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What is a Woman and Why Does it Matter?

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Leave it to a Twitter controversy to get me to finally watch The Daily Wire’s “What is a Woman?”

Released on June 1, 2022, the promotional materials presented the film as a high budget troll. Clips of interviewees leaving mid-interview and replays of Walsh’s Dr. Phil controversy impressed upon me that this was not a serious endeavor, but another opportunistic marketing stunt from Conservative, Incorporated.

Conservative, Incorporated is a lot like Kids, Incorporated except … no, it’s exactly like Kids, Incorporated. It’s a bunch of disillusioned child actors putting on a show.

If you can’t tell, I don’t care for The Daily Wire. As a voracious consumer of media, conservative and otherwise, I find that The Daily Wire waters down their reporting to protect their business interests. From COVID to elections to primary politics, the outlet has consistently chosen to “report” only that which safely keeps them uncancelable. That’s fine, but don’t call it journalism and don’t expect me to get all riled up when you manufacture controversy about being canceled. 

While I don’t care for The Daily Wire, I have always appreciated the blunt honesty of Matt Walsh. Years ago, Walsh was speaking about drag shows for kids and questioning the appropriateness and offensiveness of males being rewarded for appropriating womanhood and turning it into a caricature.

In early 2002, my maid of honor threw me a bachelorette party in Manhattan and, for dinner, we attended a drag floor show. There were stunning costumes and sets, high performance value, and hilarious comedy in between choreographed numbers. Notably, there was no stripping or junk flashing. They were caricatures, but it was an adult show for which you had to buy a ticket. You were buying a ticket to see the show—the caricature. After dinner, we headed to a male strip club — where there were both stripping and junk flashing — and, full disclosure, the drag show was much more entertaining than the strippers. 

I worked in corporate America from 2002 to 2021, and I had many trans colleagues. The first was a trans woman I’ll call Grace, who didn’t really pull it off but was an adult trying to live authentically, and she was a lovely human. The last, before I left corporate America, was a trans woman I’ll call Kayla, and she did pull it off. I didn’t know she was trans until she told me, as we were boarding a bus to the 2018 AWS Re:invent end-of-conference rave in Las Vegas, featuring Skrillex. Kayla and I danced all night. 

These experiences shape the way I personally engage with, “What is a Woman?” and, even though I respected Walsh, the hype around his film led me to believe it was going to be little more than a ‘gotcha’ piece. So, I didn’t watch it.

I Need a Twitter Intervention 

When the “What is a Woman?” Twitter controversy happened, a year after the film’s initial release, I remembered that the film existed. 

Last Wednesday, as The Daily Wire prepared to stream, “What is a Woman?” on Twitter, old Twitter seemed to rear its ugly head. Matt Walsh tweeted, “Our film got 3,500 retweets in two minutes and then Twitter flagged it as hate speech and shut down retweets. They are terrified of this film.”

The warning reads, “Visibility Limited: This Tweet may violate Twitter’s rules against Hateful Conduct,” and it was a bad look for New Twitter, marketed as a free speech platform. 

For a moment, the majority of right-leaning America coalesced behind The Daily Wire — which is great for the company — and then we saw real, rapid change: 

Walsh Tweeted, “It's been a wild 24 hours. It began with Twitter labeling our film hate speech and completely suppressing it, and ends with all suppression lifted and Elon Musk himself tweeting out the film and urging people to watch it. A huge win.” 

A huge win, indeed. You can’t buy that kind of publicity. 

Because of this incredibly successful marketing campaign, I remembered that this was a film, and that I hadn’t seen it. The next morning, the full length documentary appeared in my Twitter feed, so I decided to finally give “What’s a Woman?” a watch.

It’s a Simple Question

Let me first say that I was pleasantly surprised by the seriousness with which Walsh treats the topics in “What is a Woman?”, and he covers a lot of ground—from pronouns and non-surgical affirmation—to women’s sports and spaces to puberty blockers and surgeries to the fundamental nature of truth itself. 

The promotional materials did not do the full documentary justice, and I was wrong for judging this book by its cover. 

The rainbow terrorist coalition (successfully) paints any pushback as though our premise is that, “Trans people don’t have a right to exist.” 

Certainly, there are people that believe this. I disavow those people completely because, from a Bill of Rights standpoint, all of us are created equal and endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights. I am a single-issue voter, and that issue is the Bill of Rights. Adults have the liberty to dress and identify however they want, and I have no interest in dissecting someone’s identity to determine if they should have access to their liberty birthright. Like it or not, trans people exist. And they have the same rights as the rest of us. 

The transgender colleagues and friends I’ve known were not a threat to anyone. In fact, they spoke of their early childhood trauma and sexual abuse, their struggles with drug addiction, and their daily battles with mental health, self-loathing, and finding their self worth. They worked in an elite field and functioned as contributing members of society. They didn’t force their identity, they welcomed questions and were honest in answering them. 

But nuance is dead in 2023. The rainbow terrorist coalition message that anyone pushing back or even slightly critical believes, “Trans people don’t have a right to exist,” has now become the debate. 

Last week, Twitter influencers—who appear to work for the DeSantis campaign—shared images of adult pride clothing on Donald Trump’s website as though it were a gotcha on MAGA’s response to Target.

But Donald Trump is not selling chest-binding or tuck-friendly merchandise to children, which is the cause of parental pushback and the foundation of Target’s woes. Attempting to assert that MAGA means gay people — not even trans, but gay people — don’t have a right to exist and should be disinvited from society is a political narrative. MAGA has never been anti-gay. MAGA means America First, and there are many LGBT patriots among us. This is just one more misstep from the DeSantis crowd, as it backfired almost immediately.

We must not allow politics to co-opt a legitimate cultural debate about the protection of children in public society. 

Also, is it weird that DeSantis influencers are using the same lines of attack as the rainbow terrorist coalition? 

In my experience, trans people are, like the rest of us, broken people trying to find their way in life. But those are just my experiences—my anecdotes of the trans people I’ve known. And the trans people I’ve known weren’t rainbow terrorists trying to force themselves on kids. 

In recent years, the very loud and public narrative around LGBT rights has shifted from one of acceptance to one of recruitment, and specifically the recruitment of children.

And kids are my line. 

Myths & Misinformation 

Walsh speaks with several therapists and psychiatric professionals during the course of the film, both advocates and critics of modern gender theory. Most of the gender advocates in the film threaten to stop their interview, accusing Walsh of hatred and bigotry for asking simple questions. 

The film does a good job of unwinding many of the myths propagated by gender theory advocates, such as the illogical idea that pronouns and cross dressing have no lasting impact on a child’s mental health and development or, worse, that pausing puberty with Lupron — the chemical castration drug known for its use with sex offenders — is completely reversible. 

At a particularly heartbreaking moment, Scott Newgent, a detransitioned culture warrior for the kids, held up his mutilated forearm, tears in his eyes, and said, “We have five children’s hospitals in the United States, promoting that.”

That is, promoting the mutilation, sterilization, and psychological torture of children. 

Newgent joined Kate Awakening on Raising a Nation in May, and his story is an eye-opening look at the realities of the multi-billion dollar industry that is actively recruiting trans patients for life. “$70,000 a pop!” Newgent says during the film, and that’s just the surgery. Post-operative transgender patients face a lifelong battle of medications, additional surgeries, therapies and more to “live authentically,” and the industry is booming. 

The film also does a good job of exploring the impact on women’s sports and spaces, speaking with elite female athletes who lost life-changing opportunities to mediocre male athletes once those male athletes “discovered” their identities. The gender theory advocates in the film openly deny biological differences, dismissing the notion that men have an athletic advantage over women because transgender athletes have also lost athletic contests. They don’t present any evidence, but I’d assume we’re mostly talking about biological females attempting to compete “authentically” as men.

This is what passes for “science” these days. 

Women’s spaces are continually under attack by gender theorists, and the film provides examples, from spas to locker rooms, to Loudon County, Virginia, where an alleged trans female sexually assaulted two different girls, in their female spaces, at two different schools. The school board and education system covered up the assaults, ostensibly to protect the narrative. And the abuser.

A similar situation is one that caused me to remove my children from their school several years ago. My middle son was in the 6th grade, and his middle school friend was uncomfortable because there was a 12th grade trans female in the bathroom with her. She wouldn’t tell a teacher or her parents because she wasn’t supposed to be uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable, for this little girl at school, was bigoted and could get her in trouble. So, she told my son and, after I noticed a change in his behavior and got him to talk, he told me. 

I called the school and, as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, I was horrified that the school affirmed her fears: There was no reason for her to be uncomfortable, and the school would remain inclusive. 

The school took the position that a little girl feeling uncomfortable with sharing a bathroom with a man several years older than her was all in her head. This is a slap in the face to survivors who have fought to protect children and, especially, to teach children to advocate for themselves. The school chose the gaslight. The school was also inclusive of kids identifying as animals and accommodating their tails. I pulled my kids out and shared the experience with other parents — who mostly thought I was overreacting or being hyperbolic. That was five years ago, and the trend of protecting criminals at the expense of their victims has only intensified. 

We see the same affirmation of sexual violence and establishment cover ups in female prisons. In the UK, despite seven female inmates claiming to be assaulted by a trans female prisoner in 2020, the High Court of England and Wales affirmed the “right” of their abuser to invade the female space and deemed it lawful to continue putting female prisoners at risk. 

In other words, Britain's High Court also declined to answer the simple question, “What is a Woman?”

The Fundamental Nature of Truth Itself

Overall, I was impressed by the quality of this film I never intended to watch, but for Twitter. Walsh and his team included a variety of perspectives and provided an insightful look at one of the biggest threats to our children. Brave doctors and therapists, at great personal risk, spoke out against their peers and professions for championing the individual and societal degradation that inevitably results from the practice of modern gender theory. 

Critically, I would like to have seen Walsh and team explore more of the global network propagating this dangerous ideology and the massive financial establishment that is recruiting sterilized patients for life. For example, the film made no mention of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal #5, which explicitly enshrines Gender Theory as a global imperative. The UN SDGs are showing up in every American classroom. 

This social contagion isn’t organic, and it didn’t appear out of the ether. It’s a change program, being commissioned and propagated by the most powerful entities on earth. At the end of the day, you really just need to follow the money, but Walsh and The Daily Wire stop short of indicting the global order. This is a theme at The Daily Wire, a classic earmark of their reporting, and a big part of why I don’t care for the outlet. 

Another, related criticism is that the film didn’t fully explore the topic of parental rights.

Walsh spoke to an anonymous Canadian father, under fire for misgendering his daughter, and the Loudon County situation centers on the rights of parents in their children’s education, but instead of parents in the fight, the film chose to focus more on Walsh. The retelling of Loudon County, for example, highlighted Walsh’s publicity stunt of renting a basement to become a resident so he could speak at the school board meeting. Walsh was presented as the hero of Loudon County, and the film glossed over the rights and roles of parents when their children are inside the public schools. 

“I care about the truth … Basic truth matters.”

Matt Walsh

At the heart of “What is a Woman?” is a search for truth. While gender theory critics in the film rely on science — and common sense — to argue their positions, the gender theory advocates repeatedly find themselves trapped in logical fallacies and in need of a safe space. 

This was most poignant when Walsh asked a self-proclaimed “social scientist,” who was bursting with unearned arrogance, “Can you define woman without using the term ‘woman?’” The “scientist” stared slack-jawed into the distance as if contemplating the meaning of life. Maybe he was. His worldview had just been effectively shattered. 

This is why speaking truth, no matter how uncomfortable, is non-negotiable in the culture war.

During Walsh’s appearance on Dr. Phil, when confronted with the question of “What is a woman?” a mildly attractive, hobbit-looking therapist named Dr. Sophie D’Enbeau condescendingly asserts, “Part of me wants to ask why you care so much, because it’s not really that big of a deal.”

Matt responds, “I care about the truth. So, basic truth matters.” To which Dr. D’Enbeau flippantly replies, “Okay, fine.” You can hear the eye-roll in her voice.

Silly truth.

But truth does matter. Biology isn’t just reality, it’s actuality. It’s indisputable. Unless, of course, you can get the entire global establishment to parrot your dispute and claim that it isn’t. 

No, actually, even then.

Badlands Media articles and features represent the opinions of the contributing authors and do not necessarily represent the views of Badlands Media itself.

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Ashe in America hosts Culture of Change on Badlands Media, Sundays at 6PM ET. If you enjoyed this contribution to Badlands Media, please consider checking out more of her work for free at Ashe in America.