What is a Woman?

It's not really all that complicated - at least I don't think so.

What is a woman?

I just finished watching Matt Walsh's just released and very intriguing documentary, What is a Woman?, which currently has a 97% audience rating (among thousands of viewers) on Rotten Tomatoes. But unless you are a subscriber to The Daily Wire, you probably have not seen or heard much about this film yet. And despite favorable reviews, you aren't likely to either - as most of the main stream media has chosen to ignore the film.

You'll have to to go to Substack for reviews, where I recommend this excellent piece by Matt Taibbi.

There are exactly two reasons why this documentary is being shunned by the bulk of the media. The first is that it will be taken by many on the left as transphobic and recent history is abundantly full of instructive ques as to what happens to the insufficiently woke when it comes to this topic. The second is that Walsh is a religious conservative and this film was produced by a right wing media outlet.

These features have “No Trespassing” stamped all over this film as far as critics from, say, The New York Times, Slate, The Atlantic and other self-elected arbiters of culture are concerned.

All of that is a shame, since What is a Woman? is an extremely well-made documentary that's very much worth watching.

Matt Walsh, as previously noted, is a religious conservative and right-wing provocateur - but one with a sense of humor. Walsh's principal talent as a filmmaker lies simply in allowing his most intransigent, oblivious and self-absorbed subjects to set themselves up. He’s a conservative version of Errol Morris, who just points a camera and lets things roll. Hoisted on their own petards, as sayeth the bard.

The most interesting thing about this film, at least to me, is that it reveals the odd confabulation of people who are in no other way connected: politically, philosophically or socially, who've found themselves on the same side of the issues central to What is a Woman?

I don't personally know many trans individuals – no more than a handful. But for what it's worth, I like and respect all of those who I do know. All of them transitioned well into adulthood, when they were old enough to make completely informed decisions. They seem to be happy and doing fine.

Good for them. Everyone should follow their own path. Everyone ought to have the right to determine, at their core, who they are. I completely support that. And I don't care how many clicks out of “normal” any of it happens to be.

I literally don't know anyone who generally wishes the trans community any harm. But I do know many who, while not enthusiastic about embracing the trans lifestyle for a variety of reasons, live by the dictum that everyone should just live their best life. That's what freedom is about.

Most of us live by the ethos that one's personal business is their own - unless they insist on making it everyone else's. If you do that by, say, inappropriately involving young kids through kindergarten or elementary school curriculum, or by supporting laws that allow very young children to undergo a poorly-studied, life-altering regimen of drugs and surgery, without complete parental consent, then, yeah, we're going to have a problem.

The coalition of those pushing back against the full woke treatment of trans issues consists not only of cultural conservatives, but liberal feminists, medical doctors and a variety of scientists. Though the arguments about pronouns seem silly, the arguments about heart attack serious (literally) treatments for gender dysphoria (an exceedingly rare diagnosis according to DSM-5), are not.