Matt Walsh on "What Is A Woman," the Gender Debate, & Fatherhood | Unapologetic

[Applause] [Music] and today on the show we have matt walsh matt walsh thank you so much for coming on the show today to talk about this documentary and all your projects yeah thanks for having me anytime so let's get into this i watched what is a woman i use my daily wire subscription for those of you watching right now and you managed throughout this entire film to keep a straight face on something that i would have been completely incapable of doing i'm wondering was there any ridiculous claim or crazy moment where you where you found a hard time keeping that straight face or is there a particular statement or guess that stood out to you while you were filming all of this yeah really really throughout it i mean there were certainly times uh times when it's hard to keep a straight face also times when when it was really difficult and probably this was the harder part for me was to refrain from you know yelling at someone um when they were saying ridiculous things to me but we kind of decided early on and my the team behind the film had to keep sort of pulling me back and reminding me that uh that what we're doing here is you know we're giving them a chance to talk and uh exposing gender ideology that way so uh we kind of kind of stuck with it that way i will say that especially probably going going to talk to the african tribe um and presenting some of these ideas to them those as far as keeping a straight face that was probably um the most most difficult part for me was keeping a straight face was probably that you know having to having to communicate these ideas to someone um and especially knowing that they would think that that i myself have accepted these ideas and i'm a proponent of them uh that was a little tough right it is it is truly crazy to see the massive disparity when you travel to a different country and talk about these ideas i'm sure you were prepared for that but what was it truly like communicating with them were they utterly confused that we were even having these discussions here in the united states yeah they were you know and the thing is we weren't we were pretty sure that that would be the reaction but of course it's impossible to know for sure until you go and also western culture especially in the internet age has um has very long tentacles and and uh and so you find the western influence everywhere you go now we thought probably if you go to a remote tribe in kenya where they obviously don't even have electricity or anything like that it's pretty pretty safe to assume that you're not gonna have that influence we weren't sure we weren't sure exactly and then we got there and uh yeah there was you know what you see in the film obviously is just a small sliver of the of our of our time there we spent uh you know several hours with the tribe and even just getting the ideas across like translating them having them translated to someone else even that was just a challenge because they didn't have words to communicate a lot of these concepts like non-binary and that sort of thing so that was very interesting right and i i mean it's not only confusing for you it seems to be confusing for all the people that you're interviewing to even communicate what they're actually trying to say and you of course posed this massive question which shouldn't be a massive question of what is a woman and i don't know if you saw this twitter thread of a young girl who had asked her boyfriend a liberal boyfriend this exact question what is a woman and got a 10 page response trying to really come to a conclusion on what this means why do you think it's so difficult for them and do you think they're just going to continue to evade this question uh into the future yeah i saw that one and that was that was the one time in my life i was threatened you know i was i was tempted to put the tl tl dr down there um for that for that thread it's it's i think i think they realize at some level that gender ideology is incoherent and empty at its core and i i do think they realize that which is why there's this kind of evasion that goes on and that's why when i was um talking to people what i discovered to the so-called experts right the proponents of this stuff what i discovered is that very early on in the conversation it did it didn't even take until we got to the what is a woman question before we got to that big the the big question i found that um they got they got very hostile intense and defensive um and they were intentionally trying to evade because i think that they know that underneath all of this there is something that just doesn't make a lot of sense uh and if they didn't know that by the way like they would if they really were confident in this idea and they thought that it made perfect sense then they'd be open to talking about it um just like i'm open to talking about it on the other end i'll talk to anybody about why i don't agree with gender ideology i'm not afraid to there's nothing i'm going to try to avoid but they do because i think at some level they know how just absurd it is yeah i completely agree with you and and constantly throughout this documentary you watch them try to evade questions you have this moment uh where you talk about the word truth and somebody labeled it as rude to be even asking what the truth is what i'm curious about really is that so often when we're trying to have these conversations with people who disagree with us they don't want to come to the table they don't want to sit down and they especially do not want to be filmed what was the process like getting these interviews put together because i know most of them featured in this film do not agree with your side of the aisle whatsoever yeah i think we benefited from and we told people that kind of the general subject we wanted to talk about and there were even a few of our interview subjects that wanted to see some of the sample questions ahead of time send them sample questions that was fine i think we i think we benefited from the fact that um for the people that live in this world and who operate in this world whether they're like academics or they're doctors or whatever it just was sort of inca inconceivable to them that anyone would actually challenge them it just it honestly didn't occur to them that they might actually get challenged on this stuff because they live in a world where nobody challenges it nobody asks skeptical questions and especially if you're sitting down across the the room from a gender studies professor or something like that the relationship that he expects is that he's going to pontificate and that you're going to sit there and just listen and nod your head because that's what happens all the time in his life right so i think that's there's this kind of false sense of security that a lot of people have in this belief system because it's never been challenged and that's different from i think a lot of conservatives we don't really have that problem because our ideas are challenged everywhere we go you know you can't turn on the tv or go on the internet or walk down the street really without having without encountering messages that are counter to your belief system so you're at least used to it um whereas i think on the left that's that's not the case right and that is i think the scary part for me is that they are so unafraid uh they really do not think they're going to be met with conflict or met with pushback and that speaks to where we are as a society and sort of the acceptance of these ideas now i went through a period of looking at all this and going there's no possible way this gets worse than this there's no we've met that we've reached the bottom of this pit it's not going to get worse it's not going to get a stronghold on our society and i truly thought the the tide was turning on this particular issue last week we saw fox news go and highlight a transgender child and and parents who are communicating how important it is to affirm children in their gender identity i'm curious in all the work that you've done all the people you spoke to having this documentary get released and seen by millions do you think the tide is turning on this issue are we still falling down in that pit i think uh in one sense it is in another sense it's not i mean in the sense that it's not turning we have to realize that this is a generational struggle and um you see the you know the the exponential rise in transgender identification especially among among young people gen z you know transgender identification is like 20 times what it is for their grandparents and great grandparents lgbt identification in general has doubled generation over generation for four or five generations straight so um what that tells us and then and then we see the proliferation of all these of all the new genders and everything um what that tells us is that there's uh that there's a lot of momentum let's say that's built up over the course of generations for the left on this issue and that's not going to be reversed overnight so unfortunately you know i think it's it's to really reverse the tide it's going to take generations because it took generations to get here to begin with but um on the other hand i do i have noticed recently it seems to me anyway that more people more of the sane people even if they're not even identified as conservative just saying common sense people more of them are willing to speak up and um and just say some basic truths i think for one of the reasons why one of the ways that this these ideas took hold is that people who knew the truth were too afraid to say it just remained silent and there's still a lot of that too much of it but i think the change if there's any change of the tide right now it's just in the um in people being willing to to say something about it yeah i think we're all hoping for just this new revolution of reasonable people coming out and going wait a second i'm not okay with this and where that really changed for me i used to be you know if you're a transgender adult and that's how you identify and you want to go through the whole medical transition by all means you're an adult make your choices but when children got brought into the argument that was where a lot of people started to draw the lines and they started to speak up and you're a father yourself i know we advocate that parents sort of keep their kids away from this try to shield them from this but a lot of parents are finding that really troublesome finding it difficult when they're sending their kids to public school they're having their conversations when they're turning on disney or nickelodeon they're having their kids exposed to this stuff what is your advice as a parent for how people navigate this particular issue with their children yeah i think um i think there's some just really practical things that that can be done and it does doesn't make them necessarily easy but what we have to remember is that kids especially if they're going to school if they're going to public school or even private school you know they're in this peer culture kind of environment where these ideas um these social contagions are spreading like wildfire and they and they so they exist every day for hours a day um in that environment and then they go home and uh but they don't really go home right because they go home physically but not in their minds because they have their phones and uh so they carry this with them everywhere they go so i think what parents should be doing is provide a um you know a an oasis from that get make your home a home where they're away from all that madness make it like an actual hear about safe space as well and then much malign safe spaces well the home should actually be a safe space for a child and i think you want to make it that way one way you do that is to take the phones away from from your kids like i i would not give a phone with full internet access to a kid because you're just asking for all of these influences to come rushing in i know it sounds like a cliche to blame it on the phones but it actually is true that's one thing i discovered over you know talking to parents and everything of the last year shooting this film is that the internet isn't the only culprit but that's a huge huge part of the story it would be impossible to overstate how much that play is a factor here in that kids are picking up these ideas on social media and and they're finding that in order to find acceptance on social media they have to buy into the ideas present themselves in a certain way so if you can if you can shield your kids from that to whatever extent you can i think that's gotta be step one i completely agree and i won't spoil too much of the film but you even got a a transgender affirming doctor to admit that social contagion plays a major role here now i as my last question i want to throw out the one that every single leftist likes to throw at all of us when we bring up these issues and we we start to talk about them you famously got asked this on dr phil matt why do you care how does this affect you why do you keep talking about it why are you studying it why don't you just leave people alone yeah well really the first answer i want to give to people when they ask me that especially people on the left say why do you care the first chance i want to give is is well you what do you mean you you want me to care right this is this is what you want you're the one talking about it all the time we have the pride month the pride parades you're you're obviously you obviously want this to be an issue that's joe biden gives a speech about pride month and everything signing executive order so this is obviously an issue that people on people on the other side want us to care about it's just that they want us to care about it in a certain way and arrive at certain conclusions and uh but that you can't do so you can't tell people to care about an issue and then also assign them the opinions and conclusions they're supposed to have about that issue but beyond that um the main reason that i care is that it's is that i care is the truth you know there's an inherent value to the truth and uh we want to live in a world live in a society that recognizes the truth and i think that we should be able to just leave it there the truth matters um but we can go beyond that of course and then also look at the look at what's actually happening the consequences of abandoning truth where you've got the way that this is affecting children the entire generation of children being destroyed by this um and the way that it affects women women not only you know having their privacy taken away their opportunities taken away but also having their identities appropriated in this really i think sinister way so um all those together i think give me a pretty good pretty good basis for for caring about this yeah i think there's i think there's a thousand reasons to care about this issue in particular and i just want to commend you for being so open and confident about it because it's not an easy thing to do and you've done an amazing job with this new documentary what is a woman which all of you can go and watch at the daily wire matt i'm curious how can people keep up with you how can they continue to support you and everything that you do well you can find me on twitter matt walsh blog on twitter you could download my podcast just go to apple podcast or wherever you go get your podcast but mainly if you go to whatiswoman.com and subscribe to the daily wire watch the film support us the daily wire that would be if you could do one thing to support us i would i would ask you to do that awesome and i think they all well matt thank you so much for being on the show today thank you [Music] you