The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival and Transgender Politics

Amy Winter

The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (MWMF) has existed for almost thirty years as a women-only event.  The last ten to fifteen years have seen a backlash against feminism in mainstream culture and against lesbian-feminism in the "queer community," accompanied by the growth and activism of the queer/transgender movement.  Fewer and fewer members of the lesbian community understand MWMF's political and ideological underpinnings and the rationale for women-only space in general.  Partly through organizations such as Camp Trans and strap-on.org, transgender politics have been thrust to the forefront of "queer issues."  Most importantly for this discussion, male-to-constructed-female (MTCF) transsexuals and transgender males identifying as women have demanded entry to MWMF, using a variety of claims to justify this demand.  Likewise, lesbians who have decided to "transition" to become men by taking male hormones and, in some cases, undergoing surgery, have also demanded acceptance at MWMF.  As a result of this controversy, MWMF has come to be redesignated among its supporters as "womyn-born-womyn" only space.  As I understand the policy, MWMF is open to "womyn-born-womyn" only; the organizers have requested that the transgender community respect womyn-only space, and that women attending the festival not question whether other festie-goers "belong" there, but leave the enforcement of the policy to the festival organizers and staff.

The controversy has continued over several years.  Camp Trans has organized a protest/event held near the MWMF grounds and during the same week of August.  Some of those attending Camp Trans have engaged women attending or attempting to attend MWMF using a variety of tactics, up to and including invading the festival grounds.  Camp Trans has organized boycotts of artists who perform at MWMF, and other "queer" festivals have participated in this boycott by refusing to invite these performers.  Various protests in support of transgender activists have taken place within the festival itself, such as the wearing of armbands and protest marches/parades.  Arguments, mostly heated, about transgender attendance are routinely found on the MWMF internet bulletin boards.  The following piece is developed from my writing there in support of the MWMF womyn-only policy.

At the heart of the controversy, I believe, is the fact that lesbian-feminists who support the policy are looking at the context of MWMF in a very different way from the way it is viewed by many in the transgender community--and the lesbian-feminist viewpoint and analysis have been delegitimized and removed from the realm of discussion.  It is my understanding that MTCF transgender activists desire to attend MWMF because they believe they are women; therefore they have a right to women-only space.  Much of the material on this site addresses the difficulties with MTCFs’ aspiration to womanhood, so I will not fully develop those arguments here; I encourage readers to seek out, read, and understand these arguments, even if they do not agree with them.  This article is meant to provide support for the MWMF womyn-only policy.

A major problem that I see with transgender arguments regarding MWMF is that social reality is being denied. Transgender activists avoid naming the power and privilege men have over women in this culture and others. Much of the backlash against feminism has included arguments like "but women are violent too."  The effect of this argument is to blur the reality that the vast majority of rapes, battering, and other violence against women is perpetrated by men.  For example, recent statistics from the U.S. Justice Department show that every 90 seconds, a person over the age of 12 is sexually assaulted; 89% of the victims are female, and 99% of the perpetrators are male (see www.stopfamilyviolence.org).  The fact of male violence against women was, and remains, a primary justification for women-only space.  MWMF is an event at which women and children are overwhelmingly physically safe from male violence--because there are no men present.  One of the first things women mention about their experience at MWMF is their amazement at the freedom to walk outside at night alone and not be afraid.  For many women, MWMF is the first and only place they feel this way.  This is the safety MWMF supporters often refer to, and it is because of the statistical fact of male violence that MWMF was, and remains, womyn-only--not because transgender people are believed to be particularly violent, and not because (as various transgender proponents have asserted) lesbian-feminists are essentialists who think behavior is tied to gender.

Lesbian-feminist theory clearly states that gendered behavior is a result of gendered socialization.  It has always argued that masculinity and femininity--sets of behaviors which transgender people usually seek to swap or "play with" rather than eradicate--are not natural human behaviors and are not tied to biology, but are created and reinforced by patriarchal culture as a way of maintaining male supremacy.  However, neither MWMF nor feminism created sexual dimorphism.  Male and female genitalia, as well as ambiguous genitalia, are facts of nature.  A system that enforces particular social roles for people depending on which genitalia they possess, however, is a peculiarly human creation.  By accepting patriarchal standards of gendered behavior–e.g., “I feel nurturing/intuitive/gentle/emotional/weak so I must be a woman”–the transgender movement in fact supports and reinforces the very gender role structure it claims to undermine.  Conversely, radical feminism has demonstrated the way the stereotypes of masculinity and femininity limit and damage people, and has advocated the abandonment of gender roles rather than the mutilation of individuals to meet gendered expectations, or the swapping of sets of behavior depending on how one "identifies" one's gender.  MWMF and other women-only space represents one tactic for the overcoming, by women, of their oppression by male violence and forced conformity to patriarchal expectations of femininity.  MTCFs, who were raised as males, and who often choose and even glorify stereotypically feminine appearance and behavior, cannot  understand, support, or participate in the process of female empowerment that women-only space makes possible.  MTCF "lesbians" have also not confronted, explored, or changed their sexual orientation to become lesbians; they remain heterosexual males whether they are preop or postop.  They cannot understand the process of challenging socially sanctioned expectations of sexuality and coming to love another member of the socially subordinated class to which they also belong.  This is not to say that transgender people have no kinship with lesbians and that both might not benefit from shared community; this may very well be true.  However, this is not the goal that MWMF was created to fulfill.  Similarly, FTCMs have chosen to change their gender identity, often adopting some version of masculinity, rather than to fight the oppression of women as women, in solidarity with other women.  For these reasons, transgender people have no place at MWMF.

Because of our support for MWMF's attendance policy, transgender activists have called us "oppressive."  This is a gross misapplication of the concept of oppression.  Oppression requires the power to create a system in which freedom and opportunities are routinely denied to members of a particular class.  It is an open question whether transgender people, given their different origins and social conditioning, constitute an oppressed class.  But certainly transgender people, as well as women and lesbians, exist WITHIN an oppressive system--which, nevertheless, is created, maintained, and administered by others, namely white males.  The women of MWMF don't have the power to validate the existence and identity of transpeople--or to withhold that validation.  Individual women may, and often do, participate in activities and systems that abuse or limit the opportunities of others, such as racist white women or lesbians who batter their partners.  However, these behaviors do not take place in a social context in which women have privilege as women.  Women and lesbians as a class do not have the institutional power to enforce in the wider society whatever biases they may hold.  The fact that Camp Trans supporters continue to call MWMF and its supporters "oppressive" shows how flawed their analysis of power in the U.S. really is.

Many of the arguments and tactics used by Camp Trans and their supporters apply pressure to our feminine conditioning to be nice, to share, to not exclude transgender people who want to attend MWMF.  My experience at the festival has left me with an unshakeable conviction that the women of MWMF are right to insist on womyn-only space.  This space, in which women can be free from male violence and from expectations of stereotypically feminine behavior, free to express our love for ourselves and one another without fear of anti-lesbian violence, where we can have opportunities to develop and showcase skills women haven't had access to, where we can be ourselves in the bodies we have, is invaluable.  The existence of the festival, and its attendance policies, in the context of a society in which women are constantly marginalized and degraded, does not limit the ability of other marginalized and degraded groups to define and create their own spaces.  (In fact, there are many women's festivals which are open to transpeople; see the list in the "Myths" section of this website.)  Women and lesbians are not gathering together at MWMF to protect our economic and social privilege the way men-only groups do--because we don't have it to protect.  I wish we were as powerful as Camp Trans makes us out to be--if we were, the world would certainly look a lot different.

There is no question in my mind that identifying as a transgendered person and choosing to live as such in the world is difficult—just as identifying as a lesbian-feminist and choosing to live as such in the world is difficult.  I wish that transgendered people could see the opportunities that radical feminism presents for eradicating gender roles and begin to couple their experience of the inadequacy of male supremacist gender roles with the work feminists have done over the past thirty years.  I think this synergy could be a powerful step towards ending sexist oppression.  However, this absolutely requires that the transgender movement examine and reject tactics which derive from male supremacist conditioning, and acquiesce to the demands that feminists have always made--that we listen to women.