Courage & ‘What Is A Woman?’By Rod Dreher
June 9, 2022
Have you seen Matt Walsh’s excellent documentary “What Is A Woman?” You have to pay for it, so I suggest getting together viewing parties, especially of kids aged 10 and up. I don’t recall that there’s anything that younger kids shouldn’t see, except that they shouldn’t have to be thinking about insanity like transgenderism. However, if they’re getting any of it at school, then they need to see this movie, and then talk about it.
Every traditional church, synagogue, and mosque in America ought to hold watch parties for parents and their children, and then have a guided discussion about it. I cannot stress this enough. My podcast partner Kale Zelden and I interview Walsh yesterday, and I got kind of worked up about how the churches have by and large been AWOL on this issue. Why does it take a Catholic layman to do the work that bishops, especially, as well as priests and pastors, ought to have been doing?
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If you haven’t yet seen the movie, see the trailer, and I hope our interview will encourage you to do so. It’s as good as you’ve heard. It’s very serious, but also, in the first half, very funny. In one passage, Walsh goes to visit Maasai tribesmen in Africa, and asks these people, who live far more primitively than we in the modern West do, what is a woman? These tribesmen realize that we in the West are insane:
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You should know that Walsh and his family are paying a price for his courage: he has had many death threats. You can’t take that lightly, not in a time when leftists are being arrested for showing up at a Supreme Court justice’s house with a gun, intending to kill him. It is not cost-free to live not by lies — but what is the cost to one’s own soul to live by the lie for the sake of safety? What is the cost to children? To the future of our society?
Want to talk about courage? Matt Walsh calls Scott Newgent “the hero of the film,” and he’s right. Newgent is a biological woman who, at age 42, was convinced that she was really a man. She went through medical transition — and says the after effects were not at all what she expected. Here’s a clip with Newgent:
Newgent is furious that nobody told her the medical risks of doing all this. She says, of the trans phenomenon, “It got me at 42. Your child doesn’t have a chance.” She is trembling with anger at what the medical profession, the media, lawmakers, and others are doing with the lives and bodies of children. In 2020, Newgent wrote a piece for Quillette about what medical transition is really like. Excerpt:
During my own transition, I had seven surgeries. I also had a massive pulmonary embolism, a helicopter life-flight ride, an emergency ambulance ride, a stress-induced heart attack, sepsis, a 17-month recurring infection due to using the wrong skin during a (failed) phalloplasty, 16 rounds of antibiotics, three weeks of daily IV antibiotics, the loss of all my hair, (only partially successful) arm reconstructive surgery, permanent lung and heart damage, a cut bladder, insomnia-induced hallucinations—oh and frequent loss of consciousness due to pain from the hair on the inside of my urethra. All this led to a form of PTSD that made me a prisoner in my apartment for a year. Between me and my insurance company, medical expenses exceeded $900,000.
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Here is what we do know: The long-term use of synthetic hormone therapy shortens lives. Specifically, these medications are associated with an increased risk of heart attacks, pulmonary embolisms, bone damage, liver and kidney failure, mental-health complications, and more. Almost a quarter of hormone-therapy patients on high-dose anabolic steroids (such as the testosterone taken by female-to-male transitioners) exhibit major mood-syndrome symptoms. Between three and 12 percent go on to develop symptoms of psychosis.
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People like Matt Walsh and Scott Newgent are far too rare in our society — which is why we are in the trouble that we are in. Again, I urge you: watch the film, and watch it with your kids, and others in your church or other community. Talk about it. It’s far more important than you might think. Matt, Kale and I talked about how so many normies have no real idea at all how vulnerable their children are to this propaganda. They just hand them smartphones with Internet access, or let them have laptops with no restrictions, and hope for the best. And our churches are full of a leadership class which, even if it doesn’t support this stuff, is terrified of confronting it, because they don’t want to be called bigots, or lose middle-class respectability.
To hell with that. Look around you. Look at what is happening.
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1534181965372465152In “What Is A Woman?”, Walsh talks by phone to a Canadian father who is in criminal trouble because he “misgendered” his trans child. And this news today from California, via Wesley Smith:
California looks to be well on the way to passing a bill that would treat refusals to allow puberty blocking, transgender surgeries, or other forms of “gender affirming care” as akin to how the law now treats child abuse and abandonment of children brought from out of state. From S.B. 107 which was to be heard in the Judiciary Committee today (my emphasis):
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Who has the guts to stand up to this and say no, we are not going to live by this lie? We are not going to allow this to be done to children?
In the end, the real question behind “What Is A Woman?” is, “What is truth?” These people assert the right to define reality, and to say that there is no such thing as truth, only power. This is where we are in America today. Matt Walsh sees it. Scott Newgent sees it. Why don’t the rest of us? These are kids.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/courage-matt-walsh-scott-newgent-what-is-a-woman/
