What Is a Woman? The Daily Wire’s new documentary

What Is a Woman? The Daily Wire’s new documentary. By Bruce Bawer.

I went in knowing that transgenderism is deranged and dangerous, and the film confirmed my point of view.

But what confirmation! Folk, Walsh, and company have put together a serious and definitive piece of work — at once a comprehensive survey, a chilling indictment, and, strange though it may sound, an often laugh-out-loud piece of entertainment. …

The conceit propelling Folk’s documentary is that Walsh, the 35-year-old father of two boys and two girls, is hopelessly confused by the new concepts of sex and gender, which posit that a man can become a woman and vice-versa, and is traveling around the U.S. to learn from experts on the subject – and to pose one question in particular: What is a woman? …

The movie just asks sympathetically the trans advocates, then lets the absurdities of their replies create the argument:

In San Francisco, Walsh talks to Marci L. Bowers, “the nation’s pre-eminent sex-change surgeon.” Bowers, very obviously a biological male, presents as a woman — although when asked to confirm that he’s a trans woman offers an odd reply: “I have a transgender history.” (No, buddy, you have a transgender present.) Asked whether some people who undergo “sex-change” surgery ever regret doing so, Bowers replies, dishonestly, that such occurrences are “really, really uncommon”; asked about the similarity between transgenderism and body dysmorphia (whose sufferers want to cut off an arm or leg), Bowers says that the latter “doesn’t have anything to do with gender identity…..That’s someone who has a…psychiatric condition….Pardon my non-medical language: kooky.”

But of course nobody finds transgender ideology kooky. Asked about its critics, Bowers says that “there aren’t many” and that those who do exist are “dinosaurs” — killjoys in an “exciting” new era of maximum gender fluidity. “You know who gets it right?” Bowers enthuses. “This next generation!” …

Grzanka:

Walsh also gets blowback from Patrick Grzanka, director of the program in Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Tennessee. At first he’s quite the smug, voluble chap, banging on eagerly about how gender “infuses itself into all aspects of social life” and how gender and sex, although “different constructs,” are “deeply intertwined with each other.” But when Walsh asks if a “trans woman” can fairly be categorized as a male, Grzanka is uneasy. “Why are you asking the question? I want to understand why that’s so important.” When Walsh says he’s out “to understand reality,” Grzanka, echoing Comfrey, replies that you should simply trust what trans people tell you. And when Walsh explains that he’s “just trying to start by getting to the truth,” Grzanka declares angrily that he’s “really uncomfortable with that language”: to speak about “getting to the truth,” he complains, sounds “deeply transphobic.” Like Forcier, he threatens to stop the interview. Then, asked to define woman, he calls it “a curious question” before sitting there ruminatively, apparently stunned into silence by the query.

Gay guy in SFO:

This isn’t the last time in the film that an interviewee freaks out over a simple question. Later on, a gay guy on a San Francisco street tells Walsh that only a woman knows what a woman is. In response, Walsh asks: “Do you know what a cat is?” At once flustered and outraged, the guy stalks off.

I think this interview is over:

Then there’s Congressman Mark Takano (D-CA), a pro-trans Harvard grad who’s proud of being the “first openly gay person of color elected to Congress.” When confronted with the fact that letting “trans women” use public women’s bathrooms makes biological females uncomfortable, he hems and haws inanely for what seems like a full minute before finally declaring: “You know what? I think this interview is over.”

For contrast, a voice of sanity:

Fortunately, the documentary also provides voices of sanity. Miriam Grossman, an adolescent and adult psychiatrist, notes that since gender dysphoria only afflicts “between one in 30,000 and one in 110,000” people, almost all of the young people who now claim to be trans aren’t really trans at all. About the likes of Forcier, Comfrey, and Bowers, Grossman declares: “It’s unspeakable what these people have done to our children.” …

Freaks:

Folks like Comfrey and Forcier and Bowers hold important-sounding positions and are supposed to be respected, distinguished experts. But they’re freaks. Comfrey’s a wild-eyed wacko. Forcier has a crazy smile. Bowers (to borrow Truman Capote’s description of Jacqueline Susann) looks like a truck driver in drag. The more they talk — barely able to conceal their glee at the thought of butchering children’s genitalia — the more you realize you’re in the presence of a very special kind of evil and a very special kind of madness. In a sane society, these creatures would be recognized as outcasts, reprobates, degenerates, creeps. …

It’s striking that when Grossman, the sensible psychiatrist, first appears onscreen, you know immediately — even before she’s opened her mouth — that she’s not one of them. …

And yet what comes through so clearly in this documentary is that, for the time being anyway, these people have won — and they’ve won without a fight. Their ideas — if you can call them that — have swept society, shaping new laws and policies and school curricula before the sane majority has had a chance to notice and to say: “Wait just one second.”

It will all blow away soon, because it’s too unreal to last long.

hat-tip Stephen Neil