He’s not a man or a woman—he’s a cunt. To be frank, I don’t know what a man or a woman is—and, actually, I don’t think Matt Walsh knows either. His documentary doesn’t really say, it’s more Socratic in nature—and I’m not sure that Walsh understood what he was up to himself, since he seems to think he *knows* at an intellectual level but doesn’t really know.
“It’s an adult human female”—okay, later in this video the cunt in the skirt (or denim jeans, I can’t see in the video properly—it cuts off) says that a woman is what a group of women agrees a woman is. Walsh mumbles under his breath “circular reasoning”—and yet “adult human female” is just a tautology too, just as much as “a woman is what women agree a woman to be”. All definitions start with tautologies, just to say “adult human female” is no different from “a woman is what women agree a woman to be”.
What you see here is two minds in a fight, supposedly through “reason”—but neither person is reasonable (experience, meanwhile, goes out the window—the mind kills it). The cunt in a skirt—call him “the narcissist in a skirt” if you think that’s too rude—just wants to be special. Just listen to him as he reels off a list of other people who affirm “who he is”. His identity is affirmed by other people saying “this is who you are” (or, rather, he’s cajoled people into saying that, I suspect).
The list includes “indigenous women” (high-status, per the state cult), immigrant women, and minority women (high-status), his colleagues (who are professionals—not a load of bricklayers or workers in a sewer)—perhaps he should just have said, “I know a disabled black lesbian whose ancestors were enslaved, and she thinks I’m a woman.” I mean, total validation there—someone the state cult says is holy agrees with him; therefore, it’s true.
At the end, when he describes how he first went trans, he mentions a podcast from England—and how well-spoken the trans lady who converted him was. He’s off chasing another status hare there—one minute he’s chasing the American status hare (immigrants, women, indigenous people, blacks), the next he’s after posh well-spoken English accents. He’s just a status whore—it doesn’t make any sense, he’ll chase whatever he thinks is high-status this week.
What this guy wants is not to be called “a woman”—he wants authentic contact. He even does a passive-aggressive little wave at Walsh, “Hellooo, I want recognition. I exist.” This guy needs someone to reach down inside him and affirm his existence at the existential level—he just doesn’t know how to do it (no one has ever done it for him, apparently). I notice he has a degree in something like computing, IT, not the real difficult stuff but technical enough—this guy, like Walsh, is stuck in his mind. He doesn’t know how to feel, he just knows that you get attention from people from rational manipulation (is it autism?).
At this level, it’s fucking tragic and I almost want to cry (but the emotion extinguished because this guy is deep into his bullshit and is actually very banal, he’s a Starbucks coffee—it would take a while to get some genuine emotion from him, even though I know how to melt him; but at the moment he’s too deep in to feel for really). He talks about “how he knows who he is”—he doesn’t have any idea who he is, that’s the problem. He has no authentic relationality to other people, just awkward coy waves at people (as at the start, where he gestures with an open wave to say “I’m from Albuquerque, I’m local, like me [friend]”—followed by folded arms, “I don’t accept what you say, Walsh [outsider]”).
Just listen to the way he talks about his “six-figure salary”—it’s all an act, a grandiose act, but the problem is he’s an actor who doesn’t know he’s acting. It’s why you can’t really be angry with him—he’s unconscious “forgive them Lord, for they know not what they do.”
Walsh is also an actor, but his act isn’t so bad. The problem is you can’t argue a person out of an act—the act wasn’t developed in a rational way, it was developed to meet some emotional need and it will continue until that need is identified and extinguished.
The man in the skirt wants recognition—he wants authentic contact. You’ll never get that with a circular argument about “what is a woman?”—that isn’t really the question at stake, and I’m not sure there’s an answer to that question anyway. In modernity, all you’ll get is a functional “a woman is what functions as a woman” answer (in that sense, the trans have the science behind them)—Walsh isn’t laying down a metaphysical argument about sex difference, he’s a modern too. So all that will happen is that both sides will get more and more angry.
If I were there, I would say, “I accept that you’re a woman. I accept you have a six-figure salary, I accept that you are respected by the indigenous community, as an English person I accept that you like and admire English accents” because none of these words mean anything (to be “accepted by indigenous women” probably means he knows a Mexican girl at a taco stand who said, “oh, you’re trans—that’s awesome,” and never gave it a second thought, just wanted to be obliging to a regular customer).
You might as well admit these things because they have no more significance than if I said “I’m a grade-A space ninja and everyone knows it.” Except there’s no mileage in that, and nobody recognises it as high-status, they would just think I’m being peculiar—whereas it is high-status to be a woman, and an English woman at that (lady of the manor, to the manor born). He resorts to “English woman” because it’s distant and high-status—so it’s true (he does the same with a “Japanese woman” who recognises him as a woman—he’s addicted to high-status cosmopolitanism).
I mean, he actually says he’s “awesome”—it’s almost beyond parody (narcissism, much?). “What does it mean to be ‘awesome’?” “Define ‘awesome’?” You’re into the same trouble as with “define ‘woman’”. Again, say to him “I accept you are awesome—I think I’m awesome too, I just hide it better than you do.” We need to get him off his act and the only way is to accept the bullshit so he can’t get off on it—at the moment, Walsh aids him because he provides the resistance that makes the whole act work. “I don’t believe you”, “You must believe me”, “I’ll never believe you”, “Because you’ll never believe me, I know you’ll never leave me (we arrive at the real point)”.
I thought maybe Walsh knows that this is the game at play and that is why he never really defines “woman”, just puts forward Socratic questioning—just to pierce the narcissistic bubble, to see if he can make them self-aware. However, I suspect he doesn’t get that because he seems to be hard-headed and really thinks the problem is that his opponents are “illogical” (but he’s a tautology man too, and tautologies aren’t “wrong” per se)—he thinks he “knows” and the other person doesn’t, but he’s actually no more rational (or is only slightly more rational). That’s why I say this guy is neither man nor woman but a cunt in a skirt—or say he’s a foxy black spider in a skirt, what he *is* in the skirt is irrelevant.
Walsh is sitting there saying “nobody ever said ‘Matt, you’re a man’”—you might as well say, “Nobody ever affirmed that I exist, nobody ever said that I’m a great guy.” This is what it amounts to. “Believe me”—“I won’t believe you because I’ve never needed anyone to believe me [to tell me I exist, because I know I exist].” Walsh needs less self-affirmation, but he’s also a journalist—so he does get some self-affirmation of another sort for another game “rational common-sense no-nonsense journalist” (not random indigenous women but viewers affirm Walsh—which is more high-octane recognition than the trans guy gets, as it happens).
Until people wake up and understand that the whole charade is about a desire for genuine relatedness and authentic contact, there will be no improvement—just the angry rationalisation and the whole “Believe me” “I’ll never believe you” dynamic.