WHEN THE FACTS ARE ON YOUR SIDE, ARGUE THE FACTS:

What is a Woman? is a film that you don't necessarily have to watch to understand its significance. People who articulate even the most careful and well-intentioned criticism of the dominant narrative on gender today reliably face a tsunami of attempted character assassination and career destruction. Senate candidates have been banned from Twitter, academics have been fired, world-famous authors have received death threats. Indeed, this topic is so fraught that even a Supreme Court nominee felt the need to avoid it. Gender just is not worth expressing an opinion on for most people who wish to remain in the good graces of polite society, which explains why critics have largely ignored the film despite its popularity. What is a Woman? gives voice to a widely-held perspective that our popular culture has effectively marginalized--that by itself makes the film a positive contribution.

The highlight of What is a Woman? is Walsh's skill in coaxing his interview subjects into incriminating themselves. He speaks to a gender studies professor, a therapist, a pediatrician, and "the nation's pre-eminent sex-change surgeon," none of whom are able to define womanhood without relying on abstruse academic jargon or circular reasoning. When Walsh gently tries to get them to respond to their detractors, several of them dismiss the very notion that such detractors exist. None seem to have even a passing familiarity with the counterarguments to ideas like the fluidity of gender and sex or practices like gender-affirming healthcare. Meanwhile, Walsh is able to get clear answers from the elderly owner of a Star Wars paraphernalia store, pastoral tribesmen in Tanzania, and, at the very end of the movie, his wife, who informs him that a woman is simply "an adult human female."*

The movie's titular question also relates to its secondary theme: a defense of objective truth. Such a defense is laudable; the idea that objective truth exists and is discoverable is central to the Enlightenment values from which all liberal democracies are derived. It is also clearly necessary, as evidenced by most of Walsh's subjects who insist that the idea of a non-relativistic truth is unfounded and, according to the gender studies professor, "deeply transphobic." 

However, Walsh goes further than defending objective truth as a real concept. Throughout the film, his conservative policy preferences are smuggled in with the facts about gender and transgender healthcare. This alloys a film that could have achieved Walsh's stated goal of transcending the "conservative bubble" of his typical audience and potentially swayed public opinion.

Tweet   @brothersjudd