Guilty Feminist on Triggernometry

[CornedBeef451]

I’m trying to listen to Deborah Frances White on Triggernometry but having to do it in very small increments for the sake of my blood pressure.

Konstantin is remaining incredibly calm, Deborah is losing her mind via passive aggression, and after only 15 mins I was shouting “but which ones have the babies Deborah?” at my phone.

Its worth a listen even if just for entertainment value. It’s quite long so I think it’ll take me a week to get through unless I start day drinking.

She was embarrassingly awful - six conversations we will find even more difficult to have if we mimic her approach.

She seemed to think the reason people don’t agree with her is because they don’t understand.

It reminds me of when transactivists pop over to MN and drop what they seem to think is a really insightful point that we simply haven’t thought of before, as if the problem was the analogy that was used or the way it had been explained to us previously, and if they could only find the right way to convey it, we would finally understand the obvious truth that men are women.

I've said this before (in connection with Rory Stewart) but it applies here.

There's a certain sort of bloke, it's always a bloke, who pops up occasionally in Question Time audiences. He interjects with a question like "why don't we just have a united Ireland?" and sits back with a smug smile as if he's the first person to think of it.

DFW strikes me as someone who rarely ventures outside her echo chamber, and seems to think the reason we disagree with her is that we've just never heard her really basic takes.

I watched all 2 hours + of it today. <polishes medal>

I can't think of any salient point she made - there just weren't any. Many many many words, but no points of any interest or sense.

She's very keen on advocating for mens rights though - good on her. Is this why she is "guilty"?

She said several times that she knows cults, she was raised in a cult, she's super wary of cults - and yet she has no understanding that the whole genderbollocks is 100% a cult.

I do feel bad for her when she realises ....

In one of the Jeeves stories, Bertie has a friend who has to be persuaded to knock off the alcohol because it's bad for his health.

He then tells Bertie, "I'm fine now, I've discovered this great new health drink called absinthe."

I have no idea why I just thought of that.

I started listening to this, thinking I could have it in the background while I work, but omg it is enfuriating. For someone who allegedly wants to discuss 'ideas' she does not really like it when someone else does not buy her 'ideas' as gospel, does she?

I thought I’d try and listen to it as an experiment in tolerance to see if I could listen without shouting. I didn’t last very long!

I wish the boys had asked her how open the indigenous groups she was talking about were about homosexuality. (I don’t actually know the answer but I’m guessing that they found cross-dressing more acceptable than being openly gay and would be interested to find out)

It made me laugh when she was trying to insist that all the word waffle about trans stuff covered new ideas that they’d never heard before. “Well, maybe the bit about adoption” said Konstantin. “That’s because it doesn’t make any sense” I shouted!

I did too!
The bit about adoption made zero sense

I don’t think the bit on adoption was supposed to have a direct relation to trans. Was it not just to show that different cultures can see things differently? And so by acknowledging that, you then go on to see gender as not just women and men? Bit of a leap but that’s what I thought she was trying to do with it.

Also being a stereotype from the left it’s also to show that certain cultures are better than ours? Of course the stereotype of Victorian orphans had some truth but she also ignored the fact that lots of children would have been raised well by people who weren’t their biological parents.

I've watched the whole thing so I claim my medal too! I literally had my head in my hands towards the end. The last 20 minutes -the 'Couples Therapy's bit - was seriously weird, along with arrogant, stupid, misguided, manipulative and highly inappropriate. It was really horrifying. I'm not always the biggest fan of KK but I think he deserved a sainthood for staying so calm and polite for nearly 2.5 hours

I need to watch some Helen Joyce interviews to bring myself back down to earth

The adoption argument is one that was discussed years ago on here and dispensed with. It hasn't cropped up recently (so far as I have seen) presumably because it is so bad. The arrogance of her, saying at 38 minutes into the interview: "the adoption argument, I'm the first one making it", as a reason why KK wouldn't have heard it before

The argument around adoption seems to be -

There are both biological and legal parents ergo there are biological and legal women.

I don't agree the same logic applies to being a woman/female but even if I did mainstream trans activism won't admit that men with an identity are male.

They won't even admit that women and 'legal' women are different so why the fuck are they even making this argument?

We accept anyone can take on a parent identity and be thought of as one. No-one questions it you call your Aunt who raised you 'Mum'. Therefore any man can take on a woman identity and we should just accept that without question.

Again the first issue with this is nobody is expected to pretend Lucy's aunt is literally the woman who birthed her. I doubt any social workers would be hounded out of their profession if the aunt was referred to as an aunt by them, despite Lucy choosing to call her mum.

The second issue is that 'parent' is both a noun and a verb. To parent someone or something is an action as well as the word for the two people who created you. This is commonly understood english language.

If we apply the same reasoning as to why adoptive parents are parents (they also parent in the verb sense) to trans then the argument being made is that there is such a thing as 'womaning'.

That it is also a verb, an action that can be done by anyone. It moves it from being the name, the noun, for adult human females into something that can be achieved by any man who just tries hard enough at 'womaning' or follows a prescriptive list of 'womaning' actions.

The notion of something, an action, called 'womaning' can only lead to very sexist, misogynistic stereotypes of all women because those are the only things a man could hope to emulate.

He can't do the physiological stuff like puberty, periods, pregnancy, menopause. He can't just be a woman as women just are. All he can do is paint his nails, wear a skirt, insist he now cries at romcoms and demand that everyone lies to his face.

Total arrogance. I would not expect her to have deigned to descend to Mumsnet however it’s still a bold claim to be the first one making any argument.

Thread about adoption - this is just one from five years ago.

The adoption argument is one that can only really be made by people who don't have adoption in their families. Being Irish, I have quite a lot in my family.

I could go on and on about this, but if DFW thinks that birth parent and adoptive parent are the same thing, and therefore there should be no distinction between biological sex and certificated sex... she might like to ask herself why so many adoptees seek out their birth parents.

These are not distinctions without a difference.

As an adopted person their false equivalence makes me particularly furious.

To be fair, DWF is adopted. It appears that this may be why she feels she is "uniquely" able to come up with the argument.

I've just got to the 'couple's therapy' part, and I agree it is horrifying. I particularly disliked when she tried to psychoanalise Konstantin because he did not enjoy being misrepresented 😱

She keeps pushing with the psychoanalysis after that - the whole thing about Francis’ traumatic family history in Venezuela which she pushed him to talk about and then said “ah, yes, that so interesting that that’s why you don’t like BLM” like she’d revealed some hidden truth was fucking painful to watch - it made her look like such an arsehole, but she just kept digging regardless.

I tried, I really tried, but, DFW is an insufferable bore and I had to turn it off as I may have died of 'cringe' if I had kept listening.

I'd never previously heard of DFW and thought that this was a toe-curlingly terrible car crash of an interview for her. @Triggerpod had the patience of saints.

I also found the psychoanalysis part particularly difficult to watch. For a nanosecond, DFW looked genuinely shocked when Francis described the trauma visited upon his family. She could have accepted the point and left it there but ploughed on regardless.

Interesting. Perhaps she feels not believing that man = woman somehow invalidates adoptive parents? I don't think that at all, I find it insulting but each to their own I guess.

'She keeps pushing with the psychoanalysis after that'

She did, and it was so vain and arrogant, and wasn't answering the question that was put to her. As far as I know, she is not a therapist. There is so much more to therapy than 'but how do you FEEL?' on a loop. I absolutely love watching Couples Therapy - the therapist, Orna, is incredibly skilled and nuanced and focused and endlessly compassionate. It's clear that DFW has only the most superficial understanding of what she's doing with those couples, and watching her clumsy manipulative attempts to recreate it with FF and KK was really unpleasant

DFW was the headline speaker at a work event I attended many years ago. Ironically it was a women’s event (in an industry where the U.K. gender pay gap report makes for a very sobering read every year) but I recall she spent a LOT of the session patronising us about how we needed to be more inclusive and welcoming. Plus, word salad galore. She had just recently embraced the TWAW ideology. I’d love to know how much she got paid for churning out her waffle. Anyway we all got gifted a copy of her book which I chucked in a bin on the way home. I hadn’t heard her name in years and I can’t believe she still has a platform and followers, I’ve never met anyone less worthy of the title feminist.

Is it only recently she’s embraced TWAW?

I seem to remember I tried to listen to her in about 2018 or 2019 and was put off by some nonsense - looking back, I guess it could have been some other nonsense, but I really thought it was because of gender woo and ‘just be kind’.

Happy to be corrected, though!