are the best for everybody rather than being the best for themselves in the room. And I thought, well, how do we get more diversity in these STEM fields, science, technology, engineering, and maths? And I was seeing a lot of intergenerational fear. So mothers who would relate science and maths to their school experience, because they might not have done it since, telling their daughters and their sons, oh, it's okay not to be good at maths because I wasn't good at it. And it's really hard. And once you say that to a child, you actually give them permission not to try. And so I was like, how do we get these parents especially these mothers to

realize that they're actually doing maths and science every single day and they're amazing at it they probably just don't realize that they're doing it now not all the recipes are edible although there is instant ice cream we've talked about the earthworms but there is an erupting volcano and what most amazed me was how to make a solar oven. How do you make a solar oven in which you can bake a biscuit? Totally. So you use the power of the sun. So you just use either an empty cereal box or an empty pizza box. You cut the top open and you line the inside with foil, which is reflective.

And then you put a little bit of cling film on the top so it acts a bit like a greenhouse and then you put your cookie dough in it and you leave it out in the sun and then I use a pencil or a chopstick to keep the top open and you basically heat up the inside of this pizza box and it cooks your cookie in your garden in your afternoon and teaches you all about solar power and rays and incorporates cooking and baking, things that many people are confident with in your garden. Maybe we will get some sun in this country in order to make the solar oven work, you never know. And there are lots of plastic straws and bags in the book and I wondered how are you dealing with the whole issue of single-use plastic things. I love this issue. I'm a materials engineer by training.

And so my whole degree initially was all about plastics or engineers, we call them polymers. And there's this whole, I'm going to schools right now and they're banning plastics and they're a plastic-free school. And I think we need to have a more mature conversation about plastics because plastics and material are incredible. They solve some problems that no other material can. And in some cases, they have a lower carbon footprint.

I think the challenge we have is we've been using plastics as disposable single use when they don't have to be. And so things like plastic straws and plastic cutlery, we throw away. But actually, it's really easy to keep these things, to rinse them. And I think what we need to do is rather than ban all of these things, is think about how we reuse them, how we take care of them. One of the things I've done in New Zealand is set up a thing called Sammy the Spoon, where you take a plastic yogurt spoon, and the children make these little, basically little sleeping bags for their spoon in the school. And they keep their plastic spoon all year. They give it a name, they draw a a face on it and we show that these single-use disposable plastic spoons actually can last a child a whole year and they can keep hold of them just one final question

obviously you now live in new zealand where you set up your nanotechnology lab in auckland which i understand is now run by a former student. What should parents be thinking about when it comes to science, even for the very, very young? So curiosity and discovery, people think that science and maths is all about knowing the right answer. And it's not. Science is all about coming up with a guess or a theory or a hypothesis and then trying something to see whether or not you're a little bit closer to the answer. And I think that parents need to just let go of their fear of failing and just try some stuff and it might not work. And I think success is a terrible

teacher because we tend to learn from our mistakes because we try them again and we try them differently. And so if we can remove the fear of failure and try new things I think it's great for parents. Dr Michelle Dickinson thank you very much indeed for being with us. Now still to come in today's program as Botswana relaxes its laws on same-sex relationships Kenya does not. What impact does it have there now? Campaigners have failed to change the law and the serial the third episode of a woman on the Edge of Time. Now, you may have missed interesting items earlier in the week. Aaron Dutty-Roy on her book of essays

and Jack Munro cooking with ingredients from tins. If you missed the live programme, you can catch up by downloading the BBC Sounds app. Emily Pine begins her memoir, Notes to Self, with an extraordinary story about the demands made on her and her sister when her father, another writer, long-term alcoholic who separated from their mother when she was a child and had moved to Corfu, needed to be rescued back to Ireland when he became desperately ill. She goes on to describe what it was like to be the child of separated parents in Ireland when divorce became desperately ill. She goes on to describe what it was like to be the child of separated parents in Ireland when divorce was virtually impossible, a teenager where the title wild child is barely adequate, and her attempts to become a mother. She describes the memoir as bleeding onto the page. What prompted such a frank series of essays? For me, it felt like there was a

volcanic pressure inside. And I sometimes describe the book as being like lava, revealing the interior, all the things that we know we shouldn't say out loud, that we think about at four o'clock in the morning. I say we, I mean, I, obviously. But I just needed to get them out. And really, the turning point for me was my dad. My dad had been an alcoholic all my life. And in 2013, he went into liver failure and I knew it would be coming. You know, I'd known for years and it was still this appalling shock and it was terrible. And we nursed him through it. And the happy ending is that he's still with us. But even after that, I had this year in and out of hospital,

and though we had a happy ending, I had all of these unanswered emotions, and the only way I knew how to deal with them was to write them down. What were those unanswered emotions? Because he was living in Corfu, he's a quite well-known writer. You and your sister had a terrible job to look after him. Neither of us speak Greek, for a start. We were in a Greek hospital at the height of the austerity years. So the hospital was chaotic.

It was, I mean, the nurses had no plastic gloves. There were no paper products. There were no doctors in the hospital after two o'clock in the afternoon. It was extraordinary. So there were all these kind of emotions where you're making these big medical decisions that you feel completely unprepared for, and where you become the parent, in a sense, to the parent who is now the patient, and he was looking at both of us to try and save him. So there's all these conflicted emotions about how to play that role. And anybody who has anyone with an addiction issue in their family knows that to love an

addict is to both love them and to hate the illness. And you try to separate it out. You try to think, OK, the illness is the thing that I dislike and I still love the person, but it's a very different difficult negotiation to to manage you you write about the separation of your parents when you were very young only five and I think your sister was a baby was a baby how did people around you react to a family being split in Ireland at that time? Well, it was really unusual. People just stayed together. Divorce was not only illegal but unconstitutional.

It just wasn't a possibility. And so in my primary school, there was only one other child I knew who had separated parents in 1982. And, you know, I mean, if the word alcoholic is tab taboo the word divorced was really taboo and my mother tells a story or told me a story recently about a friend of theirs who got down on his knees in public and begged them to stay together not to separate my teachers thought it was kind of slightly strange I myself and my sister would be given two school reports, one for each parent at the end of the term or the year.

When you're that age, when you're seven, you don't understand shame. I mean, you couldn't name it. But you know the feeling. You know that something is different. And different is not good when you're younger and live in a really small society where everyone is kind of watching everyone else. And if it was difficult for me, it was really difficult for my mum. and live in a really small society where everyone is kind of watching everyone else.

And if it was difficult for me, it was really difficult for my mum. You know, she suddenly had two kids under the age of six. She had an income. She was lucky that she had a career of her own. But to be a single parent at 32 to these two kids, I just really feel for her. It took 15 years for them to divorce. They're still not divorced. They're still not divorced. They're still not divorced. So they never actually applied for divorce and so they are technically still married and amusingly because they're such oddballs they will text me every so often every year in November and say oh it's our wedding anniversary today. I mean they didn't

speak for 31 years but they will still mark their wedding anniversary today. I mean, they didn't speak for 31 years, but they will still mark their wedding anniversary. And they do speak to each other now. They do now. They do now. You write very openly about your teenage years. And why did you go a little bit off the tracks? I was, again, these are words that I wouldn't have had at the time but I was depressed and lonely and I think of them as the lost years and I knew what the rules were

and I knew that the rules were there to keep you safe I didn't want to be safe I didn't really want to make it through I I think, looking back. I was very, very lonely. And so I was seeking out people who would make me feel less lonely. Unfortunately, I was 14, 15, 16, and spending time with people who were in their late 30s, who were DJs, and I thought it was really cool. I mean, you know, I have to say, I went to a lot of nightclubs

and did a lot of really destructive things. I danced with my friends, you know, on nightclub dance floors. I had a lot of fun. But at the same time as I was having fun, I was deliberately seeking out some kind of confrontation with something difficult that would tell me that I was alive in this really strange way. There's a really interesting essay which I was quite surprised to find you've been so open about. It's about dealing with menstruation. Why was it important for you to include that? Well, in writing this book, I thought, okay, I've got to confront the things I'm afraid of and name them and use words for them rather than just let them be these formless things and anxieties that float around. And it sounds really strange now, but I was really afraid of saying the word period.

I always had been. And so I thought, right, OK, if I write about it, I'll put the word on the page and then I'll have to say it out loud. I actually did a reading in a bookshop in Edinburgh and the owner of the bookshop got everyone in the room to chant period with me. And I was cringing at the beginning. And then by the end, I thought, right, well, that's it. I can say the word period. I can say the word menstruation. It's fine. On the radio. And so for me, it was about partly about that that articulation of women's bodies the ways in which women are so often silenced in public discourse the way that we go through something every month or now in my case going through perimenopause I don't really go through it every month and we hide that and I think wow if you if you pulled a muscle in your leg and we're having physio you'd talk about it but this other thing that we go through that is painful and difficult and sometimes

creates lots of depression and so on we just hide away and part of it was also that I wanted to at this point in my life after years of trying and failing to have children I needed to get back in touch with my own body and to have a sense of what it could do and that it had its own purpose, it had its own rhythm. How have you become content, which you do say in the book that you have, as a child-free woman? It took a really long time.

There are days I still grieve for what I think of as my life as this alternate life I would have had as a mother. But I also, one I didn't get to go to the place that I wanted, but I am somewhere else instead. And I don't want to be so caught up in my sense of loss that I don't recognize what I do have. And I get to be happy. And one of the things I decided when I was writing this book was that I would write about all the unhappiness, but also I would write myself a happy ending. Because we get sometimes to choose our own narrative and to put a shape on it. And

when I was trying to have kids, and I say I, but obviously it was myself and my partner, I kept thinking, this is not meant to be my story. I remember, especially after a miscarriage, just sitting there thinking, this is not the way the story is meant to go. I'm meant to have a normal story, what I think of as a normal story. And now I think, oh, I do have a normal story because there are so many of us. So instead of seeing ourselves or myself as an aberration, instead to think, oh, this is fantastic. This is the life that I have. This is the life I get to live. I was talking to Emily Pine and her award-winning memoir is called Notes to Self. Now, we learned last night that Botswana has liberalized its laws on relationships between people of the same sex. The judge in the case said sexual orientation is not a fashion statement, it's an important attribute of one's

personality. A similar campaign in Kenya has failed to achieve the same results and it remains illegal there. Anal sex is also illegal as are sex toys. Well, what impact is it having? Aida Holinambi is a reporter and producer for the Afro Queer podcast, and she joins us from Nairobi. Aida, what does the decision mean for the LGBT community in Kenya? Well, the ruling for Botswana was incredibly encouraging for us. We have had a setback on May 24th, where we now have to go to a new stage, which is appeals. This wasn't unanticipated. So we are gearing up to go back to the courts. This type of overhauling of penal code probably will end up happening at the highest level, at the Supreme Court. So we have this amazing ruling that's happened in Botswana.

And that's something that I think all activists on the ground around the continent are taking with them as a form of encouragement. There's been a campaign, Aida, which has brought the subject into the public eye. How much support among the public has there been for the changes that you want made? I think that, you know, the public, probably more in urban areas, people are a little bit more open, people who have maybe had more of these public conversations around sexuality. But Kenya is, generally speaking, a conservative country. And these types of conversations aren't really discussed publicly, except for by politicians who tend to be using them as talking points or using it to sort of get a quick win in the public domain, a way of looking like you're doing something without actually doing something.

So I think the Kenyan public hasn't really been vocal in support or even lack of support. It's not something that has been a large conversation here. How safe has it been to be a vocal campaigner? I think that the safety of people who campaign depends on what your medium is. We at Afro Queer Podcast, we report and produce stories and we do this for audio. And in many ways, I think there is a security that comes with not necessarily having your face out there. But there are people who who have been in court every day and all LGBT organizations on the ground have had to sort of have security plans in place and really think through what the extra degree of vulnerability and exposure have been.

But we've been working with human rights organizations to make sure that activists have been safe. But of course, a large degree of visibility does also lead to repercussions. And the more visible and vocal the LGBT community is, the larger the backlash. So there have been greater harassment for people. And there have been consequences, I think. We know there's been what's known that awful term correctional rape in South Africa. How much of a risk has that been in Kenya? I think the degree of a risk towards something like correctional rape really depends on the families that people come from. It's a phenomenon that has affected,

you know, lesbian or queer women here on the ground. But it also, it really depends on the family background and the degree to which, you know, something like having a sexuality that is not normative or is not mainstream. How much of that is a is a shame, I guess, or a source of embarrassment, embarrassment to the families on what power they have to do something about that. You know, I think a lot of young women will find themselves leaving maybe their home area or disconnecting from family, breaking family ties, just so that they can, I think, have the security and forming new communities, new queer communities and in cities and away from their places of birth. What impact does the sex toy law and the idea that sex might be fun have in Kenya? Is anyone beginning to accept that that might be a possibility? Well, it's, you know, the funness of sex is not something that is discussed. A lot of these laws, actually, a lot of these laws that are legislating

against behavior between two consenting adults in bedrooms are really actually quite hard to enforce. So, you know, something like the illegality of sex toys is something that, you know, I don't, I'm not sure has been enforced in a way that impacts those who, you know, probably due to, let's just say, class privilege, don't have that much interaction with the police, and people don't know what they keep in their homes. But what these laws do is they intimidate, and that it means that, you know, if a law like the sex toy legislation or just around, you know, same sex intimacy, it means that the police can harass gender nonconforming people. They can, you know, put fear and mean that people aren't living out loud, that people are living inside of their closets. But it can't actually stop people from doing what consenting adults are going to do.

That's sort of the great irony of these laws, is that I think people think that they'll impede same-sex behavior, but it won't. So what is your next step in Kenya? So the next step for the country is going into appeals. It was anticipated that even if the activists, even if we had won, that the opposition would have appealed this ruling and we'd be back in court. So we knew that this wasn't going to be over. We also know that a lot of change around the world, if you take somewhere like the United States, I was studying in grad school there in 2008 when California ruled against Proposition 8, which was a proposition to allow for same-sex marriage. And yet, not very long after that, with more and more hurdles being

overcome, the country was able to get to a place with equal rights for LGBT people. So just like that, we anticipate here going here, not going back to the drawing board, but going to the next step, going to the Court of Appeals and eventually taking this to the highest level, to the Supreme Court. I was talking to Aida Holly Nambi from Nairobi. Now, lots of you got in touch about the Prime Ministerial, or shall I say Conservative leadership candidates, McVeigh and Leadsom. Akerno said on tweet, not one of these stories will improve the lives of ordinary women

and we shouldn't forget that. Bev said, Esther or Andrea would be a better PM. Bianca said, I'm a strong feminist, but that does not mean I would support a woman just because she's a woman. Both the women running for the Tory leadership, Andrea Leadsom and Esther McVeigh, would, in my opinion, be terrible choices as British PM. I should add that I voted Remain in the 2016 referendum, which may be a factor in my assessment, but I don't think it completely nullifies my view.

Then on the Nano Girl and the experiments in the kitchen. Jonathan Morse said, great thing about disposable plastic things is we can dispose of them, not carry the mucky item around until we go home, wash it, dry it, then store it, clean for reuse in your work stuff. We stretch, said my kid, saw Dr Dickinson at the Hay Festival, and my daughter is now obsessed with her kitchen science book. It's brilliant. Wilma said brilliant stuff from Michelle Dickinson on how never to grow up. That's basically STEM, right? And then Tabzar said, Michelle Dickinson, I totally agree with all you say.

I have two boys and was told at school I was rubbish at maths and my O-level physics teacher told us girls can't do science. And then responses to Emily Pine. Mary McCarthy said, interesting interview today with Emily Pine, very wise words indeed on coming to terms with not having children and reflections on growing up with separated parents in an island where this was rare. Now, tomorrow we'll be discussing Killing Eve, which of course started on Saturday night, and we'll be asking why so many films, novels and television programmes

seem to centre on obsessive relationships between women. We'll also discuss what's behind a renewed interest in the 20th century political thinker and refugee from Nazi Germany, Hannah Arendt. And we've an appeal for you too. We're planning a series on abortion and we would really love to hear from you. If you had an abortion, why did you have it? What did you think about it then? And what do you think about it now? You can get in touch with it, of course, on the website. Join me tomorrow, if you can, live at 2 minutes past 10.

Until then, bye-bye. I'm Sarah Treleaven, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started, like, warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con,

Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.