What is a woman? Seems like a pretty simple question. But in today’s America, the left thinks females aren’t the only ones who count as women anymore. Stories abound of biological males not only invading women’s private spaces such as bathrooms and locker rooms, but dominating in women’s sports.
All of this comes with the support of radical leftists and activists in medicine.
Worse, those medical doctors aren’t just focused on treating adults. Transgender ideologues have targeted children.
Matt Walsh, author, podcast host, and filmmaker with The Daily Wire, has released a documentary film titled “What Is a Woman?” that he hopes will expose the worst aspects of gender ideology.
“You feel like you’re staring into the pit of hell, honestly. I mean, you’re looking at pure evil when you consider what they’re doing to these kids, and they know what they’re doing,” Walsh says. “They have to know what they’re doing, because they’re the doctors and they know what it entails. They know that this stuff is obviously irreversible and they also know that kids can’t actually consent to any of this stuff.”
Walsh adds:
Kids don’t know what they’re doing. They’re not looking five, 10 years into the future. I mean, even before you get to surgery and that’s horrific enough, you’ve got the drugs, the hormone drugs, the so-called puberty blockers, and those drugs among other consequences, they also have the effect of sterilizing kids.
Walsh joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss his film and what gender activists are doing to kids, and offer solutions on how to escape this post-truth environment.
We also cover these stories:
- Tesla CEO Elon Musk accuses Twitter of refusing to provide information on the number of bots and fake accounts populating the platform.
- The national average price of a gallon of gas hits a new record high of $4.86.
- Several players for the Tampa Bay Rays, citing religious reasons, refuse to wear “pride” logos on their uniforms during a baseball game against the Chicago White Sox.
Listen to the podcast or read the lightly edited transcript below.
Doug Blair: My guest today is Matt Walsh, author, podcast host, and now filmmaker with The Daily Wire. His new documentary “What Is a Woman?” is available now on dailywire.com. Matt, welcome to the show.
Matt Walsh: Hey, thanks for having me.
Blair: Of course. So, I watched the movie and like I was saying, it was incredible. I think one of the first things though that comes to mind about this documentary is that it was so frustrating to watch it and to see these people as they kind of avoided the questions. Many of the people had so many contradictory opinions about gender identity and women that it was tough not just getting really pissed off. How did you feel as you were talking to these people?
Walsh: I felt probably much the way you did watching it. It was a very frustrating experience in a lot of ways, and there were plenty of times, and for a couple interviews in particular, where I wanted to—you want to start arguing with them and shouting and screaming and doing all that, but we kind of knew going into this that that’s one way to approach it, is just to go out and yell at everybody and get into arguments. But that’s like what I do in podcast every day. Right?
What we thought would be more effective is just to let them talk, just to ask some basic questions, let them talk, and let gender ideology sort of hang itself in the process, because the theory that kind of precipitated the film is that gender ideology is this kind of house of cards that cannot withstand even the slightest scrutiny. And all it takes is really basic questions to reveal the fundamental absurdity underlying the entire thing. And I think that was kind of borne out throughout the course of the film.
Blair: That does bring to mind one of the college professors that you spoke to in Tennessee, who kept basically going back to, like, “Why are you asking me this question?” Or like, he had this circular definition of what a woman was. Does that seem to be relatively common where they either can’t answer the question, so they try to deflect back on you, or they try to reflexively just say, “Oh, a woman is a woman”? Did that crop up a lot?
Walsh: Yeah. Both of those things. There’s the kind of suspicion and defensiveness that really made its way to these interviews pretty early on. And going into the interviews, I had some questions I wanted to ask, basic questions, and obviously knowing there’d be follow-ups and there are certain questions I planned to ask that I thought would, “OK, this might be a little bit of a tough one. Maybe things will get a little tense here.”
What I found is that the interviews got tense way earlier than I thought they would because really any question that you ask—I mean, any question you ask these people, if you ask it with real skepticism, like you actually want to know, it’s not just a setup for them to get into a talking point, any question at all like that makes them defensive.
It also makes them suspicious because they live in a world where, well, nobody ever actually really questions this stuff. And so if you’re asking any actual questions, then it makes them suspicious that, “Oh, you must not be on our side.” So a lot of that.
And then also, as far as the circular definition, if there is an answer to the question from the gender ideology proponents, it’s the one that the professor gave, which is that a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman. I got that same thing, a version of it so many times.
And of course, it’s kind of disturbing to get it from a college professor of all people, because he should know that it’s a logically invalid definition. It’s a definition that doesn’t tell you anything at all about what you’re defining. And yet, this is the best they could do, basically.
Blair: Right. Another thing that kind of cropped up a lot is that anybody who asked these types of questions was, I think the quote was, “a dinosaur or a bigot.” That seemed to be a pretty common refrain amongst these leftists, that anybody who questioned the ideology had a bad motive.
Walsh: Yeah, that was first said by Marci Bowers, a sex-change surgeon, or as they call now “gender-affirmation surgery,” big scare quotes around that. And what I was told there was that, well, actually, nobody opposes this at all. Like everybody’s on my side. And then when I said, “Well, there are a few people that—”, “Oh, well, yeah, those are the dinosaurs.”
But you get that because for these people in the world that they live in and in the circles where they spend most of their time, it’s true that everybody agrees. There is no alternative perspective …
I’m not usually a very optimistic person, but I have some optimism when it comes to gender ideology, because I think it’s very beatable because it’s so logically absurd. And also because the people who are the proponents of this stuff, they’re very weak because they haven’t been tested. They’ve been insulated from criticism, from skepticism. And so it doesn’t take much to bring it all down, I think.
Blair: One of the things, too, that really struck me about this conversation … the conversations you were having is that children became involved very, very quickly. You spoke with Michelle Forcier, who is a pediatrician. You spoke specifically about puberty blockers and a lot of these other drugs. And then the other doctor you spoke to as well was talking about giving vaginoplasties, which is creating a fake vagina out of tissue and at 16. How did that make you feel when you were discussing with doctors what they were doing to children?
Walsh: Yeah. You feel like you’re staring into the pit of hell, honestly. I mean, you’re looking at pure evil when you consider what they’re doing to these kids, and they know what they’re doing. They have to know what they’re doing, because they’re the doctors and they know what it entails. They know that this stuff is obviously irreversible and they also know that kids can’t actually consent to any of this stuff. Kids don’t know what they’re doing. They’re not looking five, 10 years into the future.
I mean, even before you get to surgery, and that’s horrific enough, … you’ve got the drugs, the hormone drugs, the so-called puberty blockers. And those drugs among other consequences, they also have the effect of sterilizing kids. And so, how could a kid actually consent to being sterile for the rest of their lives, never reproducing? They don’t even understand what that is.
They are making decisions for their future self or their adult self, that their adult self is going to have to live with but who did not actually consent to this because these decisions are made when you’re so young and your brain is underdeveloped.
And so all those things are going through my head and all the people that are behind this, they know all of this, but that’s nothing. We get into the film, is, there’s so much money involved. It’s not only a monetary kind of motivation behind it, but that’s certainly part of it. There’s billions of dollars involved in this. And so they’ve got a real incentive to keep the train moving.
Blair: That does bring up the question, when I was watching you talk to these people, it seemed like most of them were sort of true believers. You had that female therapist at the beginning who seemed very engaged with the ideology. Do you think that this is more a true believer syndrome? Or do you believe that there is a large financial motivation behind a lot of what these people do?
Walsh: I think it’s both. It probably is more of a case-by-case basis. There certainly are true believers, but I think even for the true believers, I wonder deep down in their hearts, if they really believe what they’re saying.
I think that there’s one thing that we find with gender ideology, it’s kind of interesting, is that … they’re trying to trick the world, but also, they have to fool themselves in a way. That’s one of the reasons why the gender ideology proponents, they’re really into this affirmation. You have to affirm, constantly affirm. And if you fail to affirm someone in the way that they want to be affirmed, it’s like tantamount to murder. It’s the worst thing you could possibly do.
And why is that? Because as a man myself, even though when talking to the therapist, I was wondering if I was a woman, in reality, I know that I’m a man. So if somebody were to walk up to me and call me a her or call me a woman, I would just think that they were crazy. It wouldn’t cause any kind of crisis for me whatsoever because I’m fully situated in my maleness and I’m totally confident in it.
But when you need affirmation constantly from the world, I think that tells us that underneath everything, like underneath all the pretensions, there’s a deep question down there. So I think that’s true, even of the true believers.
And then the monetary motivation, I think, is more on like when you expand to the kind of institutional level, that’s where you find the monetary motivations, I think.
Blair: One of the things that really struck me, too, is when you spoke with Forcier, you mentioned Lupron, the drug that is used to, in your words, chemically castrate pedophiles and rapists. Did they seem to have any concerns about how those drugs were used, both on children and on people we kind of want to keep sexually away from society?
Walsh: No, there are no concerns at all. That’s the thing about puberty blockers. This is just doctrinal now on the left that you’re not allowed to question it. They’re wonderful. They’re great. They have no consequences. As Forcier told me, I think the way she put it was … It’s like putting a pause on music and then you could pick it up, turn the music back on and pick up on where the last note left off.
That’s not true, by the way, of any drug at all. I mean, every drug you take, there are side effects. There are consequences. There’s a little bit of a bargain involved in any drug that you take whatsoever.
And the idea that blocking puberty would be the one exception where everything is fine, there are no side effects—but this is what they say because … if they were to admit that, “Hey, there can be some complications. There are some side effects. There will be some long-term effects,” if they admit that, then that just starts a whole conversation that they don’t want to have. So instead they have this total fanciful version of it.
But I said that Lupron is a chemical castration. I also presented the dictionary definition of chemical castration to Dr. Forcier to show that by definition, puberty blockers are chemical castration. That’s what they are. And that’s why, as you alluded to, they’re actually used in that way to chemically castrate sex offenders.
Blair: Right. I mean, there are consequences to this. And I think there was no person that kind of made more sense with than Kellie or Scott Newgent, who is a biological woman who had gone through it seemed like endless amounts of surgeries to transition to be a man. How did that story resonate with you? And how do you think that kind of represents the greater story of transgenderism that the left doesn’t want to talk about?
Walsh: Yeah, that was, I think, the most powerful interview that we did. Certainly sitting in the room it was quite affecting. And also, it was also refreshing talking to her, in a certain way. The story’s quite tragic, but refreshing just in the sense of, well, here’s someone who will actually talk and be honest and answer questions.
Because up to that point, I got nothing by talking to the so-called experts. And even a lot of the regular Joes on the street, you get a lot of evasiveness, a lot of the ambiguity and everything. And then you sit down with Newgent and it’s just straight to the point. Let’s talk about it. Here’s what happened. We’re all open, honest, which takes a lot of courage, of course, especially someone in that world.
I mean, I don’t want to speak for her, but Newgent … I don’t think would identify as a right-wing conservative or anything like that. So a lot of social consequences … as well.
And yeah, the story is just like, “Here’s what happened to me. Here’s what’s involved in it.” And I thought it was very powerful when she said that a couple times that this is experimental surgery. We don’t really know what’s involved with the drugs, the surgery. We’ve never done this to people, certainly, on this scale and at such young ages before ever in history. So it’s like a generation of lab rats that we have.
Blair: Right. This seems to be more of an American phenomenon. You obviously traveled to Africa and spoke with some Maasai tribespeople, and they seemed completely lost that we were even having this type of discussion. Did that seem like a thing that was more like it’s America-only, or maybe America and the West? Where did you find that this was sort of most pronounced, this type of gender ideology?
Walsh: Yeah, I think it’s definitely the West. It’s certainly up in Canada. We went up to Canada, too. We talked to people up there. And I mean, in Canada, it’s even worse than it is in the United States. And I think that’s the case in a lot of Europe also.
But once you get out of the kind of the modern Western liberal bubble and you go out into the rest of the world, you find that it’s not just that they disagree with these ideas. In every sense, literally in every other sense, you’re speaking of another language. They don’t even have the concepts.
And so when we talked to the Maasai tribe, one of the things that we thought going there that would be interesting is just even the trying to communicate these ideas through a translator to somebody else. And we found that also that they just don’t even have the words to describe this idea. You got to kind of describe it.
And yeah, I think they were quite horrified to hear what’s happening in the West. They also … thought that I was an actual proponent of these. I was actually confused. So they were patient about it, but they kind of thought I was sort of a confused child. And they proceeded to educate me. …
It was interesting to hear their kind of basic insights into the nature of reality. And also for me to be put in the position of having to explain these ideas to a group of people who don’t have the same shared sort of frame of reference that we do.
And I think that if you want to reveal the fundamental absurdity of any belief system, one way you could do that is by trying to explain it to somebody who’s never heard of it before. And so we certainly noticed that.
Blair: One of the things that kind of horrified me in this was when you talked about Dr. [Alfred] Kinsey and Dr. [John] Money, this idea that these scientists who, I mean, committed horrible crimes against children, it seems like they don’t have a lot of press on them, though. It doesn’t really seem like there’s that much attention to what they did.
You kind of briefly attacked it in the film, like maybe why they’re not as well known, but why do you think, specifically, like these two characters who are so essential to the modern gender ideology and transgender debate are just such an unknown property?
Walsh: I think it’s because some of it is just the basic fact that, unfortunately, in this country, we don’t talk a lot about history. I think that there’s a kind of shallowness in people’s understandings of a lot of things, where pretty much anything comes from. And that goes into, we spend all our time just like watching Netflix and on the internet and everything.
But deeper than that, it’s just that these two guys are so … monstrous. Their stories are so horrifying. And in particular, the way that they were both focused on children, … Alfred Kinsey especially, very explicit about wanting to sexualize children and John Money as well.
And so that’s very inconvenient for the left, especially when they’re spending all this time saying that the whole groomer thing is a right-wing conspiracy theory. Well, I mean, the godfathers of this movement were dyed-in-the-wool groomers. This is what they did to children in particular.
So there’s no incentive to get into the details. I mean, where are you going to hear it? The school system, obviously, isn’t going to talk about. The school system, they have gender ideology, which is from John Money, comprehensive sex ed, which is from Alfred Kinsey. So they’re teaching those things. They don’t want to get into the details of where this stuff came from, because that’s going to shock and horrify everybody.
Blair: Right. As we begin to wrap, I kind of want to talk about two things, which is, where do we go from here? And then, is it even possible to come back from the edge?
So, first of all, one of the recurring themes of the movie is that people just deny biological reality. They just deny that it exists. Is there a possibility to get back to an idea where we have a shared truth and shared reality, or are we stuck in this “your truth, my truth” world?
Walsh: I have to believe that it’s possible. I mean, … if it was impossible to make any progress at all on any of those issues, then there’s no point in even talking about it. There’s no point in making films about it.
I do think that it’s possible, but one thing, we have to start by letting everyone see how bad it’s gotten, like what the actual situation is. And that’s one thing we want to achieve. That’s not the only thing we want to achieve with the film, but that’s one of the things for people to watch it and see this stuff is ubiquitous. It’s pervasive, it’s everywhere, it’s toxic, it’s dangerous, and all of that. So you got to start with that kind of confrontation if you want to make any progress.
I do think that, ultimately, gender ideology, broadly, it’s beatable. It’s not a victory that we’re going to achieve in the next few days or even few years, but it’s such a flimsy, hollow thing and cannot withstand any scrutiny whatsoever, which means that we can beat it. But that requires us to actually kind of like stand up, look it in the face, ask some basic questions of it, and you watch it all fall apart.
What I found talking to people on the street especially is I didn’t find as much confusion or some of that, but it was less confusion and more fear. People are just terrified to talk about this, which, the fact that they’re terrified tells you that they know the truth. That’s why they’re afraid.
So we got to get people over that, I think. And so the more of us who talk about this and get it out in the open, I think it creates a kind of strength in numbers I suppose.
Blair: And then I guess the final question would be, … what do you hope that viewers will take away from this movie?
Walsh: The first thing is, like I said, that’s just to see the situation as it is. Because I think that we’ve been, and … this goes back years, we’ve been kind of as conservatives burying our heads in the sand a little bit and telling ourselves that, “Oh, this is all out in the fringes. It’s a fad. This is just crazy, weird TikTok people.” No, this is absolutely everywhere. So I hope that’s the first thing you take away, is this is real. This is the world we live in now.
But then also to take away the fact that this is a battle that can be won if we ask some questions, and here are some questions we can ask and maybe take that with you.
The next time you’re in a conversation about this with someone, rather than trying to get into an argument where you’re making competing assertions, just get them talking about it a little bit. Try to actually understand what they’re saying, because if you ask these questions, then maybe they’ll start to understand that, oh, what they’re saying doesn’t really make any sense at all.
Blair: Well, that was Matt Walsh, author, podcast host, and now filmmaker with The Daily Wire. His new documentary “What Is a Woman?” is available now on dailywire.com. Matt, very much appreciate your time. Love the movie. Thank you so much for coming.
Walsh: Appreciate it. Thank you.
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