Last week, Caitlyn Jenner announced herself to the world on the cover of Vanity Fair. And this weekend in the New York Times, feminist journalist and filmmaker Elinor Burkett used Jenner's public transition as a springboard to raise a series of questions — some important, some interesting, some insulting — about what makes a woman a woman.

In response, the inter-feminist wars around transgender issues kicked up a notch. Responses on social media were predictably polarized: Burkett's piece, it seemed, was either exactly what needed to be said, or bullying and transphobic (alternately, those who seemed to sense there was something to be condemned but couldn't quite put their finger on what went with the largely meaningless "problematic"). Many of us who read Burkett's piece, nodded in places, and cringed in others, seemed to be largely silent. After all, why risk engaging with a complex piece of writing in a social media universe where bold declaratives are rewarded more than nuanced thought, and where disagreements over strategy and theory in social justice movements inevitably devolve into denunciations not just of the perceived wrongness of one's ideas, but of the alleged bigotry of one's self?

What Burkett got right was that there is no static, inherent way of being female; there is no "female brain" that is wildly different from the "male brain," and the many things we attach to being a woman are social, cultural, and external. There's nothing biologically female about being wrapped in a pink blanket as a baby, or wearing nail polish, or having long hair, or being sensitive or emotionally competent or good with children; there's nothing inherently or biologically male about being wrapped in a blue blanket as a baby or being good at math or behaving aggressively or wearing pants or refusing to cry. And yet socially, we code those things as "female" and "male." None of it is real in the sense that if you dropped two babies on a desert island with no outside influence or human contact whatsoever, it seems unlikely the girl will grow up loving pink and wanting to be a mommy or Barbie, while the boy will like blue and want to be the president or GI Joe. To borrow the famous Simone de Beauvoir quote: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."

And yet functionally, all the ways in which we become women are real. That socially constructed ideas and constraints about gender are culturally built and maintained rather than naturally existing doesn't make them any less powerful. And so many of our social "truths" about gender have been used to marginalize and oppress women, whether it was early ideas about our uteruses making us unsuitable for higher education, or our supposedly natural maternal and nurturing qualities justifying employers not hiring women who should be at home with their kids, or modern-day arguments made to the Supreme Court of the United States about the fundamental but "complementary" differences between men and women justifying excluding same-sex couples from marriage rights. A big part of the feminist project has been to break down the stereotypes and the cultural extras that have been used for millennia to keep men in power and enforce female subservience, powerlessness, and second-class status.

From Burkett's vantage point, Caitlyn Jenner's adoption of some of those cultural extras that we tack onto womanhood — long hair, sex-object poses, cosmetics, kindness, people-pleasing — set back the work of feminists, who have fought so long and hard to expand the idea of what a woman is. After all, if becoming a woman takes little more than breast implants and high heels — if the desire for those things comes from a "female brain" — then maybe feminism was wrong all along. If being a woman starts with a fundamentally different brain, and that brain wants the girly stuff, then maybe pink toys and kitchen sets for little girls aren't about herding them into specific roles but a reflection of their true and inherent selves; maybe the fact that only 5 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women isn't about systematic discrimination and the end result of that childhood herding, but some inherent female quality (or defect).

But the fact that Jenner also adopts the cultural extras doesn't make her a feminist failure; it makes her human. If we all existed in our natural states without cosmetic intervention, men and women would look a lot more alike. Instead, we alternately grow our hair or cut it short, shave and wax and pluck, paint on makeup, wear clothing that plays up certain body parts or reads as "women's" or "men's." Lots of women — even those who were assigned female at birth and wrapped in a pink blanket — put a whole lot of time, money, and effort into looking like women. Almost none of us woke up like this.

Caitlyn Jenner, being just one woman, wants to look like a woman too. And she's trying to look like a woman in a world that has only known her as a man, in a family that took the standards for female beauty to insane levels with the Kardashian brand of giant fake eyelashes, enormous breasts and butts squeezed from either end of a corseted waist, contoured cheekbones painted on with Dali-level precision (not to mention surrealism). The requirements one must meet to be seen as a glamorous, beautiful women in 2015 are onerous, oppressive, and remarkably high. That is unfair. It harms women as a group.

But expecting one single woman, especially one in a period of public vulnerability, to change that? That's a big burden to place on Jenner's shoulders.

Transgender men and women help to highlight one of our biggest social lies: That being a man or a woman is about the extra social and cultural stuff. The existence of people across cultures and throughout history who have transgressed the boundaries between male and female make it clear that while gender is real, the way we conceptualize it and live it is largely a performance. But since the way we live gender is a performance, can anyone really blame an individual trans woman for adopting a similar version of womanhood that the rest of us high-heel-and-makeup-wearing women put on every day?

Would it have been more feminist for Caitlyn Jenner to be on the cover of Vanity Fair in a pantsuit? Perhaps. The same thing could be said about Madonna, Kerry Washington, Tina Fey, Cher, Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Aniston, and a whole host of other women who have been on the VF cover in various states of cleavaged and aggressively sexy poses. Feminists do critique media portrayals of women as sex objects, and we shouldn't stop just because Jenner is trans, but we also shouldn't put her under even more of a microscope just because her public existence as a woman is new.

The question of what makes a woman in a world where we separate out biology from femaleness is a trickier one, and Burkett's piece needles at some of the more difficult issues facing modern feminists. She points to arguments on social media and within reproductive rights organizations about how to talk about abortion and birth control — if trans men can have abortions, is it right to call abortion a "women's issue" or talk about "a woman's right to choose"? Is the play The Vagina Monologues exclusionary because not all women have vaginas? Did a fundraiser for abortion access called "Night of 1,000 Vaginas" betray the trans community because a handful of trans men prefer to refer to their genitalia as a "front hole" rather than a vagina, and because tying vaginas to abortion is gender essentialist? Should women's colleges get rid of their founding missions or replace their value of "sisterhood" with "siblinghood"? And why is it that it's women's institutions that seem to be the only ones facing these issues, and what does it say that men aren't being asked to be as accommodating or open?

Those are very real and vexing questions for today's feminist movement. And unfortunately, good-faith debate is hard to come by.

But the issues facing trans people in America are more than just linguistic. Transgender people face some of the most rampant and often legal discrimination in the United States. A white, wealthy, well-connected celebrity with lots of family and social support like Caitlyn Jenner is not your average trans woman — something that's easy to forget when she's currently the most visible. Visibility is crucial for any minority group, but Jenner's celebrity shouldn't obscure the difficult realities many trans people live (or die from). That a group of women suffer the kind of violence and discrimination heaped on trans women should of course make transgender rights a feminist issue.

And yet those rights, and the language we use to normalize the trans experience, have to coexist with centuries of female oppression rooted at least partly in women's reproductive capacities and in the physical body that gets assigned female at birth. A woman can still be a woman without breasts, without ovaries, without a uterus, or without a vagina, but it so often is those very organs that have been used to justify subordinating us. That cannot be stripped out of the feminist conversation. When we talk about the politics of contraception and abortion rights, that's not gender-neutral — abortion remains politically contentious precisely because conservative traditionalists are uncomfortable with female freedom and shifting gender roles; they understand that giving women control over reproduction helps to elevate women as a class, and affords us a wider set of opportunities and greater social mobility (that's true even though not every woman avails herself of contraception or an abortion, and it's true even if a small number of people who avail themselves of contraception or abortions aren't women). They understand that restricting and politicizing contraception and abortion are useful vehicles through which to constrain women precisely because it is socially understood that it's women who use contraception and have abortions, and women remain very much second-class citizens whose rights to their own bodies — and especially to their sexual bodies and to sexual pleasure — remain up for debate. And of course the more we debate, the more we reify the underlying notion that female autonomy is even debatable.

To take women out of that equation — to say that because some men get pregnant or have abortions it's insensitive and marginalizing to talk about abortion as a women's rights issue — does kneecap feminism as a political movement.

But part of the feminist politicking is realizing that while women are oppressed as a class, there is no singular "female experience." Being a married white suburban mom in Connecticut is a very different kind of female experience than being a black lesbian teenager in Mississippi. There are certainly patterns and commonalities and experiences had by many women, or even most women, but womanhood is as varied and diverse as women themselves. Certainly someone who is assigned male at birth but knows themselves to be female has a different childhood than the girl swaddled in pink as soon as she was born; certainly the feminist movement is capable of recognizing those are different experiences that breed different world views but that don't necessarily make an adult with one history more female than another. We can keep that big tent while recognizing that we raise girls in a particular way, that we sexualize them, that we stunt them, that we build them into "women," and that is a particular problem and a feminist challenge — and also that the category of women can also include folks who weren't raised as girls.

The lines around which we draw "male" and "female" are already too thick and bright. We know Mother Nature is messy enough and that if we're talking biology, that bodies exist on a spectrum — some people have parts that are defined as "male" or "female," and some folks have parts that fall somewhere in between. We know that despite the reality that human bodies vary pretty widely, we still group ourselves into the small social boxes of men and women, and then we pile those boxes high with colors and clothing and behaviors and characteristics and talents and deficiencies that have little to do with individuals and even less to do with whether your genitalia is external or internal.

Unpacking those boxes takes time and patience. It's not a process particularly well-served by in-group line-drawing ("women-born women are the only real women") or accusations of bigotry used in place of actual engagement with challenging ideas ("this is transphobic trash").

Today, trans women and men across America can't get the health care they need. Many are living on the streets, are economically coerced into selling sex, or face abuse at home, in homeless shelters, or in prisons. Transgender people are significantly more likely than the general population to live in poverty, to be homeless, to suffer assaults, to be murdered, and to attempt suicide. The urgency and the breadth of the challenges trans people face outweigh other feminist concerns about language or makeup. I'm with Burkett when she says she hopes Caitlyn Jenner remembers that nail polish does not a woman make. I suspect Jenner knows that already. I hope the many of us who are continuing to build this evolving, diverse, and shape-shifting thing called "feminism" can realize maybe there is no one thing that makes a woman, that we can each contribute our little bits, and that most important, we can realize that our many experiences of womanhood can lead us to different places and conclusions, and that's OK. Part of the work is to push ideological boundaries, to listen to each other with respect even if that doesn't translate into agreement, and to face injustice head-on while building the foundations of a kinder, more flexible, more expansive society.

That isn't what makes us women, but it should be what makes us feminists.

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Jill Filipovic senior political writer Jill Filipovic is a contributing writer for cosmopolitan.com.

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