Natasha Vargas-Cooper, a journalist and labor organizer, has published an essay titled “Womanhood Redefined” in The American Conservative. The piece is a jeremiad against trans-inclusive feminism, combining condemnation of American university discourse with a reiteration of the conventional view of biology as the defining experience of womanhood. The piece has occasioned much handwringing on both sides of the feminist aisle, but not in a new way. It was published this week (a bug at TAC’s site misstates the date), but had it come to us unedited from 1998, I would not have been surprised.

What really stands out from the piece is its tone. Vargas-Cooper talks about trans women and their sympathizers with the kind of dry sarcasm we usually reserve for the very stupid. The term “construct” is “college dorm parlance,” Vargas-Cooper writes, a short while before agreeing with Norman Mailer. Vargas-Cooper accuses the British writer Laurie Penny of writing that is “the product of too much French post-modernist theory.” And yet, her article could do with a good dose of poststructuralist thought, hobbled as it is by a false binary.

Trans acceptance is “a twofold proposition,” she writes: “the realistic and the rhetorical.” On the one hand are the realistic aims of trans women: To access medical care, to use the less dangerous bathroom, to possess accurate documentation. Vargas-Cooper is okay with those demands.

What Vargas-Cooper objects to is the “rhetorical” demands of trans people and their allies. By this she refers to the common complaint of trans-exclusionary feminists that it is no longer acceptable to say in public—especially at universities—that the gender you were assigned at birth defines your experience of gender in the world. Here are the “rhetorical” demands of the trans-sympathizing lobby, in her words:

…that surgical mutilation is brave; that men who decide to become women are immune from criticism after they’ve taken a certain amount of estrogen; that expression of discomfort is bigotry; and that the cause of women’s political and economic liberation is somehow hindered if we alienate transgendered women or if we discuss the realities of women’s biology.

This is the point of the essay where exasperation sets in. This is not trans-acceptance rhetoric, but trans-exclusionary rhetoric. Here, Vargas-Cooper loses any reader who was on the fence. This is not writing to convince, but to insult and to evangelize.