The question, which is also the name of the film, takes Walsh across the country in pursuit of answers, talking to professionals of all types in regards to gender, sexuality, and transgenderism.
On Wednesday, The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh premiered a documentary based around answering the question, "what is a woman?"
The question, which is also the name of the film, takes Walsh across the country in pursuit of answers, talking to professionals of all types in regards to gender, sexuality, and transgender identity.
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Walsh first speaks with licensed marital and family therapist Gert Comfrey, who told Walsh that people are "assigned" a gender at birth by doctors, who make that decision based on the genitalia of the child.
"And we know now that, like, that sex and gender are so much more than just this binary. Some women have penises, right? Some men have vaginas," she said, noting that assigning a gender at birth based on anatomy is "not how gender works."
When Walsh poses the film’s overarching question to Comfrey, Comfrey first pauses, then respond with "that’s a great candle."
"I like scented candles. I’ve watched Sex in the City," Walsh joked. "So how do I know?"
"Yeah, Matt, that question right there, like, that question is like, when it's asked with a lot of curiosity, right. That's the beginning of a lot of people’s, like, gender identity development journeys," Comfrey said.
Later, Comfrey stated, "I’m not a woman, so I can’t really answer that."
Speaking with people out on the street across the country, from Hollywood to DC, the public generally could not come up with a straight answer to the question "what is a woman," with some saying that a woman is anyone that identifies as such.
A number of professionals that Walsh spoke to, like Dr. Marci Bowers, who performs gender reassignment surgeries and is transgender, and Michelle Forcier, who has a medical degree from the University of Connecticut and did a pediatrics residence at University of Utah, both spoke highly in regards to affirming a child's gender identity, and of transitioning.
"A woman is a, you know, it's a combination of your physical attributes and then what you're showing to the world and the gender clues that you give, and hopefully those match your gender identity," Bowers said.
Bowers said in a conference at Duke earlier this year that those who undergo puberty blockers and then begin cross sex hormones directly afterward, before the Tanner 2 stage of puberty, never go on to achieve sexual satisfaction through orgasm. They just aren't physically capable of doing so.
With Forcier, Walsh tried to argue, using the example of Santa Claus, that four year old children cannot distinguish fantasy from reality, and therefore should be taken seriously when they say that they are a different gender.
Walsh attempted to also get to the bottom of the question with Miriam Grossman, and adolescent and adult psychiatrist, who stated that sex is a biology term, and is unchanging. Gender on the other hand " is a perception. It's a feeling, it's a way of identifying, it's an experience. Okay, that's subjective."
In the film, Walsh interviews a number of athletes that have competed against transgender women, or biological males who identify as transgender and choose to compete against women, with these athletes recounting how the biological males swept the medal podium.
Selina Soule was a high school track athlete in Connecticut when she competed against such athletes.
"I was forced on the sidelines in my own event and if they were not there, I would have been able to qualify. So I missed out on so much throughout my high school career," she explained.
"It is so frustrating and heartbreaking because we elite female athletes train so hard to shave just fractions of a second off of our time and going into races knowing that we will never be able to win," she added.
An anonymous swimmer from University of Pennsylvania talked with Walsh about Lia Thomas, the biological male swimmer that skyrocketed into headlines late last year after shattering pool records set by women.
"They've made it pretty clear that if you speak up about it, and you say anything negative that, like, your life will be over in some way. Like, you'll be blasted all over the internet as a transphobe if you come out and then you'll never be able to get a job. Or anyone who wants to hire you will look you up and see you're transphobic and your life will be over," she said.
Walsh even traveled to Kenya to speak with members of the Maasai people, who were stunned to hear his explanations of gender as defined in the West.
They explained that there, men and women have their own roles, and that men would not be women, and vise versa.
Walsh spoke once again with Grossman, who explained that the beginning of teaching children such topics as such a young age began with Alfred Kinsey.
"He wanted to rid Society of Judeo-Christian values when it came to sexuality, and he worked very hard to do that. And I would say he succeeded," said Grossman.
Walsh explained that Kinsey believed that "children are sexual from birth, that we're all inherently sexual creatures from cradle to grave. He believed that true happiness is found in a life of perverse sexual experimentation, no matter the age," his data though, was proven to be fraudulent. Though he is still celebrated for forming the basis of sexual education in public schools.
Walsh asked how society got from sexual education to choosing your own gender, to which Grossman responded that John Money was to blame.
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"John Money who was a psychologist and professor at Johns Hopkins University. gender ideology was his brainchild," Walsh explained.
Grossman recalled an experiment that Money did regarding a set of twin boys. In an accident involving circumcision, the penis of one of the boys was burned off at a very young age. Money had convinced the parents to transition the boy into being a female, who thus grew up that way.
This twin eventually transitioned back to being male, going by the name David. Both he and his brother experienced deep trauma from the experiment, with the brother dying of an overdose, and David taking his own life.
"There was never a retraction or an apology from John Money. Instead, his ideas were adopted by mainstream psychology and they form the basis of gender ideology today," Walsh said.
Walsh spoke with Scott Newgent, who founded TReVoices, an organization run by transgender adults that takes a stance against medical transitioning children.
Newgent said that he has had numerous surgeries and medical emergencies because of his transition, and that no one warned of him potential complications.
"The truth is is that medical transition is experimental. We have studies that said that medical transition helps mental health, helps mental health with kids. They've all been retracted, modified, changed, but the only long term study tells us seven to 10 years is when transgender people are the most suicidal after surgery. But that's transphobic to say. For the first time in history, a marginalized group has a huge dollar sign on their head," Newgent said.
Newgent said that children cannot consent to these procedures.
Cutting back to Grossman, she said that she had recently talked with a mother whose 14-year-old daughter had been diagnosed with osteoporosis because of extended puberty blocker usage. Others that Walsh cut to explained that these puberty blockers have no long term side effects.
The drug Lupron is what is used to block puberty. It is not approved either by the drug maker or the FDA for use in healthy children with gender dysphoria. Instead, it is used to treat prostate cancer, endometriosis, and precocious puberty, where puberty sets in before the age of puberty. The drug is not intended for long term use in children for that purpose.
Speaking out against gender affirming therapy, Dr. Jordan Peterson said that gender affirmation is not the place of a therapist.
"There's no such thing as a gender affirming therapist. That's a contradiction in terms. Because you don't affirm if you're a therapist, it's not your business to affirm. You come to see me because there's something wrong. Maybe you've come to see me because a destructive element of you is wreaking havoc in your life. I'm on the side of the part of you that wants to aim up, man. That's what I'm on the side of okay. Now I don't know what that means, in your case. We're going to talk about it by going to affirm what you think. No, it's not up to me to affirm it. You don't get a casual pat on the back from the therapist for your pr- existing axiomatic conclusions. That's not therapy. That's a rubber stamp," said Peterson.
The film also takes aim at the social media side of things, using a number of TikTok videos as an example, ones in which people and teachers talk about their pronouns, their gender, and their sexuality.
Walsh closes out his film by returning home and asking his wife the central question, "what is a woman."
"An adult human female," she responds.
In a press release Walsh said of his conversations with many of these co-called professionals, "Nothing they said made any sense. Their arguments collapsed, not with hammer blows or a hard push, but with soft questions, because the core of gender ideology is hollow."