An Open Letter to Matt Walsh

Mr. Walsh,

You have made a career, and a documentary, out of a question you present as profound and a great deal of confrontation aimed at anyone who answers it differently than you do. The confrontation is the brand. The cruelty is not an accident of the format; it is the format.

I notice you spend more hours on trans people’s lives than most trans people do. For a man who finds us absurd, you are remarkably unable to look away. In my experience that is usually a sign the absurdity is doing some quiet work for you — building the audience, selling the worldview, paying the wage.

I will not perform my biology for your camera or my pain for your engagement numbers. I am a woman who builds reliable systems for a living, and I am entirely uninterested in playing the antagonist in the story you have found so profitable to tell.