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Blast from the Recent Past

Jess H.

Since the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival just passed and many people have been writing online about that many-years-running debacle/struggle, I thought I’d link to an oldie-but-goodie, Emi Koyama’s “Whose Feminism Is It, Anyway? The Unspoken Racism of the Trans Inclusion Debate,” which substantially expanded my understanding of the situation when I read it in 2002. At the time, I was working with a couple dozen people to organize Ladyfest Los Angeles, and we engaged in several charged and really thoughtful big-group conversations about whether or not we’d invite artists who’d performed at MWMF regardless of its transphobic policy to perform at Ladyfest LA. Koyama’s article, along with the passionate, justice-minded arguments of many of my co-organizers, helped me a lot in understanding the MWMF conversation in the broader context of movements for trans and gender justice, a history of racist/privilege-based feminisms, and so much more.

(Ladyfest LA never did make a group decision on whether or not we’d invite MWMF performers to our festival, for lack of a collective decision-making structure — which is a whole other post I may write if I have time… We did have a proactive trans-inclusion* policy, and many of us organizers wore armbands throughout the festival in protest of other festivals’ transphobic policies.

*Six years later, I cringe a little at the paternalistic and cisgendered-“woman”-centric notion of “trans inclusion,” but, alas, that’s what we called it … )

24 thoughts on Blast from the Recent Past

  2. it’s hard for me not to imagine the same kind of uncomfortable silence that Emi describes in her piece occurring right now. 1 comment on such a large subject? i’ve never said a word, though i feministe regularly, but this lack of discussion is too much. don’t any regulars have anything to say one way or another? in case you are wondering i have a penis, and i have scruples, and its this kind of discrepancy in radical feminism’s dialectic that turns my head and makes me say, “huh…”

  3. i just finished the Reagon peice that the (still) one and only comment highlights, and am happy i have. even if there is only one comment so far, at least its content weighs a ton.

    i’d also like to add, in response to the spirit of the original post, that i’m not sure artists should be banned just for not banning themselves from an event with a different agenda. not to say that they should be allowed either, necessarily. that should question is best answered by direct questioning of the artist: do you support this policy to the exclusion of our policy?

    if they say they do not, then should you be so exclusionary? if so, it might make sense to give them a good set of months to think through the complexity of the issue(s). maybe they will favor a more inclusive policy, if forced to choose one or the other. maybe not. the distinction is probably important.

  4. Although I used to think it was somewhat important, I have a hard time still caring about exclusionary music festivals stuck on essentialist ideas of gender. These days the whole controversy mostly seems to be a magnet for annoying trollish types who speculate about whether “trans terrorist actions” by “trans fundamentalists” were responsible for a tragic car accident that killed a woman at the festival this year. And believe me, it’s best to ignore them — I link only as a cautionary example of toxic waste.

    Other than that, I tend to agree with Koyama. If anything good came out of the debate (past tense) it’s the recognition that multiple groups excluded from traditional white-middle-class-lady-centric feminism have a lot in common out on the margins.

  5. ceasless ab5tract-Maybe people aren’t commenting like crazy because it isn’t something they have really thought of before, or they don’t want to say something ignorant.

    I can honestly say, I have not heard of this issue before. I am pretty new to learning all the nuances of Feminism, and I’m eager to learn. Can someone give me some links so that I may cure my ignorance on this issue? I read the article by Emi Koyama, and learned more but I have so many more questions.

    Where does this leave the Intersexed? Is it about the penises, or the chromosomes, or the privledge? Who exactly doesn’t want these people to be allowed in? Is it the “lesbian-feminists” that Koyama repeatedly refers to?

    I’d really like to understand this better, from both sides. What’s the deal here?

  6. Emi Koyama should really get more recognition as a feminist theoriest. She always is able to push the dialogue about something that I thought was pretty simple and had been talked to death into new territory.

    I think MWMF is an importnat issue, or at least, I think that transphobia in the feminist movement is an important issue. And yet, I too find a hard time caring about one exclusionary music festival that represents a subculture of feminism that I have aboslutely no connection to. I think Koyama’s right that trans inclusion is threatening to the type of feminism that MWMF represents not because evil trannies are going to molest innocent wombmoons in their showers, but because the whole absurd narrative of universal sisterhood bonded by biology and a supposed universal experience of growing up a girl under patriarchy is threatened by the existence of transexual women.

  7. *Six years later, I cringe a little at the paternalistic and cisgendered-”woman”-centric notion of “trans inclusion,” but, alas, that’s what we called it … )

    I ‘d never thought of the term in that way, and I’ve done my share of “trans-inclusion” actvism – but I see your point. What do you call it these days?

  8. I’d add to what annalouise said that, especially in the early aughts (i.e., when Koyama wrote this piece), the MWMF struggle had a lot to do with many grassroots feminist groups discussing trans issues in ways they hadn’t before. Even though very few of us working on Ladyfest, for instance, had ever attended or even cared much about MichFest, we were talking seriously about trans and gender justice and connections between trans movement and feminist movement in large part because of the work done by Camp Trans organizers, et al.

  9. I remember my college professor talked about this Policy of the MWMF and even before I had gotten really involved in Feminism to know more about the trans community I was uncomfortable with their decision. I don’t know much more about the issue but I think it’s great that others are organizing much more trans-positive venues.

  10. (I thought I already posted some version of this comment, but I don’t see it here, so I guess I didn’t properly submit it or it evaporated or something? Sorry if it reappears later and I show up looking redundant.)

    In addition to agreeing with pretty much everything annalouise said (really, folks, if you haven’t already and have some time, go spend some of it at http://www.eminism.org), I want to add that, in the early aughts (when Emi wrote this article), the work of Camp Trans organizers around MWMF was crucial in getting a lot of grassroots feminist groups talking about trans and gender-justice issues in ways we hadn’t before. So, whether or not we were invested in MichFest itself, per se, the conversations that were happening around it really informed and provoked a lot of important discussions within and about feminist spaces.

  11. yes, what Jess H said.

    Camp Trans was my first experience with feminist activism. It was from transwomen that I learned how to be a feminist, how I learned to be an activist and how I learned to be eloquent and dignified in the presence of people who are disgusted by me.
    I feel like I owe a debt to trans* activists that can never really be repaid.

  12. ‘I think Koyama’s right that trans inclusion is threatening to the type of feminism that MWMF represents not because evil trannies are going to molest innocent wombmoons in their showers, but because the whole absurd narrative of universal sisterhood bonded by biology and a supposed universal experience of growing up a girl under patriarchy is threatened by the existence of transexual women.”

    Eh, it’s not so much that it is threatened, just that it isn’t respected. Which is funny, because it’s not like the radfems are/were pushing their “absurd” narrative on anyone or likewise “threatening” transgendered or transsexual women with it. Even the most die-hard, anti-trans radfem was coming from a position of having to defend boundaries that were not being respected. Seeing as that is a fairly universal theme for women and their boundaries, things got a bit touchy.

    Should boundaries be challenged and pushed? Yeah, they should. But that doesn’t presuppose that the original boundary setters were absurd.

  13. (Holly’s link) Oh, dirt – wasn’t high school some 20+ years ago for you? Why live there all the time?

    Q Grrl, I think that it wasn’t just a matter of pure boundary defending. I think that it was legitimately bigotry, and really nasty bigotry at that. Janice Raymond’s famous quote “transsexuality must be mandated out of existence” keeps coming to mind in its Final Solutiony glory. Germaine Greer’s characterization of trans women as incipient serial killers out to erase their mother comes to mind. Robin Morgan’s deliberate attempt to shame and exile Beth Elliott from a feminist gathering comes to mind. Germaine Greer’s attempts to destroy a trans woman’s career at a women’s college come to mind. Karla Mantilla’s lie that several trans women exposed their penises in the showers at MichFest comes to mind.

    I don’t see the MWMF argument as really being about MWMF. That’s just the central, iconic point for the argument. It’s the highly visible holdout that continues to insist that trans women should not be trusted around cis women, a sort of rallying point for those like Polly Styrene who do not want trans women in domestic violence shelters or having access to other women’s services that they might need.

    I won’t say that the woman-only boundaries were absurd, but I will say that the continued obsession on trans women as “patriarchal male invaders” is absurd.

  14. Word to all that Lisa and Annalouise said.
    And I didn’t comment because 1) I don’t always want to get into the same old arguments again and 2) I just got back from the awesome Camp Trans and I am still to happy to waste my time on haters like Dirt and Polly and whosis.
    This year a bunch of CT trans* women went to fest actually. The policy really isn’t enforced anymore and, from what trans* women who went to fest told me, it seems the majority of festies either don’t care or really want all women to be included. One woman who went said that a festie recognized her from when she walked the line and came over to tell her how happy she was that she was able to get into fest. There was even a workshop on inclusive ENDA held by CT women on the land.
    I don’t mean to say that we’ve won though. The policy is still there and so many other, more important, organizations exclude women who are trans* from women’s spaces. Moreover, there is still a lot of subtle and obvious cissexism in feminist organizations, theories, individuals, etc. (as well as in general society of course)

  15. “I don’t see the MWMF argument as really being about MWMF. That’s just the central, iconic point for the argument.”

    I agree. I was specifically speaking of the space and practices of MWMF. Frankly, although I consider myself to be a radfem, I find Raymond and Morgan to be frighteningly reactionary and disagree with their opinions. Well, actually all of our (read: radfem) past/earlier arguments to defend women-only space have been reactionary. My opinions on the issue have morphed, but I understand the origin of our reaction, especially in light of our submersion in a patriarchal/rape culture.

    That said, it is interesting to see where we’re all headed now, politics-wise.

  16. Ok, this is an impossible thought experiment, but I’m going to try it anyway because I really feel the need to poke this part of my brain with a stick: if it weren’t a question of exclusion or inclusion, maybe at a retreat to which everyone was invited but there might be circles for discussing certain things, do you think that there’s ever an appropriate situation for ciswomen to gather independent of transwomen? I wholly admit, that I may be influenced by a feeling that transwomen are “not normal,” because I’ve only recently started to read about gender and trans issues (courtesy of threads like these), although my only relationship with a transwoman was positive (except she kept telling me I needed to wear more makeup, we agreed to disagree, but this one incident loomed pretty large in the vacuum of no other interaction with transwomen!). Come to think of it, right now I need LESS ciswomen space and MORE space to meet transwomen, but I’d be insulting because I’m so relentlessly curious and would be eager for a lecture on anything and everything on the subject. (Yeah, not good at all when it comes to othering people, good intentions and all.)

  17. LargeMarge, youve identified that you still think of transwomen as “not normal”, and that you’d be insulting to them because … of being so interested in learning(?). it sounds like you need to do some more work on your own. theres plenty of resources out there (theres a reason for that!), and if youve made it here to feministe, you can access them. then you can come to your own conclusions (about at least some basics) without expecting trans people to go through the sometimes really painful process with you.

  18. Q Grrl,

    I just like to make that iconic point in these conversations. Stuff like how Vancouver Rape Relief posted article after article justifying the exclusion of trans women from MWMF – and most of those articles based on trans hatred – to defend their decision to not hire Kimberly Nixon, for example.

    Anna, check out this post here on Feministe for some trans 101. It’s a starting point, but you should have enough information to do some homework after you read it.

  19. I’m a queer; I consider myself a part of the transcommunity (as a partner of a transperson), and I’ve been to both michfest and camp trans. i’ve had transfriends and loved ones at both as well.

    my experience was probably similar to drakyn’s.

    i loved both festivals. i’m extremely upset to have missed both of them this year.

    i guess if i can try to make a point in a tiny space about such a painful and contentious issue, i’ll say this: both spaces are really important to me. michfest is imperfect. that’s not a strong enough word, but it points in the right direction.

    i feel like the biggest obstacle to solving michfest’s imperfections is the inability of folks with all sorts of different opinions to listen to folks with all sorts of other opinions from all angles of this issue (the issue of space and queering gender in a world where gender roles are still enforced and used for discrimination and opression).

    there’s very little listening.

    we all need to come from a place of loving each other, and loving each other’s differences before we can truly listen and hear how we are hurting each other.

    by the way, i read the link from holly’s comment, and i find the leap the blogger made from van accident to “transterrorism” to be appalling.

    i also noticed that the blogger herself had never been to either camp trans or michfest.

    i hope this issue something we, as a feminist community, keep discussing. i hope we don’t get exhausted, as i know i have been at times, and retreat away from it.

  20. dirt’s just a troll who likes to spread anti-trans hate speech. She <3’s the drama but hates truth.

    Nobody really reads her, though, and nobody links to her. The only real harm she represents is the fact that she reposts private information from livejournal communities and tries ineptly to snark it.

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