“Hey man, you’re sick with whatever you wanna be.”

“What is a woman?” is a question that anyone could have answered plainly about ten years ago—or fifteen seconds ago, as Matt Walsh sarcastically suggested on a now-deleted episode of Dr. Phil. Clips of that episode can be found in What Is a Woman?, a documentary film made by Justin Folk and starring Walsh that is disturbing on multiple levels.

Walsh poses his question to a number of physicians, pediatricians, therapists, politicians, psychologists, social scientists, trans women, biological women—many who hold themselves out to be experts in their fields—and to a person, they either cannot provide an answer or else offer a circular definition, a look of petrification on their faces as they realize Walsh is not on their side while fumbling their way through any number of performative contradictions. They deny fixed definitions of words while relying on them, advocate for individual autonomy while policing ideological conformity, and champion science while rejecting its findings when they are inconvenient. Indeed, one wonders how he finagled his way into some of the interviews with people who, if they had spent fifteen seconds researching Walsh online, would have realized their conversation would not go well. Nevertheless, he comports himself with candor and respect throughout the interviews, asking extremely logical questions that are rarely out of line, and even allows fairly positive presentations of the gender-affirming position to be made without any tricks or punchlines in the early portion of the film.

There’s an air of satire throughout, reaching a peak when Walsh gets booed at a women’s rights march for bellowing “What is a woman?” through a megaphone with a huge sign bearing the question dangling from his neck. Or perhaps during the montage of male-to-female athletes dominating women’s sports. Or the sidewalk interview with a nudist, or the conversation with a “trans species” wolf. Oh, and who can forget when he visits a tribal clan in Kenya who can hardly comprehend the gender studies jargon he throws at them. It gets pretty absurd, but never more so than the fact that no one is willing to simply say that transgender people were born under one of the two sexes and then at some point chose to conceive of themselves and present themselves to others as a member of the opposite sex, despite retaining the DNA that distinguishes them as their biological sex. That would allow one to give the “adult female human being” answer that Walsh is looking for without negating the existence of trans people. Voila. Instead, it gets to a point where everyone is so delicately walking on eggshells that they don’t want to define anything and don’t even want to commit to an agreed upon reality wherein they are in the room having a conversation with Matt Walsh.

This curiously pushes everything into what Francis Schaeffer would call the “upper story,” the realm of experience beyond rationality and the material world, which is not reasonably accessible to those who deny the existence of an absolute transcendent reality. All humans have ineffable experiences, but without a unifying framework that accounts for ultimate truth, one is forced into a kind of dissonance, valuing beauty and morality and justice (upper story notions) but denying any metaphysical basis for them. Usually, the tendency is to smuggle meaning from the upper story to the lower story—denying objective morality while claiming morality is objectively meaningful, for instance—but this is actually punting lower story items into the upper story. In other words, instead of deceitfully applying transcendent concepts willy-nilly while holding a worldview that does not allow for them, they are pushing an understanding of material reality into the realm of transcendence, suggesting that literally everything is beyond categorical description. On this worldview, you couldn’t even be sure what soy milk is. Well, actually, no one knows what soy milk is, so that’s a bad example. But you get the point—if you can’t agree to any baseline reality, how can you have a productive discussion, let alone tell another person how they need to comport themselves, especially in relation to you, a person who won’t even agree to a baseline reality!

I believe I would be correct in stating that although Walsh harbors great animosity toward the pervasive ideology that is pushing children to surgically and medically transition (inarguably physically harmful even when the person transitioning is happy and remains committed to the transition), he still believes that each individual person deserves basic dignity and respect. Even if, as a Catholic, he doesn’t condone “every man doing that which is right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25)—which is the new norm in a society that recognizes no divine authority or moral order, that worships the self and holds the satisfaction of one’s impulses, no matter how twisted or disordered, as the ultimate good—he doesn’t hate individual trans people as much as he hates that every corner of our culture seems to be championing the lifestyle when the medical safety and psychological well being of those who choose it are dubious at best. His hate is for false teachers, whom he would consider “stains and blemishes, reveling in their deceptions, with insatiable desires for sin, who entice unsteady souls and have their hearts fixed on greed” (2 Peter 2:13-14). Who are encouraging everyone to deny humanity’s long agreed upon conception of reality. His preference would quite obviously be that no one chooses to become trans, because he believes that we are all “fearfully and wonderfully made,” (Psalm 139:14) but once the choice is made and the procedures completed, that person doesn’t become a second-class citizen. However, neither should they get special privileges. In the end, they’re sinners in need of a savior just like the rest of us. But maybe I’m just putting words in his mouth. To my recollection, he doesn’t actually invoke the Word or the wrath of God at any point.

His interviews modulate between earnest, sarcastic, sensationalist, and substantive. He takes evident delight in watching a few of his interviewees squirm, but he also tries to engage in meaningful discussions that would help clarify the issue. For instance, he asks Marci Bowers, a male-to-female transitioned, gender-affirming surgeon, to distinguish between a transgender child and a transabled child—someone who, for example, feels like they should have only one arm instead of two. The surgeon claims to not see the relevance (though she does come closest to giving an acceptable answer to the central question without adhering to Walsh’s definition).

Walsh is frequently the center of attention, not unlike Michael Moore, a multi-millionaire documentarian who dresses in frumpy clothes and pretends to be the everyman star of his films, offering an entertaining blend of interviews, narration, pranks, and humiliation. In his first film, Roger & Me, he chronicled his unsuccessful attempts to interview General Motors CEO Roger Smith after he had closed several plants near Moore’s hometown and cut 30k jobs. Walsh is similarly looking for something elusive that never materializes. And while the approach proves valuable in many cases, one envisions a less funny but perhaps more effective version of the film that doesn’t feature him at all, unfolding Errol Morris style as the so-called experts expose themselves without the interviewer’s provocateuring stealing the spotlight. Think of his two films about former Secretaries of Defense, The Fog of War and The Unknown Known, and imagine that type of nonconfrontational pressure applied to the subjects of this film.

While the film is funny, it is also quite obviously made with a deep concern for the harms of the insidious ideologies that have at this point invaded our schools and churches and homes. It becomes downright harrowing when it turns to the topic of “trans” children, with the experts tying themselves into especially tight knots to not say the wrong thing. Walsh properly uses the term “chemical castration”—correctly stating that the same drugs given to sex offenders are now being given to children as “puberty blockers”—and gets pushback for the connotations. Even simply claiming that he seeks the “truth” or “reality” causes some consternation. “I’m really uncomfortable with that language of ‘getting to the truth,’” says Patrick Grzanka, a faculty member in the Psychology department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “It sounds actually deeply transphobic to me.” Well then. Jordan Peterson, no fan of postmodernism or gender ideology, offers a potential solution (similar to Rebecca Reilly-Cooper’s article at Aeon) when he summarizes the entire hullabaloo of gender confusion as diversity of temperament and personality being conflated with “diversity” of what is a dimorphic attribute (male/female).

Psychiatrist Miriam Grossman offers an unsettling overview of the heinous experiments carried out by Alfred Kinsey and John Money, two perverted men foundational to modern gender and sexual theory. Kinsey is taken to task for his unethical practices and distortion of data to support his own deviant preferences (using child molesters and prostitutes as his “general population” and performing sexual experiments on infants), while Money is ridiculed for his sinister abuse and exploitation of twins David and Brian Reimer. David, whose genitals were damaged in a botched circumcision, was raised as a girl at the insistence of Money, who quickly used this as evidence to suggest gender is learned. David realized he was not a girl while he was still very young, learned the truth from his parents, detransitioned in his early teenage years, got married and adopted children, and later killed himself over the accumulation of traumas and abuses in his life. These two figures are venerated by gender ideologues, and their work is held up as justification for some of their modern beliefs and practices.

Walsh speaks with Rob Hoogland, a Canadian father who was arrested for misgendering his twelve year old daughter when he tried to prevent her from receiving body-altering medication, which, by Canadian law, can be administered without parental consent. He also interviews Scott Newgent, the heart and soul of the film, a female-to-male trans person who went through the process at 42 years old and regrets their decision, believing that the current push for gender-affirming surgery is in part driven by how profitable the drugs and surgeries are for those who administer them. I know it’s not proper form to lump a bunch of political views and the people that hold them all together (so of course I’m going to do it anyway)—but it is somewhat amusing that many of the same people who claim to hate capitalism cheer on a lucrative industry built on the exploitation of children. Many other “OG” trans people share the same concerns as Walsh, and if the film has a chief flaw, it is that it doesn’t delve into wildly incompatible sub-ideologies of the wider LBTQ movement that all get flattened into a single shibboleth, all of these open questions of lineage and motive whittled down to a target for righteous mocking in a way that avoids any pretense of sincere investigative journalism.

Perhaps more interesting than the film itself is the reaction to it—or lack of one. This was a relatively low profile release (it was released exclusively on The Daily Wire’s paid streaming service), but it garnered enough social media buzz that if it were about anything else it would have gotten at least cursory attention from critics. Instead of engaging with it, offering their critiques of Walsh’s methods or answering his questions from their own perspectives, critics simply ignored it. I’ll be the first to say that it’s not a polished film and I’m not always on board with Walsh’s brash tactics, in his interviews or in his selective editing, but the obvious implication in totally ignoring the film’s existence is not that it’s so bad it doesn’t deserve mentioning but that the critics are afraid of appearing just as foolish as the subjects in the film while engaging with it. Or worse, accidentally speaking the truth and receiving backlash for it, even something as simple as acknowledging that the Wachowskis used to refer to themselves as brothers. It’s frankly disheartening, considering how film criticism generally leans as left as the industry it covers, and thus how frequently non-progressive critics respectfully engage with films built around ideological viewpoints that differ from their own.

For a solid Christian perspective on the film and the companion book, read Douglas Groothuis’s article at Christian Research Institute.