"The Guilty Feminist": Transgender Rights: The Conversation We Should Be Having!

0:00This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

0:26I wanted to restart the conversation about trans rights because at the moment there is such a fear-mongering that trans people are somehow predatorial. Yes. Sometimes I feel for people and they're like, well, I don't know what to say or how to, you know. Or I'm not going to get it right. Yes, so I won't say anything at all, which is really sad. Well, what I'm trying to do is reawaken critical thinking, debate, discussion, because when I was 14, I joined a religious cult. And if we had doubts, they said that was Satan getting in your head. Critical thinking to them was arguing with the devil. It's such a hard thing to wake up and get out of a cult.

1:04To de-brainwash yourself takes a long, long time now. It's like feminism. We all police each other. I thought, this is happening to me again. I've been out of this for years and this is happening to me again. What you're really asking people to do is think critically. Don't get your ideas from out there. Come up with your own ideas. These conversations are dividing us and I think we need to build bridges wherever we can and stop burning the ones we've got. Thank you for bringing up difficult conversations and doing it in a way that doesn't shut people down. Today I'm talking to Deborah Francis White and she has written this brilliant book, Six Conversations We're Scared to Have.

1:43So please can you like and subscribe? So basically that just means clicking the thumbs up so that you've said that you like it. And if you subscribe, just to let you know, subscribing doesn't cost you a penny. It just means that you get the episodes first, which is great. um what's quite funny deborah is i feel like we've done half the podcast before the podcast started there was no small talk no small talk not a not a murmur i bet you're not really a small talk person i i don't love how far have you come i'm like why do you care let's get into it the world's on fire let's talk about something real yeah or something about you as a human being or me as a human being or what's happening in the world i'm no one cares how far you've come I was it would be quite funny if I went but how far have you come um Deborah I would like to talk um because I I'm fascinated in how you became you and I feel like can you well could you tell me a little bit about your childhood before you were 14 um and and what that was like yes what you're asking is how far have I come yeah emotionally emotionally how far have I come emotionally which is a more interesting question um so I was born in Australia adopted immediately um I was 10 days alone in the hospital and uh at that time I didn't have a carer I just whatever nurse was on shift can I quickly ask you something yeah I'm interested that you've pointed that out because when you found that out yes did it shape something in you do you think?

3:25I think so yes but I actually also have looked into the neuroscience of it and every baby that doesn't have a main carer from the beginning and and there is also something about you're expecting to be cared for by the person whose voice you've been hearing and heartbeat you've been hearing and all of that but if you don't have a sort of main carer even if it's not that person because of course you know things terrible things happen from the beginning it matters the first week is more important than the first month the first day is more important the first week and the first hour is more important the first day so it's it's that you know being held being seen being hearing a voice so um I remember I once worked with a very insightful Lebanese film director who said to me how old were you when you were adopted and I said how did you know I was adopted he just said how old and I said 10 days and he said and where were you for that 10 days and i said just in the hospital alone with whoever nurse was on shift feeding me shifts and he went that is why you like attention and that is why you like food rude but probably accurate um and because i think if as a baby if you you you know most babies have uh a mother fussing over them going and eye to eye yeah and trying to kind of get them to latch and they won't latch.

4:50But if you're lying there thinking, where's the milk? When the milk comes, you drink all the milk and maybe you have to do a bit of jazz hands to get the milk. And I think, you know, when you get home with a family, you drink, you know, when now you're being offered more milk, you always drink all the milk because you think, well, we don't know where the next lot of milk is coming from. That's the first thing I learned outside the womb. So the first thing you're learning outside the womb is how do I survive out here? And so all adopted children, especially in those kinds of circumstances, go into fight or flight.

5:18and um the problem with going into fight or flight is that babies especially newborns are notoriously poor at both fighting and fleeing due to the no no no great strength in the arms or the legs at that point so therefore you're just in kind of panic um and i think it took me many years to a realize that it affected me and be to start to calm that nervous system down and not be in fight or flight all the time I think also you know when a child doesn't get care and attention when it's born from maybe a particular person or somebody they can it's that failure to thrive thing where you disassociate a little bit you know you're trying to get attention then you give up yes possibly and I think maybe because I was only 10 days and then my parents gave me lots for tension i have more of a perform perform and be available be um be somebody who is useful to other people right always provide a service and i think probably although my parents never made me feel like i had to do that they really didn't they treated me just like my siblings my siblings were both biologically theirs they i will give them that they never did but uh other things developed in my life that I think harked back to my family joined a religious cult when I was in my teens and it was a shaming and shunning cult which is why I've written this book six conversations we're scared to have which because I think we're currently in a shaming and shunning environment I think that's what council culture is and it's not simple but it needs to be discussed I'm not like oh down with that sort of thing I've benefited massively from the movement personally and yet I think it calls for a big deep interesting conversation and I think the reason I know this on a gut level is when I was 14 I joined a religious cult when I was in my mid-20s I left that cult and because it's a shaming cult and a shunning cult I was isolated and I think for about 10 years from you know some people who really matter to me probably mirroring the 10 days I was left alone in the in the cot right and uh I think that shaped me in a way that meant I'm somebody who's always working for your affection or just I I got to the point where I realized I had a bit of it you know when you have one of those therapy breakthroughs um i went to canada to help out a young man who was trying to get out of the show of his witnesses without being that was the group i was in um without being formally shunned but formally disfellowshipped if you're not formally disfellowshipped it's more like a soft shun there it is effectively a soft exit it's less brutal yeah people can shoot they're allowed to talk to you well they tend not to but it's not as hard line right so there's more gray areas and I went out to help him get out and my friends were like what are you doing going to Vancouver to help a 23 year old man up what you don't know this man but it was a weird call it was like I was going to help my younger self yes you're going to rescue yourself all over again and I ended up locked in the back room of the kingdom hall the kingdom hall is the like the church being interrogated by these elders jehovah's witness elders who knew i was not a jehovah's witness although i was using all the right language um they could just tell because they're men and i was looking them in the eye and i wasn't being apologetic i wasn't being in subjection and they knew um and they said we need to do a background check on you and they just locked me i didn't even know their names they hadn't introduced themselves they didn't hadn't told me they were elders i knew they were and I just thought this is illegal and I just said you just shouted at them you have to let me out you you unlock the door this is illegal what you're doing and then they kind of went like they'd never been spoken to like that before by a woman so they they let me out and I walked out of the kingdom hall and it was like this umbilical cord this is years after I'd left this umbilical cord cart and I got on the plane home from Vancouver and I cried the whole way and I was economy not because I was in economy just to be clear but I was sitting at some poor random man and I was crying crying thinking oh god this man thinking god this is 11 hours to London with this weeping woman but what I realized was as I had this sort of breakthrough of going back to the cult I'd never stood up to them I'd faded out and on the plane on the way back I'd sort of stood up to them and so what sort of came out was I don't think anybody would want to spend any time with me unless I was providing a service or creating opportunity and I just looked around and I went everyone I love I somehow hire or come with a project for or I take in or I gift something to and I'm like oh my god and it's all that's a lovely response it's a nicer response than putting walls up but I had to really rethink my boundaries and go what are you doing this for is this for them or is this for you and it it's a sort of I think being coming out of a cult makes you more of what you are like I was a generous child like before any of this happened I would maybe before any of this happened you know the adoption everything but I would always be making presents or saving my pocket money out by my mum presents I was I think an experience of being in a cult makes you more of what you were going to be you know the trauma so if you were a walled person you become more walled right you were an open generous person it makes you more of that but it's it's something to reckon with that if you have been given away at birth and my birth mother did not want to give me away it's not this is nobody's I'm not blaming anyone it was a time I'm in a place.

11:38Yeah.

11:43But it will give you attachment issues that then if you are shunned by your whole community and you have to start over from day one. I didn't know anybody. I was living in London. I didn't know anybody. I would sometimes go to, if I wasn't working, I would go to a cafe to order a coffee, just to hear my voice, just to have a connection with another person. Wow. Anybody who would talk to me. Wow. And you just, I just had to rebuild. Can I just say something? Just knowing you a little bit, you're such a sociable person and so open and, you know, go deep straight away. It's like connecting. It's an immediate connection because otherwise how far have you come is too shallow.

12:22There's no connection there, right? That's what you like, like a proper, that loneliness of being shunned. What does that feel like?

12:36I think it it is why I'm so keen to have this investigative conversation why I wrote the book in part many things in the book but one of the keen things is about the way that we are so quick to divide now and to go you're I've seen you say something on Twitter you're in that team now now you don't talk to me anymore I don't read your books anymore I don't look at you anymore i think being shunned and being part and more than that before i left the religion my friends so often got to fellowship because i was always friends with the cool people cool is a relative term um so many of my friends would get to fellowship because they'd do something like they'd have a worldly boyfriend worldly was anything outside the religion yeah or they'd Not even that.

13:23Actually, can we just explain what worldly is? So worldly is a term that was given to anybody that was not a Jehovah's Witness. That's right. You're in the world or you're in the truth. Very emotive language. We're seeing similar language now being used by the American administration. So if you're in the truth, so I would say, Sister Davina, if you were, we were both Jehovah's Witnesses, how long have you been in the truth? When did you get the truth? and that's a emotive piece of persuasive language that keeps reinforcing we're in the truth so everything else is lies it's clever and so the others are worldly that's the world how well she's gone back to the world she's a worldly person so it's interesting because as a as a worldly person i'm thinking sounds quite good being worldly but it it doesn't feel like that to jehovah's witness because the world doesn't know the truth that's satan's world okay yeah that's okay god isn't that funny so when someone was disfellowshipped and went back into the world or into the world for the first time if they're raised in it I couldn't talk to them so I would see my best friend out and about or you know you go to I remember going to a show once my best friend was in the seat right there and I had to pretend she wasn't even there like couldn't see her like literal ghosting and that is participating in eroding not just her humanity but mine and so one thing I'm talking about a lot in the book is empathy now we've recently heard Elon Musk say empathy is the downfall of the 20th century we've all got too much empathy he doesn't seem to be suffering from much but um uh you know our empathy is what makes us human and sometimes people say oh um social media makes us all less empathetic the internet's making us less empathetic and they they quote often a study which does not demonstrate that actually at all which i really looked into in the books i thought i thought it did when i started writing this book I thought social media made us less empathetic.

15:37And what I discovered is that social media every day demands that we be more and more empathetic to fewer and fewer people. How do you mean? How does that manifest? So if you're in the feminist group, become more and more and more empathetic to feminists. Anyone who's in our team, you have to speak for them. silence is violence you have to love them you have to uh you have to endorse them you have to look out for them and for the principles of our community but i i was arguing eight nine years ago i saw feminists saying hashtag men are trash and i was like what is this saying to for i argued with anyone who would listen at that time what is that saying and not all feminists said it but it was a thing.

16:30And a lot of people are like, oh, it's kind of just a joke or it's sort of highlighting a broader problem. But I was like, you're a 14 year old boy and you're just figuring out what it is to be a man. And what you see is the feminists saying men are trash. How does that make you feel? And what I was worried about is it would make them run the other way and go into this other team.

16:54And, you know, listen, I am not blaming feminists for Andrew Tate. I'm not blaming feminists for the manosphere that strain of misogyny is deep and it goes back to the 60s but it doesn't help we need to be the ones modeling empathy so we see it now if it if I'm in your team even if I'm this in this strand of feminism and that strand is wrong instead of reaching out to somebody and saying what's your experience with sex work that makes you feel that it's just a no-go for feminism as opposed to, you know, I've been listening to some sex workers who've told me that the best thing is for it to be decriminalised for these reasons.

17:34Can I sit and have a coffee with you? Can I talk to you about it? I have had feminists say that MP is, is, is a, is a, is against sex work. She's not on our team. And so if I was seen to be having a coffee with her, god it's i'm one of them but i mean honestly it's so frustrating isn't it yeah whereas i'm like how do you start a conversation about changing or being more open and understanding to people if you can't have conversations how do we persuade but also it erodes my humanity to now avoid that mp if i see her in the street i've been there and when i was shun when i did the shunning it eroded something in me yes and when I left and I couldn't you know it's such a hard thing to wake up and get out of a cult and I had all the feelings and all the instincts but to get out and have the courage to leave everything and also the to to de-brainwash yourself takes a long long time how old were you when you left about 25 okay I usually say younger because I don't want people thinking that but I haven't really admitted that before but why why would you say younger i just didn't want people to think i'd stayed in so long but you were you were brainwashed it's not that's not your fault i don't judge other people for it but that's interesting i feel a bit stupid really i feel embarrassed like how did i not see it how do i know i'm a i'm a smart you were 14 i was a smart girl my school results uh i wasn't allowed to go to university which was a heartbreak for me they didn't tell me that's like at 18 right i got baptized at 16 just before i turned 17 and in australia it's a you go to you can depending on your birthday go to university a bit younger so i would have gone to university at 17 and they told me just after i got baptized the day before after i got baptized you won't be able to go to university and it all i had ever wanted was to go to university you're a clever girl right yeah and my results got me into oxford university i went later i went in my later 20s but so it wasn't that I wasn't academic but so it and academic isn't doesn't mean you're smart doesn't mean you're clever but it's it's a difference there are different sorts of cleverness but sometimes people say what kind of person joins a cult to me because they know and I say I think a better question is at what time in your life are you most vulnerable to join a cult and can you identify a cult when you're in it because I honestly for the last eight years or so have and started feeling like I'm in a cult again.

20:13I think all of us are in a series of interconnecting cults. I don't think anybody's out of it because you'd have to go right off the grid, but then you're in the kind of off the grid cult in a way. It's these small groups. You get stuck. And so when I was shunned myself, I think it really affected desperately my attachments. I don't think I've ever really healed from it. I think I find intimacy incredibly challenging. My view as an outsider looking in, it's really interesting talking to you because I hear a lot of similarities in my own life to your life and the feelings, but I wasn't in a cult and I had a lovely, complicated upbringing, but I was loved by my mother, but then left with my grandparents and then my dad used to see me on the weekends but I'd see my mum sometimes I was lied to a bit when I was a kid because they didn't know how to say my mum was going to leave me with my granny and not come back and that set up a little chain of events of wanting to perform and you know love me um but what I'm hearing from you is what I'm getting from my mum leaving is um a fear of abandonment yes I'm I'm sure and also do you find it hard I think other people find it easy like I'm so open as you can see and I'll you know talk too much but do you find as someone with abandonment issues and attachment issues that it's hard to sit one-on-one with another human being and really open up or just be I feel like I don't know I mean the other thing is is oh god this is so much more than I've ever said before really

22:16because I didn't have any normal sexual experiences at all because we weren't allowed to we weren't even allowed to masturbate it took me a long time to develop a sense of self with my body with my sexuality and therefore intimacy I think is something that eludes me and I sometimes worry that I've got lots of friends with whom I am very open but other people having a better experience of intimacy are more connected it's just you and me here I let you see me I don't have to say anything but I'm going to let you see me maybe they're having I feel like they're having a better experience or a more deep experience and because of that time I lost without having a normal boyfriend or girlfriend or anything like that um I didn't know I was bisexual then but you know without having any kind of this we all had to look away from each other we all god you know we didn't they didn't say you have to look away from each other but you just did because what if there's a connection and What if fornication was always the thing?

23:23And they always told you like, and there'd be illustrations in their magazines, in the Watchtown magazines and stuff, where they'd be like, if you go into a worldly bar, you know, someone will, you'll just end up having fornication, you'll fornicate with someone. when I left I was disappointed to discover that is not true they don't call it getting lucky for nothing it's very difficult you can't just go into a bar especially if you look like I think I was giving off virgin didn't know my one of my friends from that time I never told anyone when I left started going to improv classes which is what we did then because we didn't have dating apps and everyone had to go to improv class that was the only way you could meet anyone unless you're into raves which I mean I was far too scared I mean I still all my clothes still made me look like I was in Alice in Wonderland so it was you can't just leave with all these dowdy clothes and then suddenly go hold my hands for a minute hold my hands for a minute the layers that what you went through and the way that it complicated your life what that was like 10 years and I was just thinking about 14 when you went in when your when your family moved into Jehovah's Witnesses like I remember myself at 14 I was like exploding in I mean I don't know why my legs like that but sorry I don't mean I was exploding no but in every way like my mind my body and everything and they just go shut down lockdown and how hard that must have been but then everything else that you would even eye contact with somebody like I'm not surprised that you feel like you um aren't connecting with somebody you know you you're still learning how to flipping do that it's like it's it's entrenched and I think you are the bravest person I know for leaving at all you know you've been worried about leaving a couple of years later than that you than you said I can't believe you you had the strength to to do that so I just wanted to kind of touch you for a moment and say that because it's unbelievable what you've been through this this this podcast is called begin again like that's a massive it's like rebooting your entire life and how hard that is anyway I just wanted to say well done because um thank you I appreciate you're you're so compassionate and I feel like it's weird because I just said I don't really have I find it not that I don't have it with anybody but I always think our people having this deeper intimacy it was so interesting when you held my hands it felt very oh I wanted yeah Yeah, well, I wanted you to feel that, like I'm with you.

26:15This is huge.

26:22I just feel huge compassion for sort of 25-year-old you trying to navigate the world. And you really made me laugh when you went improv class because me and my best girlfriend, we went and did acting classes when we were 19. We thought you were French and Saunders. and how it is a place where you tried to kind of be, let yourself be free enough to make a fool of yourself and do the warm-ups. It was the antidote to a cult. Yes. In truth, I had snuck out to improv classes when I was a Jehovah's Witness. You weren't allowed to. It was worldly. You meet worldly people, end of story. I once got told on by someone who saw me having a coffee with my boss when I was working in a for a dress designer in a shop and I the elders came to see me and said you were seen having a coffee with a bodily person and I had to say it was my boss and I witnessed to her which means you told her about the the truth and they were like just be careful you can't make any bodily friends so going off to improv class and shows was absolutely not on and I so I but I'd had this little outlet with some other rogue Jehovah's Witnesses and uh until we got found out and it was this antidote to we think everything we think all your thoughts for you this is why i am so resistant and nervous and why i've written this book because about intellectual interference intellectual control because that's what i that's what i had all your thoughts are thought for you if you critical thinking i.e critical thinking is taking two ideas and arguing them out in your own head if we had doubts about the doctrine and there was a thought on everything by the way there was no nothing open to interpretation if we thought doubts about the doctrine they said that was satan getting in your head and you had to push the doubts down you had to pray them away to go and talk to an elder critical thinking to them was arguing with the devil right wow oh my god so you couldn't even think to yourself you couldn't even come up with your own thoughts or ideas that was playing with the devil that was that and and and I feel in the last eight nine years the same things happened because I had someone as a very light on example I use in the book that I had people who would write to me when I started the guilty feminist podcast which is my you know my biggest thing that was very popular podcast and it hit a zeitgeist at a certain time and it's a comedy show but it's also can go deep and you know it's about how to be a better feminist and the whole idea is I'm a feminist but and then I confess something like I'm a feminist but one time I went on a women's rights march popped into a department store to use the loo got distracted trying out face cream and when I came out the march was gone yeah true story and so it was a confessional and it was like hey maybe we can get better at this together and I think it was one of the first podcasts that said didn't say I'm an expert teaching you but said I'm not very good at this are you also not very good at this should we get better at this together that's that's kind of the idea of the guilty feminist and early on i had lots of unsolicited advice from people much of it was very helpful but often it was presented as if i should have already known you know and one of one of the things that somebody said was um that a few people wrote in quite a lot of people wrote in about was that you should have a content warning or trigger warning so if you're going to discuss eating disorders or suicide or but even anything lighter than you you know, lots of things.

29:53There was a huge list of things that I was meant to give a content one before. And I was like, but we start with a cold open of jokes. So normally the first thing before there's an introduction is like, I'm a feminist, but, and then we was always before the pandemic in front of a live audience. It now often is. And you'd hear the audience laugh and, you know, at the jokes. And I was like, I just don't think for this show, it works for me to say a list of unsavory words at the top, because later on, we're going to have a guest who might want to talk about, you know, something serious, an activist or somebody like that.

30:27I don't understand how shouting a list of, not shouting necessarily, but saying a list of unpleasant words is less triggering here than it is when it comes up in context here. You can still turn it off here. I don't really understand it. Now, I thought it through. I read about it. I did a lot of critical thinking and decided it wasn't really right for my show. occasionally I thought oh if this is on someone's got this on the car with kids or something like that so just before I got to the section I'd say yes hey we're going to talk about this yeah maybe you're not up for this today maybe you want to save this for later but overall I felt like I didn't think they were very helpful because the very people who might need to hear about this and process it might just turn it off because they're being told there's a trigger warning I've got to turn it off and people will say to me you know you're wrong you have to do a trigger warning And I was like, I can't be told that anymore.

31:19That's how I lived for years. And it was harder than the chastity or the poverty was the intellectual obedience. Because it was somebody deciding for me what I thought, delivering from on high through the governing body, which is the sort of eight old men in Brooklyn, would deliver this and the local elders would police it. And then we'd all have to police each other and tell on each other like the Stasi. And I thought, this is happening to me again. I've been out of this for years and this is happening to me again. I'm like, I just disagree with you. You can't. But this is such an interesting thing, isn't it?

31:57Firstly, you'd done your due diligence and you had made up your decision from the critical thinking. This side, this side. How do I feel about both? Blah, blah, blah. Due diligence. Put it all in there. Decision made. Absolutely. And then somebody's coming to try and tell you, no, that's the wrong decision. Well, talk about trigger warning. And they would totally change a doctrine by saying the light, there's a scripture in Proverbs that says something like the light gets brighter and brighter as the day draws nearer and nearer. And the day in the Jehovah's Witnesses faith is Armageddon when God's going to destroy everything.

32:32And there's going to be like a judgment day. So they would do just a 180. and it was like 1984 you know we've always been at war with East Asia now that's what we all think and we just had to go okay that's new light now we all think that new thing yesterday we thought that today we thought think this no discussion no thinking through no discussing it it's just new light and that is how it was presented when there was there was new light a few years into the podcast about trigger warnings were no longer useful because somebody had finally discovered a study that had been done years before saying actually they erode our resilience they make us more attached to our trauma as identity they're not useful and so people started you know sometimes i would you know use them very lightly or whatever and then people started writing to me going you're not allowed to use trigger warnings anything and i was like but they would also present it as you should know this come on and i was like i have never really used them but if they'd obviously listen to an old podcast where i'd said yeah very occasionally i'd say look we're going to be talking about this if you're not up for this today maybe save it or whatever or because for the people in the theater who might think oh i can't really get out and i'm not feeling like i I didn't come for this or whatever.

33:56And it was just then like, no, it's a blanket. No, no. I'm like, no, it's not a blanket. Yes, they're a blanket. No, it's a, it's a, use your, use your, your own judgment. None of us want to be that parent who's constantly texting their kids. Where are you? So I've partnered with Life360 today who have the solution. For me, it's not just about keeping up with day-to-day plans. I've got a daughter on the other side of the world in Australia. And with the time difference and everything, we are always playing phone tag, trying to find a good moment to call. But with Life360, I can just check in with her without needing to pester her every five minutes and get peace of mind without being that mum.

34:39And it's not just the family halfway across the world. It's actually brilliant for everyday life. No more endless texts, checking if someone's on their way or waiting up because you don't know if they've made it home yet. Just open the app and see. Simple. Plus, Life360 works whether you're on iPhone or Android and you can set up place alerts so you get a little nudge when someone arrives at their destination. I love that. If you want to make life easier and stress a bit less, download Life360 today and family-proof your family. But why do you think people do this blanket, yes or no? Do you think it's fear?

35:20I think it's our desperate desire to belong to a community. Yes. Human beings evolved to become the top of the food chain, the dominant species of planet Earth, not to the planets. Good fortune, to be honest, but here we are. because we learnt to collaborate and communicate. One person cannot beat a lion in a fight. We are soft. We're not fast. We don't have venom. We don't have claws. We're rubbish, aren't we? Look at this. How is this the top of the food chain? You know, we're pathetic, really. the only thing we've got the fastest person is nowhere near the fastest you know panther or whatever but the only thing we've got is we can team up we're smart we can collaborate we can communicate one person cannot beat a lion in a fight six people can outsmart a lion that is why we're the top of the food chain now when we lived all you know our common ancestors all lived on the savannah and the meaning of life was to eat and not be eaten run from predators try and catch something and you know get away with it if your community

36:51decided you were not pulling your weight or that you were for some reason or other had done something and you were shunned how long do you reckon you'd have to live out on your own about 15 minutes i reckon maybe half an hour

37:06that's why it feels so painful if you see your best mates out on instagram having brunch and you weren't invited it's why it feels like you're going to die if you get shunned by your friends remember at school when some mean girls would just decide you weren't in the gang anymore and you know they call it sending you to coventry or whatever that feeling of i'm going to die of i I feel so pained at this shunning or this loss of attachment if someone dumps you or whatever. That goes back to, you know, all our commonly held phobias have roots in life or death case scenarios. You know, so if we're all scared of snakes, you know, to some extent, it's because even if some if snakes come in here now, someone says, no, no, they're not dangerous.

37:51We don't care. We're just like going. Yes. Because our rational self must be overrided by a visceral desire to survive. Right. So we must belong to a community. And more than that, it is what makes us human. If you are on a desert island on your own, like Tom Hanks, you have to make a volleyball head friend to survive. Yes. You cannot mentally survive. You will lose it. And that's why the UN says longer than two weeks in solitary confinement is torture. People talk about being in solitary confinement and what they have to do a little play and pretend there's other people there or they lose their mind.

38:30But that's why I think we are so desperate for community. It's our physical survival. It's our mental survival on a visceral level. Now, who did our community used to be? People in our village. And we knew the people who baked our bread or picked our apples or made our dress for us or whatever. now who made who who who's the person who made this who made this who made who made these we don't know who who makes who made your multigrain loaf of bread and sliced it and bagged it we don't know I know them you do know but that's a really unique situation now yes and it's really feels very but it means a lot like I love it yes but it feels very homely and almost very um it's very upmarket to know you're in bacon yeah well it's very middle class isn't it like i've got there's a well i live in a town that's got a bakery with independent bakers in who exactly now that's it's quite middle class isn't it it feels quite mega markle now yeah it's not it used to be just the ordinary way you know that you knew who it does though feels a bit like you know here i am introducing me to my personal baker and most people don't know you know and even if you order you know you grocery store delivery to the door yeah still hi thanks no that's it so who's in our community now what what is our community now in the book i'm using the word stam because i think it's such a great sort of uh german word that means like your stam tisch is your your central perk you you joey and okay um and your stam barn is your family tree so it's sort of it's a word that evokes your local your community your football colors that kind of thing so you're it's more evocative than tribe and doesn't have any doesn't have the same quite the same colonial imposition but so who's in your stand now yeah you might have a couple of mates from school and a couple of mates from this job and da da da da and the lady over the road who minds your dog or whatever but there's not like a the same village feel town hall feel all come together feel in the same way so who shares your values has now become for most people their shtam who shares their political ideology who or or who likes the same band who's into doctor who you've slightly blown my mind here already really yes I'll tell you why because when I was growing up um I went to church my granny I live with my granny my granny took me to church every Sunday and that was my community so church church choir everybody that went to that church tiny village church in Grafham we knew everybody that lived in Grafham yeah went to the church we would go and get somebody to take them to church if they couldn't get themselves community I didn't know how they voted what they were interested in what they thought politically we just were together because yeah we all want to look out but now church is eroding yeah religion is eroding like we don't have these gathering places online now and and and and you know churches in my experience also have their own problems yes i mean obviously but for you yeah and but for a lot of churches yes i'd like to talk to you about that yeah there have been you know there there are problems with everything so it's not me going we should all go back to villages and even song but if your local community is not geographical it's now for a teenager I mean you've probably just seen adolescence have you seen yes incredible unbelievable so for a teenager it used to be you'd all go and meet up on the corner and hang out here or you know you'd be in the football club or you'd be in the ballet class or you'd be in the whatever you were in on the bench down the road smoking fags quite so and and there was this sort of community sense and what adolescence you know Netflix brilliant Netflix drama um about how boys get radicalized quite easily now falling down the manosphere um uh which I also discuss in the book how the manosphere operates can you just explain to anybody that doesn't know what is the manosphere a great question it's um it's a it's a sort of anti-feminist movement of men that actually has been around since the 60s, since second wave feminism, but has really come to life in a very big way in response to recent feminist movements.

43:03You know, there was a, there was, it was there before Trump's first term, but it came out in, because women came out and marched in the streets and said, we don't want this anymore. Harvey Weinstein went to prison because he'd been routinely assaulting and threatening women and sidelining their careers. And there was a big, it's like a backlash. There's always a backlash. There's a brilliant book called Backlash. And the writer says that the history of feminism is not, it's not a ladder, it's more like a corkscrew that goes around. There's always a backlash. It's the era for any human rights movement that I like to call the Empire Strikes Back, which is you've made some gains.

43:42Now we're going to try and push you back, back in your box, because it's like we're going to show you that you we don't accept you and it's not going to be it's not going to be different for you so there is that so the manosphere really pushed back and so you get characters like Andrew Tate who seems like a manufactured character but he's a man yes and uh this this sort of push of misogyny push to um uh they talk about women should be high value women i.e really there to serve men and not have many sexual partners and we see this trad wife movement coming up now where women are saying we can't believe that women were convinced it was oppressive to have six children and being being a gingham apron making pies for their husband um uh it the manosphere is particularly the the nastier side of misogyny as is dwelling on the internet and radicalising young boys and young men and it's basically trying to trying to also guide how women feel about this trad wife thing I think is really interesting because my grandmother was a you know traditional wife from the war they got they met in the war but she was a wren and he was in the navy and they came together and she didn't work and had three children but what is interesting I think is our upbringings often shape our decisions as women so anybody that was brought up in that era may then leave and think actually do you know what I saw her not being able to make that many decisions yeah or being financially independent and so I'd like to be financially independent I don't want to have to rely on a matter that was the that's what stuck with me absolutely um my grand my grandfather was it was in the 80s he got made redundant and um and we we lost our home and I remember at that point going okay well that's never gonna happen to me because I'm gonna make my own money I'm gonna make my own way in life like I'm not gonna have to get married to absolutely I'm not gonna rely on yeah and it's interesting how history sometimes has a way of of helping us develop into stronger more independent women yeah absolutely and if if a woman you know more than anything um you know wants to get married and have children and be with those children there is nothing wrong with that or you might be a woman who has massive ambition but then you find the person that you love the most you you have children with them and you think you know what this is more important to me i love this there's nothing As long as it's your decision, right?

46:23Of course. Yeah. It's the imposition. And there is a quite scary Christian nationalist push now that is coming up and it's coming across the world. What's a Christian nationalist? So Christian nationalist is country first. You know, we don't want immigrants in our country. it's often a um a kind of has a white supremacist on a political question then yes yeah and it's it's so if you put together populist nationalism and christianity but taking out the tenets of christianity like the good samaritan or loving your neighbor or you know those kinds of things that it doesn't seem to bear much relation to anything jesus said certainly in my opinion but there is quite a strong Christian nationalist push coming up now.

47:24Is that mostly in America? Well, I think America is on the road to Gilead now. I really, really do. There are laws coming in that are very frightening. You know there's been a lot of Roe versus Wade was overturned of a woman's constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy that she does not want, or in fact, in many cases, is not viable. It's dangerous, yeah. And is dangerous. And women have died since then because doctors are not allowed to help them until it is life-threatening and doctors are frightened of losing their licences and going to jail, understandably. Some doctors are moving into state and women have died because of Roe being overturned.

48:14um but now south carolina has a bill on the table if it passes to law if you miscarry and to miscarriage is obviously a very traumatic thing if somebody decides that it was a willful or negligent miscarriage i.e you could have prevented it or you did something to cause it you could if this bill turns into law you could be charged with homicide now please bear in mind And in South Carolina, homicide can be punishable by death by firing squad. Now, a couple of years ago, I would have gone, that bill will never pass. Of course, they're not going to pass that bill that criminalises miscarriage. That'll never happen.

48:57But there is a list of words that have been issued that says if you apply for a federal grant for your science project, whether it be a you know a paper or a test a study a cure or whatever it cannot have the words female or females in the grant it can have the world word male and males it cannot have the word uh woman it can have the word man but it also can't have the word black black hispanic um disabled um there's about 100 words that it cannot have the word but some of them are just like biases but lots of science reports would have in a different context biases you know just in a sort of the biases of the study or whatever I mean you can't believe it's happening and I keep looking and going is this fake news or exaggerated but I mean that's not what I was to be thinking but because it just feels like we're going back to the dark ages obviously with um all the stuff that we've been trying to work on with loads of loads of us women in the public eye around the menopause and feeling like we're making some headway and at least we're all talking about it all of that would just disappear right well this is all the research and you've you asked me is this mostly america it is coming here and i without going to too much detail because i have written it in a very um specific way in the book legally yes yes about what is happening over here okay but i interviewed an incredible man called Neil Datta, who is the head of the European Reproductive Rights and Sexual Forum, which is really he runs for MPs in Europe who want women to have access to abortion and the pill and cervical smears and to stop cervical cancer.

50:44And, you know, he's a good guy. And he has told me some very interesting things which are in the book about how these Christian nationalist groups that together they call the anti-gender movement, gender is kind of shorthand for women in this, that really would like to see, at the heart of this movement, would like to see women back in the kitchen pumping out babies and are very, very, very anti any form of reproductive rights for women and how that has been burrowing into Europe. since about 2013 and what impact that is having on our reproductive rights already in the United Kingdom it has changed stuff is happening in the UK stuff is happening in Europe and I've written it very specifically um because you know I I'm I'm quoting Neil and you know but you can find all this stuff out you firstly can read about the book read it in the book but yeah if you look up the anti-gender movement it's quite scary um as somebody probably since the experience that i've had with my operation on my brain i've i've become sort of a great believer in the universe and the universe sends me messages or the universe knows what's right for me and if i ask myself if i search inside my own head and my own heart i know the answer to every question I ask like I already know and I found that enormously comforting and it's helped me a lot so kind of leaving I mean in recent years I found religion harder and harder to get behind yeah but I love this idea that the universe is looking out for me and if I listen carefully I can hear what I'm meant to do I've had the same experience by doing ayahuasca oh really yeah um because I up until a couple of years ago I would have said total atheist and uh then I went and did this I did it in Spain where it is decriminalized and I did it with a proper Peruvian shaman in a proper retreat I wouldn't recommend anybody do it unless they were very much felt so it's not recreational at all oh no and it must never be used recreationally in my opinion it's it they say you get the call which is you know my friend rang me and said I think you should do this and I just felt immediate like I just had to do.