All of women's aspirations--whether for education, work, or any form of self-determination--ultimately rest on their ability to decide whether and when to bear children. For this reason, reproductive freedom has always been the most popular item in each of the successive feminist agendas--and the most heavily assaulted target of each backlash.

A backlash against women's rights is nothing new. Indeed it's a recurring phenomenon: it returns every time women begin to make some headway towards equality, a seemingly inevitable early frost to the brief flowerings of feminism.

It's fine to dress in polka dots and pink crinoline if you want. What I recoil from is the idea that that alone is the only way to be female.

Gender is really varied and complicated and sort of infinitely individualistic.

the last decade has seen a powerful counterassault on women's rights, a backlash, an attempt to retract the handful of small and hard-won victories that the feminist movement did manage to win for women. This counterassault is largely insidious: in a kind of pop-culture version of the Big Lie, it stands the truth boldly on its head and proclaims that the very steps that have elevated women's position have actually led to their downfall.

My feminist view - that gender is on a continuum and we are all better off dropping a lot of those binary notions - is one that is shared by the more recent generation of trans activists and theorists.

Feminism's agenda is basic: It asks that women not be forced to 'choose' between public justice and private happiness.