http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/magazine/13FOB-WWLN-t.html?scp=1&sq=orenstein&st=cse
Dear Editor,
I would like to express my disappointment with Peggy Orenstein's piece "What Makes a Woman a Woman?" While I respect that the author's personal struggle with breast cancer has led her to feel that her feminine gender is rooted in some primal way in the physiology of her female sex, I wish she would have expressed this as her own individual experience. Instead, she generalizes her personal feelings onto everyone, using it as a way to claim that the experience of one's gender identity to be in accordance with one's birth-sex is innate, natural, profound, and extra-cultural. While it may have been "gospel" in the early eighties to understand gender as socially constructed, a view that has since, apparently, gone out of style, I was born in the mid-eighties and I am surrounded by a vibrant community of people of all genders who do not feel that "biology is destiny" in the least. Rather, we understand that there exists a wide variety of gender identities that correspond in every imaginable way with birth sex, body parts, reproductive capacities, and sexual preferences. It is, frankly, insulting how many people's lives Orenstien undermines with her ridiculous second wave feminist claims about the innateness and naturalness of gender identity. We would agree that gender identity is, indeed, a profound part of personal identity, but this by no means implies that is rooted in some predetermined way in our anatomies, chromosomes, and hormones. Her close-minded view-point is further evidenced by her repeated use of the term "disorder" to refer to the bodies of intersex people, a condition which is not as rare as people would like to believe and is completely medically harmless in the vast majority of cases. If intersex people tend to identify as either male or female, as stated by Professor Berenbaum, maybe it is because they live in a world that defines personhood largely on the grounds of "healthy" gender identity that corresponds in the expected ways to one's anatomy, and are medically, socially, and emotionally coerced into conforming to a gender norm in order to save them from the "unpleasant freakishness" of indeterminate gender. For someone who claims to be a feminist, Orenstein should be ashamed for this oversight, and about expanding her personal feelings about her gender into categorical claims. For us, feminism means granting everyone the right to embody and express our own unique genders, while respecting the validity of each other's experiences, even when they might contradict with our own conclusions. I shudder to think about all those people, teens especially, whose gender identity does not seem to innately relate to their birth sex and for whom Orenstein's essay might reiterate the societal imperative to have a correct and healthy gender, like she does, influencing them to continue to be ashamed of and hide their true gendered selves.
Thank you.
Rebecca Gordon
Chicago, IL.
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