Review of What Is a Woman? (2022) by Johnmcallister — 25 Dec 2022

I have seen many great documentaries in my lifetime and I can tell you: This is not one of them.

Let's first address the obvious. Matt Walsh is an outspoken conservative and right-wing pundit, who makes videos criticizing what he calls the "woke left". While a certain degree of bias is unavoidable, his framing and presentation of the topic at hand are uninformed at best and dishonest at worst. No effort is made to understand the struggle of everyday trans people and no scientific refutation is given in terms of how modern medicine is employed to help them. The only criticism on his part is of the ideological nature. Of course he rarely says this is out loud, hiding his true believes instead, in a thinly-veiled attempt at not coming off has disingenuous. Already, this damages the integrity of the documentary.

Secondly, Walsh does not adhere to any academic standard, neither in theory nor in practice. At no point does he reference academic writings by Butler, Foucault, Sontag etc. who lay the groundwork for gender studies. This makes his questions uninteresting, as the answers given do not contribute to scientific discourse as a whole.

Lastly, I have a huge problem with who is interviewed in this documentary. Most of the people who agree with Walsh's conservative point of view are other pundits - known online personalities who have most certainly received media training at one point. They have their talking points at hand and are relatively skilled at debate. The people who argue against him and actually push back are mostly just common doctors and at one point even a father of a transgender child. Naturally, it is harder for them to identify and counter already biased questions. If Walsh had done this documentary in good faith, he would have added debate-like segments with actual debaters like Sam Seder, Kyle Kulinski and others.

In the end, the documentary does not provide anything of substance to the overall discourse around gender studies. Most of what is portrayed as sparking new discourse was already common knowledge - most of what Walsh argues for already disproven by academics. What remains is a man in search of answers that he himself is too biased - and seemingly scared - to find.