“Humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being,” remarks Simone de Beauvoir in her seminal text The Second Sex. Women as a class have been regarded as inessential throughout history — an anomaly to the male; Aristotle noted, “The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities.” So when there are attempts to define a woman independent of man, there are multiple factions laying claim to the power to define them — Matt Walsh, a self-proclaimed “theocratic fascist”, is one of them.
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Matt is an American right-wing political commentator, the host of The Matt Walsh Show podcast and a columnist for The Daily Wire. On multiple occasions, he has publicly hailed traditional gender roles and stressed the importance of keeping women in the kitchen. Hence it is no wonder that he went on to feature in a 94-minute-long documentary titled What is a Woman?
What is a Woman? (English)
The film was first released to the subscribers of The Daily Wire on the first day of Pride month in 2022. A year later it was broadcast on Twitter with Elon Musk, the owner and CTO of the social networking site, promoting it and noting that every parent must watch the documentary.
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The documentary positions Matt as a journalist with a keen interest in finding an answer to the titular question. But, as soon as he starts out on a line of questioning, his hostility towards the trans community is palpable and his supposed good faith questions do not come across as genuine. Over the course of the documentary, he interviews a surgeon who specialises in gender-affirming surgery, a politician, a paediatrician, a gender studies professor, a psychiatrist, members of the Maasai tribe, and a transgender person.
The documentary presents some inaccurate facts — like attributing the term ‘gender identity’ to psychologist John Money, infamous for performing involuntary sex reassignment of the child David Reimer — and does not contribute to one’s understanding of the concepts of gender and sex, arguments that it alleges have captured the public’s imagination.
It is noteworthy that most of the guests in the documentary falter when they are asked to define a woman — their definitions are flimsy and arguments anything but airtight. The entire spectacle spirals to resemble an eighth-grade debate competition where both parties’ main goal is to prove the other wrong.
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To get away from the monster of his own making, Matt flies down to Kenya to speak to members of the Maasai tribe. With the help of a translator, he prods the men and women with questions on sex, gender, and transsexualism and to his delight they reaffirm his belief in traditional gender roles. The sequence is bizarre and one wonders why he chose to showcase them as the final authority on gender ideology (I’ll confess I snickered).
The quality of research and the editorial choices of the filmmakers are jarring — one wonders why his team boycotted gender-critical feminists who have risked their careers by speaking on the topic like Kathleen Stock and why they did not invest time and resources in studying the gender ideology movement in the United Kingdom, which is arguably in an advanced stage than the rest of the first world countries.
Matt also drops by an abortion rights rally and forces the protestors to define a woman while infringing on their personal space and making them visibly uncomfortable. His journey in finding out the true definition of a woman seems to come from his decades-long affair with misogyny and not genuine curiosity.
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The documentary ends with Matt’s wife defining a woman as an adult human female as she requests his help opening a jar’s lid.
But some points touched upon in the documentary are worth pondering over — a transgender person who is against prescribing medical transition for young children reveals that Lupron, a drug given to high-risk sex offenders and paedophiles, is given to children in most gender clinics as puberty blockers. He is visibly alarmed at the medical procedures being prescribed to the youth and insists on re-evaluating how medics deal with children suffering from gender dysphoria. His arguments would have gained merit if the producers cared to supplement them with examples like that of the Bell v. Tavistock case. Keira Bell, a 24-year-old woman in England, approached the court claiming she was not challenged enough about her decision to take drugs that began her transition from male to female at the age of 16 — a decision she regrets now.
The documentary does not give space to doctors to speak about the clinical procedures involved in gender reassignment surgeries especially when a section of the medical community is vocally sceptical of the procedures. It has been noted by physicians that gender-affirming hormones are partially irreversible and change people’s bodies for the rest of their lives. This has been compounded by the concerns of the Association of Clinical Psychologists, which has spoken of a “lack of robust, high-quality evidence regarding the safety and effectiveness of using puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat gender dysphoria in adolescents.”
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The issues of gender dysphoria need to be openly addressed while being supplemented with scientific research. However, turning the quest to define a woman into a narcissistic and self-indulgent exercise is doing more harm than good to the conversation.
If you have read so far, I’d recommend you watch Louis Theroux: Transgender Kids, a documentary that put transgender children at the centre of the issue with empathy and care while being rigorous with its research.
What is a Woman? is currently streaming on Twitter