Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival is, strictly speaking, not really any of my business. It’s been a few years since any artist I particularly like performed there, and I have an allergy to alternative spellings of “women.” This said, as a feminist, I do feel it’s my right to criticize gender essentialism and transphobia and take issue with people who attempt to use feminist language to exclude already marginalized people.
As you know, Bob, MWMF has always called itself a women-only space. That’s cool; the world being what it is, there’s a place for women-only spaces, and POC-only spaces, and so on. But the organizer and many attendees get squicked when it comes to transgendered women. (Transgendered men, for some reason, are welcome to attend.) So they’ve set up a “NO TRANSWOMEN ALLOWED” fort and used the academically problematic term “womyn-born-womyn” to exclude certain undesirable sorts of women from the event. (I always wonder how they check these things, but anyway.)
Here’s a great post detailing why MWMF is problematic, and what you can do to fight transphobia there, and in your own life.
In the age of analyzing oppression and owning up to our own privilege, MWMF is an anomaly time-warped from the 70s. Defining a women’s space that excludes trans women in effect defines them as other than women. Denying their common experiences, challenges, struggles and triumphs as women serves to further limit their access to community, health, well-being and dignity. It creates a class of disposable women.
Go read the whole thing.
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