"What’s different in this instance, is this conversation is tied to ideas of authentication: 'What is authentically a woman?'"

"There is this idea, this notion that there is this one specific experience that all – all – non-transgender women must have, and that transgender women can never have. So [exclusionary feminists] couch it in terms of being born a woman – that there is one essence of woman somewhere out there that’s either experiential, or somehow physical, or spiritual."

Said Cristan Williams, editor of TransAdvocate.com, quoted in a Christian Science Monitor article titled "What does being a woman mean? Caitlyn Jenner’s emergence rekindles debate./Some radical feminists say that males who transition to females can hardly embody the unique experiences, both physically and culturally, that constitute being an authentic female."

Does being a woman mean something or not? Or are we seeing a fight over a middle ground, where being a woman matters, but only in some ways, and it's a struggle over drawing the line around which ways matter. 

"Do women and men have different brains?"

"Back when Lawrence H. Summers was president of Harvard and suggested that they did, the reaction was swift and merciless. Pundits branded him sexist. Faculty members deemed him a troglodyte. Alumni withheld donations. But when Bruce Jenner said much the same thing in an April interview with Diane Sawyer, he was lionized for his bravery, even for his progressivism. 'My brain is much more female than it is male,' he told her, explaining how he knew that he was transgender...."

From a NYT op-ed by Elinor Burkett called "What Makes a Woman?" Read the whole thing. Burkett makes a lot of points, though virtually nothing the actual organ, the brain. Burkett finds a neuroscientist to quote who asserts that that "the difference between male and female brains are caused by the 'drip, drip, drip' of the gendered environment." Focused on preserving the success of the women's movement, Burkett ends up here:

The struggle to move beyond [gender] stereotypes is far from over, and trans activists could be women’s natural allies moving forward. So long as humans produce X and Y chromosomes that lead to the development of penises and vaginas, almost all of us will be “assigned” genders at birth. But what we do with those genders — the roles we assign ourselves, and each other, based on them — is almost entirely mutable.

This NYT piece does have a comments section. By far, the most up-voted comment is: "I was disappointed that Caitlyn Jenner came out as a sexpot. A stereotypically male stereotypical vision of what a woman is."