Privilege or biology?

What is the deal with the new use of the word “privilege”? It seems a person is privileged if they have anything that another person covets.

Webster’s Dictionary defines privilege as “a right, advantage, favor, or immunity specially granted to one; esp., a right held by a certain individual, group, or class, and withheld from certain others or all others.” To me that definition definitely points out how wrong it was for segregation to ever have been OK, how wrong it was to withhold the right to vote from women, and how wrong it was for marriage to be withheld from gays and lesbians when it was being granted to another group. So privilege is something that is granted by another person or group to a person or group.

So when transgender people call women born women a privileged group, who was it that granted us the right to be women? You see, it is not granted by any person. We are born with a body that can, in most cases, give birth to children, bleeds monthly and is anatomically different than a man’s body. That is not a privilege, it is just biology.

I have nothing against the transgender people until they start telling me what I can call parts of my own body and saying women cannot meet together as women unless they include male-to-transgender persons (men who say they are women). I don’t think all transgender people are so adamantly opposed to women-only spaces, but there is a very vocal group of transgender people who have shut down women-only spaces all over this country, including in Fayetteville at the Goddess Festival this past March. LINDA BARNES

Prairie Grove