Co-reported with Devon Shaw.
Turning Point USA is known on campus for its conservative and sometimes controversial beliefs. In September they showed a heavily debated Daily Wire film entitled “What Is a Woman?” at the UC Theatre.
The director of the film Matt Walsh is a right-wing political writer and columnist who began working for the Daily Wire in 2017.
The Daily Wire is a Nashville-based conservative news and media website founded by political commentator Ben Shapiro. The company was founded in 2015 and produces podcasts, movies, television shows, articles and discussion forums. The Daily Wire claims to be “opinionated…noisy” and “having a good time.”
Walsh’s film discusses transgender and gender binary issues through a socio-political conservative lens. The showing drew a crowd to the theater in both opposition and support of the message.
TPUSA Vice President Josie Hair felt that the film “exposed a lot of the truth and reality about certain aspects of transgenderism that are not often allowed to be discussed.” Hair really resonated with the film’s discussion of transgender woman competing in women’s sports. Just as the film lays out, she feels that the inclusion of transgender women in women’s sports is “demeaning and unfair” and “[takes] the competition away.”
The film follows Walsh as he questions gender study experts, psychologists, doctors and members of the trans community, on what defines a woman. At one point Walsh’s focus turns to hormone blockers and gender affirmation surgeries for children with the permanent associated health risks. The main initiative of the film, as Walsh puts it, is “[understanding] reality” and “getting to the truth.”
Transgender man and advocate against medical transitions for children, Scott Newgent appeared many times throughout Walsh’s interviews. “We have five children’s hospitals in the United States telling girls that they can be boys at $70,000 a pop in a surgery that has a 67% complication rate…” says Newgent in an interview with Walsh. Medical transitions include bottom surgeries such as a phalloplasty or vaginoplasty and puberty blockers. Newgent discusses the harmful side-effects of these surgeries and drugs as well as their experimental nature for adolescents.
During one striking scene of the film Matt Walsh interviews and ridicules Naia Okami: a transgender woman that identifies as wolf therian. People who identify as therian believe they have a spiritual connection with a certain animal. Okami’s interview only served the purpose of creating a further spectacle of her.
In another scene that stands out to viewers, Walsh visits a Maasai tribe in Africa to ask them to define the roles of men and women. A member of the Massai tribe lays out the beliefs of their community, saying “a woman has their own duty and a man has their own duty and a lady cannot do the duty of a man and a man cannot do the duty of a woman.” The tribe was unfamiliar with the terms transgender and nonbinary.
A freshman at WCU who identifies as non-binary watched the film to try and understand opinions opposite of their own but felt the film portrayed a “negative take on trans people.”
“I didn’t like the way it framed the transgender community and speakers [from] the community. There were speakers that were [edited] to make look stupid and uneducated,” said another WCU student who viewed the film. These students chose to remain anonymous to avoid conflict with their families who have different social and political beliefs.
Western’s TPUSA President, Marques Stanfield feels that “the movie talks about subjects that are kind of changing and evolving over time and it is best to stay educated on the subject. It’s important to understand what is going on in today’s culture, I think it educated a lot of people.” According to Stanfield, these are important subjects to the members of Turning Point who really pushed for the movie to be shown on campus.
Turning Point at Western Carolina is no stranger to opposition. In preparation for the showing, there was campus police presence at the UC theater.
“A lot of people would rip down posters, that happens a lot,” said Stanfield. “You know we print out a lot of them, so we just put them back up.”
Hair explained that although a reaction was expected, their “heart in showing the film was not like ‘let’s do that and get reactions out of people for no reason’, it was like ‘okay, let’s expose the truth and whatever comes with it we accept that’ and sometimes it can be interesting to see how it plays out.”
She felt that by showing this film TPUSA provided a place for this type of discussion.
TPUSA also brought another Daily Wire film, “The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: George Floyd and the Rise of BLM“ at the UC theater on Nov. 8. The film discusses the Black Lives Matter movement, their fundraising and their spending.
