Audio only:
In this episode Trent reviews Matt Walsh’s latest documentary “What is a woman?” and talks about its strengths, weaknesses, and the parts that disturbed him the most.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
What is a woman? I want to say it’s the question everybody’s asking, but that’s not actually true. People who defend transgender ideology not only refuse to ask this question, they refuse to answer it. The only person who’s publicly and prominently asking this question is Matt Walsh, a commentator from the Daily Wire. Recently, he released a documentary called What Is a Woman? that exposes how inconsistent, illogical, unfounded, and frankly evil, the transgender movement is.
Trent Horn:
Now, I’m not talking about people who suffer from gender dysphoria. That is tragic to feel like you are trapped in the wrong body. We ought to have compassion and empathy towards anyone who has a body identity disorder, whether they have gender dysphoria and they think that they are a man trapped in a woman’s body, whether they have body identity integrity disorder and think that they are supposed to be amputated, even though they have healthy limbs. This could also apply to anorexia, someone who thinks they’re morbidly overweight when it turns out they’re morbidly underweight. Anyone who has a body identity disorder, we ought to treat with compassion and sensitivity.
Trent Horn:
No, my anger and ire, frankly, is towards the people that Walsh interviews in this documentary. The politicians, the social scientists, the gender studies professors, the elites in the world who cram this down people’s throats and demand that others comply, and hurt people and hurt children in the process. Watching this, I’ve been around, understood transgender ideology arguments and what goes on in that movement for a long time. But seeing it, the evil, face to face, and just how smug, narcissistic, and sinister it is, hiding under this cheerful facade that slowly melts away when they’re being interviewed by Matt Walsh and they realize they’re being asked questions that they can’t answer it.
Trent Horn:
The word to describe it is a word I don’t use that often here on the podcast, but it’s one I just threw out there, and that is demonic. When I watch this documentary, the people being interviewed who defend these kinds of things, the way they talk, the way they act, it’s demonic. Not wild-eyed, red horns. What I mean is that there is a sinister evil lurking underneath, and you’ll know it when you see it, when you watch the documentary.
Trent Horn:
So today, I want to give a review of the documentary first. I’m going to do that by just… I’m going to play through the trailer for the documentary. I’m going to pause it a lot to talk about different parts that are in it that I liked and expanding a little bit more on it. So that’s how I’m going to give my review. Before I do that, though, one, just letting you know, if you’re a patron, if you subscribe to trenthornpodcast.com, if you’re supporting us there, you get access to my newest course called Arguing Against Abortion, a full length pro-life apologetics course, free for every patron in the month of June. If you would like that, if you want to get that free course, become a subscriber at trenthornpodcast.com. Go and check that out.
Trent Horn:
I also want to give just my general overview of the documentary before I play through the trailer. I would say that it’s very slickly produced. They have great locations, the cinematography is excellent, the editing is good, the pacing is good. I never felt bored as it was going through. It was about an hour and 20 minutes long. Matt Walsh is hilarious. What makes Matt Walsh funny is that he maintains one… Until the very end, throughout the documentary, he maintains one consistent emotion. He’s just incredibly deadpan. He has the same flat affect and discussion of things. And so it’s hilarious when he interviews transgender advocates that at first, he could sound like he’s agreeing with them just because he’s so deadpan. It’s clear to you and me he’s being ironic, what he’s talking about, but they don’t see that. And then eventually, they do see it and they want out of the interview. So he does a good job in that.
Trent Horn:
My only criticism is the same criticism that I gave of his appearance on the Dr. Phil show, which does show up in the documentary. And that is he really spends no time defending his own answer to the question, what is a woman? The answer he gives is an adult human female. But you could do a little more with that because then people are going to ask, “Well, how do you know what a female is versus a male?” He might say biology, and a shrewd critic will say, “Well, what do you mean by biology? Is it chromosomes? What about chromosomal disorders? What about is it genitalia? What about hormonal disorders? People don’t develop the proper genitalia.” And of course, this is all a red herring. It’s a smoke screen. 99% of people who identify as transgender, they are not intersex. There’s no doubt about their biological sex.
Trent Horn:
I talk about this in two videos, really. One in my review of Matt Walsh’s appearance on the Dr. Phil show, the other is The One Question Transgender Advocates Can’t Answer. I’ll leave links to those in the description below so you could watch them, where I talk about how we need a deeper definition. Something related to a woman is a human ordered towards gestation, a man is a human ordered towards impregnation. Or you talk about having a body designed to produce spermatozoa or ovum. The whole point is you don’t want to use the same word that you’re defining in the definition itself. But female is a synonym of women, so that can be also problematic as well.
Trent Horn:
My only criticism, I would’ve like to see a little bit more on that in the documentary. But otherwise, it’s a great documentary. I plan to show it to my children when they’re older, when they’re 11, 12, maybe 13, once they start to be familiar with these kinds of things. So I highly recommend it. It has mature content, though. So if you’re going to show it to kids, I would definitely pick the older pack. But honestly, even junior high, I think would be fine. Because guess what? Transgender advocates… Well, they show in the documentary books that are in libraries marked for children ages 10 and up have graphic cartoons depicting sex between men and women, sex between two men, sex between two women. Graphic cartoons of this for books for 10 year olds. So if you’re going to show your disgusting things to little kids, I’m going to show the truth about your disgusting worldview to kids.
Trent Horn:
It’s the same policy I have with abortion, by the way. People will say to me, when do you think it’s okay to show a child pictures of an aborted unborn child? My answer is when a child is old enough to have an abortion, they’re old enough to see an abortion. In many cases, that’s 12. 11, 12. If Planned Parenthood won’t turn them away, why would I?
Trent Horn:
By the way, you know what’s funny? There are some more left Caths than others, and I’m doing a writing project on this particular group, so hang in for that. They’ll say things like, “Ugh. I can’t believe Catholics. Culture warrior Catholicism is just so bad for the church.” You’ll see that online. Certain left Caths will say, “We have to abandon culture warrior Catholicism.” I have no idea what they mean by that. Really, it’s not that we’re not choosing to fight in the culture wars. It’s which side are you going to be on? Are you going to be on the side of truth or are you going to be on the side of appeasing the culture? Doesn’t mean you have to be a jerk about it, but we should stand up for what’s true in a loving way.
Trent Horn:
Now, I also think it’s hypocritical, because many more left Catholics online will say that they hate culture warrior Catholicism, which is basically being openly pro-life, pro-marriage, pro-biological male and femaleness. But these same people will talk about racism until kingdom comes in that we have to fight racism, which is a culture war issue. So they are culture warriors, but they just pick defending the issues that our culture agrees with. So the question is not whether you’re going to be a culture warrior. The question is, are you going to defend the culture of Christ or defend the culture of death? Which one are you going to defend? Which culture warrior are you going to be?
Trent Horn:
All right. So let’s jump into the trailer and I’ll talk a little bit more about the documentary as we go through.
Matt Walsh:
What is a woman? Can you tell me that? Well, you’re at the women’s march. You must have some idea. Please, if one person could tell me what a woman is.
Trailer:
You’re not here for women.
Trailer:
We ask you to leave.
Matt Walsh:
What is that?
Trent Horn:
That’s his rejoinder he uses throughout the documentary, because that’s a common definition. You’ll ask what is a woman? Well, a woman is anyone who says they’re a woman. And then he immediately says, “What is the thing they say that they are? Yes, but what is that?” And then the person stops and they’re really just unable to answer. So yeah, Walsh goes to the women’s march, talks to people. This was filmed about a year ago.
Trent Horn:
I love that they yell at him, “Put on a mask.” Which, of course, now we know that wearing masks outdoors… Well, we know that mask mandates had no effect on the spread of COVID. You can look at statistics to show that states that had mask mandates versus states that didn’t had the same rates. And of course, wearing masks outdoors was just absolutely silly. People needed to be outdoors. Your risk of transmission was just absolutely incredibly low.
Trent Horn:
Which, by the way, this documentary has helped me to see I basically don’t trust social scientists anymore. I don’t. I trust someone in the hard sciences, somebody who can show their results and replicate them. A chemist, a physicist. But people who are social scientists, I feel like they can fudge the data with any sample of people who identify as transgender or whatever and present any conclusion that they want. So frankly, I just don’t trust what they have to say.
Matt Walsh:
I’m a husband, I’m a father of four. I host a talk show, I give speeches, I write books. I like to make sense of things.
Trailer:
A woman is not anything in particular.
Trailer:
There is not one particular thing.
Trailer:
It could be many things to many people.
Trailer:
Some women have penises, right? Some men have vaginas.
Matt Walsh:
I like scented candles and I’ve watched Sex in the City. How do I know if I’m a woman?
Trailer:
That’s a great question.
Trent Horn:
That’s what I was talking about, by the way, with the deadpan. He’s just being completely ironic here. But he talks with that same flat affect, and people just go along with it until they see the issue.
Trent Horn:
This woman here, Dr. Michelle Forcier that he interviewed, a typical blue haired feminist transgender advocate, this woman was probably the creepiest one for me to listen to, the one where I cringed and just felt disturbed listening to her. There was a point, because she is involved in transitioning children, to helping a boy who says he’s a girl to become a boy. There’s no concept for her the idea that a child or a person could be mistaken about their own identity. And so at one point, Walsh asks her, “Four year olds think that Santa Claus comes down the chimney, but they’re wrong. So if they can’t distinguish fantasy from reality, why should we believe them when they say that they’re a girl or they’re a dinosaur? And she says that the Santa Claus does deliver their presents, and she delivers it in a creepy, I’m going to say demonic way. “But Santa Claus does deliver their presents.”
Trent Horn:
You’ll see a common theme running through this, is relativism, straight up relativism. What’s your truth, my truth? People ask Walsh, well, what is your truth about this issue? And Walsh says, “I don’t have my truth. There just is the truth. I want to figure it out.” And so Dr. Forcier will say, “Well, it is true for them.” Even on the Santa Claus thing. And you see, bam, it’s just pure unbridled relativism. And just the weird cheerfulness at first, it just sets me off.
Trent Horn:
Let’s go ahead here a little bit. But then he interviews this guy who runs the Star Wars shop and had a sign, a obscene but truthful sign, about who men and women are based on their genitalia, and was berated by a transgender individual from the city council. And it was fun when Matt talked to him.
Matt Walsh:
You’re not a scientist, you’re not a gender studies major.
Trailer:
No.
Matt Walsh:
How do you know that you’re a man?
Trailer:
I guess because I got a dick.
Matt Walsh:
Can a man become a woman?
Trailer:
I’m not a woman, so I can’t really answer that.
Trailer:
Women only know what women are.
Matt Walsh:
Are you a cat?
Trailer:
No.
Matt Walsh:
Can you tell me what a cat is? You want to tell us what a woman is?
Trent Horn:
So that was from where Walsh is going to, let’s see if I can bring it up here, San Francisco. Goes around interviewing people, talks to a guy in the Castro district, I assume, who was completely nude because you’ve got naked people in parts of San Francisco. It just can’t get progressive enough for them there. I remember there was a debate several years ago in San Francisco, people were outraged. The city wanted to pass a law saying that if you choose to be nude in public, you need to have a towel with you and sit on a towel in places, and people thought that was just outrageous. That is why I would rather live in Siberia than San Francisco. If somebody said you have to pick between one of these two places, off to Siberia it would be.
Trent Horn:
Actually, San Francisco wasn’t always… There was always a crazy part of San Francisco, but it didn’t overtake the whole city. I remember going there seven years ago and it was okay. Nowadays, though, I went there for a conference, to speak at Lila Rose’s conference she was hosting, and I and the other speakers felt too afraid to leave the hotel. We stayed at the hotel the whole time and then took a cab back to the airport. Just didn’t want to walk around because of the crime, the drugs, the feces.
Trent Horn:
But this is a great rejoinder from Matt, by the way, you need to borrow when someone says, “Well, I can’t say what a woman is because I’m not a woman.” That comes up a lot. Okay, but you can say that lots of things, what they are, and you are not that thing. Walsh will also ask other people, he asked that pediatrician and others, “Well, if a chicken lays eggs, we know that it’s female. Do we just assume it’s female?” They say, “Well, yeah, we just assume that.” They say, “Well, chickens don’t have gender ideology.” What does that have to do with it?
Trent Horn:
I would ask the question, by the way, of these individuals. Can you give me an example of a biological trait and a corresponding social construct where the social construct is normative against the biological trait? There’s nothing besides sex and gender in this regard. What do I mean by that? Imagine you had your race… Well, let me pick another example. Height. Let’s say you had your height and your schmender, okay? So your height is biologically how tall you are. I am about 5’10”. I used to be 5’11”. I think I’m shrinking and I hate that. But I would love to be over six feet tall. I remember when I was 5’11”, sometimes I’d say, yeah, I’m about six feet. Now I’m 5’10”, maybe shrinking into 5’9″ territory, who knows? Because the vertebrae in your back, the cartilage, it shrinks over time. It’s why people do get shorter as they get older.
Trent Horn:
So what if I said, “Well, my height is 5’10”, but my schmender is six feet and I identify as a six foot tall person”? I identify as a 6’8″ tall person. The coach at my MMA gym is 6’8″. I wish I could be that big, but I’m not. And if I thought I was that big, I would be deluded. That’s not the body that I have. I’m sure my wife would say, “I don’t want you to be that tall. I’m short. It’d be weird,” is what my wife would probably say.
Trent Horn:
But you don’t have height and schmender, you don’t have species and… What’s another word? Blender. I’m just rhyming it with gender here. We don’t do that except for sex. Why should someone’s sense of whether they’re a male or female override the biological reality? We don’t do that anywhere else.
Trailer:
I’m a biological woman that medically transitioned to appear like a male. I will never be a man.
Trailer:
And so they go on the internet and they’re told that all of their problems will be solved if they become a man.
Matt Walsh:
Do you worry that there could be a social contagion element of this?
Trailer:
A teeny tiny bit.
Trent Horn:
I can’t stand her. Once again, the smug condescension, almost bordering on baby talk. This is a gender reassignment surgeon. And Walsh asks him, Walsh asks this individual… I forget this individual’s name. I want to say it’s actually a him. Let’s see if I can find it here. It’s Dr. Marci Bowers, gender reassignment surgeon. He asked Dr. Bowers, “Well, you’re a woman.” And Bowers says, “I identify as a woman, but I have a transgender history,” and then just leaves it at that. So I think that this is a biological… I don’t know. It was a very vague, ambiguous answer in the documentary. But it’s highly probable, I would say, that this individual identifies as transgender, is a biological male who identifies as a woman.
Trent Horn:
But hearing the smug elements that are involved, like do you think there’s a social contagion? And we do know this, by the way. We do know this. Very clear from the PLOS One research survey that was done that was published a few years ago. It was retracted because transgender advocates were mad about it, but it was true. They control the data in these spaces. That’s why I don’t trust the social science that they put out on this issue.
Trent Horn:
Dr. Bowers reminds me, then. If this is a transgender woman, if this is a biological male, it would remind me of the fiercest advocates for abortion are people who are post-abortive, because they’re hurting, and I feel like that they want to double down on their hurt, even if it ends up hurting other people. They just double down into the thing that hurt them. Think about it. Some of the fiercest defenders of abortion are post-abortive women, and some of the fiercest defenders of transgender ideology are people who identify as transgender themselves, though not always. The other interview of the woman who transitioned into identifying as a man and going back, that was probably the saddest interview in it. Scott Nugent from TReVoices. She will come up later in the documentary.
Trent Horn:
But it’s just very clear, like the stuff on TikTok. Keep your kids off social media. That’s another takeaway from the documentary that I loved. If you let your kids on social media, you are being a negligent parent. I will never. I won’t let them. I’ll tell them about it. When they’re 18, they can live their lives however they want. I won’t let them on there. Frankly, I need to dial back. I shouldn’t be on that much. I go on for research purposes. It’s so dangerous. Don’t, as a parent… Well, my kids will get mad. No, I don’t care and you shouldn’t either. My kids get mad all the time when I set boundaries for them. You’re a parent, not a friend. I struggle with this. I struggle with oscillating between being a permissive parent and being more authoritarian. We should be authoritative. You don’t want to be a friend, you don’t want to be an ice cold parent, you want to be a friendly parent in that regard.
Trailer:
And you’re affirming it with hormones that have never been used in this way.
Trailer:
Puberty blockers, which are completely reversible. Completely reversible.
Matt Walsh:
One of the drugs used was Lupron, right? Which has actually been used to chemically castrate sex offenders.
Trailer:
You know what? I’m not sure that we should continue with this interview.
Matt Walsh:
So you don’t want to talk about the drugs that you give to kids?
Trailer:
How can they be removing the healthy breasts of 15 year old girls?
Trailer:
There are masculine girls.
Trent Horn:
I don’t even want to pause necessarily on… Because I want to back up a little. Well, okay, this is fine to pause. There’s no nudity involved. If we did this to animals, it would be considered animal abuse, I really feel like. It would be unconscionable. And yet we’re doing this to children. Surgical alterations that obviously cannot be reversed. You can create prosthetics so they can’t be reversed. This idea, and the document is a good job of showing, there are no long term studies on this issue. We’re sowing the wind and we will reap the whirlwind. It is so scary and sad to see what is happening. There are even people who identify as transgender who are in favor of transgender ideology who say, we need to pump the breaks on what we’re doing with children. We need to pump the brakes.
Trent Horn:
You cannot… Puberty, think about the radical changes that happened in your body at puberty. That’s not something you can just take a pill and pause and then start back up again. No way. This is a radical thing we have never done before, except using these drugs to make sure sex offenders do not reproduce or do not have certain biological functions.
Trent Horn:
But here, Jordan Peterson gets in on the action, and I think he’s funny.
Trailer:
Breasts of 15 year old girls.
Matt Walsh:
There are masculine girls. There are feminine boys. What are we going to do about that? Carve them up?
Trailer:
How can this whole thing be happening, Matt?
Trailer:
I wanted us to have a safe place to be able to talk about this.
Trailer:
Part of me wants to ask why you care so much.
Matt Walsh:
I care about the truth. I care about children. I care about the women who are having their opportunity stolen from them.
Trailer:
It transphobic to tell the truth?
Mark Takano:
The interview’s over. Turn off the cameras.
Trent Horn:
That’s Representative Mark Takano. I am amazed that Walsh got him to be in the documentary. But he asked him about public accommodations, equality rights, and then says, what about bathrooms? And he says there’s people who have this idea that only men have penises, or so I hear. What about people who are uncomfortable around penises in the bathroom? What do we do about them? And Takano realizes, uh-oh, this person is not actually on my side, and then they bail from the interviews. Because, as I’ve said in previous videos, transgender ideology cannot survive a fair investigation. It cannot survive a debate. It can only survive when those who criticize it are punished with losing their jobs, being deplatformed. Transgender ideology is inconsistent, makes no sense, causes grave harm. It can only survive when those in power prop it up by silencing the voices of those who disagree. That’s why we have to support things like what Matt Walsh is doing.
Trailer:
Excuse me.
Matt Walsh:
I just wanted to know, what is a woman?
Trailer:
And you’re not going to find out.
Matt Walsh:
Based on what I’m saying, would you ever want to move to America?
Trailer:
No. Never.
Trent Horn:
That was when Walsh goes to Africa to interview a tribe there. This is actually one of the most uncomfortable parts of the documentary for me, when he interviews the African tribe and he talks to them about transgender, non-binary, what is a woman? And they’re like, this is sick. This is crazy. This makes no sense. I almost felt, in this instance, bad. Matt, don’t introduce this disorder to people that have an ordered sense of the human person. I think it was good. It was helpful for the documentary. But almost it’s like, no, don’t contaminate what they have with these evil things in Western culture. Now, of course, Western culture has a lot of good things. Frankly, there’s a lot of bad things that still happen in Africa where Western Christian values would be extremely helpful in that regard.
Trent Horn:
So of course, I reject anthropologists and others who say that no culture is superior to any other culture. They can’t believe that because anthropologists, people on the left, you can’t say one culture is better than another. Will they believe… Well, I would say, what about the anthropologists, the liberal culture, that we should say all cultures are equal. What about an African culture that says they’re the best culture? Are they right? Are they equal? Well, no, you reject that view. So this whole relativism thing, it falls apart. But I liked this part with the interview with the African tribe, but I still felt bad. Don’t introduce all this awful stuff into people that have got this issue right.
Trailer:
No. Never.
Matt Walsh:
I hope you enjoyed it a little bit.
Trailer:
We’ll see when it comes out.
Trent Horn:
This person, by the way, identifies, I think, as part wolf. Gender queer, transgender, but now you have people who are identifying as animals. I’m trans species. Oh, that’s never going to catch on. How many times through our history have we said that’s never going to catch on? Gay marriage, that’s never going to catch on. Transgender, that’s never going to catch on. Trans species, that’s never going to catch on. I don’t know. Track record doesn’t look so good. This person identifies, I think, as part wolf. I almost want to be like, could we take you to Alaska and you could spend a day with this wolf pack and just see what happens? Sorry, that’s a bit of a spoiler there for that part. But otherwise, it’s really good.
Trent Horn:
Thank you guys so much. I hope this was a helpful review diving into it. If you can watch it, I would definitely recommend. And yeah, definitely let’s continue to go, to speak out, and to do so in a gracious way. We can present the truth in a loving way without compromising the truth. I actually give Walsh credit in the interviews he does with people who disagree. He’s very reserved. He’s not belligerent, he doesn’t talk over people. He just asks the questions and lets the people hang themselves with their own words. I think that’s something that we have to take into account when we engage others. So thank you, guys. Hope this was helpful. I’ll leave a link to the documentary What Is a Woman? in the description below, and I just hope you all have a very blessed day.
Speaker 1:
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