The What Is a Woman? documentary makes objective reality its focus.
The What Is a Woman? documentary makes objective reality its focus.
W ho knew that the best way to expose transgender ideology is not to focus on its harms, but on its falsehoods? The central claims of transgenderism aren’t true. Once you’re prepared to confront that publicly, trans activists have nowhere to hide. In fact, most can’t define what they mean by “woman,” let alone offer a defense.
This is the main takeaway from the Daily Wire’s new documentary What Is a Woman?, starring Matt Walsh, who is a husband and father of four. Though he’s better known as a conservative provocateur, in the documentary Walsh plays the role of an ordinary man trying to better understand a new idea his children will inevitably encounter.
Walsh travels across the United States, then further afield to Africa, speaking with a therapist, a surgeon, a pediatrician, a psychiatrist, trans-identified people, ordinary citizens, and tribesmen in search of truth. Not his truth. The truth — objective reality.
The results are both hilarious and terrifying. His first interview is with Gert Comfrey, a gender-affirming therapist. “You know, I like scented candles. I’ve watched Sex and the City,” Walsh says. “So how do I know [I’m not a woman]?” Comfrey nods and smiles: “Matt, that question right there, like, that question is, like, when it’s asked with a lot of curiosity, right, that’s the beginning of, like, a lot of peoples’ gender identity journey.”
Interestingly, throughout the interview Comfrey seems not to notice Walsh’s skepticism. Indeed, what the interviews with trans ideologues reveal is that few have ever faced meaningful challenge.
This was evident in the exchange between Walsh and Dr. Patrick Grzanka, professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Tennessee.
WALSH: I’m just trying to start by getting to the truth.
GRZANKA: Yeah, I mean I’m really uncomfortable with that language, like, getting to the truth — again, in social life —
WALSH: Why is that uncomfortable?
GRZANKA: Because it sounds actually deeply transphobic to me.
WALSH: The truth?
GRZANKA: And if you keep probing, we’re going to stop the interview.
WALSH: If I probe about what the truth is?
GRZANKA: You keep invoking the word truth, which is condescending and rude.
WALSH: How is the word truth condescending and rude?
GRZANKA: Why don’t you tell me what your truth is and you’re walking on 30 seconds more of thin ice before I get up.
WALSH: What my truth is? Well, I don’t really think I have a truth. I think there’s just the truth, the reality. And so, we should begin by trying to figure out what the reality is.
Walsh asks Grzanka if he can define the word woman. “For me, it’s a really simple answer and it’s a person who identifies as a woman,” Grzanka says. “But what are they identifying as?” Walsh replies. “As a woman.” “But what is that?” “As a woman.” Isn’t that a circular definition? Grzanka is not the only person trapped in this cycle of nonsense. On the streets of New York City, Walsh asks a man in a neon leotard who says, “A woman is anyone who identifies as a woman.” When Walsh asks what that is, the man says, “I don’t know.” In a debate with Walsh on Dr. Phil, a feminine, bearded man finds himself in the same dead end.
Some aren’t even willing to try offering definitions. For instance, when Walsh tells Democratic representative Mark Takano that some women have “really bought into the rumor that only men have penises” and therefore want single-sex spaces and asks, “How do you respond to that?” Takano says he’s “mystified” that Walsh’s question wasn’t on trans people’s “basic right to live.” Takano cuts the interview short. “I just wanted to know what a woman is?” Walsh says, as Takano walks off set. “And you’re not gonna find out,” a Takano staffer replies.
Walsh interviews Michelle Forcier, a pediatrician, and professor at Brown University. Forcier, a specialist in “advanced contraception and abortion as well as gender hormones,” tells Walsh, “your sperm don’t make you male” — “it’s a constellation.” Walsh pushes back: “In reality. In truth.” Getting nowhere, he gives the example of how sex is observable in animals. For example, we know a chicken laying eggs is female. Forcier replies: “Does a chicken have a gender identity? Can a chicken cry? Can a chicken commit suicide?”
Forcier suggests that even very small children can discover a “gender identity that’s not congruent with their sex assigned at birth.” Walsh asks if she’s ever met a four-year-old who believes in Santa Claus. She says she has. “Maybe this is someone who has a tenuous grasp on reality,” Walsh suggests, since, you know, Santa Claus isn’t real. “To that child, they are,” Forcier replies, smiling. Perhaps Forcier also has difficulty distinguishing fantasy from reality.
Most disturbing are Walsh’s interviews with ordinary people on city streets. “If it’s your reality, it’s truly none of my business,” says one woman in Hollywood. Walsh asks whether she’d be willing to accept somebody else’s truth that she doesn’t exist. She said she would. On the streets of New York City, Walsh asked a group of women and girls what a woman is. They giggle. “We’re all women.” So, what is that? They reply: “That is hard.” “Yeah, it is a stumper.” Women at the “Women’s March” seem no better informed.
Of course, not everyone is confused. Walsh interviews Don Sucher, owner of Sucher & Sons Star Wars Shop in Washington state. Sucher went viral after he was caught on video having a confrontation with his local trans-identifying politician after he’d posted a sign in his shop window saying, “Just out. Dr Seuss’s new book. ‘If you are born with a d***, you are NOT a chick.’” Walsh asked how he knew the politician in question wasn’t a woman. “Common sense,” Sucher replied. What about trans people’s feelings? “I don’t give a s*** about their feelings, I’m old,” he said. He’s not a scientist, he’s not a gender-studies major, how does he know that he’s a man? Walsh asked. “I guess because I’ve got a d***.”
And in Nairobi, Walsh meets with some tribesmen. He watches them slaughter a goat and eats raw kidney. A tribesman explains “A man has a penis; a woman has a vagina.” And what about a woman with a penis? Laughter. The tribesman says, “A man has a duty, and a woman has a duty. A man cannot do the duty of a woman and the woman cannot do the duty of a man.” While different cultures will disagree about the social applications of this statement, the reproductive element is as universal as it is immutable.
Though Walsh includes testimony from those harmed by gender ideology, he does so with truth front and center. He talks with female athletes, such as Selina Soule, the high-school runner in Connecticut displaced by young men who claimed to be women; Scott Newgent, a female transsexual enduring the devastating and potentially life-shortening consequences of transition surgeries; a father in Canada, who did jail time for publicly “misgendering” his 13-year-old daughter (while trying to stop her state-sponsored medical transition).
“How can this whole thing be happening?” Miriam Grossman, a psychiatrist specializing in child and adolescent psychiatry, says. “There are masculine girls. There are feminine boys. What are we going to do about that? Carve them up?” Jordan Peterson asks.
In a recent interview with Piers Morgan, the women’s rights activist Kelly Jay Keen said she doesn’t care being called “transphobic” if that’s the price of speaking the truth about sex. Indeed, the entire mass-intimidation campaign collapses as soon as people refuse to go along with the lie. So, what is a woman? The answer is given by Mrs. Walsh: An adult human female. Nothing more, nothing less.