Comments by "Snuzzle" (@Snuzzled) on "Free Speech Absolutists Melt Down After Student Bible Protest of Matt Walsh" video.
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@CJ-wh3zy Asking the question is legitimate, but he didn't ask it in a legitimate way. It's fine to ask questions, gather data, and try to use these things to form your world view. Matt Walsh went in with a preconceived notion (that trans people aren't the gender they say they are) and then worked backwards from there to justify that. For example, when he shows the interviews with the gender studies experts, he chops them up into pieces, at one point even fading in and out to give the viewer the impression that it's a long and complicated answer that doesn't mean anything.
But if that's the case, why not leave that whole answer in so we can decide for ourselves? Why cut it out? Because he doesn't want us to hear it. He doesn't want us to say "Huh, that makes sense."
A documentary just exploring what it means to be a woman would not be transphobic, but that's not what Matt Walsh made. He made a propoganda piece trying to affirm his world view, that trans people are delusional and harmful, and that's transphobic.
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@CJ-wh3zy Here is the thing, though. You agree that, when he set out to make the video, he had a preconceived notion, yes? Would it also be fair, then, to state that his audience also had a preconceived notion going in to the film?
Why, then, would it not be a better idea to leave in more of the answers that challenge that notion, if the object of the piece was truly to explore what a woman is, and what it means to different people? I think you're being a little disengenuous if you can't admit that he chose to portray the pro-trans side in a decidedly negative light.
The people "just got up and left" because of the way he was deliberately phrasing his statements and questions. You may not be aware, but he was actually intentionally deceitful with the way he got a lot of these people in to be interviewed. When he was looking for people on the pro-trans side, he set up a website for a fake organization called the Gender Unity Project, with the actual people behind the project hidden under layers upon layers of registered agents and fake names (the person who contacted Eli Erlick, for example, used her first and middle name, because if you Google her first and last name it immediately comes up that she works with Matt Walsh.)
Matt Walsh also, quote, in his own words, "declare(d) an all out war on gender ideology" in regards to the creation of this film. You don't think that's transphobic?
These people were told, if we go by the email that Eli got, that the film would be quote "an independent documentary" "exploring the real lives of people in the lgbtqia+ community, and to shed some light on the topics of gender identity, and gender fluidity." I think a reasonable person would agree that is not an accurate description of the film that was produced. It sounds very neutral, positive even, and I believe you did agree that Matt Walsh's opinion of trans people is not neutral, and the film is not neutral. When these people realized that they were not being interviewed in good faith, they left.
In one case, the person was a medical professional, and she simply asked Matt to stop using inflammatory phrases like I believe it was "giving drugs to children" (it's been a while since I've watched the thing, and I don't plan on watching it again so I don't recall the exact quote) and he refused. So she left.
I agree that bias in creating an informative documentary is inevitable, but that doesn't mean that it can't be handled in a responsible way. When you know you are walking into a topic with a bias, you have even more responsibility to ensure you're not misrepresentating the other side (which I'd argue Matt did intentionally), and to ensuring your facts are correct (which his were not, not even close; he asserts that phalloplasty has a 67 percent complication rate when the reality is it is about thirty percent for both cis and trans men).
Matt is not shy about stating exactly what he believes, directly inside the film. Quote: "You are all child abusers. You prey upon impressionable children and indoctrinate them into your insane ideological cult, a cult which holds many fanatical views but none so deranged as the idea that boys are girls and girls are boys." He then calls it "vile nonsense" and "poison."
Is it really not transphobic to call trans people "deranged predators"?
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@CJ-wh3zy You're seriously saying it's normal for people to misrepresent a film's purpose and hide the true makers when seeking out folks to interview for a film? That.... seems very unlikely and if that's true, it needs to change. Shady practices shouldn't be the norm. People typically have to disclose things such as the book's title, author, and publisher when interviewing someone for a book. Why is the same not true for a movie?
I don't think it's morally ok to basically trick people into a film with a false pretense, and then point to the fact that they left when they realized what the film was actually about as a "win". Not saying you did this, but a lot of Matt Walsh fans definitely feel quite pleased with themselves when they saw the interviewers get up and leave, as though they simply couldn't answer Matt's simple questions. However, in context, I think it's pretty clear that's not the reason they left. These people should have been given the opportunity to give honest consent, and they got mad when they found out they weren't. That's understandable and reasonable.
If no pro-trans people agree to be in his film when he honestly told them what it is about, well, that says a lot. He could still use quotes from pro-trans people, their articles, their research documents, etc. It wouldn't necessarily make the film more one sided by not being able to interview them in person. He used one trans teen boy's top surgery photos in his film (without the boy's consent, by the way) as well as clips from multiple trans peoples' tiktok and YouTube videos. And while it's true that these people put their videos online, and it may be legally fair use, I'm not sure, it shows that he's not shy about bringing people into the conversation without having them personally there to be interviewed.
The words I would use to describe puberty blockers, aside from "puberty blockers," is medication, or more specifically a GnRH agonist. Hormone agonist, perhaps, for short, as that's what they do. I might use the brand name, Lupron. I wouldn't say "I'm having my morning drugs" when I drink my morning cup of coffee, even though caffeine is a drug and a stimulant. I'm glad you can agree that Matt was using deliberately emotive language there.
As far as a way we can talk, I'm not sure. I don't really use other social media like Twitter. YouTube doesn't really have a direct message system as far as I know.
I do want to thank you for listening and keeping an open mind. For what it's worth, if you want some more accurate data (though again, it will have a decidedly pro trans bias) I can recommend Cass Eris' channel. She did a wonderful breakdown on Abigail Shrier's book about trans youth, and you'll find a lot of the same statistics and papers Matt Walsh used. There's really a common theme with a lot of these anti-trans folks using the same data points over and over, so the nice part about that is that when someone brings actual data to the table it handily addresses dozens of videos and articles at once. Cass is a cognitive psychologist so she has the educational background necessary to really go in depth into the papers and break them down into layperson speech.
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