I grew up needing feminism, even though I did not yet have the terminology. My trig teacher never answered questions from girls. I knew two church families with six girls apiece. Each family stopped reproducing with the arrival of a son. Calling a boy a "girl" was the worst insult imaginable. As an imminent girl, this concerned me greatly.

I left for college believing myself a transsexual -- although, again, I lacked the terminology. Then I took my first course in feminist theory with Heather, my closest friend. She helped me turn into a girl. Together we became lesbian-feminists, and began building this massive archive of historical feminist literature. I realized that since I was fortunate enough to choose to become a woman, I should choose to become a feminist woman. A woman that would make my feminist forebears proud. I'd be strong. I'd be invincible.

As I studied herstory, I found many of the prominent feminists expressing strong, negative opinions about all this transsexual business. Janice Raymond, one of the most bitter opponents, accused transwomen of being both pitiful dupes of a fascist medical conspiracy and spies for the patriarchy. There were others: Mary Daly, Robin Morgan, Andrea Dworkin -- so many that you'd think one of them would have thought to launch a counterintelligence assault, conscripting us Frankenwomen into Mata Hari-dom against the patriarchal regime. No such luck. Lo these many years, a lot of feminists still seem to prefer dis-missing trannygirls as colonized colonials, and trannyboys as heretical sellouts.

As a result, every time I meet feminist O.G.s, like Mary Daly or Andrea Dworkin, it's a disappointment. The day I met Dworkin, she was introduced as believing that "gender is a lie." I asked her to elaborate, but she dodged the question nervously. Daly wouldn't even speak to me. Then came Alison Jaggar.

Jaggar is the editor of Feminist Frameworks, a feminist primer I first read in 1988. She is, in part, responsible for making a feminist out of me. She was the keynote speaker at the Radical Philosophy Association conference last month. I was there to present a paper which considers gender in the light of law, language and pornography.

In this paper, I trace an argument that starts with Sade and Masoch (the S and M of S&M), and stops to pick up Barthes, Irigaray, de Beauvoir and Wittig along the way. It's a theoretically-involved discussion about why we seem to need gender so badly, anyway. It reconsiders definitions for words like "gender," "masculinity," and "femininity." It challenges us to define gender without using simile. This paper is a practical application of transfeminism. I think it's a smart paper, if only because I've had to read a lot of books.

So in came Alison Jaggar, and I got really excited. I wished she'd come, and here she was. I stumbled nervously through the exposition of my paper. But it seemed that Jaggar -- one of four audience members -- was not reacting well. When I finished speaking, she abruptly left. Twenty minutes vanished, and she returned to ask me whether my agenda was to destroy the gender binary, or expand it. Then she posed the Famous Feminist Transphobia Chestnut Question (the FFTCQ): isn't my gender presentation simply a reification of existent gender stereotypes? Jaggar pretended to listen to my answer, and when she had enough, picked up again and left the room, never to return. So much for her signing my book.

First of all, you don't have to be Hegel to figure out that destroying and expanding the gender binary are pretty much the same project. Second, the FFTCQ is a dirty trick question, and it always has been. The answer is always both yes and no, and the answer is always irrelevant when the inquisitor already has an opinion. Jaggar did not come to discuss the ideas which gave birth to my paper. She came to condemn my appearance. Ironically, the move was neither radical nor philosophical.

I guess I'm just going to have to quit meeting my feminist heroines. Their words are so much more interesting on the page. I'm reminded of a passage in Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, in which she is lamenting the life actions of the boldest women in history: "Timid in their actions, and bold only in their art," she says of Simone de Beauvoir, Lillian Hellman, Emily Dickinson. Jong was writing in the early 1970's. It was the bra-burniest of times. Thirty years later, I'm being told by an esteemed feminist that I look too much like a girl to be taken seriously.

Maybe I was asking for it. My outfit was professional, and also a little slinky. I harbored hopes of a dashing gender outlaw wanting to discuss theory over a pitcher of manhattans, and I certainly didn't want zir to fall for me just because of my mind. But haven't feminists long fought for women to dress however we want? And isn't dressing like a middle-aged dyke professor -- as Jaggar was -- its own stereotype?

I'm planning a paper for the next conference in which I critique my entire wardrobe via Kant. Until then, I'm left to ponder why "femininity," whatever that is, is so important to me and so many other femmes, dykes and otherwise.

Sarah Michelle Gellar, who portrays a more-or-less feminist heroine in Buffy the Vampire Slayer was once quoted as saying she prefers "girl power" to "feminism" because the former term allows room for "femininity." She went on to say "There's no femininity in feminism, which is really weird because it's technically the same word."

Feminism has long lamented its lack of youth involvement, and I think Gellar gets at the heart of the matter: "femininity" does not equal disempowerment, and to link the two undercuts the thinking of a lot of women and girls. It also plays right into the methods of the dreaded patriarchy, which definitely links femininity with weakness.

Perhaps Jaggar was reducing me to a curvy mimic in pigtails, aping the non-natural fashion of natural women. The rest of the world -- friends, lovers, employers, customers, the creeps who cat-call me from their cars, and, most importantly, me -- sees me as female. I get girl jobs at girl pay, where my girl opinions are ignored and my girl appearance is my chief asset. Feminism still has a lot of work to do.

So do transwomen. Transwomen ought to be required to pass extensive coursework in the history of institutionalized sexism before their first mouthful of estrogen pills. This is a topic for future exploration.

I don't think that Jaggar, Raymond, Dworkin and the rest are beyond hope. I do believe that if feminism is going to function progressively, though, it needs to break free of its own essential gender binaries. I believe that Dworkin wants to believe that gender is a lie, that Jaggar wants women to dress whatever ways we want. I see contradictions in their behavior which make feminism something even biological women want to distance themselves from; contradictions which alienate, shame and dismiss women in the name of liberation. We can do much better than this.