The Insane 'Indigenous' Gender Argument

Why you should leave Rousseau out of the culture wars

Deborah Frances-White on the Triggernometry podcast. Credit: YouTube

There is a scene in Matt Walsh’s viral documentary What is a Woman? in which he visits a Maasai Tribe in Kenya to ask them about their views on gender. The scene is designed to mock the modern idea of men and women changing sex by showing how laughable these tribesmen find the idea. The tribesmen say that a women has her own duty and a man has his own duty, Walsh asks if a man can become a woman and they respond that if you are a lady and you want to become a man, you have something wrong with you, a man has a penis and a women has a vagina. Walsh asks “what if it’s a women with a penis?” to which the tribesmen burst out laughing. And scene.

It’s hardly rigorous investigation into indigenous concepts of gender, and like most of the documentary the brief segment is simply a slightly lazy way of making aspects of contemporary gender ideology look stupid. As with most of the Daily Wire polemics, he has a point, but his point consists of conflating the extreme with the whole and mocking it with an equally cliched opposite, which depressingly for the rest of us undermines the point made in the first place and just exaggerates the political and cultural divides for cheers from an audience rather than seeking to resolve them.

It’s interesting though, that underneath this piece of quasi-journalism is a kind of Rousseauian argument: if innocent Maasai Tribesmen in the wilds of Africa think gender ideology is ridiculous, then so should we. One comment underneath the clip that Walsh posted on YouTube, with 4.9k likes, sums this view up:

“A woman has her own duty and a man has his own duty. A woman cannot do the duty of a man and a man cannot do the duty of a woman.” This man has cracked the code humanity. Proof that traditions are solutions for which we’ve forgotten what the problems were. Reject modernity. Embrace tradition!

Yet at the same time, this argument is made significantly by the other side of the pop-political spectrum. In a recent episode of the Triggernometry podcast writer and comedian Deborah Frances-White made the argument that the reason we don’t accept gender ideology and transgenderism is because of the imposition of the “artificial environment” of societies, and that when you look at “indigenous societies,” you find gender fluidity. This is therefore the most human form of existence because it’s the oldest.

This is Rousseauianism without any subtlety at all. When Konstantin Kisin (the podcast host) interjects that society brings lots of benefits, penicillin, for example, she objects that the only reason those indigenous societies required said penicillin is because we the colonials brought so many diseases with them. In other words she is straight up making the claim that indigenous societies were once happy, gender-fluid and living peaceful sickness free lives when along came society with its genocidal impulses and diseases and forced them into the servitude of gender binaries and antibiotics.

Granted, to anyone who watched the podcast Frances-White came across as poorly read, patronising and incapable of understanding the basic concept of a discussion, since she adopted the main tactic of taking offence every time Kisin didn’t immediately agree with her assertions. Nonetheless, it is worth giving this argument consideration, since it is clearly at least implied by Walsh’s stunt, and considering that while some of her arguments are ridiculous she is not the only one to make the claim that progress has less been about flourishing than about the establishment of an artifice that separates us from our natural existence.