The Guilty (Vichy) Feminist encounters Konstantin Kisin

Change My Mind

Vichy was a town in unoccupied central France that collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. The Vichy Government and its administrators were complicit in the implementation of the Holocaust and were seen as betraying their own people by siding with the oppressor. That is why I often use the term "Vichy feminist" to describe women who describe themselves as feminists while betraying women by aligning with structures or ideologies that maintain sex inequalities and oppressions.

One of the best examples of this faux-feminism is Deborah Frances-White, also known as The Guilty Feminist.

I had the terrible misfortune of being invited to a live show of The Guilty Feminist Podcast about five years ago while I was living in Wellington. I had never heard of Deborah Frances-White nor her podcast so I toddled off with some colleagues unaware of the mad rabbit hole I was to travel down.

The TSB Arena was packed with bright, op-shopped clothing, a severe lack of natural-coloured hair, and lots of dramatically manicured hands clutching wine in plastic cups. It was a colosseum of virtue signalling. It was the most Wellington event I had ever been to. Facial piercings twinkled, reflecting blue light from mobile phones held aloft for selfies.

It took little time for me to realise I had made a big mistake. This was not the feminism for me. I was confident, in fact, that despite all proclamations, it was not feminism at all.

Deborah Frances-White’s guest was welcomed onto the stage and I could not suppress my groan, earning me a sharp glance from the colleague who had invited me. In hindsight, I think she had hoped it would serve as an indoctrination into the ‘correct’ kind of feminism, but there was little chance of that and even less chance when it was Emily Writes who joined The Guilty Feminist on stage.

Writes is a New Zealand blogger and an early adopter of cancel culture and struggle sessions. She has written about how she is gay. So gay. Even her husband agrees she is so gay. Not sure what her children think. Once upon a time, when things were simpler and we told attention-seekers to fuck off, she may have just called herself ‘bisexual’. But we do not live in such a world so this woman, who is married to a man, has laid claim to an entire identity that simply isn’t hers.

Thanks to this night of torture, I have been left with the memory of tittering salacious disclosures of masturbation as Emily Writes and Deborah Frances-White spent a large part of the show reviewing a particular sex toy and making tangential and obscure comments about intersectional feminism. I’m not sure which bits revolted me more.

At the very end a wee butch lesbian took to the stage with her guitar and I thought, ‘oh thank goodness, we’re ending with a nice song’. It was not a nice song and apparently the wee butch was in fact a ‘trans man’. Or maybe a non-binary. She called herself trans anyway. Her song was quite catchy. My toe began a-tapping; that is until she started singing about ‘terfs’.

It was an evening of the most vapid discussion I could imagine. Somehow the atmosphere was one of ‘we are so open-minded, our brains have fallen out’ and also thick with the tension of mutual multi-directional judgement. Frances-White and Writes espoused all of the approved 2020 woke, white, liberal, political opinions with all of the correct jargon. I felt as if at any moment someone would realise a terf was among them and I would be carried up onto the stage for a struggle session or a witch burning.

I hadn’t thought about that evening behind enemy lines for a long time, but this week who should pop up as the guest on Triggernometry, but Ms Vichy Feminist herself - Deborah Frances-White. I suppressed a shudder at the memory of Emily Writes wanking confessions and the preview video began to play. I could not hit ‘download’ fast enough. Witnessing The Guilty Feminist have her arse-kicked intellectually while being given just enough rope to hang her own credibility would surely erase my troubling recollections.

The first few minutes had me confused. She was on the show to promote her new book and the premise of it sounded actually quite good. A book of ideas that discusses how we can talk about difficult things without cancelling each other etc. Sounds good.

Also sounds like the antithesis of the live podcast show I suffered through in 2020, but hey, people change…

Reader, The Guilty Feminist has not changed.

After extolling the value of calm conversation and discussing tricky topics without devolving into name-calling, Deborah Frances-White proceeded to behave in the exact way she says she condemns in her book. She virtue-signalled, she attempted to cancel, and she reduced Frances Foster and Konstantin Kisin to their demographics - incorrectly. When Konstantin made a pretty benign comment about Australian colonisation she strawmanned so hard it is a wonder she managed to stay in her chair. She said she was “scared” by his comment and repeatedly suggested he had made a statement of white or Western supremacy.

It is very telling that when she lost control of the argument her default was to slip straight into identity politics and woke attack tactics. She called Konstantin a white man and suggested he had no right to talk about indigenous populations. Sex is a spectrum, a mysterious and undefinable thing, until a woke woman wants to exclude a man from a conversation.

Logical fallacies dripped from her every proclamation throughout the painful two hour interview. The goalposts shifted at every opportunity. And, every time The Guilty Feminist opened her mouth she revealed how shallow and performative her thinking is.

There is no doubt she thinks she is very insightful and honestly seems to believe that she is introducing new and groundbreaking arguments on gender identity and transgenderism. Konstantin disabused her of this notion, assuring her that we have all heard the tired comparisons to the gay rights movement a billion times before. She did not like that he pointed out that many of the people at the front lines of the gender wars fighting against transgender woowoo are gays and lesbians.

Frances-White did actually bring something new to the table though… She declared that she knows for a fact that no one else is talking about the orphans. Yes, The Orphans. She is very proud of Orphan Theory(TM) or Orphan Metaphor(TM). You see, she was adopted, and it wasn’t until she met her birth mother later in life that she realised that in another era she would have been an orphan. Oliver Twist still had a living parent, you know, but he was deemed an orphan. And if you were adopted back then you weren’t made part of a loving family. You were a ward who the family had responsibility for and you called your adoptive parents Mr and Mrs Such-And-Such. It was oh so terrible and oppressive. And even though Deborah Frances-White was happily adopted into a family that included her as one of their own, she is nonetheless an orphan. She identifies as one.

Frances’ facial expressions sustained me as I suffered through this train crash

The relevance of this is…well, I am not sure what the relevance is. Only that I think she was trying to say that attitudes to “orphans” have changed and so attitudes to transgender people will change. Because her central premise seems to be that the world is not used to seeing transgender people and so we are reacting viscerally. She compares this to if your bus driver showed up to work dressed as a clown. (Let the record show that she is the one who compared men who identify as women to clowns). This would be shocking and grab attention, she contends, but if he did this everyday for six months everyone would stop noticing it.

Konstantin interjected here to disagree. He said he would definitely still notice if his bus driver was dressed as a clown. To which The Guilty Feminist replied something to the effect of ‘well your brain must just work differently to everyone else’s then’. She, again, did not like when Konstantin reminded her that it is simply what she is asserting and she does not know if that is how everyone’s brain works.

Equal parts aghast and enthralled, I suddenly felt the need to seek validation that I was not the only one listening to or watching the interview and thinking ‘this woman is fucking mental’. I googled her name and even though it had been mere hours since the episode had dropped, it was evident that I was not alone in my assessment of her batshittery. The comments on YouTube were top notch:

“This is the intellectual equivalent of a Rachel Raygun breakdance routine.”

While I was snooping around reading what others were saying about The Guilty Feminist, I found a review Sarah Ditum did for The Times about her book. I’m a fan of hers in general and, my goodness gracious me, she did not disappoint with her searing takedown of Frances-White and her book.

For starters, Ditum describes the podcast thus:

“The Guilty Feminist started in 2015 as a place for Frances-White to share lightweight material for women who liked the idea of the “feminist” label but weren’t sure about the detail. When Donald Trump arrived, though, Frances-White’s audience — and her self-perceived importance — ballooned.”

She captures the essence of Frances-White’s narcissism perfectly. The woman genuinely thinks that she has all the correct opinions and that any conversations about difficult topics should only serve to bring the wrong ‘uns around to the light.

“Frances-White’s first problem with “conversation” is that she clearly struggles to imagine a reader who doesn’t think like her.”

Like Ditum, I suffer from an unwillingness to contain my disdain for fake feminists who do despicable things… for example, like inviting a man who is pretending to be a woman and who was chief executive officer (at that time) of Edinburgh Rape Crisis onto their ‘feminist’ podcast and then giggling along when he says “bigoted” service users who don’t accept trans women as women will be invited to “reframe [their] trauma”. Yes, that actually happened on The Guilty Feminist Podcast. Nothing like giggling at victims of sexual violence being re-educated to prove you are a serious feminist right, Deborah?

It will come as no surprise that one of the tropes (strawmen) that Deborah Frances-White leans on the heaviest in the Triggernometry interview - and presumably in her book - is the ol’ Noble Savage.

The term "noble savage" refers to the idealising of indigenous or non-Western peoples as living in a pure, natural, and morally superior state—uncorrupted by the complexities and perceived moral decay of "civilised" society. It was a feature of colonial and post-colonial literature and is now absolutely bloody rife in woke discourse.

The Guilty Feminist says indigenous societies are evidence that sex is a spectrum and transgenderism is a ‘natural’ state of being that the West has destroyed. She deeply believes that indigenous people in 2025 are the untouched evidence of what is good and true and that the corrupted West should learn from them.

What she is really doing is hiding behind other groups of people because she has no arguments to support the idea that sex is a spectrum without deflecting. She is painfully on brand as a posh, straight, white, middle-aged woman invoking gays and indigenous people as if we are props to be used to further her own virtue. Konstantin, who is Russian, reminded Frances-White that the West is actually a hell of a lot more liberal than the rest of the world. Russia, China, the Islamic world - they aren’t big fans of the concept of gender fluidity.

Riddled with white guilt and embarrassingly invested in the “noble savage” narrative, she is not capable of even imagining indigenous people outside of her face-painted, didgeridoo playing fantasy where they all need a nice posh white lady like her to tell everyone how they’re a bunch of simpletons who don’t know what the two sexes are.

Ditum is spot on in her analysis that Frances-White must truly think that having difficult conversations is a metaphor for preaching the ‘Good Word’ to heathens:

“For all her claims of a damascene conversion, Frances-White still believes that being on “the left” guarantees her moral superiority.”

I’m not sure if she is always like this, but throughout the Triggernometry episode she was all over the place with her arguments. She would suddenly make a wild claim or spit out some woke-sounding words and then pivot to something else. I can’t be the only one who got whiplash. For example, at one point out of no where she suddenly leapt into prison abolition discourse repeating the usual lines about prison not rehabilitating anyone. She declared it our only remaining Victorian institution as if that were reason enough for every prison to be torn down. This is also how she avoids answering questions about male prisoners who declare they are trans demanding to be housed in women’s prisons - well, no one should be in prison. She kept coming back to this even when the conversation had moved on to “predators” on the comedy scene.

Despite having disavowed cancel culture, she was more than willing for the men of comedy to be sacrificed for being awkwardly autistic or joking about gypsies. Look, I don’t know the correct terminology for the gypsy community as we don’t have them in New Zealand, but I am pretty sure they care less than The Guilty Feminist does about Jimmy Carr making a dark Holocaust joke about them. She seems to think it was the worst, most off-colour joke ever told. She clearly hasn’t been to many of Jimmy’s shows.

Frances-White loves dropping in cultural references that show how artsy and well-read she is. She dropped in a few references to the play Prima Facie. I have read the book and it is very good, but it was alarming when she declared that all courts have to watch it before sexual assault cases in the UK. I may have misheard, but I am pretty sure that is what she said. Does she mean that judges, juries, court staff, actually already watch Prima Facie before cases in the UK? Seems a bit prejudicial. Or is she saying she wants courts to show it to juries and judges before a case? After the recent Adolescence fervour neither option would surprise me.

It is quite plain that in the process of writing a book about conversations Frances-White never ventured beyond her own echo chamber. She claims, for example, that she has never met anyone who isn’t scared of Elon Musk. Her rant about the power he has accrued and how he is insane is exactly the perspective someone on the hard left would have. It isn’t a majority view though. The right like him, obviously, and in the less-invested-in-politcs world he is admired for his work with Tesla, SpaceX, and even X. He is also far from the only billionaire to be heavily involved in politics. Bill Gates and Soros wrote that playbook.

Usually, I try very hard not to fall into the trap of using stereotypical negative descriptors for women, but goddamn The Guilty Feminist makes it hard. ‘Shrill’ is the only appropriate adjective to describe her when talking about Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Sue me. The woman definitely has Trump Derangement Syndrome and, let me tell you, there is only one thing as bad as Trump Derangement Syndrome and that is Trump Devotion Syndrome.

The

Triggernometry

guys disagreed with her emphatic assertion that Trump and Musk are “far right” and this made her nothing less than incredulous. Operating on emotions and repeating rhetoric, she isn’t engaging with the raw facts that people would tend to use to build evidence for claims like that. Both men were Democrats and are now moderate Republicans. There is plenty of evidence they both support gay rights - which Frances-White scoffed at - and neither man is the ultra-conservative trad-wife guy she described. They are both divorced with children with multiple different women. She may not like them. She may disagree with their politics, but that doesn’t make them “far right”.

Trump may have triggered Frances-White, but she absolutely detonated when the topic of abortion arose. Pretty sure she introduced it to be honest. So much hyperbole. She repeated horror stories that have been repeatedly and easily debunked about women dying in the streets because doctors wouldn’t treat their miscarriages for fear of Trump. What she either doesn’t realise or conveniently ignores, is that nothing has changed in regards to abortion law for three years since Roe v Wade was overturned. Biden and Harris could have mobilised the Democrats to pass federal law at any time since the Supreme Court decision in June 2022. They chose to leave it and then use it as an election issue. Donald Trump has made it clear he does not intend to make any changes to the law because he sees it as a matter for each individual state.

For all of Frances-White’s handwringing, women in America have the exact same abortion rights now that they did under Biden. But she is not a serious feminist. She does not want to talk about the actual issues affecting women unless they involve screaming about Trump. Abortion is not the only issue women need to care about, but Frances-White is so locked in that way of thinking that she even started on about a conspiracy that there is a cabal trying to make abortion illegal in Britain. The police arrest people for praying near abortion clinics for goodness sake. She is catastrophising and it destroys her credibility as someone remotely capable of talking to people who think differently to her.

Rebuffed from calling POTUS and Musk “far right”, The Guilty Feminist turned to accusations of ‘fascism’. Konstantin was struggling by this point to remain patient, but nonetheless tried to coax out of her some kind of definition of the term that they could agree on. This proved impossible, but she did start ranting about protestors at universities being deported. This likely refers to Columbia University students Mohsen Mahdawi and Mahmoud Khalil who are Palestinian (Khalil was born in Syria) and are facing deprotation. If Mahdawi and Khalil had been protesting about abortions, climate change, BLM, or any other cause that wasn’t pro actual terrorism I would agree that deporting protestors and defunding universities for facilitating their protests would be very concerning. But they weren’t just protesting. Their behaviour would have seen them deported from most countries around the world including Egypt and Jordan who actively keep out Palestinian agitators. The two men, who are in their 30s, have expressed explicit support for groups that have been designated terrorist organisations in the USA - Hamas and Hezbollah. They were involved in illegal occupations of university buildings which were vandalised, during which a school janitor was injured, and classes were disrupted. Khalil served as the negotiator on behalf of the lawbreaking students pressuring the administration to accommodate outrageous student demands. No country sits back and allows foreign nationals to incite violence and lionise terrorism.

“They are literally cancelling everything!” Frances-White cried, running out of attack angles. “We are heading into Gilead!”

“This is going to hit queer people!” The further into the podcast episode we got, the more frequently Frances-White invoked gays and “queers” and the more I wanted to through my phone and headphones out of the car window. Who told this woman that she had the right to invoke our history and use us to prop up her shitty arguments? Leave us alone, for goodness sake. The “progressive” left does not own the gays. We are not props and we do not owe women like The Guilty Feminist shit.

To be honest I have run out of steam to reflect on anymore of her hysterics - oh yes, she '“joked” that Konstantin was calling her a “hysterical woman” at one stage. It was a train crash in slow motion. The hyperbole, catastrophising, strawmanning, DARVO, and the sheer dramatics of her performance on the Triggernometry Podcast has discredited her and her book completely.

So, don’t read this vapid, self-righteous woman’s book.

Deborah Frances-White is not an intellectual and she is clearly not even a deep thinker. She considers herself to be profound, but is incapable of introspection and humility. As Ditum summarises:

“Ultimately, Six Conversations We’re Scared to Have is a mealy-mouthed imitation of robust intellectual inquiry. It is a coward’s idea of what bravery looks like. It is a conversation in the same way that shouting into a well and listening to your own echo is a conversation.”