Envisioning an Inclusive MichFest: Thoughts from Trans Womyn Belong Here

by Trans Women Belong Here on Thursday, May 16, 2013

Trans Womyn Belong Here (TWBH), along with supporters, allies, and would-be Festival-goers, envisions an inclusive Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MichFest) that honors and values all womyn.


The individuals who make up Trans Womyn Belong Here believe that by making Fest more inclusive for trans womyn, we can make it more inclusive for all womyn. While the Festival’s producer has written a letter making it clear that she does not intend the Festival to be for trans womyn, she has also invited continued discussion of this issue and some of us continue to attend the Festival with hopes for change. Until the website and Festival program explicitly state that trans womyn are not welcome, we will continue to understand a Womyn’s Festival as a place for all womyn and work to make it as welcoming as possible.

Recently, a renewed call to boycott the Festival has generated artist statements, online discussion, and a letter from MichFest’s producer. In response, we have worked together to articulate some answers to some of the questions that have been floating around. We have also put together a brief history of the actions of Trans Womyn Belong Here.

Please note that TWBH is very loosely organized. People come and go from discussions, and are involved in a variety of ways. The perspectives of those involved are diverse and complex, and cannot be represented thoroughly or accurately here. The comments below are intended to reflect some broadly-shared thoughts and ideas from within TWBH.

Despite the challenges we face, it is TWBH’s intention to continue to create welcoming space for trans womyn at MichFest. We support those who decide not to attend—in fact, some of us have made this decision ourselves. We also support showing up and engaging with MichFest as allies.  We are doing the best we can and coming to this work from a place of love.


What Does Inclusion Look Like? What Are the Possibilities?

In considering these questions, it is important to acknowledge that trans womyn have already been attending MichFest throughout its thirty-seven-year herstory, and therefore the Festival has wrestled with these questions already for some time.

The issues around inclusion must be dealt with for the sake of the health and integrity of our womyn’s community. These are some of our thoughts and ideas about how the Festival could become inclusive of all womyn. They are by no means complete but are a contribution to a continually unfolding process.

Public Face of MichFest

An inclusive Festival would use language that specifically welcomes trans womyn on the website and in any Festival literature or advertisements.

MichFest promotes diversity by including performers who are a variety of ages, races, and performance genres; an inclusive Festival would also ensure programming that includes openly trans womyn performers.

Healing from the Conflict

Over the years, this conflict has created a lot of pain and harm for many involved in the Festival.  In following the healing traditions of MichFest, a truth and reconciliation process is needed where each womon has the opportunity to speak to her experience and be heard and validated.  We envision this happening via a healing tent in the community center area, for both drop-in conversations and activities, as well as structured workshops. In this way, we can begin to heal the rifts between us and move toward a Festival where all womyn feel included.

Role Models

We know that our children are watching us.  In an inclusive Festival, we will model what it means to form sisterhood with all womyn. We will demonstrate through our actions that it is not okay to treat another womon poorly or admonish another womon’s body parts or genitalia because she is different.  In showing the next generation that separatism is a valid and empowering tactic against patriarchy, we must make clear the distinction between creating healing space for womyn impacted by patriarchy and casting out a specific group of marginalized womyn.

Revitalization of MichFest

Many womyn choose not to attend MichFest because of trans exclusion, either because they don’t identify as WBW, because their partners/friends don’t feel welcome, or because they don’t want to support discrimination. Each year we hear from several more womyn—workers, performers, and general attendees—who decide that they can’t return until things change.

We envision a revitalization of Fest in which many of our lost sisters return, and many more feel inspired to join the land for the first time.  We ultimately want MichFest to flourish and thrive into future generations, and we believe an inclusive Fest is the only way to make that happen.

An Inclusive, Body-Affirming Festival for All Womyn’s Bodies

MichFest has always made a strong attempt to be body-positive and to counter patriarchal  expectations by celebrating the diversity of womyn's bodies. In a recent letter to attendees, producer Lisa Vogel states: "Our intention [that the Festival is for womyn-born-womyn only] has always been coupled with the radical commitment to never question any womon’s gender."   Excluding womyn purely based on their bodies undercuts this commitment. At an inclusive MichFest, all womyn's bodies are welcomed and celebrated.  No womon will be glared at with hostility because she is suspected of being trans. No womon will fear being told that she is not womon enough because of her facial hair, the shape of her breasts, for wearing or not wearing makeup, her height, weight, style of dress, infertility, reproductive choices, irregular menstrual cycle, or anything else. The diversity of expressions of womynhood at the Festival would continue to be empowering and unifying.

Safer Spaces for Survivors

Much attention has been focused on the hypothetical potential for violence that including trans womyn may bring: accusations of trans womyn being predators, fears about predatory men pretending to be trans womyn to gain access, and trans womyn’s bodies triggering past experiences of trauma and violence. TWBH believes the way to address these fears is not to exclude trans womyn, but rather to address the issue of violence on the land. For example:

1. Educate Festival attendees about sexual violence. Fears about trans womyn do not align with what we know about sexual violence and have more to do with prejudice than reality.  An inclusive Fest would challenge harmful myths and prejudiced-based fears.


2. Learn about triggers.  It's important to respect that triggers come in a variety of forms.  They can be smells, sounds, emotional feelings, sights, or any other sensation.  We must take care to support each other around our traumatic histories, minimize our harmful impacts on each other, and respond to requests for help in dealing with them.  However, we must not blame another womon, or an entire demographic of womyn, for the violence that has been inflicted upon us by others, just because of her accent, skin tone, body shape, or genital shape.
   For the vast majority of womyn, it is triggering to be scrutinized, inspected, and judged, or to be asked to hide part of your identity or body for someone else’s sake. An inclusive MichFest recognizes that triggers are not justifications to cause harm to others.


3. Increase support for survivors. MichFest has long served as a healing space and has made a particular effort to support survivors of sexual violence.  In an inclusive Fest, we must recognize that many survivors are trans womyn, and that supporting survivors means supporting trans womyn survivors as well.


4. Develop effective community responses to violence on the land. An inclusive Fest would recognize that acts of violence and sexual assault occur at the Festival regardless of whether or not trans womyn attend. An inclusive Festival would provide resources and space for those who experience violence on the land and for survivors who have faced violence at the hands of other womyn.

Provide Adequate Privacy Showers

As much as we value the representation of all womyn's bodies, we also believe that no womon should be pressured into putting her body on display. To this end, we ought to provide better options for those who prefer privacy when showering. Too many womyn have been forced to choose between forgoing showers or navigating a situation they feel uncomfortable with.

The Festival must increase its efforts to ensure that the privacy showers currently provided are well-maintained and available throughout the Festival.

We also recognize that there are womyn who are not comfortable being exposed to other womyn's bodies in a group shower setting.  In an inclusive Fest, we would not make distinctions based on the type of womon's body they are uncomfortable with.  If a womon is uncomfortable with seeing a womon whose body differs from hers while showering, then she could choose to use the private showers.

In Summary

An inclusive Festival would:

• publicly welcome and feature trans womyn;
• facilitate a healing process for those affected by this issue
• model inclusion and celebration of diversity
• berevitalized by the addition of many womyn who have not felt comfortable to attend;
• celebrate the wide range of womyn’s bodies;
• educate attendees about prejudice-based fears;
• address the issue of violence on the land;
• and provide more adequate privacy for showering. 

We hope that this collaborative statement will help the MichFest community move forward to undertake specific discussion of what an inclusive festival can look like. We urge all womyn to envision with us, to discuss, and to create actionable solutions this summer, at future Festivals, and everywhere in our communities.

With hope,

TWBH
May, 2013

To become part of the discussion, please email trans-women-belong-here@googlegroups.com.


Actions by Trans Womyn Belong Here

While TWBH is mostly known for providing T-shirts as a way to demonstrate support for trans womyn’s inclusion, we are also involved in many other actions toward our goal of an inclusive Festival. Some of things we do:

• Provide workshops focused on trans womyn’s inclusion.
• Provide a safe(r) space "chill tent" for trans womyn and allies on the Land to have a space to meet and decompress.
• Create and distribute ‘zines detailing workshop times and locations, artists who are supportive of changing the intention of the Festival, and the mission of Trans Womyn Belong Here.
• Create and distribute T-shirts, buttons, and tent flags encouraging people to act as visible allies and have one-on-one discussions about inclusion.
• Have one-on one discussions with other womyn who are interested in discussing the issue of inclusion.
• Facilitate a scholarship program that fundraises ticket fees for interested trans womyn to attend the Festival.
• Circulate a card soliciting "welcome to the Land" messages from trans womyn’s allies.
• Create safe(r) spaces signs in specific camping areas, such as "Zone for All ♀."

Towards a Spiritual Definition of Wymhood

excerpted from Bevin Branlandingham's blog "The Queer Fat Femme Guide to Life"

During the Opening Ceremonies [at Michfest last summer] I had a spiritual awakening. These happen for me in a subtle flash, sometimes suddenly, sometimes slowly there is a shift and I have clarity about something that previously troubled me. The opening poem spoke of Artemis and her tribe of womyn hunters. On the stage appeared dancers, many topless, dancing with bows. The ceremony continued with music and the shooting of three flaming arrows from the stage. It was visually stunning. I was stirred in a very deep part of myself.  [...]

The opening ceremony reminded me that Artemis (or choose your own deity/higher power and insert it here) drawing together her tribe to gather in the woods of Michigan is a lot stronger than an intention around organizing or a sex assignment at birth. The spiritual call to womanhood and, specifically, Festival Wymhood is stronger and more important.

I think all girlhoods are important. All girlhoods do not take place embodied or recognized. A lot of womyn who were female assigned know what it is like to feel disembodied for a lot of reasons. I felt terribly disembodied throughout my girlhood and I can point to Festival as a place that helped me heal. Our trans sisters were raised, by and large, in environments that did not recognize their bodies as legitimate. I think the call to womanhood is a spiritual one, and comes from a much higher and more powerful space than Western medicine. Western medicine is what the present intention of the Festival–Womyn Born Womyn–bases their organizing around.

Why, in a space so inherently Womyn-centric, lovingly built from scratch by Wym hands, where we worship the Feminine divine either explicitly or implicitly, are we dependent on a patriarchal medical definition of sex to define who we bring together to celebrate wymhood and all it can be?

Read Bevin's full posting....

Trans Womyn are Born Womyn

by Marja Erwin, fully updated

Since the 1970s, the term "born womyn" has been used to exclude trans womyn, or to include other womyn and sometimes certain men, on the grounds of biology, socialization and originality. However, if we consider this more closely, I think it is clear that we are also born womyn on all of these grounds.

1. Womon.

I call myself womon because I understand my female existence in relation  to myself and my sisters, not in relation to male normativity.

A misogynistic society centers the male sex-class, reserving the unmarked term, man, to the male sex-class and applying the marked term, woman, to the female sex-class. A feminist response should decenter the male sex-class.

An Open Letter to the Estranged Branches of My Radical Queer Family

by Zeph Fish

I just emerged from three weeks working in the woods to help put on the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. I've been friends at different times with both festival workers and folks who've organized with Camp Trans, and I want to share a little something about why I chose to return this year and what happened.

I attended and worked a bunch at the festival from 1988 through the mid-90s. The first time I came, I had been "out" as a dyke for just a little over a year. The only queers I had met were the very earnest academic lesbians at the McGill University Women's Center in Montreal, mullet-haired bar dykes and bisexual punk girls. MichFest more or less blew my mind--I met my first leatherdykes, my first grandmother-herbalist lesbians, my first fully-bearded femme coffee-slingers, my first so-butch-she-passes-as-male carpenters, my first travelling-anarchist-dildo-makers. It radically complicated traditional notions of "female" and opened up new spaces and possibilities for who I could be in the world--which is why when I was working in 1994 and I heard about the very first Camp Trans, I visited as an ally. Trans women have always been part of lesbian community, though at different times they’ve been “outed” and excluded. It seemed like a no-brainer to me that trans women belong in this place, where we are radically questioning and re-visioning what it means to be female.

Inclusion from MY butch dyke perspective

by Zeph Fish

Recently I spent a bunch of time reading the online forums of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, trying to understand why many attendees feel like it’s so important to exclude trans women from this event. I was drawn to a thread called “Inclusion from a Butch Lesbian Perspective.” I am a middle-aged butch dyke (also two-spirit, and genderqueer, and a lot of other names). I read the posts in this thread with a lot of grief. Grief that butch women have to fight so hard in the world to be who we are. Grief that so many of these posts are about pain and struggle, and that safe space is so hard to come by.

Yes, out there in the mainstream world, patriarchy wants to keep all the categories simple. The good ol' boys know that Men are Men, Women are Women, period. And if they meet anybody who confuses those categories, they react with fear and anger, with questions and accusations.

100% WBW

by Ida

The other day while I was riding the subway there was a White man harassing a naturalized Latino immigrant on the other end of the car. The two men were in the middle of very loud and angry argument, which made me feel increasingly anxious since I have also been harassed on the subway.

I have no idea how the argument started or why the White man picked this particular passenger on a car with several other immigrant people of color. But it was obvious that he was targeting this man because he was an immigrant of color with a strong foreign accent. It's possible that the White man may have mistaken the Latino immigrant for an Arab American, given what I was overhearing.

The White man was yelling at the Latino immigrant, shouting variation on a theme: "You're not an American." "Go back where you belong." "Go back to your own country." With each attack the Latino immigrant held his ground shouting back in response: "I am an American." "This is my country." "I belong here." Intermixed with these remarks, the men called each other "assholes" and told the other to "fuck off." Eventually the White man left and the Latino man seemed to gain some support from a few Spanish-speaking passengers.

This interaction, in a different context, could have easily taken place between a trans womon and a cis womon separatist. In this context, the trans womon would be in the role of the immigrant, and the cis womon would be in the role of the nativist xenophobe.

Blyth wrestles with the idea of attending festival

I’ve been going back and forth. About going. About why I would want to. About how important it is. About what I can contribute and what I can risk.

For the past year The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MWMF) has been a part of my life. Many of you might remember that I had decided to go last year and then changed my mind last minute. It was absolutely the right decision for me at the time and I have no regrets. But nearly every day since then I have thought about the festival. Either because I was weighing whether or not I would ever go or someone was encouraging me to or I was talking/reading about the spoken/unspoken policy excluding women who are Trans. It just kept coming up. A lot. From expected and unexpected places.

Three "Trans Women Belong Here" Organizers Contribute to "Lesbian Connection"

The latest edition of Lesbian Connection printed three letters from MWMF workers, craftswomen, and attendees in response to an entry in the previous edition about the 2010 activism conducted within Michigan this year.  We were responding to a four sentence letter that basically "congratulated" trans women for violating Michfest's woman-born-woman policy.  The writer suggests that, in the future, we leave our t-shirts at home. Here are our responses:

LETTER FROM KRISTA

In regards to [the] letter about the [Trans Womyn Belong Here] t-shirts at MichFest this year. I am not a trans woman and I wore a t-shirt that said "Trans Women Belong Here" at the festival. Many of the other women who wore the shirts were also allies like me.  We wore the t-shirts to publicly declare our support for including our trans sisters in a very important women's event. Trans women are a wonderful and important part of my women's community. In order for me to be in integrity with myself there isn't a way for me to be silent and not advocate for them. I did not intend to violate anyone's space by wearing the shirt, just speak up about something I feel in my heart. I think that speaking up for something you believe in is a time honored tradition amongst people who want to see positive change in the world.

A 2010 Worker's Feedback to the Festival Admin

This is the feedback I sent in to the festival [after being a festival worker]. I know we’re not focusing on getting a policy change, but even though 99% of the work happening has to happen from us, from the women who attend and work at fest, I do think that the feedback forms are an appropriate place to push for the best case scenario, of official and non-official welcome and support.


Amanda
—
Q: What improvements would you suggest? 

 An official welcome to all women, including women who identify as trans. Creating a women-only space without all women is transphobic and just plain wrong.

I almost didn’t come to fest this year because not all women are welcome. I’m glad that I did come and participate in on-the-ground activism and ally work – wearing a Trans Women Belong Here shirt and engaging in dialogue with (especially with) older women – most people who I talked to were in support or didn’t care one way or the other. Many artists that I spoke with were angry about the lack of action from the office. The few brave women who were also out as being trans were met with so much love and support from many festival goers, but that didn’t drown out the voices of my sisters who are transphobic, afraid of change, and unwilling to educate themselves about the meaning of gender.

In Amerika They Call Us Dykes: Lesbian Lives in the 70s

by Amanda Ream
published in Sinister Wisdom, Spring 2011

Here we are now.

I, like so many of my friends in our 20’s and early 30’s, am hungry to be with my elders, my heroines, in a time of political uncertainty, when endless war and economic hardship are the daily grind.  I have a lot of nostalgia for a time I never knew--the 70’s with women’s self-determination, collective life, political engagement, journals, art, music and spirituality.  A new culture born of the sweat and heart and soul of lesbians. A culture I never read about in books or even saw much of the legacy of, by the time I came out and around the bookstores were gone, the covens underground. As Urvashi Vaid has said, the common view is that 70’s lesbians had been replaced by a wittier, smarter more sex positive group of queers.   It feels like the 70s lesbians had been kept from me.



I was born the year of the very first Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, 1976.



One of my mentors as a community organizer, Miriam, was at the first Michigan.  To hear her tell it, her life was transformed by lesbian feminism. She left her husband, left the “left” as she had known it, and started the long process of healing from patriarchy, the kind she faced growing up in the 50s, and in the radical movement of the 60s. Miriam is the bridge generation. She grew up in a time where gay people were considered mentally ill, an impossibility even, found herself in wimmins community, shirtless and with an axe in her hand.