The movie starts of with your average conservative fears: the fear that you'll be fired for saying something racist that's true; the fear that you're kid will be educated by a public school twitter socialist; the fear that you're wife will stop believing in the sacrality and indestructability of marriage and leave you for a democrat.
I thought the movie was funny sometimes, and I think that makes one person who thought so. I've seen both conservatives and progressives call it unfunny. I'm fine with having bad humor though, I thought Ben Shapiro saying "keep it tucked ladies" was funny. I thought a bunch of white guys pretending to be women beating everyone except a bunch of big black guys pretending to be women was funny.Here's where the movie stops making sense.
I think that a risk Ladyballers runs into, is that it is a little too silly. It's a silly movie; it does not fill me with political action. Men pretending to be women to win women's basketball is silly. Shapiro himself had to admit as much, saying that he originally wanted to make the movie a documenatry, but that in reality, "quote." (Womp womp.) So by the last act the movie takes a stop when ... kid tells him, "I want to be a boy." ... asks why, and she says, "because boys are better at everything."
This is a moment to bring the movie back to seriousness - this is what the issue is about - they want to trans our kids. Julia Serano. The trans woman is, to the conservative, an irrational, incomprehensible creature. She's a walking contradiction, trying to achieve power, sex, money, whatever, while to the conservative (at least in theory, probably not in practice) only manages to enact pity, disgust, cringe. In her incomprehensability - the illogical want to be "the lesser gender" - she grows more dangerous and pathological. The trans man, on the other hand, is as rational as any man. To the conservative man, or gender-critical woman, any rational woman would want to become a man. The conservative understands the trans man to the bone, or at least he thinks he does. The male is after all, the default. The young girl suffers from penis envy. It's interesting in gen-crit spaces, how being a woman is often tied to trauma, especially exactly when discussing trans-issues. It's seldom a sense of protecting womanhood from a perspective of "womanhood is fantastic, and you can't have it" - no, both with conservative men and gender-critical women (and conservative women and gen-crit men, I guess) it's a sense that womanhood is the worse lot, and it's unfathomable and scary to me that you'd want this, the same way it's scary when a guy does something kooky on the bus and I don't know why or what he's thinking.
So, this movie is clearly about trans women, but watching it as a cis woman, I feel like this is more a commentary on gender, and womanhood, generally. It's not a movie saying "it is irrational to want to be transgender," it's a movie saying "it is irrational to want to be a woman, unless it's for an external goal, and even then it's irrational. It is always rational to want to be a man. In a world open to gender expression, all irrational, resentiente-driven people will choose to be women, and all rational women will choose to be men. It will be anarchy." And as a woman, I find that idea offensive, mysogynistic. I did not choose to be a woman; but if you sold testosterone injections at the grocery store, I would walk past that shelf and still choose to be a woman. The scary thing about gender freedom, is that it would no longer be possible to constrain half of the population to the narrative that they were sadly, unfortunately, born to the lesser sex; it would be obvious that about half the population is simply happy as women, at the intersection of choice and necessity that constitutes freedom; not struck by internal penis envy, but external annoyance at the things stopping them. And this ability - for all women - to want to be women as well as being so intrinsically, is radical. I am a woman, I didn't choose to be one; I choose to be a woman, because I am one. Wanting freedom, power, intelligence, sexual freedom, creativity, will to power, does not mean wanting to be a man. The chances are, that if you think gender affirmative care, or legal changes in how we assign and inforce sex, will lead to a world divided between the rational, the strong, the smart, those with a will to power (the men), and those who are irrational, weak, effeminate, delusional, incomprehensible, exploitative of their own weakness (the women), it's because you're already living in that world.