The Historical Irony of Feminism’s Silencing of Women (Abigail Favale, November 30, 2021, Church Life Journal)
When I was in graduate school, I remember reading an essay in which Jacques Derrida purports to “write as a woman.” I was in a gender studies program in a highly secular context, and we had a lively seminar on Derrida’s essay, eventually reaching the consensus that no, Jacques, you can’t simply step into a woman’s identity like you might step into a set of trousers. This was the mid-2000s, a different era, when the word “woman” still had some fleeting connection, however tenuous, to female embodiment.Now, fifteen years later, we have reached a juncture where appropriating the identity of women is considered laudatory, liberating, the next frontier of civil rights—and raising cautions or questions is blasphemous. Increasingly, defining a woman as an adult human female is considered hate speech.