What is a Woman?
The anti-LGBTQ+ right believes it has a poignant question here. As usual, they are wrong.
A serious man
On June 1st, commentator Matt Walsh released a “documentary” film titled What is a Woman in which he discusses the nature of womanhood with various guests in an attempt to illustrate the absurdity of contemporary transgender issues with an anti-LGBTQ+ bent. The film is behind a paywall on the website of Walsh’s employer Daily Wire, but the upcoming corresponding book’s listing on online retailers summarizes it as follows:
Is this even a question?
What is a woman?
But all of a sudden, way too many people don’t seem to know the answer. Is a woman a woman just by feeling or acting a particular way? Aren’t gender roles just a “social construct”? Can a woman be “trapped in a man’s body”? Does being a woman mean anything at all?
We used to think being a woman had something to do with biology, but the nation’s top experts keep assuring us that is definitely not the case. So Matt decided to do what no man (whatever that means) had done before. He sat down with the experts and asked them directly.
In What Is a Woman?, our hero:
• Discovers that no one—not doctors, therapists, psychiatrists, or politicians—can actually define the word “woman”
• Hilariously convinces a radical gender therapist that Matt is questioning his own gender identity
• Uncovers the shocking and horrifying roots of radical gender ideology
• Learns exactly how activists and ideologues are trying to brainwash our kids
• Reveals a strategy to defeat the collective insanity that has taken over our society
If no one can define the word “woman,” why does Walsh care who calls themselves women? What is his interest in muddying these particular waters with a question he admits early on is unanswerable?
As is the usual case when the right thinks it has struck rhetorical gold, the actual point behind the argument is meaningless and easily sidestepped, because a “woman” is whatever we want it to be and can change depending on our purposes, a concession to the imprecise nature of categories in the real world that does nothing to diminish the historical suffering of (a demographic we might call) cis women or anyone else, nor does the inclusion of seemingly non-female women in the category do anything to abrogate their claim to equality and fairness (it only broadens the tent). Walsh discovers the truth in the first bullet point above, that gender roles are indeed a social construct and that no one in any field (medical, ethical, psychiatric, etc.) is concerned about hashing out the particulars of what does and does not constitute womanhood, but he seems to take the exact wrong lesson from it and implies that because women do not exist, men who transition cannot claim to be one. This is not the indictment of gender ideology he seems to think it is, and the question he poses so smugly is one that no serious person is asking.
There is no more a platonic ideal of womanhood than there is manhood, or personhood, or any other real world phenomena that exists outside of its theoretical counterpart. The usual rhetorical gambit here is similar to moving the goalposts: if a precise, 100% objective gestalt of womanhood cannot be defined, then individuals who have transitioned cannot claim to be any particular gender. Of course, this also means that no one can claim to be a woman by the same demanding criteria, a reasonable answer that would be immediately countered by anti-LGBTQ+ campaigners in one of two ways: that of course a human being born with female chromosomes is a woman and to claim otherwise is absurd (this forgets intersexed and hermaphroditic individuals exist and are born naturally that way, and that medicine used in transitioning contains female hormones), or in a more general appeal to common sense, that if a person looks and acts like a woman, most people would agree that they are one and we can consider them a woman by consensus (the problem here is obvious). Both of these answers are self-defeating: one presumes that the question is meaningless in anything but a theoretical academic context (with no attendant implications for normative real world rights discussions) or that the definition of womanhood is fluid and open to interpretation to begin with. To put it simply: if the ideal of womanhood exists, the transphobes are wrong; if the ideal of womanhood doesn’t exist, the transphobes are wrong.
The implied goal with the question is to turn feminist leanings (see the TERF, or trans-exclusionary radical feminist, movement, a small but vocal proportion of feminists) against trans rights campaigners by pitting them against one another, the implication being that an individual who once presented as male transitioning into a woman is somehow corrupting or trivializing their struggles, when it is plain from actual feminist perspectives that all allies are to be welcomed and supported. For a feminist to be unwelcoming of trans issues is to be exclusionary themselves, to seek a spot at the table with the goal of using their newfound rights to exclude others for reasons no better than those which kept them down for centuries.
There is also the right’s usual attempts to play the victim, with director Matt Walsh claiming that “People simply don’t want this film to be seen,” an attempt to drum up attention that could be said about any critically and scientifically reviled “documentary” that has emerged in the last 30 years (see also Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed and No Safe Spaces, by the same director of Matt Walsh’s pseudodocumentary).
This twisted attempt to play the victim is an important aspect of the fascist program to curtail the rights of others, a corruption of the harm principle that argues they are being oppressed (by the existence of LGBTQ+ people in this case) in order to justify immediate measures to stop that harm. Where consistency and rationality are not required, rightists can successfully conflate two issues—the manufactured one, which is that LGBTQ+ individuals are forcing their lifestyles on others and demanding they be worshipped, and the real issue, which is that they exist and demand equal rights—and propose a solution addressing the imagined threats which in effect targets LGBTQ+ groups very existence. The book synopsis claims that the author “Learns exactly how activists and ideologues are trying to brainwash our kids.” By “brainwashing,” he of course refers to a very small and very polite movement to destigmatize gender questioning in children and provide gender-affirming care, in order to (among other laudable goals) prevent depression and suicide in trans youth:
The first large-scale study of its kind, announced Tuesday by The Trevor Project, provides a strong rebuttal to anti-transgender activists and Republican lawmakers across the country who have tried to ban gender-affirming healthcare for trans and nonbinary youth.
The organization said its peer-reviewed research paper found that gender-affirming hormone therapy, also known as GAHT, is significantly related to lower rates of depression, suicidal thoughts, and suicide attempts by young people who identify as transgender and/or nonbinary. …
The key findings of the GAHT study, according to The Trevor Project, are:
Half of all trans and nonbinary young people said they were not using GAHT but would like to.
36% were not interested in receiving GAHT.
14% were already receiving GAHT.
Youth of color had lower rates of accessing GAHT when they wanted it compared to white youth.
Young people receiving GAHT reported a lower likelihood of experiencing recent depression and considering suicide, compared to those who wanted GAHT but did not receive it.
Receiving GAHT was associated with nearly 40% lower odds of recent depression and of a past-year suicide attempt by young people under age 18.
Nearly 80% of those who received GAHT reported they had at least one parent who supported their gender identity, showing that parental support for a child’s gender identity is strongly associated with receipt of GAHT.
An idea for a documentary: Why Does Matt Walsh Want Trans Kids to Kill Themselves? As with the “Don’t Say Gay Bill” and the idiocy surrounding the “grooming” debate (written about here), the right has used its vast propaganda network to preemptively answer an imagined oppression, in this case the unacceptable oppression of trans individuals asking to be treated like human beings. Characteristically, Walsh claims that his opponents are interested in the very outcome he is currently working to achieve:
As is the usual case with right-wing propaganda, the actual soundness of the arguments is unimportant. Only their use as sound bytes and “gotcha” moments are necessary for the propaganda to fulfill its purpose, which is not to convince anyone of any particular point—the film is for people who already agree with Walsh and want to increase their hatred and laugh at those who are different (unsurprisingly, it is only viewable by members of Ben Shapiro’s echo chamber site The Daily Wire). Here is the real reason Walsh created this film:
A transgender man says that Matt Walsh is using his image without permission for a transphobic documentary. He also says that Twitter refused to remove the trailer for the documentary in which his photo appears.
The Daily Dot previously reported that Walsh was behind a fake company duping trans people into being interviewed for a documentary. Walsh tweeted the trailer for that documentary, What is a Woman?, on May 14. The right-wing site Walsh works for, the Daily Wire, produced it. …
Kyriacou says his concerns about the effect of Walsh using his image have already been realized.
“I have received multiple transphobic replies and tweets since my original post about the film,” he said. …
“You’ve used a photo of me in your trailer for What is a Woman? and I demand that you remove it from further trailers and the film in general,” Kyriacou wrote, according to a screenshot of the message he posted on Thursday. “I did not give you permission to use my content and do not want to be affiliated with this project in general.”
Kyriacou tagged Walsh in the tweet and added, “I hope you do the right thing here.”
Walsh has not responded, Kyriacou said.
Walsh didn’t reply to inquiries the Daily Dot sent via email and the contact form on his website Friday morning.
Images posted to public profiles on social media are often considered “fair use,” meaning that they can be reposted elsewhere without permission. There are various factors to consider, however. Instagram’s terms include an explanation of such factors, which include whether the content is transformed or used for commercial purposes, in which case it may not be deemed “fair use.”
Walsh also included the image of an underage person in the film, leading to an interesting catch-22:
I did not and will not watch the film. I do not wish to give Matt Walsh any more attention or views than than I am already doing by mentioning it on a Substack with little readership. Even this is giving him undue attention. The issue behind its central conceit, though, the pseudoscientific attempt to twist what the right considers leftist thinking around to use against leftists, is common and a compellingly simple and tidy chestnut for the film’s intended audience who are searching for easy, pat justifications for their transphobia. There will be criticisms that we cannot write off the film without watching it, but this is yet another strategy in the rightist playbook. Demanding that we watch this “documentary” before dismissing it is part of the overarching attempt by the right to drag the discourse down by promulgating an endless and interchangeable series of hollow points that leftists do not have time to dismiss one by one. The non-question “What is a woman?” is emblematic of the right’s tendency to misuse and distort language and to attempt to turn leftist principles of inclusion and fairness against themselves, in the process betraying their misunderstanding of those principles. It is not worth a moment of consideration.
The answer here, as it often is, is not engagement. It is shaming, ostracizing, deplatforming, and silencing hatemongers like Walsh by any nonviolent means necessary. Twitter has already suspended Walsh for transphobic comments once, but as of now his one million follower account is active, free to violate the platform’s rules against hate speech because Twitter’s ownership is afraid to enforce their own rules against right-wingers on the platform out of a fear of being labelled biased (this will happen regardless of their actions). They have no such compulsion against punishing leftists who post much less incendiary content, because there is no pervasive, well-funded left-wing propaganda machine ready and willing to accuse them of unfairness. Unfortunately, it seems that the right wing grift machine is going to continue to chug along, producing an infinite supply of charlatans like Walsh, who will continue to enrich themselves at the cost of innocent bystanders’ mental well-being and lives, celebrated by similarly ignorant (and/or evil) hangers-on. We can only marginalize his viewpoint as best we can and in the meantime hope his children are unscathed by his doubtlessly damaging parenting.
To put it simply, the cruelty is the point. To that end, Walsh went beyond using individuals’ likenesses without their consent and attempted to trick several members of the trans community into appearing in the dishonest propaganda:
From Pink News:
Shortly after Erlick posted her Twitter thread, Makenna Waters and Justin Folk deleted their Twitter accounts. Twitter has also suspended the account of the Gender Unity Project.
Based on the responses to Erlick’s post, it seems as if as many as 50 trans people and doctors had been contacted by the anti-trans project before it was exposed, according to The Daily Beast. One of those people reportedly filmed scenes for the documentary. …
She continued: “Right now, there’s only one thing that we can do that’s going to be effective, which is going through and reporting all of his accounts until his social media platforms can’t avoid suspending him anymore.
“He is breaking their discrimination policies, he’s ignoring their misgendering rules, and he is living it up because they refuse to ban him. So the most effective next steps would be to report his accounts and make sure platforms actually follow through with upholding their policies.”
In a just world, Walsh and his cohorts would have been out of a job long ago.