Y’all I’m really struggling with this attempt to displace vaginas from feminist conversations. Honestly, I don’t think this is the move.
Here’s the thing: feminism taught me to love my vagina. (Hip Hop) Feminism gave me the courage to use the word “pussy,” when I need to make requests in the bedroom. (Cues Missy E.) But feminism a la bell hooks also taught me about the historical politics of “selling hot pussy.” Feminism taught me years ago not to feel embarrassed about telling y’all a period story and gave me the structural analysis to think about why we ask women and girls and all people who have periods to hide them or feel shame about them. Even in 2017, I still have to walk into women’s and gender studies classrooms and tell my intro students about the historical reasons for period shame. Their faces still turn beet red – all of them.
But also: we live in a world that doesn’t love vaginas. Vaginas are structurally maligned, and considered the property of men. Just ask your new president. Let us not forget the transvaginal ultrasound fiasco of a 5 years ago, when several states tried to make it legal to put a phallic like ultrasound probe into a woman’s vagina against her will. In a hierarchy of genitalia, penises are chief. Vaginas are near the bottom. And then the genitalia that intersex people have labor and languish in epistemic obscurity, by which I mean, that up until only the last few decades or so, science chose not even to acknowledge that penises and vaginas aren’t the only configurations of genitals that exist.
When I think about what it would mean to build a Black feminist framework which decenters the pussy, it gives me pause. The call is of course to decenter cisgender Black women from Black feminist frameworks. Again, this move, and the ways in which, in far left social justice spaces, such moves are assumed to be a clear mandate, a clearly desirable end of our politics, gives me pause.
From The Crunk Feminist Collective with “Pussy Don’t Fail Me Now: The place of vaginas in black feminist theory & organizing”.
blue milk 
What concerns me about the place of vaginas in feminism is this: is it cis-normative and therefore excluding trans women or intersex people who identify as female? While we shouldn’t demean vaginas or continue to use the term “pussy” as a pejorative, equating vaginas with femaleness ignores the experiences of these women.
This is an interesting question. I have previously expressed concern for the mission for abolishing gender altogether as risking further erasure or demonization of the feminine. I also have come to love my vagina and want efforts to continue destigmatizing it. I wonder if there’s a way to do both: celebrate the vagina while also making room to include women without vaginas? I don’t have any good ideas as of right now, but this as me thinking.
Decentering the vagina also gives me pause. To decenter it is to risk forgetting that the roots of women’s oppression have to do with their gestational, birthing, and lactating roles, which, as the original author plays out, is even more meaningful/oppressive when race is acknowledged. Plus by my measure, menstruation takes about 416 hours of tampon-changing in a lifetime, which is a problem when you’re trying to compete with men for jobs. It’s a pussy tax.
We have all come earthside from someone with a vagina. In some ways it could be seen as a very inclusive symbol.
This relates to the criticism of pussy hats that I have been thinking about.
I certainly understand, like Jess, that criticism came primarily from those who identify as women who don’t have vaginas (although I have also seen a number of WOC comment on the colour of the hats).
But I share the discomfort the subject of the OP and a couple of the comments here.
A partial answer, I think, is that it depends on the purpose of using the pussy as part of the dialogue or rhetoric. From where I sit, the pussy hats were a response to “grab them by the pussy”. They were an engagement with, and a refutation of, that awful attitude – a reclamation, if you will. I see the pussy hats as a way of saying “GRAB THIS” – and so I see them as a form of resistance that anyone could engage in, not just those who have pussies between their legs.
But clearly, there were women who did not see them that way, and who felt excluded. So as I said, it’s only a partial answer.