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.

How much input does an author have over the cover of the book these days?

I ask because I knew an author years ago and in the 1990s/2000s she regularly moaned about the awful covers that her books were given. I don't know if that is still the case, maybe it varies depending on the publisher or what the specific book deal is?

True, but I’d imagine she’d have veto rights against using ‘TERF’ colours if she’d objected to it.

I take your point that the cover design doesn’t necessarily indicate that this was her personal strategy, though.

That said, she did say that a fellow author (Johann Hari, that bastion of good judgement) suggested she approach Triggernometry and ask to be their guest, and she did say in that interview that she wanted to reach their audience.

Yes, an author should at least have a veto if they have a good reason to really hate the cover.

I don't think that the TRAs are going to like the book as suggested upthread. On Goodreads, currently, the written reviews are mostly positive and the book has a good score. However, there is also this review quoted below.

'This is a very white book written for white people, it's a decent start, but there's a lot missing. As an older (Gen X) nonbinary person, the conversation about trans and nonbinary people was about 80% right, but she dropped the ball suggesting TERF is a slur. It never has been, and will never become, a slur. Given the level of violence TERFS have and wish on trans and nonbinary people, the acronym will remain firmly in my lexicon.'

If Johann Hari has a bright idea, one should probably do a sense check.

But I think this is true - listening to TRAs in my social circle, they really don't believe they're in an ideological bubble. They think their position is the one that any moderately intelligent and reasonable person would reach, and anyone who disagrees is an ideologue detached from reality.

I hear them talking about Mumsnetters as a kind of uninformed and unthinking mass who are just following misinformation from the Murdoch press and have never met a trans person or heard a TRA argument.

You might guess from this that they've never been on FWR. They also can't explain all those of us who started out from a "be kind" position and became more critical.

I think that's definitely an element behind DFW saying "if only I go on a podcast, my analogies will convince people who've never thought about the issue."

I suppose you have to give her credit for not just being content to preach to the converted.

Just to confirm - I am agreeing with the poster who said the TRAs won't like the book. I ran out of time to edit my post to clarify my meaning.

'I suppose you have to give her credit for not just being content to preach to the converted.'
Yes, she had the hubris to give it a go on Triggernometry for sure!

Yes, I haven’t read the book, but from the Triggernometry interview, it certainly seems like the same old “guys, guys, stop fighting - why can’t we all just be kind?” messaging that ignores the key concerns of both sides. It suggests she doesn’t really understand the arguments but simply wants all the fighting to stop.

I get the impression that she perhaps sees herself as sitting somewhere above all the silly TERFs and TRAs fighting this out, and feels that being in neither camp somehow makes her best-placed to bang our heads together and bring about world peace.

Maybe this is what has happened to pandas?

Oh thanks for that, I'll enjoy listening. Maya, like Helen Joyce and Kathleen Stock, are so clear headed and logical, I always feel like it's a return to sanity when I hear them!😁

Surely the bus driver analogy can work whatever way you want it to. Let’s say in the coming few months we start seeing a lot more TW playing on men’s football teams. At first you may think that’s odd, they may look a little different, but as you see it more often it becomes normalised.

what i found incredibly frustrating was that DFW seemed to be confusing her arguments. She seemed to think that proving gender nonconformity in indigenous populations was accepted as completely commonplace was THE SAME THING as proving trans women ARE women.

It's not. Trans women can wear what they like and that can be accepted in society but they ARE NOT women.

And she went on about short hair, being 'masc'. Well, so what? It's not long hair that makes you a woman, just as it's not a uniform that makes you a bus driver.

If that really is the foundation of her argument, then someone like Helen Joyce or Maya Forstater would absolutely rip her to shreds, but she wouldn't have them on The Guilty Feminist.

KK and FF are fantastic and i really enjoy their interviews, but I felt aggrieved that in two hours, they didn't bring up the Edinburgh rape crisis CEO that The Guilty Feminist not only had on, but celebrated. That's surely a conversation DFW would not want to have!

I feel she would just have carried on in the same vein though, insisting that being wary of Mirdal just because he wore a sari was a Western framework or something, but it wasn't why he shouldn't have been CEO of Edinburgh RC - it's because he is a MAN, advocating to give MEN access to vulnerable, abused women against their wishes!!!

I can't face watching all of this - initially, I wasn't going to watch any of it

Does anyone know roughly where the conversation about Venezuela takes place? thank you

"And she went on about short hair, being 'masc'."

According to wiki although she was born in 1967 her family became Jehovah's Witnesses when she was a teenager, so maybe eighties fashion passed her by?

JW women quite often have shortish hair. I wouldn't say it's the majority style, and they tend not to be in sync with the latest fashion, but they're not Amish.

I stopped listening to the Guilty Feminist podcast years ago when DFW insisted TWAW. She said once that she has at least one trans identified male friend so it's very personal to her - she won't be swayed and goes through life with her confirmation bias filtering everything for her. Utterly infuriating how people still listen to her podcast, she's the ultimate guilty feminist.

I meant more that she might not be familiar with contemporary tv and music.

Or maybe fashion was different in Australia?

There was a time in about 1982 when it seemed that short layered hair was pretty much universal - partly influence of punk, partly influence of Princess of Wales.

I used to watch a lot of old Australian films, 70s and 80s vintage. My memory is a bit hazy, but I remember the fashions there always seemed to be about 10 to 15 years behind the rest of the world.

I suppose the equivalent would be Napoleon Dynamite. It came out in 2004, and has contemporary things like the internet and Backstreet Boys, but everyone looks more 80s or early 90s. But it was made in Idaho which is known for this time capsule effect, especially in the rural Mormon regions.

So that's a good point - a strict religious upbringing in Australia could lead to anybody feeling a bit out of time.

Agreed. While I thought KK kept his cool very well, I think it exposed that he is not on top of the subject matter. Very early on he could have asked what all her chat about gender non-conformity had to do with sex and sex based rights, but it was really late that he got that out. However all her answers were so rambling that that it may have been difficult for all to know what the the hell the conversation was actually about.

The clown bus driver idea sounds incredibly insulting to trans people tbh.

I got on a bus this evening. If the bus driver had been wearing a clown suit I would have assumed that they were a bus driver wearing a clown suit and that it was probably some kind of charity thing at their workplace. I wouldn't ever have thought 'being a professional clown is now the same as training as a bus driver'. Nor would I have thought 'it's really normal to wear huge shoes and a red nose to drive a public service vehicle' because it's really counterproductive and attention-seeking thing to do.

The obvious trans analogy would be perhaps a male bus driver dressed as a woman. I would have thought 'there's a male bus driver dressed as a woman'. I wouldn't associate it with something as bizarre or deliberately ridiculous as dressing like a clown. Even more ironically, most female bus drivers actually are dressed exactly like men, bevause there's only really one uniform. Surely she's thinking about the sexist idea that women couldn't be bus drivers, which possibly had more reason behind it prior to power steering, but which really suggests she does think women doing historically men's jobs is still so out there that we might genuinely be astonished by it.

None of this suggests she has much idea what feminism or trans politics might be about.

No. Fashion was not different in Australia at the time. Short layered hair was very much the norm there for both girls and women. And it still is not unusual at all.

I think you might find that Australian's have their own style. What you judge as being 'behind the rest of the world', is not really. It is usually a mixture of local trends with international influence, just like here in the UK.

I'm being slightly facetious. I would not say that Ireland has ever been at the cutting edge of anything!

The last 10min mainly

what i found incredibly frustrating was that DFW seemed to be confusing her arguments. She seemed to think that proving gender nonconformity in indigenous populations was accepted as completely commonplace was THE SAME THING as proving trans women ARE women.

There is also the question of whether what she presents are arguments at all. Presenting the fact that some communities of Aboriginal Australians had what is read by the modern liberal as categories of gender nonconformity proves absolutely nothing. She is actually promoting nothing more than the stock racist notion of the "noble savage", the idea that "primitive" peoples have inherent wisdom in their perspectives of the world, which are superior to the corrupt or corrupting notions instilled by our "civilisation". And DFW reinforces this with the proposition (well known to be historically false) that non-European peoples were accepting of difference until those terrible colonisers came along, and forced them to be mean to gender nonconforming individuals.

At least the latter bit has an aspect of an argument about it. But the idea of "indigenous people believe this so it must be good" has no substance whatsoever, to the point that it barely qualifies as an actual argument.

KK and FF are fantastic and i really enjoy their interviews, but I felt aggrieved that in two hours, they didn't bring up the Edinburgh rape crisis CEO that The Guilty Feminist not only had on, but celebrated. That's surely a conversation DFW would not want to have!

I only noticed far too late into the interview they were giving her all this time - twice the length of their usual shows with people who generally know what they’re talking about - to discuss each of the six ‘ideas’ in the book in turn, so she got to plug, plug, plug as they discussed each one and they couldn’t then edit it down. A hot mess all round, then, and grilling her about MW wouldn’t fit in with that structure. Wonder what possessed them to do it this way (well, apart from the fact we still all have our jaws on the floor days later)

I think much of the reason they let her just talk is the whole steel man strategy that KK encouraged- they didn’t need to grill her or make her squirm like a press interviewer would, as she exposed the glaring flaws in her own arguments merely by continuing to talk anyway.

I’m glad they were open to her perspective and gave her the space and time to just look like she did, as there can be no accusations that anyone twisted her words or that she was tricked or blindsided. It was a hugely charitable airing of her views, whereby she was free to push the direction in whatever way she chose frame her arguments in the best light. So I guess that was it..

It was interesting that, as a seasoned podcaster and comedian, she complained that doing interviews was different from writing the book as she didn’t have time to think about her arguments in the moment, especially given that she requested to be interviewed by them. This suggests she knew how she she was coming across and had some regret, and I think at that point, she would have been very happy for KK and FF to have wrapped things up (as she couldn’t bring it to a close without flouncing as it’s not her show).

I think their strategy of simply not wrapping it up and continuing to let her talk herself into the ground when she expressed frustration that she wasn’t coming across better was far more effective than grilling her about her past antics. It was the whole ‘more sunlight’ strategy, which, as we all know. can work incredibly well.

Also, they are running a business, and this video will obviously do really well as people on both sides of the debate will be talking about it, so the cross-pollination is good for them (as they still get paid whether people watch the video because they love it or hate it). So the more of a hot mess it is, the more people will talk about it.

Plus, they don’t want to put off other guests from the other side of the political spectrum who might want to approach them in the future by getting a reputation for aggressively blindsiding interviewees, especially when it wasn’t necessary to expose her hypocrisy or muddled thinking - she didn’t need their help with that.