To the Editor:

“What Makes a Woman?” (Sunday Review, June 7) is in line with a growing emergence of tired, second-wave feminist critiques of Caitlyn Jenner’s decision to finally become the woman she is. If Elinor Burkett spends even a moment with a trans person or advocacy group, she will quickly learn that the “born into the wrong body” rhetoric is simply a poor translation of the truth, a phrase crafted for mainstream consumption of an otherwise nuanced notion that gender, and even biological sex, are social constructs. The landscape that’s being mapped out is hard to understand and navigate only if you’re holding onto old notions of feminism.

Ms. Jenner has every right to be as beautiful and superficial as she wants, regardless of the male privilege she benefited from previously, or the feminine beauty ideal she conforms to now, because that’s the culture we want to live in — one in which we’re all free to express our individual truths.

ALLISON H. STEINBERG

New York

The writer is an L.G.B.T. communications professional.



To the Editor:

Thank you for featuring Elinor Burkett’s brilliant essay. I, too, have been struggling with the Vanity Fair cover of Caitlyn Jenner. While I have the utmost respect for and support a transgender choice and lifestyle, I feel slammed by the decision to portray Ms. Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair as the stereotypical male fantasy of a woman.

As a woman who has spent much of my life fighting that stereotype in my personal and professional life, I would wish to have the same support from members of the transgender community as they have received from me and other nontransgender women. Yes, we all have the right to choose what kind of woman or man that we want to be, but to play up a stereotype that has cost so many women so much feels like going backward to me, whether it is done by a transgender person or a woman who is not. It’s sexist, no matter who does it.