"There’s a reason that after describing gender as fundamentally a performance, [Judith] Butler counsels people to revel in messing with its scripts..."

"... to treat gender as nothing more than an ironic parody. Gender categories need to be taken down a notch, she thinks, but not only because they harm people in all the ways feminism spends so much time criticizing. Butler charges that in their focus on spelling out the harms of gendered socialization, feminists unwittingly entrenched the very things they claimed to be criticizing. By demarcating feminism’s subject matter — by articulating a concrete category of harms that deserved feminist attention — feminists inadvertently defined womanhood in a manner that implies that there are right and wrong ways to be a woman.... The women who are accused of being impostors these days are often trans women.... Feminists who deny 'real woman' status to trans women seem to rely on a false assumption — that all trans women have lived in the world unproblematically as men at some point — and claim the importance of affirming the identity and experiences of those who’ve spent entire lives in women’s shoes.... TERFs [trans-exclusionary radical feminists] also sometimes complain that the performances of femininity enacted by trans women are chiefly retrograde stereotypes, caricatures of a femininity designed primarily for the pleasure of men. When Caitlyn Jenner says that she has always felt like a woman, for example, what she seems to mean by this is that she wants to be an airheaded piece of arm candy all dolled up for delights of the male gaze.... If cis women were honest... we’d admit that if some trans women occasionally camp up their femininity a little more than TERFs might like, they’re not doing anything we’re not just as guilty of. If we don’t like what we see when trans women turn the mirror of femininity toward us, we have only ourselves to blame."

From "Who Counts as a Woman?/The attempt to exclude trans women from the ranks of women reinforces the dangerous idea that there is a right way to be female" by philosophy professor Carol Hay (in the NYT).

ADDED: Despite Hay's stern lecture on the right way to be a feminist, this is the top-rated comment at the NYT:

Every time I read articles on this topic, it makes me feel like I’ve gone through the looking glass. I was born female in a male-dominated world and subject to discrimination, harassment, and the threat of sexual violence just because I was a girl and now a woman. I had no more choice being born female than My partner did being born African-American.

I have fought my whole life to be heard in the workplace and to be seen as more than a pretty face or female body. But now I have to once again sit down and shut up because some men now want to be women and need to explain to me via academic proxy that if I talk about topics such as my female anatomy or menstruation I am being non-inclusive. Sorry, this is nonsense and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

I do not wish transgender people any ill will, live and let live. Just don’t tell me what it is really like to [b]e a woman, ok?