IDENTITY + SURGERY = BUTCHERY:

What is a woman? A question like this might seem like a strange premise for a 90-minute documentary. But we live in unusual times when primary school children can answer a question our leading politicians struggle to get to grips with. Matt Walsh's film shows that ordinary people are often baffled too. His interviewees responded with confusion, obfuscation and prevarication when asked to define the word 'woman'. A professor of women, gender and sexuality studies at the University of Tennessee was stunned into silence by the slightly harder task: 'Can you define the word woman without using the word woman?'.

Walsh's wife at least knew the correct answer. 'An adult human female', she replied - as she worked in the kitchen - adding, 'who needs help opening this (jar)?' [...]

Disappointingly, Walsh didn't consult the British and Irish writers and speakers who know more than most about what it means to be a woman, or indeed what it means to be a man. 'A blindspot,' according to Spiked's Jo Bartosch. Helen Joyce's Trans and Kathleen Stock's Material Girls are superb commentaries. Those two authors - distinguished in journalism and academia respectively - are walking antidotes to the gobbledegook, but neither were featured. And how could any commentary on transgender nonsense fail to cite Julie Bindel who was ploughing this furrow when Walsh was still at school?

That niggle aside, Walsh's film is a must watch. The naivety of the gender identity brigade is breathtaking. 'When someone tells you who they are, you should believe them,' the gender studies prof told us before claiming that a woman is a person who identifies as a woman. His reasoning may have been circular but his body language spoke volumes as he squirmed in his chair; he had been poleaxed by a simple question and he knew it. I wonder how much his students pay to attend his classes?

Democratic Congressman Mark Takano was similarly uncomfortable when Walsh asked him how he might respond to women who don't want to see penises in their spaces: 

'I think a person who wants to use a woman's bathroom who identifies as transgender really does think of themselves as female.' 

His logic crumbled as he waffled about respecting 'their (transwomen's) basic right to live'. I wonder what his female electorate in California made of that?

But if this first half of the documentary was excruciating, the second was terrifying. Walsh moved onto the impact of gender identity ideology on children and adolescents, some of whom have been persuaded they need hormones and surgery to ward off the risk of suicide.

Transman Scott Nugent didn't fudge and responded with brutal honesty, 'I am a biological woman that medically transitioned to appear like a male (but) I will never be a man.' Nugent spoke passionately about the complications of surgery; 'six inches of hair on the inside of my urethra for seventeen months'. But Nugent's main concern was youngsters. 'We are butchering a generation of children because nobody is willing to talk about anything,' Nugent warned.

Tweet   @brothersjudd