Thanks. That’s my suspicion as to what will happen in general — some people will decide a genderqueer identity doesn’t work for them, some won’t, and very few will end up joining Operation Rescue protests who wouldn’t have been there no matter what.

I know a couple people using those identities who are in their 30s, actually. More to the point, so what? If you want to call yourself the Keebler Elf, and calling yourself the Keebler Elf makes you happy and has zero effect on my life beyond occasionally having to remember to use elf-self pronouns, go ahead and elf…

I didn’t know that. When awful people get together, it means at least they aren’t wrecking the lives of anyone else?

Does Kristen Bell not own a breast pump? I get that they were traveling and maybe she didn’t have it with her, but they aren’t that hard to find and it’d be a lot less weird than having my husband nurse.

Oh, for fuck’s sake. Even if we pretend that it’s okay for an adult to fuck an 8th grader (which, BTW, it very much is not, but thought exercise time) it’s still not okay to have sex with a girl of any age who says no and who you had to feed pills and booze to just to make sure she would be pliant enough to go along…

Y’know, good for them. It’s hard enough to be married, let alone being married with a thousand paparazzi lenses on you. If being divorced but together is better for them, so be it.

Weren’t she and Andrew kind of unofficially back together for a while, as in living in the same house? Is that still the situation, or did they drift apart?

“Male privilege” may have been an inexact phrase — I used it out of habit. “Male culture” probably would have been a better way to put it. Either way, observing and responding to gender-specific culture and being raised with those expectations on you are very different things.

I feel like you’re moving the goalposts a little by saying a culture of women can only exist inasmuch as it’s inaccessible to people with male bodies. I can watch football and hang out in barbershops all day every day; it’s not going to give me male privilege. If I were trans those experiences might be formative for…

I don’t understand why woman-only communities would be required for “shared girlhood,” especially as so much of living in a female body is about the threat of male sexual violence. I also don’t understand what you mean about there not being a culture of woman-ness in a world where you can’t so much as buy a razor…

I’d say the “shared girlhood” theory is at least as true as the idea of white privilege. Obviously there are many different ways to be a girl, just as there are many different ways to be white — but there’s still a core set of factors that seem to be true across American culture. People treat baby girls and boys…

I think the thing is, we don’t even notice the “most” who just scroll past a discussion about periods or whatever. We notice the one random trans woman who goes off on a screed about how not ALL women have periods. It kinda sucks that the most extreme people in any group always tend to be the loudest.

Yeah, I’ve seen disturbing stuff on Tumblr too. I eventually realized that it was making me less tolerant, so I basically got off the site. I think a lot of the more misogynistic posts come from teenagers who are either venting or trying to be edgy, which doesn’t make it okay but makes it easier to keep it in…

Anytime, and thanks for not being defensive!

I honestly don’t know. It doesn’t seem like there’s less support for reproductive rights overall, which is the big thing I worry about. (I think it helps that access to hormones is also a reproductive rights issue.) Some of the effort to avoid using language that implies women have vaginas strikes me as a little…

You know what, for a long time I was really stressed about this. I thought young women were opting out of being female partially because being female sucks sometimes, and that made me worry about the future of feminist movements — can there be a feminist movement if a lot of people with uteruses don’t think the word…

I don’t have any sisters, and watching the Kardashians/Jenners together is one of the few things that makes me wish I did.

Seriously. I honestly thought having a kid at 20 with a dude she dated for five minutes before getting pregnant was a bad life choice — and maybe it is one on paper. But she genuinely seems in the video like she loves and wanted that baby, and she and Travis look sweet together, and she definitely has more than enough…

It’s a quote from a woman she interviewed.

The thing with the second quote (which is from a woman Roiphe interviews, not Roiphe herself) is, maybe the enamored guy WAS a stalker. Maybe the drunk sex WAS assault. The fact you’ve retroactively decided something wasn’t that bad doesn’t mean your initial perception was false.