Send In The Clowns

A critical response to Deborah Frances White’s foray into moral philosophy

On Wednesday, uber-libfem and host of The Guilty Feminist Podcast Deborah Frances White was a guest on Triggernometry, considered to be a contrarian, anti-woke podcast. (I’d be more inclined to describe it as woke-sceptic and, for the most part, classically liberal). Given DFW’s openly pro-woke stance and the fact that The Guilty Feminist had a “giggling over pornstar martinis” vibe rather than serious political discussion, this was the last platform I expected to see someone like her make an appearance on. Indeed, I scrolled past the teaser clip online, thinking: “That woman on Triggerpod looks weirdly like Deborah Frances White” before doing a double-take and scrolling back up.

The TL;DR summary of the 2 hour and 21 minute interview is that it has a lot of parallels with the 2018 car-crash Cathy Newman interview with Jordan Peterson. Even those who align - or align more than I do - with DFW can probably see she’s not sufficiently prepared for it (not that she shows any awareness). She exemplifies how out of practice a certain faction of the left are with genuinely constructive dialect. As the comments are already heaving with cutting jibes about her ratio of wisdom to confidence being wildly off, there’s little need for me to labour this point.

The overly-generous Catholic in me says there’s a valiancy in DFW going on a show where she is setting herself up for a lot of trolling from viewers. Yes, I know she has a - breathtakingly hypocritical - book to promote about the importance of having “difficult conversations”, and that her contacting the Trigger lads to ask to come on their show is 95% an “all publicity is good publicity” stunt. And yes, I know that, like Katherine Ryan and Ash Sarkar, she’s picked up that “no debate” is going out of a fashion in favour of “pretend to debate” or “pretend to care about debate” in elitist lefty media circuits. There is no naivety about motive here.

And to be really fair, there was one moment where she did make a decent point. When Kisin stated that the rise of the hyper-masculine right-wing overreach happening now is due to backlash against feminist overreach, she rebuked that that itself was a backlash to centuries of patriarchal overreach, something he could have conceded with more grace than he did. So on that basis, I’m with you Deborah. A broken watch is right once every 141 minutes.

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Another part of the interview I find weirdly laudable is the bit generating the most mockery. DFW - a resolutely inclusive feminist - effectively tries to make the case for trans women are women (TWAW) and why the rise in what she dubiously calls gender-non-conformity is a positive, progressive thing, by evoking an analogy about bus drivers dressed as clowns.

Yes, you read that correctly. DFW’s argument is as follows:

“What I’m doing is looking at how the brain works, and our brains are sort of a prediction machine, it’s the auto-complete on your phone really [...] And it’s going throughout the world looking for things that the brain wouldn’t expect them to be. So, if you got on a bus and the bus driver was dressed like a clown, you would double-take. There’s no reason to suspect that clown is going to hurt you or that there’s anything pejorative about the bus driver being dressed like a clown. [...] If you got on the bus and the bus driver was dressed like a bus driver, you probably wouldn’t notice the bus driver AT ALL [...] so, if 30% of bus drivers dressed like clowns for a year...you’d stop noticing.”

Believe it or not, I don’t think this is totally stupid in terms of methodology. It’s not a good argument - it’s hilariously dreadful and I’m going to explain why in a moment. But, fair play to her, DFW is trying to conjure a philosophical thought experiment. I studied enough philosophy at university to know that it’s very common for philosophers to summon up very strange, eccentric and sometimes funny analogies when trying to test reader’s minds. One of the most famous moral arguments by feminist philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson in favour of abortion as bodily autonomy, for instance, creates a situation where a person wakes up to find they are being used as a life support system for a violinist in a coma. Jonathan Haidt devised a test for socially liberal vs conservative values that revolves around a man having sex with a frozen supermarket chicken. Bus-driving clowns are no more or less out there.

Of course, a crucial difference here is that the first two examples were put forward by seasoned, well-read philosophy and sociology intellectuals, whereas DFW seems to be running before she can walk. See, part of coming up with a witty, wacky philosophical thought experiment is that you have to spend more than six seconds thinking it through, which she clearly hasn’t.

In essence, DFW seems to be making the argument that something, like clown bus drivers, is only threatening or perceived as immoral before its normalised. Konstantin Kisin pushed back that he disagreed it ever would become normal, that actually, he would keep noticing if 30% of bus drivers dressed as clowns for a year. Likewise, many women/people would insist that no, they would always notice a man in a women’s space regardless how regular an occurrence it became or lovely his lipstick application.

But for the sake of argument, even if DFW is correct that we collectively would stop noticing if enough bus drivers dressed as clowns - in the same way we’d become permissive to enough male people in feminine attire entering women’s facilities - that doesn’t mean the practice is good for society and therefore should be normalised in the first place. Before something abnormal or deviant or radical becomes commonplace, you should ponder the consequences of this. Ask who might it harm? Who or what does it help? Normalisation ≠ progress ≠ kinder, better society necessarily. There are plenty of things in modern society that aren’t good for us but that we’ve become used to - the level of hyper-sexualisation in advertising for instance, or our addiction to smartphones.

Indulging her idea on a literal level, there are many reasons why having a large minority of bus drivers dressed as clowns would be a terrible thing to normalise. For starters, anyone with a bad case of coulrophobia could no longer comfortably take the bus. Children especially, are more often afraid of clowns than charmed by them. Exclusionary. Also, it would promote a general sense of unprofessionalism in the public transport sector. Standards would slip. If you’re busy checking your clown make-up is nice in the rearview mirror, you’re not watching the road. Perhaps most dangerously, the enormous novelty shoes would be a health and safety hazard when it came to working the brake pedals.

So by the same token, the question to ask (and that many, many, many, many people did bother asking at great cost to themselves) is: Is normalising male people infiltrating women-only spaces regardless of circumstance beneficial to society? The answer, now enshrined by the Supreme Court, is no. It’s a proven threat to female safety and dignity and child safeguarding and has wreaked havoc in policy, causing deeply damaging confusion and ideological polarisation in institutions due to the free-for-all interpretation of ‘sex’ in the Equality Act . As bizarre an analogy as it may be, bus drivers adorning Krusty or Pennywise get-ups, if anything, would have fewer bad consequences by far than what we have demonstrably seen this past decade thanks to trans extremism and the posturing midwits who tried to normalise it.

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So that’s my logic 101 response to DFW’s attempt at thought experiment. It’s quite brief, I concede. I’m not doing a deep-dive into why trying to normalise breaking down safeguarding and privacy barriers between men and women to placate the feelings and unfalsifiable beliefs of a minority has been so damaging to us because I can’t be arsed anymore. Why the hell would I repeat the reasons YET AGAIN when it’s all that sane, rational women and men have articulated for the best part of ten years (twenty plus if you’re Julie Bindel).

It’s worth highlighting that one of the reasons DFW’s clown argument doesn’t get much light shone on it in the interview itself is because barely halfway through making it, she gets side-tracked talking about aboriginal 2-Spirit people and how they prove sex is a spectrum (debunked here), followed by an argument with Kisin about colonial genocide and his white privilege. This a feature of politically cosseted gender ideologues, once they put forward a clever-clever point only to be told it’s dumb-dumb, they panic and start firing off on all cylinders. They are allergic to specifics.

Moreover, we in the sanity sphere have heard all this 2-Spirit guff before a thousand times and we’re BORED WITLESS debunking it to people who have no intention of listening. By far, the most audacious thing about DFW and those in her echo chamber who have now taken it upon themselves to lecture the plebs and write books about how we all need to get out our echo chambers (lmfao), is that they sincerely belief their hot takes are original, rather than luxury belief pseudo-intellectualism confirmed nonsense circa 2019, if not before. They just weren’t paying attention because it wasn’t fashionable to do so.

In short, you’re behind the times, babe. Your side already lost the gender argument. Legally, it’s over. Finito. The Supreme Court ruled in our favour. Sex is not a spectrum. The end. I appreciate her interview might have been recorded prior to April 16th but, either way, us in the exiled feminist camp are moving on to new things, or focusing on picking up the pieces of our industries and livelihoods. If people like DFW want to catch-up, here’s a reading list to get started. One she might have wanted to consult before penning her own fallacious, patronising, narcissistic screed. (Obliterated brilliantly by Sarah Ditum here).

And on that point, isn’t it fascinating that Deborah’s first big olive branch extended from her echo chamber is to hoist herself onto a platform hosted by two men? I’m not getting at Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster here, I’m getting at her. Look at the strong-independent woman bravely going over to the dark side (!) where she can easily frame any ridicule heaped on her as proof of anti-feminist sentiment and the unwillingness of those on the side of patriarchy to be civil and open-minded. In essence, where she can martyr herself as a political voyeur and come out smelling of roses to her own echo chamber either way.

Why not start closer to home - your own podcast, for instance? It’s not like you haven’t had opportunities. Infamously, you were happy to platform now-disgraced former Rape Crisis Edinburgh CEO trans-identified male Mridul Wadhwa and let him preach to women that if after being raped they don’t want a male counsellor, they should reframe their trauma.

On the other hand, you declined Sall Grover, who is currently leading the case to reform the legal definition of sex with Australia’s Supreme Court, with potentially monumental consequences. Grover approached The Guilty Feminist to see if they’d have her on and received a smarmy, curt response informing her that no, unfortunately this was an inclusive podcast and no smelly, terfy girls allowed at the Cool Feminist’s table (note: the email wasn’t written by DFW but rather the podcast’s talent booker Rachel Kraftman). Nonetheless, this is very telling decision, not just due to its underlying discrimination against GC women, but the fact that in many ways Sall Grover was a perfect fit for The Guilty Feminist. She has so much to bring to the discussion about sexual harassment and misogyny for women in Hollywood, for instance, having been a former screenwriter who left L.A left due to the rampant sexism - The Guilty Feminist was, after all, a champion of the #MeToo movement, right?

And outside her ongoing lawsuit, Grover is an inspiring female entrepreneur. DFW and I daresay the entire Guilty Feminist team is far more in line with the outlook and interests of proud feminist Grover than the Trigger lads by a long shot. Yet because of a single, crucial ideological difference of opinion, they shunned her. If the podcast’s main representative is ready to have “difficult conversations”, how fascinating that instead of starting at home with fellow women, she skipped off to try and woo some edgy boys. If that’s not internalised sexism, I don’t know what is.

“I’m a feminist but...I’ve never platformed a woman I disagree with on my super-progressive, hyper-inclusive, pro-women podcast to see what I could learn from her.”

On that, you should feel damn guilty, Deborah.