In a provocative column in Sunday's New York Times, 68-year-old journalist and former women's studies prof Elinor Burkett takes on the transgender police seeking to redefine womanhood. Using Bruce/Caitlyn Jenners' coming out as a starting point, Burkett is empathic and enraged in equal measure by the campaign to hijack her gender. The term vagina is now exclusionary; sisterhood has become siblinghood; reproductive rights, according to one trans blogger, is “a uterus owner’s issue.” The word women itself is un-PC.
"The landscape that’s being mapped and the language that comes with it are impossible to understand and just as hard to navigate," writes Burkett. "...People who haven’t lived their whole lives as women ... shouldn’t get to define us.... Their truth is not my truth. Their female identities are not my female identity. They haven’t traveled through the world as women and been shaped by all that this entails."
