The Valentine’s Day Film Review:

“What Is a Woman?” Is a Dangerously Transphobic Documentary

By Amy Reiter, February 14, 2024

“What is a woman?” That’s the title of a 2022 online documentary-style film from The Daily Wire; it’s also the question its star, Matt Walsh, repeatedly fires at interviewees.

Whether (or where) Walsh, a columnist and podcast host for the right-wing site, finds a satisfactory answer depends on your perspective, but the film may find consensus around a different question, albeit one he does not ask: Who is Matt Walsh?

A group of women seen marching in Washington offer an answer. “Asshole. Asshole,” they chant as a badgering, bullhorn-toting Walsh tags alongside. It’s one of the film’s better moments.

“What Is a Woman?”, directed by Justin Folk, remains a right-wing favorite in 2024. It has been embraced by conservative commentators. Tucker Carlson thanked Walsh for making it. Elon Musk boosted the film’s profile last summer, when he linked to it on X and wrote, “Every parent should watch this.”

Others have called it dangerously transphobic. It absolutely is. Walsh has built his brand on demonizing LGBTQ+ people, promulgating racist and anti-trans conspiracy theories, condemning gender-affirming health care, harassing hospitals and, the Southern Poverty Law Center notes, calling for the execution of doctors who provide transgender care.

(His current headline-making gambit: denouncing airline-industry DEI initiatives as “anti-white discrimination.”)

In 2022, The New Republic crowned Walsh — whose work includes a children’s book comparing being transgender to pretending to be a walrus — its “Transphobe of the Year.”

So for thoughtful consideration of the nature of gender, Walsh is not the man for the job.

A Bully in a Plaid Shirt

The film begins with Walsh musing, “Give my son a BB gun and that’s just about all the emotional support he needs. My daughter, on the other hand … And now our culture is telling us that the differences between girls and boys don’t matter … Forget trying to figure out women,” he says. “The real question is, what is a woman?”

Cue a montage of 1950-ish footage … and Walsh is off.

He travels to New York, Hollywood and San Francisco to ask people on the street what a woman is. He sits down with gender experts and trans-rights advocates (therapist, surgeon, pediatrician, professor, politician) and also interviews those who see in the trans-rights movement a nefarious conspiracy.

Through a combination of straight-faced gotcha questioning and unflattering editing, Walsh tries to make the gender experts look like fools, pedants or worse. (Several have said the filmmakers lured them into participating under false pretenses.) One leitmotif is watching the penny drop as Walsh’s hidden agenda becomes clear. The interviews often end abruptly.

No doubt: Walsh commits to the bit. He travels all the way to Africa to elicit derisive chuckles about transgender and non-binary people from male members of the Maasai culture. (The Brookings Institution says this about the cultural status of Maasai women and girls.)

Violent Rhetoric and Ad Hominem Attacks

“What Is a Woman?” is billed as “comical,” and it seems to aim, in part, for iconoclastic humor in the Michael Moore mold. To some, Walsh’s bearded, plaid-shirted, bully-in-hipster-dad’s-clothing schtick may initially seem charming – although no one may be as charmed by Walsh’s act as Walsh himself. But when his disingenuous, pleasant-enough mask slips, it reveals an unfathomable chasm of hostility – and it’s chilling.

Witness a stunt in which he bulldozes into a Virginia county school board meeting to fulminate against a policy supporting the use of students’ chosen names and pronouns (Walsh pointedly does neither) and of bathrooms that correspond to students’ gender identity. 

“You are all child abusers,” Walsh spits out. “You prey upon impressionable children and indoctrinate them into your insane ideological cult, a cult which holds many fanatical views but none so deranged as the idea that boys are girls and girls are boys.”

There’s nothing funny about this ad hominem attack. Walsh’s violent rhetoric has had real consequences.

Asked why he cares about trans issues, Walsh cites “truth,” “children” and “stolen” opportunities. Having turned his anti-trans vitriol into a lucrative, high-profile career, he may well care.

In the end (spoiler alert), Walsh’s wife, whom he finds in the kitchen (where else?), provides the answer he seeks. A woman, she says, is “an adult human female” – she hands Walsh a jar of pickles – “who needs help opening this.” Ah, the weaker sex. Right.

But why give Walsh or his wife the last word? Although it seeks to impugn the experts’ definitions, the film, to its credit, allows them to offer them.

“It’s actually a really simple answer,” Dr. Patrick Grzanka, dean of social sciences and professor at University of Tennessee, tells Walsh. A woman “is a person who identifies as a woman.”

Skip this film; leave it at that.

To watch the first 15 minutes of “What Is a Woman?” for free, go here. 

Amy Reiter is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Daily Beast, Salon, and numerous other print and online publications.

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