Cosmetic surgery processes the bodies of woman-made women, who make up the vast majority of its patient pool, into man-made women.

What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men?

Today, women have access to the technological capacity to do anything to our bodies in the struggle for "beauty", but we have yet to evolve a mentality beyond the old rules, to let them imagine that this combat among women is not inevitable. Surgeons can now do anything. We have not yet reached the age in which we can defend ourselves with an unwillingness to have "anything" done. This is a dangerous time. New possibilities for women quickly become new obligations.

The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon them.

Only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth, and that is not speaking.

The idea that women are innately gentle is a fantasy, and a historically recent one. Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, is depicted as wreathed in male human skulls; the cruel entertainments of the Romans drew audiences as female as they were male; Boudicca led her British troops bloodily into battle.

I'll go anywhere to talk about the Constitution. I believe in trans-partisan organizing around these issues.