Six Conversations We’re Scared to Have by Deborah Frances-White

I wanted to learn from this book, but having gone straight to the chapter on gender non-conformity to see how one of the most polarising and risky-to-discuss issues of the present was dealt with, I found myself alienated by the assumption made by the author that anyone who disagreed with her position on trans issues was wrong, uncompassionate and bigoted.

I would love, for instance, to understand more about the techniques used by mediators, diplomats and negotiators to find common ground as a place to build from, because being scolded and shamed never works.

Can we have scary conversations? I think we can, but they require intellectual rigour and the discipline of sustaining genuine emotional distance from one’s subject. Both are desperately hard to achieve, essential – and lacking here.

Louise Tickle

One of the great pleasures of working in a newsroom is the morning editorial conference – a forum for rigorous, stimulating debate about the day's news agenda. It's this format that inspired Tortoise’s live discussion format, the ThinkIn: an attempt to open up the closed-door world of newspapers' decision making and reveal, as the saying goes, ‘how the sausage gets made’.

A similar spirit of openness and intellectual courage runs through Deborah Frances-White’s latest book, Six Conversations We're Scared to Have. Drawing from her own experience growing up in a religious cult (Jehovah’s Witnesses) and over a decade hosting The Guilty Feminist podcast, Frances-White makes a compelling case that society is limiting itself by avoiding the difficult conversations we urgently need to have.

Tackling topics from free speech to cancel culture, the book isn’t a manifesto but a provocation – a conversational appetiser designed to encourage deeper discussions among friends, families, colleagues, and communities. It’s an approach that reflects Frances-White’s personal wariness of how “new light” was once handed down to her in the rigid hierarchy of the Jehovah’s Witnesses - an extreme example, perhaps, but an apt analogy. When conversations are overly controlled, truth and understanding are the casualties.

That said, the book acknowledges its own limitations. The most charged and complex issues — gender identity, cancel culture, abortion – are rooted in structural inequalities that must be addressed before any truly healthy dialogue can take place. For instance, before we can debate whether trans women should be housed in women’s prisons, Frances White argues that we must also ask whether the prison system itself is fit for its purpose for women (cis or trans) in the first place.

Ultimately, Frances-White offers not a conclusion but a starting point – much like an editor might do before a spirited debate in the newsroom. And that’s the point. Opinions evolve. Understanding grows. Changing your mind isn’t a weakness, she argues, it’s a strength.

Phoebe Davis