There’s a reason that after describing gender as fundamentally a performance, 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. “Identity categories are never merely descriptive,” she insists in “Gender Trouble,” “but always normative, and as such, exclusionary.”

Any attempt to catalog the commonalities among women, in other words, has the inescapable result that there is some correct way to be a woman. This will inevitably encourage and legitimize certain experiences of gender and discourage and delegitimize others, subtly reinforcing and entrenching precisely those forces of socialization of which feminists claim to be critical. And what’s worse, it will inevitably leave some people out. It will mean that there are “real” women whom feminism should be concerned about and that there are impostors who do not qualify for feminist political representation.

The women who are accused of being impostors these days are often trans women. You might think that a shared suspicion of conventional understandings of sex and gender would make feminists and trans activists natural bedfellows. You’d be wrong. It all started with Janice Raymond’s controversial book, “The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male,” published in 1979. Reissued in 1994, the book continues to inspire “gender-critical” or “trans-exclusionary” radical feminists — TERFs, for short. (For the record, while some consider the acronym derogatory, it is a widely accepted shorthand for a literal description of the views these feminists hold; also for the record, many of us who are critics of TERFs consider Raymond’s book to be hate speech.)

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. Even the feminist icon Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has echoed this, claiming in a 2017 interview, “It’s about the way the world treats us, and I think if you’ve lived in the world as a man with the privileges that the world accords to men and then sort of change gender, it’s difficult for me to accept that then we can equate your experience with the experience of a woman who has lived from the beginning as a woman and who has not been accorded those privileges that men are.”

TERFs 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. “The hardest part of being a woman,” she infamously quipped, “is figuring out what to wear.”