...because Eve Ensler's 1996 play isn't inclusive of the experience of trans women who don't have vaginas and trans men who do. So it will no longer be performed at Mount Holyoke. Elizabeth Nolan Brown reacts:

I just can't get on board with the logic of Mount Holyoke's dismissal, similar strains of which have been seen elsewhere recently. Last January, for instance, a fundraiser for a Texas abortion-advocacy group came under fire because of its title, "A Night of a Thousand Vaginas," which some argued was hurtful to trans individuals.

In both cases here, the argument is premised on the idea that a) not all women have vaginas, and b) some men do have vaginas, because some trans individuals identify and live as a different gender than they were born without getting genital reconstructive surgery. Ergo, a trans women is a woman, full stop, but she may have a penis. A trans man is a man, full stop, but he may have a vagina. Fine. I get that. I'm cool with that. And, regardless, it doesn't matter if I'm cool with it, because how other people define their genders/bodies/sexualities is none of my concern. If you are a woman without a vagina, neat; there is totally room for all of our experiences in this great big, crazy world.

Yet I am a woman with a vagina, and this becomes an area of my concern when people start saying that I shouldn't reference or acknowlege that—that it's in fact bad and intolerant so 20th century to even speak about it. The fact that some trans women don't have vaginas doesn't negate the fact that the vast majority of women do. And now, in the name of feminism, "female-validating talk about vaginas is now forbidden," as one anonymous writer on a Mount Holyoke messageboard put it.

The American Prospect covered the controversy surrounding "A Night of a Thousand Vaginas" and whether the event was trans-exclusive. In Gabriel Arana's piece, Katha Pollitt reacts to suggestions that feminists and trans allies should use "internal genitals" in place of "vagina":

"Feminists have fought—are are still fighting—for women to be able to use frank and correct words for their sexual parts. Now we're not supposed to use the word 'vagina?'" says noted feminist critic Katha Pollitt. "There is no way you need an abortion, as some transmen do, if you don't have a vagina. Calling it 'internal genitals,' as is apparently the preferred term, is just a ridiculous Victorian euphemism."

The labia and the clitoral glans are outside the body, of course, so using "internal genitalia" to refer to women's genitals (and the genitals of trans men (although some trans men object to having their genitals referred to with the V-word)—and "women's genitals" are what most people mean when they use the term "vagina," even though that's not correct (and it's how the term is used in the Vagina Monologues), but meaning follows usage (gay used to mean delightful, right?), so "vagina" kindasorta does mean "women's genitals" nowadays (even though some men have vaginas)—doesn't quite nail it. And so long as we live a culture where cis women are still attacked and silenced for using the word "vagina" when referring to their own genitals—as in this case—the word "vagina" remains important, empowering, and irreplaceable. It certainly can't be replaced by something as prudish as "internal genitals" or as childish as "fronthole," which has also been floated.