If you’re looking for gripping summer movies to watch in the air-conditioned cavern of your local multiplex, you won’t have to go far to find a theater playing Top Gun: Maverick or Elvis (two very good films I recommend). But try as you might, you won’t find any big screen playing What Is a Woman? and Eve in Exile, two very good documentaries that engage questions about gender that apparently cannot be asked in mainstream pop culture anymore.

The Daily Wire’s What Is a Woman? is so blacklisted that very few film critics even agreed to screen it. I’m currently one of only four critics whose review of the film is on Rotten Tomatoes. Yet this erasure tactic by Hollywood—trying to make Matt Walsh’s transgender exposé go away by simply ignoring it—will likely have the opposite effect. It allows Walsh to credibly say, “This is the film they don’t want you to see!” But why not? If you think your argument is sound, what’s to fear in engaging opposing views, let alone simply allowing them to exist? By continuing to silence, ban, blacklist, or dismiss dissenting voices, LGBTQ+ activists reveal just how fragile they know their narrative to be.

I don’t endorse every single thing in What Is a Woman? or Eve in Exile—the two films I review in the essay below. But that’s true (or should be) of anything a critic reviews. We should be able to engage provocative works and learn from them, even if we don’t end up agreeing with all they have to say or how they say it. That’s a lesson not only for critics, but also for Christians. If we care about truth, we’ll find it best out in the open, in the marketplace of contested ideas, rather than in protected bubbles of groupthink or fortresses of Safe and Acceptable Narratives.