This Week in Barrel Scraping: What Is a Woman? IDK, You Tell Me, Joel.
The Daily Caller isn’t even trying with these gotcha videos lately.
by Alyssa Steinsiek
Hey, let’s talk about women.
Well, no, let’s talk about trick questions.
Actually, let’s talk about the most annoying ambush being deployed by far-right weirdos of late: asking strangers, “What is a woman?”
But first!
Joel Gibbons is an occasional print contributor for The Daily Caller, the baby of conservative political advisor Neil Patel and man of many faces Tucker Carlson (formerly of Fox News). Joel also appears, from time to time, as the man in front of the camera for the Daily Caller’s personal spin on annoying streetside interview shows, Man vs. Street.
One of my potential topics this week was Joel’s latest Man vs. Street appearance. Honestly, it’s short and uninteresting: Joel went to a Moms for Liberty protest where some walking footnote is wearing a sandwich board, and tried to “interview” the pro-queer counter protestors.
Unbeknownst to Joel, they’ve already overheard him saying that he’s with The Daily Caller, and so they wisely refuse to give him the time of day.
He says he just wants to know what they’re protesting, that he’s “not trying to go to war today,” but they aren’t biting. I don’t know what it’s like when people don’t want to talk to you, because I’m very interesting and special, but it seems to dishearten Joel.
It’s a big fat zero of a video. They didn’t get the reaction they wanted, but they published it anyway because they’re deeply committed to mocking trans people and their supporters… uh, even when they functionally fail to do so. I wasn’t going to write about the video, or Joel… until I considered the kind of question I think Joel wanted to ask the counter protestors.
To provide some context, I have to mention the ridiculous “documentary” infamous transphobe and enemy of age of consent laws Matt Walsh put out last year, “What is a Woman?” It is, of course, a thinly veiled excuse for Matt to go around calling trans women men and inviting strangers to do the same. Early viewership was underwhelming, because it sucks, and because it violated Twitter’s since-removed rules about misgendering… until dipshittery magnate Elon Musk reversed that ruling and promoted the movie to millions of bigots.
Most relevant about that movie is the way in which some of its participants were lied to. After its release, three people featured in “What is a Woman?” made public statements asserting that they were misled about the documentary’s goals and tone. Two provided evidence that producer Rebecca Dobkowitz had flat out lied to them to suggest that it would be a narrative about the kinds of challenges trans people face today.
And those weren’t the only people they tried to deceive, either.
A few months later we saw a similar tactic repeated at the congressional level: In the 13th hour of her confirmation hearing, Justice Ketanji Jackson Brown was asked by Tennessee opioid crisis instigator and horse torture advocate Senator Marsha Blackburn, “What is a woman?”
The sort of questions that must be answered by Supreme Court nominees, of course.
Justice Jackson Brown explained, with some confusion, that she wasn’t a biologist, and that her job as a judge—and her soon-to-be job as a Supreme Court justice—was to interpret law, not to make sweeping declarations about partisan science. In so many words.
So, back to Joel Gibbons who, like “What is a Woman?”, is funded by The Daily Caller.
I can’t prove beyond a shadow of a doubt what kind of questions Joel would have asked those counter protestors. I don’t live inside his head. If I did, I’d suggest ditching that formless fit for something more feminine, shaving that denial beard, and trying out four milligrams of estradiol daily! But, I do know that this has become an era of annoying “gotcha” questions and yellow journalism styled to attack the trans community for simply existing, and frankly, it’s grating.
These folks have no moral backbone, no conscience, but more importantly, they don’t even have real ammunition against us. They think Webster’s dictionary can protect their narrow, bigoted worldview from the reality that this debate is more complicated than basic, grade school concepts of gender dimorphism.
Here’s my message to Joel "Let Me See Fetterman's Balls" Gibbons: find better a better angle of attack, or stop wasting everybody’s fucking time.