Right Wing Rhetoric: An Analysis of "What Is A Woman" by Matt Walsh

 The right wing has decided that their ticket to control of Congress is scaring people about sex.  They're been doing this since forever, but they're nothing if not committed to the classics.  The current iteration is stoking fear of transgender people, especially those who transition from male to female.  In their fevered imaginations, women's bathrooms are places of extreme peril, with sex crazed men in dresses waiting to assault every precious and fragile white woman who needs to pee outside of her house.  Exactly what statutes are required to address this catastrophe are left to the imagination.  

One of the most recent, and worst, entries in this area is by Matt Walsh, who created a 'documentary' around him asking various people the question "What Is A Woman?" Walsh himself has a long history of hating women having any public existence.  He 

It starts with videos of little kids' birthday parties with a voice over from him talking about being a dad.  All the boys are wearing blue and all the girls are wearing pink.  The boy gets a football and the girl gets a tiara.  He states "I gave my son a BB gun and that's all the emotional support he needs.  My daughter, on the other hand . . " This is the perfect distillation of Walsh's extremely harsh gender essentialism. Men and mindless gun nuts and women are inscrutable masses of complexity.  He reinforces this with a quote from Steven Hawking, "women are a complete mystery." He follows this with clips of 50's sex education films and an uncomfortable vignette of him doing a terrible job of fishing.  

At this point he starts with the interviews.  The interviews follow a pattern: Walsh is in a room with the interviewee who is identified by text at the bottom of the screen.  That's all.  He never explains why he chose the people he interviews or provides any other context to their statements.  Are any of these people recognized experts in their fields? Have the published anything? What made him choose these people? There are no answers to that question.  They are freaks demonstrating that anyone who doesn't believe in a strict divide between men and women are gross.  Whether viewers are persuaded by his view depends entirely on whether viewers consider 'gross' a salient factor in determining public policy. 

The pro-trans side are Gert Comfrey, a family therapist licensed in Tennessee; Dr. Marci Bowers, a surgeon specializing in sex reassignment surgery; Michelle Fournie, pediatrician; Dr. Patrick Grzanka, professor of women's studies at University of Tennessee; Rodrigo-Hang Lehtinen, Executive Director of the National Center for Transgender Equality; Rep. Mark Takano, Democrat, California's 14th Congressional District.  The gist of all of these interviews is that the interviewees refused to state that being a woman is a matter of biology.  

Walsh stages his interviews with the pro-trans people in ways that emphasize the freak show aspect, especially Dr. Fournie and Mr. Lehtinen.  Each of these interviews takes place on a nearly empty set, in front of a wall with large windows.  Walsh and the interviewees sit on stools or short chairs facing each other, with a large blank wall between them.  Dr. Fournier has blue hair and wears something like a Jedi robe.  There is an electrical outlet at the end of a long piece of metal conduit on the wall behind them, clearly dividing the screen between Walsh and the doctor.  Mr. Lehtinen is wearing a poorly-fitted shirt and blazer, and sits so that his belly, and not his face, is centered in the shot.  Since Walsh never bothers to explain why he spoke to these particular people, the strong implication from the visuals is that these are weird people whose opinions can be ignored.

The 'trans advocates are freaks' aspect gets stronger with his set of 'person on the street' interviews.  He asks random people in New York and San Fransisco his title question and gets a bunch of vague answers.  At one point he asks a naked man in San Fransisco about gender and gets a hostile response.  It is never made clear why Naked Dude's opinion is important, other than as an example of the freaks in the nasty city.   

The much more revealing interviews are with the anti-trans side of things.  There are three sets of these: people presented as experts; people who have been involved in conflicts regarding trans issues; and a group of Masai.  

The first of the 'victims is Don Sucher, owner of a Star Wars store in Aberdeen, WA, famous for a confrontation with a city council member in his town over a sign in his window stating 'if you have a dick, you ain't a chick.' Sucher gets a sympathetic portrayal from Walsh.  Sucher answers Walsh who asked him how Sucher knew he was male with 'because I have a dick."  The one question Walsh doesn't ask is why Sucher put the sign up in the first place? Why was this important to him? Sucher's business is selling memorabilia from a set of space fantasy movies for kids; why would he make a point of using a slang word for male genitals in his store? Are Star Wars fans unusually attracted to retrograde gender roles? 

The second alleged victim is Scott Newgent, a transman who regrets his transition.  Newgent describes the health problems he's suffered since his transition and shows this scars on his arm resulting from phalloplasty surgery.  Newgent -- note his name, New Gent -- asserts that pharmaceutical companies make a 'million dollars' from every person who undergoes medical transition.  Walsh does not ask for or provide any support for this assertion.  He does, however, cut back to the interview with Dr. Fournier and ask her about Lupron, a transition drug.  This is the extent of his analysis or investigation of Newgent's assertion.  

The third alleged victim is an unidentified Canadian man who appears on camera as 'Unknown Caller' on an iPhone.  Unknown Caller claims to be facing trial for child abuse in British Colombia for 'misgendering' his daughter and objecting to her medical transition.  This is the most egregious example of Walsh's tendentiousness.  Because this person is anonymous, it is not possible to check anything about his statements. We are expected to take these man's assertion as truth, with no way to check it at all.  

The longest 'victim' segment concerns women athletes allegedly victimized by competing against transwomen.  He does not present anything about transmen in athletics at all.  Walsh interviews one of Lia Thomas' teammates, a Connecticut girl who lost track events to two trans girls.  Lehtinen appears in this section as an advocate for trans athletes.  Walsh puts Lehtinen's voice over a montage of Lia Thomas and various other transwomen athletes holding trophies and prizes.  (note: one of the pictures features Minna Sveard of Texas A & M Commerce, in my home town.  Minna did quite well, and is definitely not trans.)  

It is especially interesting that Walsh spent so much time on women athletes, since he has a long history of hostility to women athletes.  He does not disclose that history in this movie.  

The experts are presented in a manner similar to the trans-adovocates: interviewed in rooms or offices with their names and titles in text at the bottom of the screen.  As in the advocate interviews, he doesn't provide any context to their views or explanations of why he picked them.  He presents medical experts in the same way as a theologian and Jordan Peterson.  

What is most interesting about the experts is that all of them admit that there is a deeply subjective aspect to gender identity.  Peterson admits that there are masculine women and feminine men.  Miriam Grossman, an anti-trans advocate psychiatrist, who says that 'sex is biological,' also admits that gender is a subjective feeling.  

By far the most offensive thing in the whole presentation is Walsh's field trip to Kenya to ask the Masai his title question.  This bit starts with shots of him driving on a dirt road, big animals on the savannah and includes him trying to throw a spear.  (For those of us of a certain age, this part is especially cringey, since 'spear-chucker' is an old racist term for Black people.  I would be very surprised if Walsh didn't know that.) He then goes to interview some men dressed in plaid robes in front of a mud hut, emphasizing the 'primitive people' aspect. 

The Masai men agree that 'a man is someone who does the role of a man.' They describe the 'role of a man' as fathering and providing for children.  In case Matt didn't notice, half of that description is a social role, not a biological one.  A better interviewer might have dug further on this, but Walsh is not interested in nuance or study.  He's here to show the fancy white people in cities that even primitive tribesmen know what women do.  Had he been a little bit better researcher, he would have looked into the complexity of gender roles in traditional African societies..  He might even have interviewed someone on the street in Mombasa.  Instead, he chose to be The Great White Visitor to African Disneyland.  

He never gets an answer to his question.  He never wanted an answer.  Walsh believes in a rigid and brutally enforced gender hierarchy with men on top and women as the permanent underclass, assigned forever to domestic shit work.  Women only exist as pregnancy machines  His view of fathers is that they exist to make money.   Men and women share nothing in his world, which makes me wonder why he ever got married, requiring him to share space with something as boring as a woman. 

He could have focused on what current research says about the effects of puberty blockers, on what the medical standards for transition for children, on ways to structure athletic competitions to be fair to everyone.  Instead, he puts on a freak show for the rubes.  

Odd hobbies and the Culture War

Instead of flying cars and Star Trek replicators, the 21st century has given us mostly stupid wars, environmental collapse, economic collapse, and, now, plagues.   Worse, we do not seem to want to work together to solve any of these problems because scoring points on the Other Team is so much more fun than, say, getting a vaccine to protect oneself and everyone else from dying.  Cooperation and community is just so last century, like TV antennas and shag carpeting but without the cool retro charm.  

What did get, from the cool electronic devices that almost make up for not having flying cars, is the Culture War.  This is the set of silly 'issues' devised by our oligarchs to keep the people whose only policy is massive tax cuts in power.  And yes, this essay is going to be nakedly partisan, because whatever else it is, the Culture War is a Republican Party operation.  

This is a post written by Rod Dreher of The American Conservative freaking out about a BBC article discussing a 15-year-old drag queen.  He asserts that the existence of a kid with an unusual hobby is evidence that the West is 'declining.' 

"Cherry West is what liberals want boys to be, or at least have no objections to boys embracing this repulsive identity. Conservatives — or at least Hungarian ones, if not US Conservatism Inc. grifters— don’t believe that. Which side are you on? A lot of people — especially conservatives — want to sit this out, but that option is not available to us. The Left will not allow that. If you are not consciously and actively opposed to this stuff — and act politically and otherwise to push back, as the Hungarian ruling party is doing — then you might was well get used to the cultural castration represented by Cherry West."

He provides no evidence from any source to support his assertion that liberals want boys to be Cherry Wests.  He is correct that we don't have any objections to boys adopting drag as a hobby, any more than we object to them making model airplanes or playing Dungeons and Dragons.  This does raise the question as to why should I care about Dreher's opinion any more than I care about Cherry West? Aren't both things, like, just opinions, man? No, they are not, because Dreher wants his opinion to carry the force of law.  

I think Dreher is perfectly entitled to his opinion about Sam Carlin, the boy who plays Cherry West, and Carlin's family, but neither he nor anyone else should be able to use government authority to punish that kid or his family.  (FWIW, in the BBC article, Carlin's family refers to the boy using masculine pronouns and the character with feminine ones.)  Carlin's family supports his hobby.  There is nothing in the article to lead one to conclude that Sam Carlin is at all sexually active or even what his sexual orientation is.  He does perform at Pride parades, which is an indication but by no means conclusive.  There is just nothing in this piece to suggest that Sam Carlin is being victimized at all.  

Dreher, in fact, never discusses anything about whether Sam Carlin is being victimized.  He simply calls Cherry West 'disgusting.'  He further says that conservatives should be 'consciously and actively opposed to this stuff' and should be politically active in that opposition.  What Dreher doesn't say, and what I want to know, is what form does that political opposition take? 

He frames his condemnation of the kid, his family, the BBC, and liberals, in an article praising Victor Orban and the Fidesz Party in Hungary's policies restricting what Fidesz calls 'gay propaganda' toward children.  Hungary's law mostly bans mention of nontraditional gender roles in any media designed for kids.  The government of Hungary can, under this law, outright ban a publication, require the publisher add a disclaimer, or restrict access to the publication to anyone under 18.  Here is a link to an article discussing the law in greater detail.  Dreher supports the Hungarian law, including its penalties.  The question that this raises is: how much further does Dreher want to go with punishment? 

It is important to remember here that laws banning things don't, actually, stop anyone from doing or making those things.  Bans give the government the authority to fine or imprison people who keep doing those things.  It's one thing to dislike something or be disgusted by it.  It's another thing entirely to want the people who do that to be imprisoned.  Culture Warriors want to put people in jail for hobbies, or at least won't deny that they want to do so.  Prosecution and jail are very expensive.  To Dreher and company, that expense is justified even if it means we don't have the money to handle our other problems. I strongly disagree.