In this episode of Trigonometry on the Road From the USA, author and filmmaker Matt Walsh joins Francis and Constantine to discuss his new documentary, What is a Woman? and why it's so important to make a movie about gender identity.
00:08:49.180Have you had to have that to be able to make a movie like that?
00:08:52.120Yeah, I mean, sadly, it's necessary in general just because of what we all do here.
00:08:56.800And so a lot of the security is not specifically for me.
00:08:59.760It's just because this is the world we live in now.
00:09:02.600But I could say for me in particular, when the movie came out, yeah, we got death threats, doxxed, all the rest of it, quite a lot of it, you know.
00:09:13.840A lot of it that I haven't talked about in really specific terms, just even for security reasons.
00:09:17.540I can't even say some of the things people have said to me.
00:09:20.040And that was all, you know, that was all expected.
00:09:24.520But we know that, and I'm certainly not the first person to experience this, that trans activists are vicious on a level that other kinds of activists rarely reach.
00:09:52.100And I think part of the reason for that, if I'm just to, like, psychoanalyze them, is I think that there's some envy and jealousy, actually.
00:10:00.740It's the male trans activists in particular who are the most vicious, in my experience.
00:10:04.800And I think in the experience of women who stand up to them.
00:10:07.380But then also, there's, like, this idea that if you disagree with them, that you are interfering with their self-perception.
00:10:19.880and if you interfere with their self-perception it's like a form of murder they see because you
00:10:25.280if you if you if you take away how they perceive themselves or if you interfere with that or
00:10:29.180question it um then you're like destabilizing their perception of themselves do you think
00:10:34.740they actually think this because i've always thought of it as a linguistic trick it's a way
00:10:38.080of legitimizing violent behavior or threats of violence by claiming that you know you're raising
00:10:44.460their existence when actually i think they realize they're still there right or do you think they
00:10:49.260genuinely believe that by saying you can't change your biological sex you are erasing them i think
00:10:55.300it's i think it's a mixture of both i think there's a lot of drama and pageantry that goes
00:10:58.500into and anytime the outrage brigade gets into action there's always there's always a lot of
00:11:03.040people that are pretending to feel things they don't really feel but but but for some of them
00:11:07.580it's at some level they do actually think that the most important thing about them is how they
00:11:12.240perceive themselves. And so, you know, if you're a man who identifies as a woman, then that's who
00:11:19.760you are. But it's this very fragile thing. And if they hear anyone question it, then they just sort
00:11:27.540of panic and lash out, sometimes violently, I think. Matt, how do we separate the people who
00:11:34.080genuinely have gender dysphoria, which is a horrible mental illness, and they genuinely need
00:11:38.620support and treatment for dealing with that illness and this ideology? How do we separate
00:11:44.460that? Still having compassion for people with gender dysphoria, but also criticizing and
00:11:49.900challenging the not-so elements of the ideology? Well, first of all, when you're dealing with the
00:11:56.420concepts on a general scale, I don't think you have to separate it because what we're talking
00:12:00.580about is just the truth. So if someone is saying something that isn't true,
00:12:04.500our first goal should be to affirm and defend the truth so the reason why they're wrong about
00:12:12.640what they're saying is almost immaterial in my mind um the first thing that matters the first
00:12:18.140thing they have to establish is the truth men are men and women are women period so that's our first
00:12:21.780thing and if we want to get into the specifics of like why are there so many people that are
00:12:27.040confused about this in their own for themselves um yeah i think i think then especially if you're
00:12:32.560dealing with someone on a personal level, like one-on-one, to understand where this is coming
00:12:37.140from is important. But we also have to realize that gender dysphoria, people who are,
00:12:43.180you know, for reasons that are almost unexplainable, really actually confused about this,
00:12:48.680that's such a small minority, such a small sliver. And all you have to do is look back,
00:12:53.540you know, 100 years ago, how many people were confused about their gender? Like how many men
00:13:01.380were going around who really thought that they were women. I'm sure there were some, like very,
00:13:05.280very small number. And they were mentally ill. It's a mental illness. And if we were still a
00:13:09.480sane society, we would treat that with therapy, counseling. It's what you do for mentally ill
00:13:13.900people. You treat their minds to the best of your ability. This astronomical rise, though,
00:13:21.460in transgender identification, that's obviously not just mental illness. It's not something people
00:13:29.820are born with. There's something happening in the culture, clearly. Because in the film,
00:13:37.340like the first half an hour was really funny. I was sitting there with the lads and we were,
00:13:42.720you know, we were laughing. We're going like, oh, this nutball saying these.
00:13:45.600I wasn't laughing. I saw all the trouble coming.
00:13:47.780Yeah, but I was laughing because I think you exposed these elements of it and it was comically
00:13:54.720humorous but then what was terrifying is when we saw the medical professionals the doctors
00:14:01.220affirming this did you expect that because I certainly didn't yeah I think well that's one
00:14:06.960thing I was a little bit worried about actually with the film before it came out is that we knew
00:14:11.060we're gonna have this tonal shift and I don't know is it too abrupt is it's kind of weird and
00:14:14.700it is abrupt and weird but at the same time I think it's also necessary that like on the surface
00:14:19.160level, this is absurd. And so we laugh at absurdity, which is an appropriate response.
00:14:26.000But then you go a little bit under the surface, you see there's some really sinister stuff going
00:14:28.980on. And that's when you get into the doctors who are encouraging, who are sort of spreading
00:14:38.900this plague and doing it in a really intentional way. And doctors who I think certainly know
00:14:44.060better. And, you know, we talked to one pediatrician in the film, Forcier, who prescribes these drugs,
00:14:51.640chemical castration drugs to children. And what was so revolting about that, aside from just,
00:15:00.080you know, the obvious, is that when I talked to her, she had no defense of the practice at all.
00:15:07.300She was not able to even begin to defend this, and yet she's doing it. And so that makes you think,
00:15:12.800well if she can't defend it then she must know that this is wrong that's just my
00:15:17.360you know that that that's my interpretation is that a lot of these people know what they're
00:15:23.060doing is wrong and yet they do it anyway why would they do it anyway well one big thing is money
00:15:28.360there's all there's a huge financial incentive we get into that a little bit in the film but
00:15:31.520you have to keep in mind there's billions of dollars not for one individual but like for
00:15:36.200these industries there's billions of dollars at stake um and you think about you know you've got
00:15:41.620a six-year-old kid who says that, you know, a six-year-old boy says he's confused about his
00:15:45.520gender. And if you were to just say to the six-year-old boy, oh, no, you're a boy, and help
00:15:51.560him to accept himself for who he is, then that's great. That's the right thing to do, but there's
00:15:55.820no money in that, right? If, on the other hand, you encourage him to go delve even deeper into
00:16:02.660that confusion, then that boy is worth thousands, if not millions of dollars to big pharma therapists,
00:16:10.320doctors down the line so I think there's a real financial incentive and you know we've interviewed
00:16:16.440a ton of people about this trans people who don't agree with some elements of this ideology
00:16:21.860other people gender critical feminist etc and yet I was still shocked by the second half of the
00:16:29.900movie were you shocked by what you found in particularly with doctors and professors I was
00:16:34.960yeah that's the thing even when you encounter something that you already knew about intellectually
00:16:40.980it's still shocking just to encounter it exactly to I knew that so-called sex change or what they
00:16:47.300call gender affirmation surgeries now which is a euphemism if I ever heard one but I knew that
00:16:52.560that was happening and yet to sit across from someone who does this and hear them explain it
00:16:57.300it's still shocking just to encounter it and I was also shocked there were some things I learned
00:17:01.620Before getting into the film, making the film, and researching it before we filmed it, I did not realize how young the kids are when they start them on the actual medical transition part of it.
00:17:18.260Well, I mean, as young as 10, 11 years old, when they start them on the hormones and you get into puberty blockers, the surgery especially.
00:17:26.620I, a year and a half ago, I didn't realize that they were actually, that they really were mutilating kids.
00:17:34.120I thought that, you know, this is something that starts at the age of 18.
00:17:37.700But no, I mean, they chopped the breasts off of 13, 14-year-old girls, even younger sometimes.
00:19:33.400And I think when the movie first came out, there was, it seemed to me anyway, among some of these gender critical feminists, there was like this internal fight among them about, well, what do we do?
00:19:44.180Do we link arms with this guy or what?
00:19:46.500And maybe for a brief moment in time, it seemed like maybe they would.
00:19:50.500But then ultimately, I think they just decided that they can't do it.
00:24:14.920I mean, we're talking about for the youngest generation, the transgender identification of the youngest generation is like 20 times what it was for my parents.
00:24:25.740That's another reason why it's a civilizational crisis.
00:24:27.960This exponential growth of this identity crisis, this confusion, and there's no sign that it's going to stop.
00:24:34.480I mean, you don't have 20 times growth like that, and then in the next generation, it just goes away.
00:24:40.580um in fact we see it's like it's there's this for lgbt identification in general there's been a
00:24:48.680doubling of lgbt identification generation over generation doubling dating back to like my
00:24:55.200grandparents generation and then trans in particular's astronomical rise there um so i
00:25:03.360think that what we're seeing is that entire generations of kids being lost to this confusion,
00:25:11.960which leads ultimately to despair. What they tell us about the trans suicide rate is true, that,
00:25:17.820you know, the suicide rate is so much higher for people who identify as trans than it is for anyone
00:25:23.500else. But they're lying when they say that the way to solve the suicide rate is to affirm the
00:25:28.700trans identification. That's not what the data tells us. The data tells us that no matter how
00:25:32.960firm they are, get the surgeries, get all that, suicide rate is still high. In fact, they're more
00:25:39.620suicidal after surgery than before. So what that tells us is that this leads to despair ultimately.
00:25:46.360Matt, do you think that this is a symptom of something that is deeply wrong within Western
00:25:50.220society and Western culture? That it's merely a symptom? There's something actually far deeper
00:25:54.920and far darker going on there? I think absolutely. And that's one thing. Carl Truman will tell you a
00:25:59.900lot more about that. I'll speak more eloquently about it than I will. But that's one thing that
00:26:04.240I noticed in these interviews, is that so many of the interviews devolved pretty quickly into,
00:26:13.860well, what is truth? A college professor is a famous, infamous example now that I talked to
00:26:18.400a college professor, turned into this. But really, every single interview I had, especially even with
00:26:22.380people on the street, eventually turned into this like punches pilot. What is truth? Is there a
00:26:27.160truth? Whose truth are we talking about? And what that tells me is that the deeper thing going on
00:26:32.220is relativism. People are raised in our society to believe that we all have our own truth.
00:26:42.300Truth is whatever you say it is. Whatever you feel is true. And I can remember being raised,
00:26:51.160even when I was a kid, hearing this kind of thing all the time. And so I think that's what's
00:26:56.500happening underneath all this. Really, it is a war against truth, and what lies underneath all
00:27:01.720of it is just relativism. It's the rejection of objective truth entirely. And how much do you
00:27:08.660think of this as caused by technology? One of the things that I often think about is we now have the
00:27:13.980technology to do some of these surgeries in a way that we didn't have before, and obviously we now
00:27:18.400have technology to propagate the ideology in a way that we didn't have before, and those things
00:27:23.520coming together seems to me like two very powerful things that from my perspective offer perhaps an
00:27:28.560even better explanatory option than you know ideologues driving it like the ideology was
00:27:35.220there and then the technology came along to fuel it or is it more maliciously intended you know
00:27:41.140making money off it or whatever what's your take uh i think i think it's all of the above but um
00:27:47.500you can it's impossible to overstate the effects of technology now you're right that the technology
00:27:52.900for the actual surgeries has advanced quite a bit,
00:27:56.000but it's still a barbaric Frankenstein stuff they're doing.
00:28:19.580I think kids, they go to school, most kids do, like public schools, and they spend five
00:28:28.620days a week, six, seven hours a day, nine months a year for 12 or 13 years, and they're
00:28:34.780marinating in this peer culture where gender ideology now is just totally taken over.
00:28:41.560And then that's bad enough, but then they leave school, but they don't leave the peer
00:28:47.400culture behind because they carry it around with them.
00:28:49.380they have it in their pocket, they have it on their phone. So it just becomes this kind of like
00:28:52.060fog that they never escape, this choking fog they can never get away from. And the drive and
00:29:02.360compulsion when you're a kid to try to fit in is overwhelming. And we all remember it as kids.
00:29:09.260For a lot of adults, it's still overwhelming, but especially when you're a kid. And that's even more
00:29:14.700the case when they are when they can never escape their peers and so like you know they're already
00:29:21.080driven to be to be accepted by their peers but when you're around your peers all the time even
00:29:25.440at home you're still with them then if you're not accepted by them then it becomes a real crisis
00:29:31.420that's one of the reasons why the suicide rate among kids tragically is so much higher than it
00:29:36.020ever was um and so i think that's what what drives a lot of these ideas it just catches on it's like
00:29:42.560the cool popular thing now to be not necessarily to be you know to be trans is cool and popular but
00:29:47.240the main thing for kids is to you don't be cis right to be anything pick something else
00:29:52.040gender non-conforming non-binary zeezers m pronouns whatever it is uh furry like just
00:29:58.540pick something that isn't plain old ordinary regular you know um and now that that's caught
00:30:05.580on there's just no no stopping it which is why like you know if you have to send your kid to
00:30:12.200public school I'd recommend don't do it but if you have to you have to but there's no excuse I
00:30:18.480think to give an adolescent kid a phone with full internet access that they can just use all day up
00:30:24.900in their room who knows what they're looking at it's just it's crazy I think yeah it is a recipe
00:30:29.740for disaster Matt we've seen you know a huge amount of growth with young girls and pubescent
00:30:36.260girls wanting to transition now there's been a lot of theories but being put about a lot of people
00:30:41.440They're saying, you know, they're autistic girls who may feel that way or they're girls who, for whatever reason, feel desperately uncomfortable in their bodies.
00:30:49.000What do you think the reason is behind this?
00:30:51.620Well, I think, first of all, the drive to be girls in general, more relational.
00:31:01.580They care more about, you know, what people, what their friends think, which often could be a very good thing about, you know, kind of that feminine tendency.
00:31:14.140But at the same time, it can also lead to, you know, wanting even more to be accepted by their peers.
00:31:20.440But I think even deeper than that, a lot of this stuff kicks in around puberty, right?
00:31:25.860And when you're going through puberty, whether you're a boy or a girl,
00:31:28.140your body is changing in ways that are confusing.
00:31:33.060And I think that's especially the case for girls.
00:31:35.820And the changes that girls go through during puberty are even more drastic
00:31:40.500and can be more sort of unsettling for the girl.
00:31:43.820And so I think, especially at puberty, feeling sort of not at home in your own body,
00:31:50.040feeling like your body is revolting against you and doing things that you don't want,
00:31:55.000It's normal to feel that way, even more normal for girls, given what they experience.
00:32:00.160The difference is that when we were all kids, you went through puberty and you had that kind
00:32:04.020of awkward phase and it was a phase. And all the adults in your life said, oh, it's just a phase.
00:32:08.100You'll get over it. You'll be fine. This is, you know, all these changes are good and you'll grow
00:32:11.720into yourself and grow into your body and all that kind of stuff. But now the adults are going
00:32:18.740around to the kids and telling them, oh, well, if you feel like you're not at home in your body,