1. Get Your Facts Straight
As the 39th Festival closes and we turn our hearts and minds to our
landmark 40th anniversary, we reiterate that Michfest recognizes trans
womyn as womyn - and they are our sisters. We do not fear their presence
among us, a false claim repeatedly made. What we resist – and what we
will never stop fighting – is the continued erasure and disrespect for
the specific experience of being born and living as female in a
patriarchal, misogynist world.
Over 20 years ago, we asked Nancy
Burkholder, a trans womon, to leave the Land. That was wrong, and for
that, we are sorry. We, alongside the rest of the LGBTQ community, have
learned and changed a great deal over our 39-year history. We speak to
you now in 2014 after two decades of evolution; an evolution grown from
our willingness to stay in hard conversations, just as we do every year
around issues of race, ability, class and gender. Since that single
incident, Festival organizers have never asked a trans womon to leave
the Festival. We have a radical commitment to creating a space where for
one week a year, no one's gender is questioned - it's one of the most
unique and valued aspects of the Festival. The Michfest community has
always been populated by womyn who bear the burden of unwanted gender
scrutiny every day.
The truth is, trans womyn and trans men
attend the Festival, blog about their experiences, and work on crew.
Again, it is not the inclusion of trans womyn at Festival that we
resist; it is the erasure of the specificity of female experience in the
discussion of about the space itself that stifles progress in this
conversation. As long as those who boycott and threaten Michfest do not
acknowledge the reasons why the space was created in the first place,
and has remained vital for four decades, the conversation remains
deadlocked.
2. Acknowledge the Validity of Autonomous, Female-Defined Space
Michfest is widely known as a predominantly lesbian community. This
does not mean that heterosexual womyn, bisexual womyn, or those who do
not share this identity are not present or welcome. But for a week, we
collectively experience a lesbian-centered world; we experience what it
feels like to be in a community defined by lesbian culture.
There
are trans womyn and trans men who attend and work at the Festival who
participate in the Michfest community in this same spirit – as
supporters of, rather than detractors from, our female-focused culture.
The presence of trans womyn at Michfest has been misrepresented as a
kind of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” But the real issue is about the focus
of the event, a focus on the experience of those born female, who’ve
lived their lives subjected to oppression based on the sole fact of
their being female.
In an August 4, 2014 article titled “What Is
a Woman: The Dispute Between Radical Feminism and Transgenderism,” The
New Yorker magazine documents the extremism of the current push for
language that erases the female experience. The board of the New York
Abortion Access Fund, for example, “voted unanimously to stop using the
word ‘women’ when talking about people who get pregnant. A Change.org
petition directed at NARAL and Planned Parenthood “specifically
criticizes the hash tag
#StandWithTexasWomen. . .and the phrase ‘Trust Women.’”
We see this same pressure for erasure of a specifically female reality
when “Pussy Manifesto,” the female empowerment song written by the
performers Bitch and Animal, now embraced as an unofficial Michfest
anthem, is disparaged by some as transphobic – as was the event “A Night
of A Thousand Vaginas” – solely for the use of the words vagina and
pussy.
If it is considered transphobic to talk about our pussies,
our vaginas, or to even use the word female as specific to sex, our
movement is dangerously close to using the same tactics as the far
right, womyn hating, Michigan Republican leadership, who revoked the
speaking privileges of two female legislators for saying the word vagina
out loud on the Michigan State House floor. What has our movement come
to when the mere articulation of your own experience in your own female
body is denounced as an injury to another? It’s time to examine the core
issue here, which is our right to create an autonomous space focused on
a female-defined experience.
3. Acknowledge That Michfest Creates Spaces That Do Not Exist Elsewhere
This year, thousands of womyn and girls from 3 weeks to 92 years old
attended our 39th Festival. This included over 75 deaf womyn who came to
rejuvenate and be in community. Nearly 200 womyn with disabilities came
into the woods to thrive. At one of the workshops held this year, young
womyn stated that until they came to Festival, they had never seen an
old gender-non-conforming female in person; they did not know that those
womyn existed. We built this space to let these womyn be seen and
celebrated. We built this space around the fierce solidarity of female
experience that has always been and continues to be deconstructed into
invisibility; where that unique experience is relegated to a place of
dishonor. Whenever females honor ourselves, wherever we take up space,
and sit collectively in the source of our collective power, we are
burned and stoned, both literally and metaphorically.
4. Turn Your Energy Towards the Real Enemies of Female and LGBTQ Liberation
While the abuse and disenfranchisement of womyn and girls escalates
around the world and LGBTQ people experience life-threatening harms,
LGBTQ organizations have turned inwards on a curious target – a weeklong
music festival that does not ban or exclude anyone, that simply seeks
to devote its focus to an experience that is denigrated in the larger
world: the experience of being born and living as female.
Equality Michigan and the organizations endorsing its petition including
HRC, the Task Force, NCLR and the National Black Justice Coalition, are
targeting Michfest with McCarthy-era blacklist tactics. Specifically,
they have called for attendees and artists to boycott the event, and –
astonishingly – have threatened the livelihood of artists and vendors by
branding those who participate in the Festival as “having committed
anti-transgender discrimination.”
These organizations are
targeting artists who perform at Michfest while remaining completely
silent when queer-identified artists play at venues that generate
profits for racist, transphobic, and homophobic corporate entities and
individuals, whose interests are dangerous to the global LGBTQ movement
and all basic human rights.
We call on the constituents, donors,
and dues-paying members of the LGBTQ institutions targeting Michfest to
hold them accountable for this misuse and misdirection of organizational
resources, and to withdraw their time and dollars from these
organizations until the targeting of Michfest ends. Sisters - we urge
you to redirect your money to organizations that speak to your lives and
speak for you.
5. Join the Conversation, Not the Digital Sound Bite War
Our community is strong enough to hold disagreement and to engage
deeply with each other, face-to-face, through difficulty. The Michfest
community welcomes conversation; we do not stifle it. We have and will
continue to remain in community with those trans womyn for whom Michfest
has been home; trans womyn like those organizing the New Narratives
Conference who do not require females to disappear ourselves or our
unique experiences to prove our political and social solidarity.
Michfest has always existed outside the gender binary. We built this
city out of a radical diversity of age, culture, race, class and gender.
We continue the revolutionary work of digging out from under the boot
of patriarchy; a system of oppression so omnipresent, it is invisible in
the analysis used by the very organizations who are supposed to be
fighting alongside and for us. We are fierce allies to and members of
the trans and broader LGBTQ movement – but our alliance cannot and will
not be premised on our continued erasure.
We turn to our LGBTQ
community and say: we hear your truths; we ask you to acknowledge that
you hear ours. Listen to the voices of the tens of thousands of women
who call Michfest home. Join the conversation in person in your home
communities, not exclusively through social media platforms or online
petitions. We invite our sisters to participate in this conversation in
person on the Land. Make room in your heart to hold difference of
opinion and disagreement – this is the challenging path to honoring true
diversity. We turn to our LGBTQ community and ask you to unite with us
in the belief that we can work together as a movement and stand
together in solidarity. We ask you to work with us, not against us.
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