As globalisation continues to drive the unprecedented overlap of cultures, global disputes on ideologies have become a staple of the modernist and post-modernist scene.
Several shifts have been affecting the human essence, questioning and redefining themes that had long been taken for granted and destabilising the global social order in the process.
One of these subjects is the transgender issue, which carries a host of repercussions on societies around the world. The topic has been stirring endless debates in most if not all globalised communities.
Tricky question
Some seemingly naïve questions can sometimes ignite an endless debate. This is exactly why in this documentary, American political commentator Matt Walsh asked people in the streets, psychiatrists, social experts, and even members of the African indigenous Maasai tribe a simple question: “What is a woman?”
Naïve and superficial as such a question may seem, it unleashed an endless flow of discussions on other related issues.
Walsh’s tricky question was a prompt for interviewees, including transgender people and witnesses of gender transformation surgeries, to tell their stories.
The 95-minute documentary film sheds light on several crucial issues, including the modern gender narrative and the prevalence of the gender transformation concept among children and youth, driven by the endorsement of this concept by today’s globalised politics. In these conversations, Matt Walsh provides a deconstructed view of the path taken by the modern human.
To address that key question, the film explores the whirlwind of questions that emerge when attempting to define women. Are women birth machines, objects of sexual pleasure, tools exploited by globalisation for its interests and commercial purposes, or mothers?
No interviewee could give a specific definition of a woman, and that’s because there is none: there is simply an essence to women as human beings.
Is biology irrelevant?
Through his questions, Walsh manages to bring chaos to order by inquiring about identity and biology. Could transgender women be considered real women? Is biology irrelevant?
Walsh’s opening scene is a birthday party for a pair of boy and girl twins. The gifts presented to the boy were a football and a gun, whereas his sister received a tea set and a colourful tiara.
While both were having fun playing with their new games, Walsh wonders what the difference is between a boy and a girl. He offers the answer himself: how he makes his son happy differs from how he makes his daughter happy.
Walsh says people who say that there are no differences between boys and girls are “idiots”, adding: “I like to make sense of things, but making sense of females is a whole other matter.”
Walsh then asks a transgender woman he meets on the street to define women. Scrambling for an answer, his interviewee says she knows she’s a woman, but does not have an answer to his question.
Throughout the film, Walsh interviews several psychiatrists and gender transformation physicians on the identity of women and humans. Their replies seem to be distorted and incohesive when attempting to define gender and sex. No one offers a conclusive truth.
Yet, the interviews revealed that the majority of people who undergo gender transformation surgeries become suicidal within a few years due to the resulting physiological problems.
Among other things, Walsh’s documentary reveals that 67% of transition surgeries for children have highly dangerous effects, questioning the scandalously huge profits made by US health institutions out of such operations, such as doctors’ wages and drug costs.
Personal stories
Walsh used his key question “What is a Woman?” as a prelude to asking follow-up questions about transgender issues and giving his interviewees a space to relay their own personal stories.
In the process, the documentary reveals a disastrous growing tendency to encourage children to go through gender transformation, facilitate their access to hormonal therapy, and approve sex reassignment surgeries when children are not yet mature enough to make such a crucial life-changing decision.
Walsh hints at the inaccuracy and corruptness of some scientific research results regarding gender transformation, revealing that some fabricated data are purposefully overstated to normalise the concept in human societies and in the minds of children.
