Lady Ballers: What Isn't a Woman?
Consider yourself lucky if you did not subject yourself to Lady Ballers, the recent Daily Wire film that, like seemingly all conservatives these days, has an axe to grind against transgender athletes. I watched it so you don’t have to, as the saying goes.
I’ve written before about What is a Woman?, the Daily Wire anti-trans doc led by Matt Walsh; it was hateful and bad and hateful some more. This time the conservative media company is trying its hand at a comedy in which a bunch of men pretend to be trans women in order to win at basketball. Lady Ballers doesn’t so much rhyme with What is a Woman? as it does answer the rhetorical question of the title with a straw man: this is the world you libs want, isn’t it? If so, then what isn’t a woman, right?
As such, the world of Lady Ballers is a fantasia of performative wokeness in which, keeping with modern right-wing conceptions of reality, almost everybody secretly hates the ultra-liberal status quo but is too afraid or coldly ambitious to defy it. Imagining that everyone really shares your values — openly or secretly — is an easy way to avoid introspection. Like the “atheist” professor in God’s Not Dead who actually just resents god (thus necessitating an admission of god’s existence), there are no real liberals in the conservative imagination.
Cinematically, the best precedent we have here is the crossdressing comedy — Some Like it Hot being among the best examples — even though the function is essentially opposite. Classically, the crossdressing comedy erodes gender lines, as evidenced by the nonchalant reaction of Jerry/Daphne’s paramour Osgood to his wig-off gender reveal in Some Like it Hot: “well, nobody’s perfect”. The joke is not on Osgood, or even on Jerry’s alter ego Daphne; it’s on Jerry himself, for taking gender (including his own) too seriously.
Lady Ballers, on the other hand, is much more interested in shoring up a hyper-conservative definition of what gender is. The filmmakers clearly think of this scenario as their silver bullet, of sorts, but the scare tactic of “men invading women’s spaces” goes back to the likes of Janice Raymond, who wrote in The Transsexual Empire that “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves”. The preoccupations are slightly different (although Raymond does mention transgender tennis pro Renee Richards), but the thrust is similar and hinges in part on an absolutist and biologically deterministic vision of gender.
Unlike the traditional crossdressing comedy, in which cis men or women pretend to be cis women or men, respectively, instead, in Lady Ballers cis men pretend to be trans women, taking advantage of the exact nonessentialist definitions (or lack thereof) of gender that really rile up transphobes like Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles (who both appear in Lady Ballers). Thus, the film wants to say, the system falls apart without strict gender roles and assignments.
This is the crux of the film’s argument, but nothing about Lady Ballers makes any real sense, down to the fact that the film’s own premise involves athletes who are not actually trans. So you have an anti-trans-athlete screed with no actual trans athletes, which does track with the fact that to a certain faction of right-wingers, trans people do not exist. A fundamental premise of modern trans panic is that being trans is an illusion, a sickness, a social contagion. If being trans is just imaginary, the thinking goes, then it must be fine to eliminate “transgenderism”, as Michael Knowles specified1, as though the -ism on the end makes it any less murderous.
As the movie ends, gender norms and roles are largely back where conservatives would have them. Or something. Whatever. It’s an absolutely dull slog of a film with nothing to say except regurgitated bullshit about protecting “real” women from… men who are not trans, apparently.
Ideally, Lady Ballers ought to not go down in history at all, but if it does, it will be for its sheer cluelessness and the ideological gasp of an anti-trans movement that has lost (if it ever had) the hearts and minds of the public. They know that popularly, they’ve lost, and Lady Ballers is little more than a bunch of sad whiny bigots grasping at straws.
Michael Knowles specifically said, “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.”