You are all child abusers. You prey upon impressionable children and indoctrinate them into your insane ideological cult, a cult which holds many fanatical views but none so deranged as the idea that boys are girls and girls are boys. By imposing this vile nonsense on students to the point even of forcing young girls to share locker rooms with boys, you deprive these kids of safety, of privacy, and of something more fundamental, too, which is truth. If education is not grounded in truth, then it is worthless, worse, it is poison. You are poison. You are predators. I can see why you try to stop us from speaking, you know that your ideas are indefensible, you silence the opposing side because you have no argument. You can only hide under your beds like pathetic little gutless cowards, hoping that we will shut up and go away. But we won’t. I promise you that.
Matt Walsh made a documentary about a woman.
To follow up on yesterday's post by Steve Novella in which he discussed the current scientific understanding of sex and gender, the many misconception about it, as well as some of the anti-trans misinformation based on those misconception, we at SBM thought that now would be a good time to review The quote above comes from 80 minutes into the movie, when Walsh is shown speaking at a meeting of the Loudoun County School Board, so that residents could express their views on Policy 8040, which would allow trans students to use their correct name and pronoun. Walsh rented a basement from a friend in order to be able to speak at the school board meeting and make the above-impassioned speech.
In What is a Woman?, pundits, traditional media, and social media platforms advertise against gender-affirming care and especially the use of pronouns, restrooms, and locker rooms by trans people that align with their beliefs. The Alliance Defending Freedom is representing Cross in the case. Walsh discussed a case against trans athletes in Connecticut.
Walsh is a conservative political commentator who hosts a podcasts on The Daily Wire and is the creator of what is a woman. The controversy surrounding the creationism pseudo-documentary Expelled! is very similar to Walsh's deception during the making of his movie. There is no intelligence allowed. Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers were interviewed under false pretenses. Dawkins and Myers agreed to be interviewed for the film because they were told that the documentary would explore the differences between creationists and Dawkins.
Expelled!, which was released, turned out to be sympathetic to intelligent design and similar to other pseudodocumentaries that promote bad science and science denial. Expelled!'s filmmakers tried to make a connection between Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and the Holocaust. The appearance of vaccine experts like Dr. Paul Offit in the anti-vax film The Greater Good comes to mind.
It was released on the first day of Pride Month. Walsh presents himself as a curious man who goes on a journey to discover the truth about sex and gender. This framing technique, in which the documentarian or a stand-in travels around interviewing people and observing events in a quest to answer a question, is a favorite in pseudodocumentaries of this type. The Beautiful Truth, a documentary that promoted the cancer quackery known as Gerson therapy and was framed around the story of a curious 15-year-old boy, is an example of a science-denying documentary.
Matt Walsh's "question of a generation" isn't answered well.
The protagonists in Expelled! and The Beautiful Truth did the same thing. Walsh travels to a number of places to interview people and ask them a question in the film. The 94-minute documentary features high production values, interviews, news clips, a trip to Africa, and about as much balance and accuracy as Expelled!, The Beautiful Truth, or The Greater Good, all with a degree of fear-based campaigning and misinformation rivaling that found in Walsh insists that women were understood to be a certain thing throughout it all. What did you see change? One can't answer the question now.
There is an appeal to antiquity and a strawman here. Trans people have always existed, and the term "woman" has never had a single, fixed meaning. The answer to the question is more complicated than what Walsh is willing to believe or accept. Walsh is confident that his film can't be discredited and that the Left is afraid of it.
We will expose as much of the deceptive framing and narrative as we can.
Two children are opening birthday presents in the film. The boy and his friends are excited to unwrap a football and play with a gun while the girl and her friends are having a tea party. The use of color to designate a child's gender is a relatively new phenomenon that only began around World War I. Pink, which is associated with red, was thought to be too harsh for girls, who were assigned a color associated with sky and daylight. Up to the age of six or so young children were usually dressed in white gowns, which provided easy access for diaper changes and allowed for bleaching, as well as easy reuse for each new child in the family. When industrial dyes became more common, children's clothes were usually all white. The preference for colors based on a child's gender reversed in the 1940s, with blue being the default color for boys and pink for girls. The "pink for girls/blue for boys" color assignment became firmly entrenched in the 1980s due to the rise of prenatal testing, which allowed parents to know if their child was a girl or a boy.
Walsh said in the narration that people who say there are no differences between males and females areidiots. A man is a straw man. No one is saying there isn't any difference. Walsh doesn't like the way a trans woman uses the term "woman" in a way that is not acceptable. That doesn't mean it's incorrect. Sex is a lot more complex than what is presented here. The majority of the cells in the body are marked either male or female, according to one of Walsh's interviews. The biology doesn't accept thebinary Scott Newgent stated that the skeleton of someone assigned female at birth will clearly be labeled as female when dug up. The link between the anthropology study published in 1972 and the inter individual variation in sex characteristics on bone is not new. Walsh states that nature always tells the truth even when we don't want to hear it. Walsh doesn't want the truth to be the one he hears. According to Dr. Patrick Grzanka, one of Walsh's interviewees, Walsh's invocation of "the truth" is condescending and mocking in the same way as Ben Stein's invocation of "the truth" Stein confronted a statue of Darwin over his "crimes" at the end of the film.
When interviewing members of the African Maasai tribe, Walsh is told that men and women have different roles in their culture and that trans people don't exist. Walsh asked what if a woman had a penis. Walsh says he can't go a day without hearing that. The answer to what a woman is is that a woman is able to deliver babies. Walsh believes that gender ideology is a unique Western phenomenon. He's right. Anti-LGBTQ activists in Europe use a term called gender ideology. It's not an academic term or a political movement. The movement is led by queer and feminist activists who want to upend the traditional family and natural order of society. The fear-mongering of gender ideology is based on two beliefs: first, that LGBTQ people threaten Christian values and the traditional family, and second, that men and women should follow antiquated gender roles in order to protect society.
Walsh interviewed members of just one out of 3000 tribes in Africa and no one from any other culture outside of the U.S., which comes across as some spectacular cherry-picking that is unrepresentative of the diversity of beliefs and practices involving gender. We don't know if Walsh knows that the Maasai tribe has a tradition of female genital cutting. The ritual is still used to prepare girls for marriage at a young age. Walsh states in a clip from his appearance on The Dr. Phil Show that he cares about the truth and wants to live in a society where people care about the truth. It is hard not to wonder if Walsh approves of a society in which gender roles are so rigidly constrained that girls are forced to undergo genital cutting to enforce them.
There are a number of false equivalences in the film that are meant to cause maximum fear and revulsion about trans people.
Walsh inquires about Body Identity Integrity Disorder, also known as the "transabled" community, while interviewing a gender affirming surgeon. If a man in this kind of marginalized community went to the doctor and asked for his arm to be cut off, what would happen? The situation has nothing to do with gender identity. Walsh wants to know if this is completely irrelevant. Being trans is not a pathology. It's rare, and we're still learning its neurological and psychological underpinning. It is clear that Walsh is trying to make gender dysphoria, trans identification, and gender-affirming care look ridiculous.
Dr. Patrick R Grzanka, chair of the Interdisciplinary Program in Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Tennessee, asked Walsh why he is so concerned with not believing a person who asserts their gender identity. Being trans isn't a choice, it's identification as another race. Rachel Dolezal doesn't experience racism on the scale that a black person does. The author and journalist was noted in The Guardian.
But someone who crosses racial boundaries from a privileged one to a marginalized one is much more likely to do so for political purposes (as Dolezal seems to have done) or to profit from minority culture (as we’ve seen time and time again with white artists, like Iggy Azalea, appropriating black culture). Transitioning doesn’t often benefit trans people politically or financially; it benefits us because it is a way to begin to make our external presentation match our internal perceptions of ourselves, even as it is likely to disprivilege us socially and economically.
The argument is appealing to extremes.
Kids are now identifying as animals and are not allowed to be questioned about it because it is considered a queer identity. Naia Okami was recruited for the film under false pretenses. Human brains are very similar to each other and very different from the brains of other species. People who identify as Otherkin or Trans-species are not always queer. Conservatives use them as a way to mock trans people. They are a variation of the helicopter meme.
The above three arguments are similar to jokes made by transphobic comedians that use the phrase, "I identify as 'X'; so you have to treat me as 'X'" There are appeals to extremes, false equivalences, and appeals to ridicule in different proportions.
Four-year-olds who believe in Santa Claus are asked by a doctor if they are fantasy or delusion. According to Walsh, these children have a tenuous grasp on reality and cannot distinguish between reality and fantasy. This argument is the same one that Bill Maher made in a joke in which he compared trans children's assertion of gender identity to his childhood fantasies of wanting to be a pirate, leading him to joke that he was glad that no one ever scheduled him for eye removal, amputation. Fantasy play and understanding of gender identity are different. A four-year-old girl can say she is a girl without anyone questioning her identity. A trans girl is questioned, scrutinized, and often pressured to recant her story. Trans and cis children understand who they are, so why do they have to prove themselves? Walsh wrote a book that compared trans youth to a boy who thought he was a walrus. The child was offered a simple procedure to turn his feet into fins by the doctor. The inaccurate narrative of the conservative right that trans children are being rushed into gender-affirming surgeries is fed by this. He certainly has no issue foisting his own bizarre ideas about gender on children, as he claimed on the Dr. Phil show.
Walsh interviews a woman who says she missed out on much of her high school career because she was forced to compete against men. Her case has been supported by the ADF. The executive director of the NCTE immediately corrects Walsh's statement that there were two male track runners. Many trans people compete on teams that do not excel, and there is no inherent athletic advantage to being trans. There may be some differences, but they don't add to a competitive advantage. Walsh scored two expert interviews with the song "Man I Feel Like a Woman" while showing pictures of exceptional trans athletes such as Lia Thomas, Terry Miller, Mary Gregory, and more. The images shown include Caster Semenya. Intersex is what she is, she is not a trans woman.
In the film, the author of The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths about Sex and Identity in Our Society states, "No one seems to care about the safety of women and girls..." Isn't there still a women's and men's team for trans men and women? Trans people are just like cis people.
Walsh presented two incidents as proof that trans-inclusive policies endanger girls and enable predatory behavior. A trans woman with prior convictions was charged with indecent exposure at a bathhouse after customers complained that she was exposing her penis. There were violent protests following the incident.
In June 2021, a parent who was opposed to Policy 8040 reported that his daughter was attacked in the bathroom by a boy wearing a skirt. The story snowballed because of the conservative right's fears of trans predator in women's restroom. The girl had had priorconsensual contact with the cis boy who was responsible for the assault. Walsh did not mention that wearing a skirt at the time of the incident would have prevented the attacker from entering the girl's bathroom. Over two months later, they were approved.
Such is the brilliance of Walsh's movie. The Equality Act would amend the Civil Rights Act to include sexual orientation and gender identity. Takano doesn't last long in the interview.
There is no evidence that trans-inclusive policies lead to an increase in sexual offenses or that trans people are more likely to be victims. Trans youth in schools that don't allow access to gender-aligned facilities are more likely to be raped. The evidence on the safety of public restrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms with trans-inclusive policies has been reviewed.
The results show that the passage of such nondiscrimination laws is not related to the number or frequency of criminal incidents in such public spaces. Additionally, the results show that reports of privacy and safety violations in public restrooms, locker rooms, and changing rooms were exceedingly rare and much lower than statewide rates of reporting violent crimes more generally. This study provides evidence that fears of increased safety and privacy violations as a result of nondiscrimination laws are not empirically grounded.
Two people are featured in the documentary. The lack of benefits from gender-affirming surgery was the subject of an editorial by the authors. She fearmongers about the dangers of sexual education, and runs webinars such as The Truth about Gender, which sources anti-trans websites such as 4th wavenow. She has argued in favor of gender-affirming policies.
The founder of TReVoices, Newgent, spoke out about the brutal reality of medical transitions. Even though he didn't actually transition until age 42, Newgent uses his personal experience as a lens to undermine all gender affirmation. Trans people are the illusion of the "opposite sex" according to Newgent.
There are many blatantly false claims in the film.
According to Newgent, there are only a few long-term studies on the subject of gender-affirming surgery and suicidality. Yes, it's false. During a time when care was already difficult to access, Dr. Paul McHugh used his interpretation of the research to shut down the gender clinic. The primary researcher of the study stated that her research was misrepresented and that gender affirmation is positive for mental health. There are studies showing that gender-affirming surgeries are a positive intervention.
Many youth were suicidal before they found gender, and threats of suicide are terrible emotional blackmail. It is an intensely personal process to discover gender. Who decides if prior suicidal thoughts are related to gender dysphoria or not? Statistics on suicide rates among trans youth are consistent. Young trans people contemplated suicide at a higher rate than the rest of the country. Trans teens have a suicide rate six times higher than cis teens. There has been a 150% increase in the number of trans youth calling the suicide hotline.
There are no long term studies on hormone blockers for children and puberty blockers have never been used this way in the field of medicine. It's wrong. Gender-affirming care is not experimental. It doesn't make sense to say that it is.
There are a number of conspiracy theories about trans youth in the film.
Walsh interviews a teammate of Lia Thomas who says she will be called a transphobia if she speaks out. Sara Graft is worried that she won't be able to have conversations with her peers because they won't talk to her. Sex researchers have been afraid to speak out against trans activists due to the fear of ruining their personal and professional reputations. This is a story that is very old.
Trans people have been subject to pathologization and medicalization by researchers and health care professionals in the larger scope of systemic abuse. It is not possible to do good research into gender identity because you don't want to upset the activists. Soh believes that people who agree with activists are lifted in the media and are rewarded. We often note that we haven't gotten our big paychecks. Where are our homes? When Target removed the book from its online store, Walsh predicted that the canceling would begin.
Amazon has removed my bestselling LGBT children’s book from their LGBT book list. This is an unconscionable attack on gay rights and a horrific example of homophobia and gay erasure. pic.twitter.com/AZeyqp66Ps
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) December 10, 2021
It doesn't mean that the book is being canceled because a couple of big corporations didn't want to be seen as promoting transphobia and didn't categorize it as an LGBTQ book. The book's ads were pulled because they were not appropriate for all audiences. Nobody was silenced or canceled. Despite this, Walsh's book became the best seller on Amazon. Ben Shapiro tried to be funny but no canceling happened here. Powerful people in both traditional and social media promote Walsh's book. A depressing number of movement skeptics seem unaware of the film's nature as a propaganda film. Michael Shermer agrees with most of what What Is a Woman? has to say.
At one point in the film, Walsh speaks with a father in Canada who was arrested and fined $30,000 for messing with his daughter's gender. There is more to the truth. Misinformation by omission, also known as malinformation, is a recurring theme in Walsh's narrative, in which verifiable facts are presented in a deceptive fashion without context. What really happened? In a family law dispute, the father tried to block his child from gender affirming medical procedures. This fact is not mentioned in the film. The father's trans teenager was allowed to pursue gender-affirming testosterone because of the case. The court banned the father from saying anything about the case. He wouldn't refer to his child by the child's name or pronoun. The father went on various platforms to find out who was involved in his child's gender affirming activities.
A number of internet famous people are interviewed in the film. JordanPeterson is just plain tiring. He says that there is no such thing as a gender-affirming therapist because they don't affirm you. He asks if there are masculine girls after defining gender as "diversity in personality and temperament" There are girls. How are we going to deal with that? Is it possible to carve them up? It is like a doctor telling a patient, "Hey man, you're sick with whatever you want to be" We can't figure out what the word salad is supposed to mean, other than that he doesn't like gender-affirming care and that being trans is akin to'satanic ritual abuse'. The quote that inspired the meme was attributed to defeated comic book and video game villains.
Walsh wanted to know if it was a simple question. It's difficult to answer. It is a very difficult question to answer, but not for the reasons that Walsh claims. Walsh doesn't like complex answers that don't conform to his beliefs
A woman is a combination of physical attributes, what one is showing to the world, and the gender clues one gives, and hopefully, those match one's gender identity According to Grzanka, Walsh wants an essentialist definition of gender, saying that sex is a set of biological characteristics, that gender is a social construct, and that a woman is a person who identifies as a woman. If a man thinks of himself as a female but also as a male, he is not actually a female.
Walsh inquires about what is a woman in the film's conclusion. Do you want to marry one and find out? He asks his wife the question. Her response was cringe-worthy, as she handed him the jar. We think that this is a joke on Walsh.
This is Matt Walsh's best attempt at humor.
According to Dr. David Gorski in his review of VAXXED, all documentaries have a definite point of view, although some are not neutral. Having a point of view and a narrative that a filmmaker is trying to convey to the audience does not imply permission to present information and data in ways that are deceptive or dishonest. VAXXED cycles through a list of anti-vaccine false claims while Walsh presents misinformation as fact.
The film's popularity makes it a dangerous and influential piece of propaganda that further fuels the anti-trans movement. It should come as no surprise that it uses techniques common to all propaganda films designed to deny consensus based on science and medicine.
Walsh is no longer an expert on gender than Jenny McCarthy is on vaccines or Ben Stein is on evolution. Walsh didn't set out to honestly seek answers to a complicated question in his film. He started with a conclusion and then sought out sources to support it, making this film an exercise not in truth-seeking but rather motivated reasoning. Walsh made this film in order to further mock and degrade trans people using fake experts, bad science, false equivalences, and blatantly false claims to reach his conclusion.
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