Media Literacy Means Knowing Matt Walsh is a Mass Murderer

I never wanted to watch the Matt Walsh-led documentary What is a Woman?, because, well, Matt Walsh is a hatemonger and a stochastic terrorist against transgender people. The Daily Wire host walks viewers through the insidiously sophisticated What is a Woman? not in the effort of gaining any understanding of a particular community but to reinforce his existing notions of that community. What is a Woman? was made to spread hate, and although Walsh and company aren’t exactly trying to hide it, they do a certain amount of work to convince perhaps only themselves that this is a project undertaken in good faith.

The self-delusion of Walsh that he’s a fair and unbiased “journalist” simply trying to learn more, to answer the allegedly simple question of the film’s title, is what stood out the most to me, although I certainly can’t read Walsh’s mind to see if he really thinks that. One thing I’m fairly certain he thinks is that trans people are better off dead, because his behavior reflects a desire to see trans people erased from the fabric of society, and if that entails violence, Matt Walsh seems fine with that.

With the help of absurd amounts of money dumped into conservative media, What is a Woman?, like much of the offerings of The Daily Wire, looks slick in a way that tries to disguise the sheer toxicity of Walsh and the film itself. The entire film is an effort to “prove” that trans people simply don’t exist, that trans people are a fabrication of something rotten at the core of society, a symptom of the disease that people like Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, and Jordan Peterson (who appears in the film as an interview subject) think plagues their world (and they do see it as their world).

Matt Walsh is not the first person to make a transgender documentary, though certainly his is among the more hateful of the bunch. But I want to go back first to Doris Wishman’s film Let Me Die a Woman for some context. I’m going to go out on a limb and call Let Me Die a Woman the best trans documentary ever made, not just because I love Doris Wishman, but because it really does lay everything on the table. With groundbreaking footage of a real trans support group and an infamous self-mutilation sequence, the film becomes a defining document on a now-gone era of transgender public opinion, in all its messiness and contradiction. Other documentaries range from groundbreaking (Paris is Burning) to a selection of important but very often cinematically uninteresting films on a variety of transgender topics like trans people in the military (Transmilitary) or individuals like Marsha P. Johnson (The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson).

Even when not working in actual documentary modes, early examples of transgender cinema employ documentary-style modes of address to discuss trans issues. All the way back to Ed Wood’s 1953 Glen or Glenda, trans people were sort of a stranger-than-fiction concept such that many fiction films seemingly felt the need to couch fiction in documentary language and overly realist style to back up the assertion that, yes, these people exist. That’s from a time when trans people were little more than a novelty to most cis people. Now, when trans people have become a useful scapegoat and enemy in the conservative culture wars, we get What is a Woman?, a film that’s nothing if not the perfect distillation of every meme, every talking point, every hateful thought conservatives have about the transgender population.

In 1990, the same year as the now-iconic Paris is Burning, a film by Susana Aikin and Carlos Aparicio called The Salt Mines chronicled a group of unhoused queer and trans people in New York City. The film is a bracing document of poverty and queerness that was followed up by the much more thematically complex The Transformation in 1996. If The Salt Mines is a fairly straightforward slice-of-life of an underserved and neglected community, The Transformation is a more nuanced portrait of one of the subjects of The Salt Mines as he de-transitions within the environment of a homophobic Christian community in Texas. In some ways The Transformation is the essence of transgender documentary, transformative in itself, an exploration of identity not in a vacuum but in a fraught nexus of vulnerability and exploitation.

With What is a Woman?, Matt Walsh operates in a similarly complicated nexus of contradiction and uncertainty that defines modern life. But unlike the directors of The Transformation, Walsh is obsessed with getting a one-sentence answer to the titular question and becomes frustrated when simple answers elude him. This owes in part to the strategy of talking to trans-friendly individuals earlier in the doc, laying the groundwork for Walsh’s belief that the inability to get a simple answer to an allegedly simple question represents the madness of trans and trans-friendly people. Part of Walsh’s frustration seems to stem not only from a desire for a simple answer but for a universal, one-size-fits-all answer. For conservatives like Walsh, only such a suffocating mandate will do, something that applies to everyone all the time and against which there can be no resistance. Walsh uses the messiness of the truth — that there is no universal, simple answer to the title question — to cast that truth into doubt and present his own answer. The idea that trans and trans-supportive people can celebrate womanhood and at the same time admit to womanhood as indefinable concept is both unacceptable to Walsh and also his primary evidence in support of his thesis that trans people are unnatural crazies who are enacting violence against children.

I wrote all that before the shooting in Colorado Springs at Club Q. I wrote all that before we had seen the latest example of the tragic, violent consequences of the projects undertaken by the modern right-wing apparatus. Before we knew, even though we always already knew, that the real “answer” Matt Walsh wanted to his titular question was the exact violence recently perpetrated against the queer community. Matt Walsh (and Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Tucker Carlson, and on and on) are beyond “fine with” violence against queer and trans people: they actively promote it. They want us all dead. The modern right-wing collective trans panic poses an existential threat. That’s no longer speculation (even before the shooting at Club Q), but it’s clearer now than ever.

Matt Walsh is a mass murderer. Tucker Carlson is a mass murderer. They are killing us. The seemingly innocuous title question — “what is a woman?” — becomes more terrifying when you realize that the shooting at Club Q is the real answer Matt Walsh is looking for.