An Evening with Deborah Frances-White and David Tennant (Part One)
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Hello and welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm Head of Programming, Conor Boyle. Today on the podcast, we have comedian and writer, Deborah Frances White. Best known as the host of the Guilty Feminist podcast, she joined us live in London to discuss the themes of her latest book, Six Conversations We're Scared to Have, alongside world-famous actor and, of course, former Doctor Who, David Tennant.

This is part one of the conversation, and if you want to hear the full thing right now, just go to intelligencesquared.com slash membership to sign up to become a member and get all our live recordings right away. Now, let's join our host, David Tennant, with more. Hello, everybody. Good evening. Good evening.

We decided we're going to do this before we do anything else, so we don't forget. We're raising money tonight for the Albert Kennedy Trust, AKT. There's a QR code on the leaflet that you've got on your seat. I think you can donate outside as well, is that right? Their mission is to ensure that every LGBTQ plus 16 to 25 year old facing homelessness or hostile living environment has a safe place to live.

which is a commendable cause of course, especially these days, as that particular environment gets made more difficult by certain people in our society. 24% of homeless people aged 16 to 25 identify as LGBTQ+, which is an extraordinary, horrifying statistic. So anything you can afford will be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time and attention. Deborah Frances White is a writer,

an actor, a comedian, a podcaster, an activist, and surprisingly a magician. She's not a magician. I was kidding about that bit. But if she decided to turn her hand to it, I suspect within two weeks she would be better than David Blaine. Deborah is someone who wears many hats, all of them fabulous.

But tonight, she is with us as the author of Six Conversations We Are Afraid to Have. It's a brilliant new book. It's timely, it's challenging, and it's probably essential for the time we live in and for the struggles that the world is facing right now. So perhaps she is a magician after all. Ladies and gentlemen, Deborah Frances White. Thank you.

Thank you, David. That was a lovely introduction. It was a delightful introduction. I did think when you said magician, I thought, oh my God, what have I done? Because I've always thought a feminist magician, what would be a great act is to just bring a man out, cut him in half, and then just leave him. Just go. So I thought that would be a good... No, actually, if you are a man, welcome. I love you all. I love most of you.

And look, here's a man. He's interviewing me. See? You're welcome. Very welcome. Love you. Deborah, there's a lot to talk about in this book. There's a lot to unpack. I thought maybe a good place to start was, have you explained your experience, which you write about brilliantly in the book, as a Jehovah's Witness, gave you an insight into Jehovah's

the way political discourse has gone lately and in particular the way certain people behave with each other within those kind of communities. Can you just sort of sketch out how those two things join up?

Yes. So when I was 14, my parents and my family became Jehovah's Witnesses. So we started studying. I was baptized at 16. So I was a minor. And that is not a good thing because your whole life is engulfed by it. There are like eight old men who live in Brooklyn who... That makes me feel like now that was Jehovah. LAUGHTER

Still annoyed. Still annoyed that I left. If there's a lightning bolt coming through, I just duck. Yeah, I was a minor when I got baptized. I did not know what I was doing. And the reason I call it a cult is it's a shame and shun religion. So if the elders who were the

in your congregation, all run by men. That's what I was saying before my glasses fell. Oh yes, if you're listening on a podcast, what Jehovah did was knock my glasses off the table, just to be clear. I just suddenly realized some people will be listening to this podcast and go, what did God do?

Let's wind them up. It was really bad. The whole curtain in the theatre just fell down and behind it was just... A huge lighting rig nearly took my head off. Behind it was just a man in a white robe who disappeared and...

So yeah, there's eight old men in Brooklyn who made all the decisions. They've moved upstate New York now. They sold that real estate in Brooklyn to Jared Kushner for 340 million. And I don't know what they've done with it, but I... So they made all the decisions, wrote them down in the Watchtower magazine, which you've probably had brought to your home.

and then the wisdom is dispensed around the world that local men in your congregation decide on everything and they police you and then you're all expected to police each other. When the wisdom comes from on high, if it's a new thought, it's presented as new light. So it was like yesterday we thought this Bible verse meant this, today we think it means this. And it's not we think it does mean this for now, it does mean this, that's what it means.

And if tomorrow it means something else, you're not allowed to say, hold on a minute, can I just think that through and debate it, discuss it, emotionally metabolize it? That's what we believe now. And if you were to say, I've got doubts about that, the elders would be rounding your home. And the elders are just guys.

They're just guys. They just got a window cleaning business in your local neighbourhood. They're not trained. And they would come round and say that you're having rebellious thoughts and if you continue with this, you'll be disciplined and if you don't accept that discipline or we think you're still rebellious, they disfellowship you. And then you were shunned from everybody that you know and love. And the problem is you can't have friends outside of it. All you people are worldly people.

So if I was seen having a coffee with you,

They'd say, well, you're having coffee with someone worldly and your worldly ways are going to rub off on me. So when I left, it was a painful thing to leave, but a really very, very releasing thing to leave. And I went to university and I debated with people and we had big arguments in the passionate, brilliant, really enjoyable political debates and discussions. And then I went about living my life. But it was a time when...

Feminism was not really happening in the public sphere. I'm sure there were brilliant feminist academics and thinkers and activists, but in the JCR in my university college, no one was talking about feminism. It was all girl power dating me beautifully. And so we had... I tell you what I want, I really, really want, and the answer was a zig-a-zig-a. LAUGHTER

Looking back, we could have at that point said, you know, pay equality, but we didn't. We said... Plumped for Zig-a-Zig-a. We went for Zig-a-Zig-a and it was an oblique one. And I don't think we ever met it, actually. I don't think we ever met that goal. It could have just been expressed better looking back. What to you is a Zig-a-Zig-a? More specifically. I'm glad you've asked. You're delving into chapter four. Yes.

I think it was just, it was at that time, girl power was about, it was a, it was all magic culture. It was like, to be equal to a man, you had to drink him under the table. You had to have, you had to want to shag as much as him in the same way. And you had to talk like him. And that was, it was really the culture of, can you keep up?

in the environment we've set. If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen. And I think what feminism says is, is this the best kitchen? Could we remodel this kitchen? And the girl pal says, oh, we can deal with it. We can do whatever, you know, we can...

Fuck as hard as you can in this kitchen. On top of the kitchen. On the kitchen floor, mate. Yeah. Don't you worry about that. So by the time the feminist movement started taking off again in a more public space, people started talking about it in pubs and dinner parties or bus stops, whatever. Yeah.

I was so raring to go. I was like, this is what I've been waiting for. Because I'd come out of a patriarchal religion into a space that had said, I remember trying to talk about feminism at uni and people said, you're trying to get what you've already got. You're trying to get extra. You're trying to get unfair leg up. I remember talking about gender studies and a friend of mine said, it's so boring when women do gender studies. And that was the era, guys. That was the era of young people. It was a difficult time. Does anyone else remember this era? I'm telling the truth, right? Yeah. Because young people don't believe it.

So I was raring to go. And I immediately thought, well, I'm not sure I'm good enough at this. I don't know if I know what I'm doing because lots of the feminists in the public sphere that I saw were very brilliant and so certain. And I was thinking, well, I'm a feminist, but I don't know if I'm doing this right. And so that's why I started The Guilty Feminist and then was enjoying it very much, but then started to realise there was an atmosphere that was mostly online, but of course bled offline very quickly and

That where someone would come into my DMs and say, how dare you have said this on the podcast? That was the first attempt at a conversation. It wasn't like, I really, I love your podcast. I think it's really interesting. And sometimes people would say that. But it was a strange number of people. Someone came into my DMs not long ago, and I wrote it in the book a year or so, maybe two years ago, and said something.

This was how they started. Fuck you if you say you're a feminist but you're not talking about this. And I wrote back and said, oh, well, here's the podcasts I've done on this and here's the posts I've made recently, probably been shadow banned, and I've screenshot them. And here's this big fundraiser I did and this is this and this and this. And then she went, oh, I'm really sorry. And I went, just out of interest, what made you open, given we're strangers? Sure. With fuck you. And she went, I don't know. She said, I can't, I don't know.

She said, "What made you think that was a good way to approach a stranger?" And I was asking in a nice way. I wasn't being pass-ag. I was genuinely saying, "I'm curious as to know."

And I said, I said, she said, I'm really sorry. And I said, no, no. I said, is the landscape that has taught you, you know, at school we had to learn to put the address up on a letter, you know, and we had to do. Sure. Dear. Sure. So and so and yours faithfully. I don't know if kids learn that anymore, but, you know, we had to learn that. They probably learn what the at symbol is for their email, don't they? Yeah, exactly. But we had to learn, you know, dear and yours faithfully for this and yours sincerely for that.

The landscape of the internet has taught us that fuck you is a perfectly... It's basically hello. Yeah. It's an acceptable greeting. Yeah. And then if you won't comply, you argue back, it's pylons, it's shame, it's shun. And I sort of think, I've been here before. Right.

And it does not lead to anything good because all you do is swallow your doubts until you cannot bear it anymore and you leave and you move over. And I just think essentially why I wrote this book is because I feel that progressive people have to upskill dramatically and quickly because we are losing. And I also feel...

How dare we be so unskilled given the stakes? How dare we start with fucking what we're thinking? I'm not blaming that person. I said to her, like, you know, this is just a, this has become a thing like, you know, but we need to start rethinking these things because our ideas are very precious. And I don't see Coca-Cola advertising by saying, fuck you if you drink Pepsi or

This is not persuasive. It's not attractive. And I think we need to be at least as interested as capitalists selling sugar water in what will attract and persuade. And what's happened? Is it an empathy deficit? Oh, yes. Sorry, David. Would you mind just pausing for the applause? That's going to happen a lot, and I just need you to know. Yes, I see that now. Now I understand. Yeah. It's not a sound I hear often, so it's...

I thought maybe, I thought maybe something. Could you give David a round of applause, please? Oh, yeah. Just pop out a bit of 022 solid flesh. It's worth waiting for, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.

Thought it was God sending something from the rafters again. I wasn't sure and yes, so it's so it's a there's an empathy deficit in those in those internet chat rooms Is that what it is? Well, what I'm arguing in the book is a lot of people now say the internet makes us less empathetic social media makes us less empathetic, but what I discovered in my Discoveries my noodling and my in my research work is

is I think something different's going on. Yes, go on. I think that every single day social media demands that we become more and more empathetic, but to fewer and fewer people. Right. And that's what a cult does. So when I was joining a cult, it was empathy for me, empathy for everyone. Once I was in and I couldn't get out without consequences, have to have empathy for these people, no matter what they do.

Anyone outside, no empathy at all. And certainly, you know, affective empathy. You can have cognitive empathy. I don't know if you know about this two different sorts of empathy, but cognitive empathy is I know how you got there. I can see, I can read a book about Stalin's life and go, ah, okay. It doesn't mean I'm crying for Stalin. Affective empathy is I feel what you feel. So if you knew Stalin or you, you know, I don't know, you watched a film about

you might feel something. Films and stories are brilliant for motivating effective empathy. But I think we're being invited to only have empathy for people in our... Well, I'm using the Stam instead of tribe. Yes, why is that? Well, because I think community doesn't do it because your community might be the people that you see, your local community, right?

There's a lot of colonial impositions to tribe, and it's just not a very evocative word. It was just a little bit of a... That was a one-person clap there. But it's...

There's a lot of colonial impositions. I just don't think it has the vim that we need from the word. So I had to spend a long time researching. And there's a German word, Stamm, which some German speakers might know. But you know how Germans use compound words? So your Stammtisch is your central perk, your Joey, Chanda, and so on. Your Stammbaum is your family tree.

But Stamm is the word for tribe in the Bible. But it makes up a lot of other interesting words like stand and institution. And, you know, there's a lot of evocative words that come out of it that I thought this is the word we need. And so for chosen family, I use the word Stammelie.

because it's more than chosen family, isn't it? You are like family, but you want to have another word. So a lot of LGBTQ people, I think, have a shtamili. A lot of neurodivergent people have a shtamili, but you might have a shtamili, an acting shtamili. And so I think it's... If you don't have a word, I think it's nice to borrow one that has a lot of history. It's very persuasive, because you're talking about we have to...

there is a drive to make your shtam be smaller and smaller and everyone who's anyone who's not in it is evil and wrong and must be must be in just like you're in the Jehovah's Witness you must turn your back on them and they must never come near you because they will infect you with their with their not quite pure the purity politics you have to be purer and purer and purer

Now to do that, I think we need more. We need empathy that looks out, don't we? We need the empathy for the people that are with us and are within our stand, but we need to be practicing it for outreach, don't we? When the world is vomiting forth daily shit,

and horror and shock. And it's because empathy, I think, requires calmness and clear sightedness and a bit of Zen. But it's very hard not to spend every day getting angrier and angrier and angrier. I've found that. Yeah. And yet anger, a bit of anger is a good engine, isn't it? But too much anger is an obstacle to outreach. So what's the...

How do we deprogram? We keep just enough anger to keep us on the simmer, but we deprogram from, I mean, how do we cut ourselves? I mean, it's overwhelming sometimes. No, it is. All the time, every day, from dawn till dusk. I hear that. I hear that. And a lot of people here, I imagine, will feel similarly, right?

I think it's not about rationing your anger. It's about what you use it for. If you feel a lot of anger, we can get into toxic positivity where it's like, you've got to feel joy or joy is an act of resistance or whatever. What if you don't? What does that mean? I think it's what you're using your anger for. Anger is an amazing motivator, but it cannot be the only tool in our box.

It is not a strategic tool to use all of the time. I feel like there are times when we are overwhelmed with anger and because of that, we must analyze what to do next. We must respond and not react. And the far right, especially the far right American Christian nationalists, in the last 13 years particularly,

have been in this country and in Europe, and they have become extremely, extremely strategic. Are they angry about LGBTQ people having rights? Yes. Are they angry about women and other people who can get pregnant accessing abortions? Yes. They're angry about all sorts of things. But what they have not shown us is their anger. They have come in with strategy and

with influence, with clever words, with story. And they have, you can see what they're doing in America. That is what they have been doing behind the scenes here. And we're starting to see that rise to the top now. We have to become strategic. Use your anger, not to just go, rah, rah, rah, rah, rah, rah, rah. You can use it, but you don't have to show it every day. You don't have to, it's not, it can't be the only tool in your box. Mm-hmm.

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And we have to find allyships where we might, we have to engage in that outreach, don't we? It's interesting, there's a great example you use in the book of, a section you call Standing on the Shoulders of Problematic Giants. And it's a great example you use about, well, as it happens, George Bernard Shaw. We're in the Shaw Theatre tonight. Yes.

And he was this extraordinary thinker, playwright, activist in the late 19th, early 20th century. He talked about gay rights at a time when nobody was doing that. He talked about animal rights at a time when nobody was doing that. Hugely progressive, hugely forward thinking, a champion for social mobility, also a bit of a Nazi. Yeah.

This is the twist. Yeah. Yeah, this is the twist. He wrote seminal playwrights, many more than any male playwright would now. You know, he wrote Pygmalion. He wrote, who am I thinking of? Man of Superman, he wrote. Well, I'm thinking of Ones with Female Leads.

Major Barbara. Major Barbara is what I was thinking of. The one that... Mrs. Warren's Profession. Exactly that one. Which is about... Which was arguing... They're doing in the West End right now? Arguing for sex worker rights. That's right, yeah. You know, he was... He pumped out plays with female leads. Art specific... What he was driving for...

was women's rights and women to have a more central place. He wrote political pamphlets and articles and books specifically to get women to understand that they deserve more rights than they had. But he got caught up in an early 20th century movement called eugenics.

And the people at the beginning of the eugenics movement, they were left-wing people because they progressive people thought science, science, not religion. And what they thought science was telling them with evolution was, ah, now we know that we can inherit traits, right?

And they didn't understand how it worked. They had it wrong. But essentially they thought, well, if we know asthma at that time killed people because we didn't have Ventolin. So they thought, well, if we know asthmatics, two asthmatics will have an asthmatic child, we should just tell asthmatics not to have children and we'll be done with asthma in a couple of generations. And they saw it as sort of human town planning. So, you know, at the beginning of COVID where they said, wash your hands to sing two happy birthdays.

And remember that just sort of petered out, they stopped saying it? They never said, sorry, we were wrong about that. That's not how it's transferred. It's transferred through droplets, through people talking to each other. Do you remember this? Yeah. So it turned out that coming home and singing, before we even really knew to wear masks, we were doing that before masks, coming home from your walk, where you'd stopped to have a chat to a friend, and right near your family member, your housemate, singing happy birthday to you.

The science was wrong. Science was wrong. We didn't know. We didn't know. We didn't know, right? Now, I'm not comparing eugenics to singing to your happy birthdays, but I am saying you didn't know and you went along with what they were telling you. And at the beginning...

It sounded like that made sense, but George Bernard Shaw was one of the biggest proponents, because of course you see the ethics mire of that. Well, an asthmatic might want to have a child, right? And of course it doesn't work like that. You can't, it doesn't work like that. Of course, people who are not asthmatic might have an asthmatic child. They thought it was very simple. So then who decides who should have children? Who decides what are the best genes? Who's in charge at this time? Always white people.

And although George Bernard Shaw, you know, he said lots of things about race, some of them very progressive, you know, some of them it's always hard to know what exactly people said as well. But he was a proper eugenicist in a way that other people woke up. He, the reason he's exceptional is he believed in eugenics after the Second World War when every other progressive person had gone, oh, fuck. Eek. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And yet we don't reject all of what he did and all of what he stood for. So this is the kind of conundrum, isn't it? And it's allowing each other to be fallible and to not necessarily accept ideas that are wrong. But this is the thing that we can struggle with as a... And this is the thing that... Correct me if you're wrong, but I think one of the points you're making is that the right wing are very...

at building their coalition. They'll just have you. They don't really care if it doesn't fit in with all their box ticks as long as the box gets ticked. 100%. If I turned up to Trump and said, I hate everything you stand for, I'm going to

I'm a massive feminist. Everything you've done is wrong, but I've got 100 million and I don't know what to do with it and I need to get rid of it now. Will you take it? He absolutely would. Yeah. Whereas we would say we can't take money from Elon Musk. Right. Even if he offered us 100 million to do, you know, whatever we wanted with, we'd go, that's dirty money. We can't touch it. So it's... And I'm not saying you should take money from Elon Musk, but he's not going to offer it, so it's not a problem. But the thing with George Bush, sure, that I found really interesting is...

I feel when we just go, no, no more. Don't look at him. Don't talk about him. Don't think about his memory. What we're doing is we're refusing to look in the mirror. I think we need to look at how brilliant many of his ideas were, how progressive he was, and then look at how... Like, he campaigned against fox hunting.

And yet really advocated for the first Hunger Games. What? How is that the same man? We need to look in the mirror and go, what is it that we might be doing now? What are future generations going to judge us for? And I go through various things in the book around where our devices are made and climate change and all sorts of things, but other things that you might not have thought about.

I think there was a time when there was a push to take the name off the George Bernard Shaw Theatre not far from here. And I said, I would rather keep it on because it's a theatre. If it's a eugenics lab, take it off. No, lots of eugenicists did have their names taken off buildings in 2020 and they should, of UCL. The RADA one, which was around the corner, they didn't take it off. And I think that's because it's on there because he was a dramatist.

And I think every year, instead of Take His Name Off, we should have what we call the Unsure Lecture. And we talk about all the unsure debate. We talk about what we're unsure about, but it's spelt like George Bernard Shaw. And we could have it here. We could have it in this space. Good idea. Where we have the Unsure Lecture, the unsure debate. And we talk about, we have a little piece about Shaw and his contemporaries. And we go, how could they have got this so wrong? If we would have been there, you're going to say you're going to be the only liberal not on their team? Think that through. Really? Yeah.

So what do we need to discuss? Yeah. I want to get onto some of the other conversations in the book as well, because there are six. The clue's in the title. Even within the book, you note that the chapter you write on gender nonconformity is going to be the most important.

eye-catching the most controversial the one that that that is going to attract the most heat and it feels like since you wrote it that's only got hotter um especially with the the recent verdict from the uk supreme court ruling that gender is defined by biology what that truly means and what where that will end who knows but we're right in the middle of it right now um and you write that

The conversations and the issues going on around trans rights are eerily similar to what happened around gay rights in the 80s when Clause 28 came out. It feels very similar. I wonder if, in a way, Clause 28 was a sort of watershed moment. It was kind of the apotheosis of prejudice. And looking at it objectively now, it was almost the moment where people started to recoil, actually. Started to wonder...

This has all gone a bit mad. And do you think there's a chance that this Supreme Court ruling might similarly be a watershed moment? I hope so. But my fear is that Section 28 was a backlash against an enormous movement of gay people who had fought for their rights and

My concern is the trans population is very small. So it will need a powerful coalition of influential people. There's always been enough influential gay people, gay actors, gay writers, who were able to speak or be seen or come out or whatever. And that was brave and took time and not everyone did come out right away and all of that. But I worry that the trans population is extremely small and...

You know when you look at the origins of how this happened most people don't know an out trans person Most people have never met an out trans person Most people have never knowingly gone to the loo with an trans person like in a public loo You know how how this has become a topic for so many column inches when there is

It's not like there's all these stories about things that have happened in public loos. I've never had a bad experience. I've never read a bad experience. I've never had anyone tell me a bad experience. Not saying there's never been any.

But I am saying that I've never heard... I don't think it's a problem that the Times needs to trouble itself with every day. Is it? Is it such a huge problem? And when they say, we're just asking questions. We're just asking questions. I don't know if you heard the witch trials of J.K. Rowling, if anyone listened to any of it. I did because I was writing this book. And J.K. Rowling kept saying, we're just asking questions, just asking questions and just asking questions. And my whole book is about we need to be able to ask questions.

But when you are asking the same question over and over, and the implication is that the answer is murky, and the answer is unpleasant, and the answer is danger, what you are doing is using the politics of civility to plant an idea. Because if I could ask a question, I could say, you know what, five years ago I heard about a taxi driver assaulting a woman. Just asking a question, should a woman ever be alone with a taxi driver? I'm just asking a question.

I heard about that. I heard about that. I heard about... I'm just asking a question. If I ask that question every single day in every single broadsheet, in every single tabloid in this country, if I ask that question constantly over and over and over and over again, are you safe with the taxi drivers? Are women safe with the taxi drivers? Maybe two women should get in a taxi. I don't think one would. Maybe you should have a man with you. I just don't think... Maybe all taxi drivers should be women. I just don't know if they're... But then...

What's going to happen every time I go to get in a taxi? What am I going to start thinking? What are you going to start thinking? Is this safe? And taxi drivers are going to start saying, I'm not going to hurt you, love. I'm not one of those taxi drivers. You can plant any idea, but I'll tell you this, you are much more likely to be assaulted by a male taxi driver than you are to be attacked by a trans woman. That is absolutely true.

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