Elinor Burkett Summary

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In their respective pieces about the transgender community, Mari Birghe’s piece falls short due to its lack of detailed examples and its heavy reliance on eliciting sympathy from the reader to persuade as well as its failure to see the other side of the argument while Elinor Burkett’s piece proves far superior due to its multitude of extensive examples in addition to its surplus of concessions.
Burkett’s piece is stronger in part due to the surplus of concrete examples provided in contrast to Birghe’s meager examples. In Elinor Burketts’s piece, which states transgender women are not entirely female because of their previous male privilege, she intertwines many specific examples that help to prove her overall message. This is that transgender …show more content…

He could get by on his large annual salary. She proceeds to explain that if somehow Bruce were born a woman, he would not have an easy-going experience with job searches. It would be a difficult to find a job flipping through “ ‘Help-Wanted - Female’ ads in the newspaper.” By using this relevant example in today’s society, she is showing this inequality is happening today, while also beginning her argument with a valid example. Examples like these, that are present throughout the piece, give Burkett a leg up on Birghe’s contending argument where she leans on herself for evidence. With limited examples and reliance on collecting sympathy, Birghe uses personal experiences to attempt to prove her point. Resultingly, this ineffective tactic fails because of the absence of concrete evidence. Birghe, being transgender herself, says, “I wasn’t born a boy, and I’ve never been a boy, and it’s like a knife to my heart every single time I hear that phrase. And boy have I been hearing that phrase a lot!” To start, the