Review: What is a Woman?

Hey, have you seen Matt Walsh’s documentary, What is a Woman?

Me neither.

I am curious. But Matt Walsh is an arch-conservative. He works for the Daily Wire, a news outlet founded by another notorious arch-conservative, Ben Shapiro. Plus, to see the documentary, I’d have to take out a $100 annual membership in the Daily Wire.

Ew.

As a left-liberal, I just want to see the documentary, not get in bed with these guys.

Instead I take to YouTube and watch vicariously — by watching people who have watched the documentary.

There, I find the movie trailer. And a ton of documentary footage reproduced in scores of commentary videos. After watching several hours worth, I feel like I’ve seen the whole movie.

The premise is Walsh on a mission to answer the big question of our time, What is a Woman?

Among those Walsh interviews are a gender-reassignment surgeon, a gender-affirmation therapist, a politician, and a gender-studies professor.

Predictably, all reject definitions based in biology. That is, woman equals adult, human female.

Instead, these “gender experts” insist that womanhood is a state-of-mind. Ergo, a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman.

In the course of their interviews, they also make a bunch of other assertions. That puberty blockers are low-risk and completely reversible. That reassignment surgery is perfectly safe and effective, and leads to overwhelmingly happy outcomes. And that children are capable of informed consent in these matters.

One of the commentators I watch is a trans-man who goes by the moniker, The Offensive Tranny.

Offensive has big concerns over the direction trans-activism has taken. Particularly those who deny or minimize the risks of puberty blockers and gender reassignment surgeries. Or those who trivialize the age-of-consent principle.

His beef with the movie is that it fails to include enough science-friendly trans perspective (from people like himself), thus portraying the trans-community as a crazy monoculture.

Still, The Offensive Tranny calls the movie a must-watch…

Blair White is a trans-woman and YouTube commentator. She says the movie “really cuts a hole in the gender cult and gender ideology we always talk about on this channel.”

White watches clips of the “gender experts” and writes off their words as psychobabble. For example, she takes issue with the oft repeated, “gender assigned at birth” language.

It’s lunacy, she says, to completely restructure society in deference to the 0.01% whose gender doesn’t align with their biological sex. The exception is not the rule.

Notwithstanding the conservative bias, White gives the film 4.9 out of 5 stars…

What I find most distressing is that we on the liberal-left aren’t producing our own fair-and-balanced cultural documentaries.

Why? Because we’ve chosen psychological safety over the principle of free speech. In so doing, we’ve lost our ability to openly and honestly discuss the issues of our age.

Instead of seeking to improve our ideas through reasoned debate, we’ve let activists get the upper hand. They tell us precisely what we’re allowed to think.

Disagree or raise any issues and they accuse you of hate speech and come for your job.

I’m alarmed. How about you?

Do you believe the current strains of activism will lead us to a brighter future? If so, maybe there’s nothing to worry about.

But if, like me, you believe the activists are destroying society using McCarthyite fear tactics, then we’d better talk.