What is a ‘Woman’?: Progressives Erasing and Redefining Concept

The Daily Wire produced a documentary that features conservative commentator Matt Walsh traveling worldwide to ask a simple question: “What is a woman?” The responses are both shocking and unintelligible. The diverse interviewees include professors, female athletes, African villagers, and random pedestrians. The movie’s initial comical tone grows sinister, as eminent doctors offer absurd explanations of gender as a social construct isolable from biological sex, then proceed to justify genital mutilation, castration, and sterilization for minors. Scholars in the movie condemn the pathologizing of gender dysphoria but praise its medical treatment. Those arguing that gender is independent of sex simultaneously encourage surgeries so that embodiment and gender identity correspond.

Walsh refrains from debating and does not attempt to change his interlocutors’ minds. Instead, he asks direct questions, and in response, progressives disgrace themselves repeatedly by failing to defend their own ideology with substantive arguments. The irony is profound: The people who earn degrees in women’s studies apparently do not know what they are studying. It is troubling when the “experts” in the film provide definitions for “woman” that are wrong, but it is astounding when they cannot provide any definition and resort to the circular explanation that a woman is a person who identifies as a woman.

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Abigail Anthony

Abigail Anthony is a staff writer at National Review.

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The Daily Wire produced a documentary that features conservative commentator Matt Walsh traveling worldwide to ask a simple question: “What is a woman?” The responses are both shocking and unintelligible. The diverse interviewees include professors, female athletes, African villagers, and random pedestrians. The movie’s initial comical tone grows sinister, as eminent doctors offer absurd explanations of gender as a social construct isolable from biological sex, then proceed to justify genital mutilation, castration, and sterilization for minors. Scholars in the movie condemn the pathologizing of gender dysphoria but praise its medical treatment. Those arguing that gender is independent of sex simultaneously encourage surgeries so that embodiment and gender identity correspond.

Walsh refrains from debating and does not attempt to change his interlocutors’ minds. Instead, he asks direct questions, and in response, progressives disgrace themselves repeatedly by failing to defend their own ideology with substantive arguments. The irony is profound: The people who earn degrees in women’s studies apparently do not know what they are studying. It is troubling when the “experts” in the film provide definitions for “woman” that are wrong, but it is astounding when they cannot provide any definition and resort to the circular explanation that a woman is a person who identifies as a woman.