Documentary Feature Review of No Way Back

In the past decade or so, the documentary film industry decided to take a political side, as opposed to offer an objective look at a particular subject. I miss having those kinds of resources. I know that any film, especially those selected for the Oscars, will reflect the singular point of view of the American Left. I didn’t used to know that. I assumed what I believed was simply the truth. It took me a lot of work and grit to crawl out of my own bubble and see things from other people’s points of view.

Once I did that, and I watched the documentaries and doc shorts on offer it was easy to see that they took a point of view and were making a movie to back that up. Oh sure, sometimes documentaries that tell a story from an objective POV do manage to get produced, and even win — like Free Solo — but they most of the time, especially lately, the pointed ones do better.

This shift began with the success of Michael Moore’s pointed films like Roger & Me, Bowling for Columbine, etc. The idea was: things are so urgent, so potentially catastrophic, that documentarians can no longer stand on the sidelines.

But what happens if all of Hollywood, most of culture and even the United States government is captured by a specific ideology that has become so powerful dissent is not allowed? The government isn’t censoring speech directly — especially not now — but after what happened when activists pressured AMC theaters to pull a documentary on detransitioners called No Way Back, it was clear that everything had changed.

It’s not fun writing about it and even less fun having to listen to people flip out about it – a longtime friend of mine and reader of this site actually called the film No Way Back “Hate Speech.” Because political polarization is so extreme and whatever the Right is freaking out about, the Left automatically takes the other side, but in this case, the Right is right and the Left is wrong.

How do I know this? Because if there is one thing I’ve learned growing up on the Left it’s this: children can’t consent. PERIOD. They certainly can’t consent to losing their sexual function – many lose the ability to even have orgasms, let alone a working penis, let alone reproduce. They’re essentially performing medical experiments to serve an ideology and a social contagion that is moving too fast and can’t be controlled because activists have captured the entire government.

So yes, that means no Democrat — not one — will even hit the pause button or offer parents any cautionary warnings. Not Joe Biden, not Kamala Harris, not Gavin Newsom, not Hillary Clinton — NOT ONE. The potential harms are all in the fine print and are horrifying. And I believe it will go down like similar medical experiments meant to achieve some utopian ideal did – Eugenics, lobotomies, etc.

People mean well but science often gets ahead of our humanity and we become enthralled with what we can do. Already, there are thousands of detransitioners who are now lifelong medical patients. Maybe you readers do not care about them but I do. I care about them because I am a mother and I was put on this earth to protect kids.

And sure, probably half of them are happy with how their bodies changed. The most popular influencers like Dylan Mulvaney and Rose Montoya (the one kicked out of the White House for going topless) all had the luxury of maturing fully as their biological sex before transitioning.

Here is Montoya as a gay man coming out just ten years ago at 18:

And here is Rose now, one of the most influential trans activists on TikTok:

I really like her, and I like Dylan Mulvaney and I wish for them the best lives imaginable, but neither of them is going to struggle with health problems because neither of them transitioned when they were children. At the very least, 18 should be the minimum age but I would strongly urge people to wait until their brain fully matured by the age of 25 to decide whether they want to amputate healthy breasts or take cross-sex hormones.

My heart breaks for the young women growing up and realizing that there weren’t people around to protect them because in our strange new world they think protecting them is transitioning them. AMC Theaters dropping No Way Back is the perfect example of this — they bury the truth or any dissenting points of views.

But to me, if one person has to live out the rest of their lives without the ability to have normal sexual function (male) or breastfeed or bear children (female) then it’s worth putting a pause on treatment until more research is done. That is why they’ve already banned it in the UK, Norway and Sweden.

Last year, Matt Walsh made the documentary What is a Woman that no film critic would touch. He made a deal with Twitter this year to show the film and when Twitter balked on the deal, Elon Musk stepped in and allowed the film to screen. That film is not this film. No Way Back was made by self-described progressives. They hoped that would mean something. Surely activists are only trying to silence Matt Walsh because he’s a conservative and they don’t support the kind of abuse transgender people receive.

But no. Even a nuanced take like No Way Back was met with a authoritarian smackdown. There is not one frame of the film that could be called “hate speech.” Not one. Yet, rather than even watch the movie, most on the Left now just automatically take their positions and fight against it. So what’s the answer here? How did we arrive in 2023 when this is the American Left? I do not know.

No Way Back talks to doctors, detransitioners, psychologists and activists about the potential dangers of medical transitions on young bodies with no long term studies of the harms done. The emotional blackmail against parents, teachers and politicians and even children themselves is that they will kill themselves if they don’t get to transition to the opposite sex.

30% of those who transition have Autism, which means not only are they children, who can’t consent, but they’re also struggling with a disability. Raise your hand if you think this is going to play well over time?

More than likely, this is going to splash back in the face of politicians and activists, very likely ruining their careers and legacy when the worm turns and I can promise you this with 100% certainty, when children are being made infertile by the medical industry, the worm will turn. It is not a matter of if but when.

The Eugenics movement was widely praised by people like FDR and Winston Churchill. In the wake of Darwin they believed that sterilizing the “feeble minded” and in the South, Black people and in Germany, non-Aryans was a way to make civilization better, stronger, etc.

This, from the New Yorker:

You can find articles in the Time machine of scientists ruminating on Eugenics and not all that alarmed that Hitler and the Nazis were taking full advantage of it and, in fact, building a fascist movement rooted in it.  Then, like now, it was nested in careful and flowery language, like the “Human Betterment Foundation.”

This sprang from a misread of Darwin’s evolution theory. But going back to that era, the 1800s, one can imagine just how shocking it was for a civilization that relied on religion to explain the history of humanity suddenly grappling with science. Selective breeding can only take you so far. I like mutts rather than purebred dogs for this reason. They are far more less neurotic and they are more resilient.

The human brain was never equipped to come of age online at the mercy of algorithms. This is especially true for those raised by helicopter parents who overprotected their kids yet didn’t realize they were entering the brave new world of Tumblr and other forums, not to mention Youtube, Instagram and eventually Tik Tok. Influencers sell happiness through transition for lonely, isolated kids who are trying to accept who they are. This is wonderful convo with a self-described “sad gay boy” who mistakenly believed he could find salvation as a female.

Adolescent girls who transition before puberty are then stuck as grownups with bodies that are neither fully female or fully male. Boys who transition might have a slightly easier time but they lose their manhood and their sexual function.

The Autism factor in “gender affirming care” is where this “movement” is going to get into trouble. So many don’t understand where Autism came from, how to stop it, what to do with it because more and more children are being diagnosed. Yet, at the same time, they’re being ushered into treatment that could likely sterilize them, a defacto Eugenics process.

And that’s how we get to a new phenomenon called Parental Dysophoria:

Parental dysphoria involves the extended state of having to stay silent about something that you know will lead to tragedy, because you don’t want to lose your child, your friends, your extended family, and your marriage—everything you’ve worked to build. You do this to preserve some small chance of having an impact, to keep your child close enough to eventually help them find their way out of this delusion. It’s living with fear—fear of loss, fear of estrangement, fear of losing your own mind, fear of losing your integrity by denying your own instincts. Those who suffer from this condition, myself included, know this to be the most awful feeling you’ve ever experienced in your life.

Parents are innately wired to protect their kids, which is why cults separate children from parents. In this case, they’re being told “would you rather have a transgender kid or a dead kid”? And what wouldn’t they do in that case?

Lucky for me, I’m an obnoxious loudmouth. I am wired to be a pain in the ass and I can’t stay silent on what I can see is a growing problem. But it’s more than that. When activists become fascist-like in their mandates of what we can see, what we can read, what we can no, it’s time to put the kibosh on it.

This controversial treatment must be open to debate. We have to be able to talk about it, all of the problems with it, without that also demanding we go against all of the work the gay community has done to gain equal rights and protection. I will always be supportive of the gay community, and even the trans community. But where children are concerned…boundaries have to be respected.

No Way Back is a nuanced, compassionate and informative documentary on the problems with and the harms done by so-called “Gender Affirming Care.” The film is now available to stream on its own site because it’s been “deplatformed” everywhere else.

They don’t know it yet, but AMC Theaters will be tangled up in that legacy and will remain there for decades, maybe centuries.

Remember this moment. It’s going to mean something in about five years when everything will have changed.

[I’ll leave comments on for now but I will delete/ban those that are abusive]