'What is a Woman': review and commentary
What is a Women’ follows Matt Walsh’s interviews with a colourful array of characters (pun potentially intended); paediatricians, professors and politicians, asking how they would define a woman - a question all struggle to answer. But if Walsh genuinely wanted an answer to his films eponymous question, he should have asked it in better faith. Walsh comes across in his interviews as unconvertible, and nefarious intent mars his questioning. Walsh’s ideological position, and that of his target audience, is already set.
In an effort to provide my earnest perspective, I will offer Walsh the courtesy he did not extend to his interviewees and present his position as charitably as possible.
Walsh’s camp holds that gender and sex are inextricably linked. Actually, he would likely consider himself as believing that gender and sex are ‘the same’, but this would be a misrepresentation of the terms as they are commonly used today
In general, sex pertains to our biology and gender to our sociology. To be of a certain sex is to possess a category of anatomical attributes - chromosomes, genitalia, hormones. Gender is meant to refer to socially constructed roles that are normatively characteristic of members of a sex. This is a common point of friction in the gender identification debate, but it is largely semantics. A line is drawn between sex and gender because of their qualitative differences, and separate paradigms of observability. Observing a person’s anatomy can tell us their sex, but it cannot give us anything more than normative clues as to that person’s behaviour, personality and social role.
Walsh’s belief in the phenomena of biological sex is clearly communicated in the film, and I think it is fair to assume from the montage of gendered birthday parties in the opening scene, that he is aware of the behavioural and social phenomenon of gender. It is at this point that Walsh’s perspective on the relationship between pink birthday parties and XX chromosomes gets a little muddy. Clearly, he believes a women is a female, but what else?
Biological sex impacts anatomy; females tend to be smaller, weaker, with female reproductive systems, XX chromosomes. These differences are observable scientific facts; they could be deduced as easily from a dead body as a living person. However, these causal anatomical pairings only directly account for a small portion of the characteristics of women in society.
These anatomical features of sex don’t provide a full account for the observable social features of women; why women are typically more concerned with their looks, more emotionally intuitive, more comfortable being vulnerable, more extraverted, more polite, more orderly, more neurotic (Weisberg et al, 2011). Similarly, they do not account for gendered experiences of women particular to our contemporary western context; playing with barbies and wearing pink bows, to draw on the films opening montage. Furthermore, they do not account for much of the historical oppression of women in society; they don’t provide explanation for why women have been contained to the domestic sphere, denied voting rights, considered to be the property of their father and spouses. I doubt Walsh would deny these experiences as gendered. So how then, would he make sense of these features in relation to the question ‘What is a Woman’, given they are not biological?
Walsh acknowledges the existence of gender a-typical people briefly, when he refers to ‘feminine men’ and ‘masculine women’. He uses these terms to refer to people who possess behavioural traits unaligned with the traditional characteristics of their sex. The sub-text here is that in Walsh’s view, this is what transgendered people are, people with the behavioural traits of the opposite sex, who have become confused as to the ‘truth’ of their identity.
He talks about that word a lot ‘truth’ - Walsh holds himself as being on the side of real objective truth. He accuses one of his interviewees of ‘circular reasoning’ when they answer the question of what a woman is by saying a woman is whatever a woman believes herself to be.
Some truths are not matters which can be ‘uncovered’ through reductionist arguments. Some truths cannot be readily expressed, nor can their qualification be readily categorised by anything beyond self effectuation. This does not make them untrue, as truth is not contingent on our ability to qualify it.
One such category of truths are the contemporary concept of identities. ‘Identity’ differs in substance between philosophy and psychology, but for our purposes can be defined as the characterisation of a person. Some identities can be objectively and clearly defined, such as a persons nationality i.e the country of which they are a citizen.
Other identities are harder to qualify objectively, due to a multiplicity of input factors. An example of this is cultural identity, which is a complicated intersection of ethnic heritage, genetics, history, geographical context and social practise. Not all truths, especially those concerning identity, can be ‘proven’ or imposed objectively; this is not because they don’t exist, but because we lack consensus on the criteria. There are a myriad of different sources from which a person may piece together their cultural identity, and so despite the commonality of the experience of belonging to a culture, its constitution is variable. It should be noted that nationality can only be objectively identified because it is clearly defined; even a persons nationality is contingent on factors such as geo-political division into nation states, or a countries current political circumstance. Truths about identity are rarely ‘objective’ in the sense of being separate from circumstance.
Walsh is not on the side of ‘truth’ about identity. He has concluded that because he has a simple definition of gender based on objectively measurable facts, he has effectively trimmed the fat from gender identity. And because his ideological opponents cannot point to a similarly succinct and objective criteria, Walsh feels has has ‘distilled’ gender identity to its essence.
In reality, he has thrown the baby out with the bath water. I accept Walsh’s point that sex creates biological dimorphism as objective truth. But there is no explanation as to the contents of gender which are not direct phenotypical expressions of sexual biology. To return to the nationality versus cultural identity analogy, suppose that every citizen of Australia is taken to be of the same cultural identity. In this analogy, truth has not been distilled - quite the opposite. The intricacies which make up cultural identity more tangibly than a stamp on a passport, such as religion, ethnic heritage, customs, intra-nation geography and the feeling of belonging, have been ignored. Real features of the experience of cultural identity have been ignored to simplify the criteria, and as such we have failed to catalogue the nuance we actually wished to capture when talking about cultural identity.
It is at this point I anticipate that Walsh may say I have missed his point; gender is only important or useful in so far as it does pertain to biological sex, and there is no real need for anyone to profess any sort of identity beyond this. Be a feminine man or a masculine woman. All anyone is really talking about when they call someone a man or a woman IS biology, and Walsh would reject the utility of a division between the two, especially as identities.
Firstly, we live in a society.
As discussed, despite our desire for simple definitions, much of what we interact with as gender in our day to day lives isn’t really founded in anatomy. The pink and the dolls, the politeness and extraversion, the social acceptability of our emotional expressions and the pressure to place others needs before our own (to draw on my own experience of being a woman); many of our common interactions with gender and womanhood aren’t with biological sex at all. Circumstances where we are normally encountering biological sex, like sports performance and different health care, are rather peripheral to the breadth of our salient experiences of gender. And these paradigms can (with some problem solving) continue to play out reasonably well by operating on differences of biological sex where warranted. Those born a female will have different health care needs and sport performance capacities than those born a male, and while some activists do argue otherwise, I would describe such views as extreme and largely reactionary. Most people who can conceive of the difference between biological sex and experienced gendered identity, also wish to safely institutionalise sex distinctions where it is the salient factor. My point is that these instances where it would be harmful to organise ourselves around poles of gender rather than sex, aren’t as widespread as Walsh’s perception of the threat would lead us to believe. They can also continue to be upheld in a world where gender identity is defined by individuals, and will only be supported by gaining clarity around the extent of biological sex’s impact.
Secondly, the need for separation between gender identity and sex identity has not been created out of thin air. There is no great conspiracy behind trans-activism, no masterminds pulling the strings so that, come time for sex education at a public school, they can convince your bonnie baby boy he is a non-binary cat. The rise of trans-visibility is just that - a movement concerned with legitimising, through institutional and social means, Trans people. Denying the spectrum of gender identities by denying the distinction between sex and gender has never succeeded in legislating transgendered people out of existence.
I get the impression that Walsh is fearful of what will happen to society if we let people decide their gender without a criteria in place to objectively verify or override. I don’t think this fear is ungrounded, because some areas of concern he hints at, I share. I share skepticism about the gravity gender should have in the way people are encouraged to understand. I also acknowledge it is not helpful that there is now next to no concrete criteria for what constitutes man and women, particularly as the cultural veneration for gender identity increase simultaneously to the unravelling of classical understandings of gender. We are bound to become confused, contradictory and inconsistent. But to believe we are not, and were not already, is naive. Myself and Walsh share the experience of having our gender identities affirmed by societies interpretations of our biology. With no experience of struggle, we could be forgiven for believing there was nothing invasively prescriptive about sex-as-gender, and for being cognisant of only limited impact of our gender identity on our lives. A person of the dominant culture in a nation-state may well believe citizenship and culture are one and the same, just as those who do not struggle may confuse the harmony between their gender and sex for synonymy. But having access to the struggles of others expands our understanding and illuminates the fact that the pipe dream of ‘just being a feminine man’, may not be something the paradigm of gender enables.
My womanhood is not contained to any one experience, and it is not hidden in my vagina or my oestrogen. It is a truth I know little about, and it unfolds in my life in a great melee of boobs, submission, menstrual blood, empathy and a distaste for STEM. There is a place in gender discourse for questions about how a women is defined, but ‘What is a Woman’ has not intelligently formulated these critiques aside from its bigotry.
Citations:
Weisberg, Y. J., DeYoung, C. G., & Hirsh, J. B. (2011). Gender differences in personality across the ten aspects of the big five. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 178.