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.
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