You Just Concede The Entire Argument To Him

There are too many ideas in the world. Especially in the social media age. So we find ways to whittle them down. 

Does the person promoting it have expertise in the field? Does their idea align with what we already know about the world? Is there data to back up their claims?

These filters are far from perfect, but they give us a more or less reliable basis to decide whether to invest more time. Lately, however, I’ve noticed a far less reliable filter gaining popularity; is this person on “my side”?

In my article, Trans Activism’s Self-Inflicted Backlash, I used examples from Matt Walsh’s film, What Is A Woman?, to highlight the flaws in gender ideology. Walsh visits several “experts” in gender ideology and asks them to express, in their own words, their views on gender, womanhood, and the medicalisation of children. If the ideas are bad (spoiler: they are), it’s not Walsh’s fault. 

But because the examples were presented by Walsh, some readers automatically rejected them as anti-trans. And because I was sharing them, so the logic goes, I must be anti-trans too.

I’m not sure if it’s fair to call this exchange a conversation (it’s precisely two comments long), but we each cover a lot of ground in our replies. 

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Roman:

It's weird that you start by saying Walsh is a creep, but then you just concede the entire argument to him. Sure, if you grant his basic premises, this film comes out looking great!

(1) You seem to think Walsh is a totally honest dealer, just showing exactly what people said. As you claim, "he just lets them talk." Uhm... okay, that's not actually what the people he interviewed have said, and that would be pretty uncommon for a documentary anyway. So, is it possible that maybe he intentionally edited the footage to make people look particularly bad? I wonder. Would a creep do that?

(2) "This is the complexity with which Walsh thinks about gender roles. But sadly, it's not much better or worse than the experts he interviews." This is actually weird, because you directly contradict this claim immediately. I'm not sure how you didn't notice that. Presumably, the point about Wlash is that his understanding of gender has no complexity. But it's obvious from every single quote you then list that the people he interviews find lots of complexity to gender. In fact, you directly criticize them precisely for this, when you talk about "the resistance to giving clear, straight answers" (and then you editorialize by referring to "their many contradictions", which places your reader in the position of having to take your word over the word of, well, people who study this for a living).

So what's your issue? Is it that their conception of gender lacks complexity? Or is it that it's so complex that they can't give answers that are "clear, straight" enough for you?

Maybe gender actually is complex, and therefore hard to talk about using the very simplistic categories our language makes available? Is that possible? I suspect, after reading this, that your view on gender is about as simple as Walsh's, and that's why you're buying his framing of the issue. You expect there to be simple and clear answers. But, you know, maybe there aren't?

And then you repeat the standard transphobic bullshit according to which trans people, who face regular violence and murder, and who are the targets of anti-trans laws in states around the country, are actually aggressors who are hounding people.

Never mind that literally any time in history a marginalized group has attempted to stand up for their rights, the exact same bullshit gets trotted out against them by the establishment. That's what you're doing here. Nice job. Helping to oppress trans people on behalf of the right wing anachronisms who think gender is as simple as women being in the kitchen and men running around with guns.

But sure, Matt Walsh can make a convincing movie because it's not hard to make a marginalized minority group look bad: they're already subject to tons of social prejudice, so as long as you repeat the standard prejudices, most people are going to agree with you. By the time I finish reading this article, I go back to the beginning and your whole account of how Matt Wlash is a creep, and it looks like this: you're kind of surprised by all these ridiculously backwards views he has, because actually you find him pretty reasonable on trans issues, since you happen to share the same prejudices as he does.

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Steve QJ:

“It's weird that you start by saying Walsh is a creep, but then you just concede the entire argument to him.”

No. Conceding the entire argument to him would be saying that trans people don't exist or are at least an aberration that should be stamped out. Conceding the entire argument would be saying that trans people should never receive gender affirming care regardless of age. Conceding the entire argument would be saying that women are fragile little things with pink brains who like tiaras and makeup (which, ironically is not so different to what the gender ideologues are saying).

I don't believe any of these things.

1. Each of the references I make to the interviews is a link to a clip of them talking. Go and click them and see for yourself whether you think he edited them or if that's what they were actually saying. Of course he edited the film to some degree. But no matter how you edited a clip of me speaking about gender, unless you literally snipped individual words and pasted them together, you would never find me saying anything as ridiculous as these people say. And, to be fair, they're hardly the only people saying these ridiculous things. Walsh could have found far worse actually.

2. I'm wondering if you can possibly be confused by the apparent contradiction here. Yes, too little nuance is usually a bad thing. But that doesn't mean that infinite nuance until all concepts become meaningless is a good thing. Especially if we used that excess of nuance to drive policy and legal decisions.

We could argue indefinitely about whether the sky is blue, or whether humans have 10 fingers, or topically enough, about what a woman is. Yet across all cultures, throughout all of human history we've accepted the there is such a thing as an answer that is complete enough. And before the advent of the idea that a man became a woman simply by saying so, our idea of gender was complete enough and included trans women.

Indeed, as I've pointed out elsewhere, even cultures that recognised gender diversity millennia before we did, never became confused about what a woman was. They simply recognised that some people don't fit neatly into what were usually extremely rigid man/woman frameworks. Far more rigid than ours in fact. We make gloves with ten fingers even though some people have nine and others have 11. So on and so forth.

As a society, we segregate by sex on only a few occasions and for good reason. And each of these occasions exists solely for the inclusion, privacy or safety of women. Female sports, female changing rooms, female prisons. That's pretty much it.

Female sports so that people like Serena Williams and Sha'Carri Richardson get the opportunity to become household names whose hard work would otherwise never be recognised. Serena herself has admitted that she’d rank 500th in the world against men. Do you know the name of the 500th ranked tennis player in the world?

Female changing rooms, for their entire existence have recognised women’s right to privacy when they’re naked or otherwise vulnerable. They've had the reasonable expectation that they won't encounter penises in those spaces.

Female prisons should hopefully be obvious. A bunch of women, most of whom are vulnerable or have a history of abuse, in a space where they can't leave, often for years at a time. Locking them in there with male criminals is obviously a problem.

Gender is complex. It's complex enough that as I often say, there aren't 2, there are ~8 billion. Each of us expresses ourselves though the various gender stereotypes in a unique way. There is no single word that can define two of us, never mind 50% of us. Which is why the words "woman" and "man" are useless as markers of gender identity (and why people have invented, what, 72 different "genders" and counting?).

Woman and man have, for the entirety of human history until about ten years ago, been unambiguously the name for an adult human female/male. Just as a lioness is a female lion and a bull is a male cow. Men and women will express themselves in all kinds of different ways, many of which don't conform to stereotypes, and I think that's unreservedly a good thing. We should do everything possible to normalise that as a society and prevent discrimination on the basis of gender non-conformity.

But, as it used to always be trans people who reminded us, gender and sex are different. Sports aren't segregated by gender, there are lots masculine looking female athletes. Prisons aren't segregated by gender. Inmates have to submit to a physical exam before they go in. And penises don't grow and ungrow according to gender identity. Nor do average tendencies towards sexual violence (https://fairplayforwomen.com/criminality/).

As I said, Walsh manages to look reasonable by keeping his mouth shut. I don't think he's any more reasonable than the idiots who appear in his film. But those idiots, currently, are influencing and more importantly operating on children.

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One of the “how the sausage is made” elements of my writing is the effort I make to find sources that won’t be dismissed out of hand. Wherever possible, I’ll avoid linking to Fox News or The Daily Mail or The Young Turks or Vox, not because everything they say is a lie, but because some people are so comfortable pretending that it is, they’ll tune out before they get to the point. 

The problem, especially when it comes to gender ideology, is that it’s almost impossible to find liberal or progressive sources with the integrity to report on it accurately (which, unsurprisingly, is why so many liberal and progressive people are blissfully unaware of the damage it’s causing). 

So we’re stuck with people like Walsh. 

Walsh and I agree that gender ideology, especially when used to medicalise children and expose women to danger, is a problem. And we seem to disagree about pretty much everything else. But that’s fine by me. 

Because my allegiance isn’t to individuals or political parties and especially not to ideologies, it’s to the truth. And even if we don’t like who or where it comes from, we should all do our best to be associated with that.