Michigan Womyn's Music Festival and transgender people

The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival is an annual feminist music festival held every August near Hart, Michigan. The festival maintains what producer Lisa Vogel refers to as "the intention" that only women who were assigned female at birth should attend. The festival's term for its intended attendees is "womyn-born womyn" (WBW): women who were assigned female at birth, raised as girls, and currently identify as women. This intention is a point of contention among many members of the transgender community, some of whom feel that trans women and/or trans men should be allowed to attend. As of August 2014, festival producer Lisa Vogel has issued a series of statements on the issue.

History

The intention first came to popular attention in 1991 after a trans festival goer named Nancy Burkholder was asked to leave the festival after festival goers noticed that she was assigned male at birth. Burkholder refused to comment on her birth assignment when asked by festival security near the festival's front gate. Festival producer Lisa Vogel maintains that this instance was the first and only time anyone was asked to leave on the basis of sex or gender.

In a 2005 interview with Amy Ray, co-founder and owner Lisa Vogel discussed the intention within its informing political framework:

I feel very strongly that having a space for women, who are born women, to come together for a week, is a healthy, whole, loving space to provide for women who have that experience. To label that as transphobic is, to me, as misplaced as saying the women-of-color tent is racist, or to say that a transsexual-only space, a gathering of folks of women who are born men is misogynist. I have always in my heart believed in the politics and the culture of separate time and space. I have no issue with that for women-of-color, for Jewish women, for older women, for younger women. I have seen the value of that and I learned the value of that from creating this space for so many years. So the troublesome thing is, in the queer community, if we can't, not just allow, but also actually actively support each other in taking the time and space that we need to have our own thing, then to come together, in all of our various forms, is going to take that much longer. And I understand how certain activists in the Camp Trans scene only see this as a negative statement, and I think that there's a lot of connection that's getting lost. Because, I really think that folks aren't understanding how crucial this space is, as it is, for the women who come here. And, maybe that's just it.

Support for the intention by festival attendees and workers focuses mainly on the different aspects of oppression felt by females living under patriarchy in contrast to trans women who were assigned male at birth and have lived and been perceived (albeit without consent) as boys and/or men. Victoria Brownworth writes: "Being transgender carries its own oppression–there's no question about that. And no one should be checking genitalia at the door of MWMF. As someone who's spent years experiencing bi-genderism, I understand why transwomen would want to attend MWMF. But women are not the enemies of other women, whether those women are born women or transitioned women. Women are not the oppressors. It's a patriarchy out here."

Criticism and protest against the WBW intention

After Nancy Burkholder was asked to leave the festival in 1991, a protest movement against the "womyn-born-womyn" intention developed. Opponents contend that the intention constitutes discrimination against transsexual and transgender people, many of whom they say identify as women, are legally female, and have to cope with the effects of sexism and misogyny in their daily lives. Transsexual activist Julia Serano provided her perspective on the issue: "Some of the women who travel from all over the country to attend Michigan think nothing of wearing their suspicion or hatred of trans women on their sleeves, and they will often make extraordinarily ignorant and insensitive comments about trans women in their attempts to justify our exclusion. . .[The] idea that the femaleness of my mind, personality, lived experiences, and the rest of my body can somehow be trumped by the mere presence of a penis can only be described as phallocentric." Activists for including trans women have handed out pamphlets to festival goers waiting in line for admission, protested at the gate, and boycotted performers who have played at the festival. They also established an annual protest encampment near the festival known as Camp Trans, which became inactive after 2011. Several trans women have, since that time, attended the festival openly. In 2013, Festival producer Lisa Vogel was compared to George Wallace for her continued defense of the Festival's WBW-only intention. Several artists who have been invited to and/or performed at the Festival have lost contracts or been forced to cancel appearances because of their support or their appearance of support for the intention. Other performers to the festival were physically threatened by pro-inclusion supporters, faced verbal harassment and bomb threats. In October 2013, the Bay Area Girls Rock Camp asked a Board member, whose Festival related team had raised funds for the organization, to resign her position for attending the festival without repudiation.

In 2006, a trans woman and Camp Trans organizer named Lorraine was sold a ticket at the box office. Supporters of trans women inclusion then issued a press release declaring, incorrectly, that the "womyn-born-womyn" intention was no longer in effect. In response, Lisa Vogel reaffirmed her support of and the festival's adherence to the intention. More recently, on April 11, 2013, in response to a Change.org petition organized by activist Red Durkin, asking performers to boycott the festival as a result of the WBW intention, Lisa Vogel released a statement again reaffirming the intention: "I reject the assertion that creating a time and place for WBW to gather is inherently transphobic. This is a false dichotomy and one that prevents progress and understanding.... Whatever spaces we carve out in our community to encourage healing and rejuvenation should be accepted, and we should support each other in this endeavor. Nobody should be asked to erase the need for autonomous spaces to demonstrate that they are sisters in struggle."

Current status

In a September 4, 2013 statement recapping the festival, Vogel stated her hopes and desires for the community of women in light of the inflamed tensions around festival attendance:

The intention of Michigan as a space for womyn born female and the question of trans inclusion has been a painful issue within the Festival. It is important that we continue these discussions and truly build alliances across our complicated and multi-faceted identities and beliefs, based on truthful, compassionate conversation and radical listening. In Michigan, as well as in our home communities, the difficulties we have experienced having these discussions in a clear and open-hearted format has pulled a great deal of focus. It is critical that we remember -- as a radical, loving and diverse community -- that a just world for all humans is our common ground and our greatest good. This is a fundamental tenet I hold dear as founder and producer of the Festival, and as a radical feminist womon. I pledge to continue to foster and support discussions about gender identities and to renew the Festival’s commitment to focused community work around issues of sexism, racism, classism, ageism, ableism; issues that, in their own ugly ways, overlap, injure and separate us. This excavation must be an ongoing process in our intentional community; good work is never complete – we are always in process.

After artists were once again requested to boycott festival in 2014, Vogel issued another statement on the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival's Facebook on May 9 to address what she called the "rampant inaccuracies in social media" regarding the festival. In it, she noted:

We have said that this space, for this week, is intended to be for womyn who were born female, raised as girls and who continue to identify as womyn. This is an intention for the spirit of our gathering, rather than the focus of the festival. It is not a policy, or a ban on anyone. We do not “restrict festival attendance to cisgendered womyn, prohibiting trans women” as was recently claimed in several Advocate articles. We do not and will not question anyone’s gender. Rather, we trust the greater queer community to respect this intention, leaving the onus on each individual to choose whether or how to respect it. Ours is a fundamental and respectful feminist statement about who this gathering is intended for, and if some cannot hear this without translating that into a “policy”, “ban” or a “prohibition”, this speaks to a deep-seated failure to think outside of structures of control that inform and guide the patriarchal world. Trans womyn and transmen have always attended this gathering. Some attend wanting to change the intention, while others feel the intention includes them. Deciding how the festival’s intention applies to each person is not what we’re about. Defining the intention of the gathering for ourselves is vital. Being born female in this culture has meaning, it is an authentic experience, one that has actual lived consequences. These experiences provide important context to the fabric of our lives, context that is chronically missing from the conversation about the very few autonomous spaces created for females. This erasure is particularly mindboggling in a week when 276 girls were kidnapped and sold into sex slavery solely because they were female. This is the world females live in.

On August 1, 2014, Vogel issued another statement, asserting that MWMF's position had been represented inaccurately, in the media, (by such organizations such as Equality Michigan and the Human Rights Campaign. In this statement, Vogel said:

We call upon followers of this petition and bloggers reposting Equality Michigan’s statements to stop circulating this misinformation and to include our truth. To this end, the Festival offers these simple facts:

• We believe all humans suffer under patriarchy;
• We believe that transgender womyn are womyn;
• We believe that females experience a unique, historical, and debilitating oppression as a class under patriarchy;
• We believe that the subjugation of females is an international phenomenon, experienced across time, culture, nation, class, ethnicity, ability and race;
• MWMF has, since its inception in 1976, formed itself as a space for womyn-born-female as a means to resist and survive the debilitation of female subjugation;
• We believe that support for womyn-born-female space is not at odds with standing with and for the transgender community;
• We believe that the statements calling for the boycott of the MWMF neither speak for all transgender womyn nor include all of their voices, many of whom are silenced or ignored with regard to their support of the Festival’s intention of womyn-born-female space, for example, the New Narratives Conference held in Portland, Oregon this Spring.

On August 18, 2014, Lisa Vogel issued an official statement on behalf of the festival:

The truth is, trans women and trans men attend the Festival, blog about their experiences, and work on crew. Again, it is not the inclusion of trans women at Festival that we resist; it is the erasure of the specificity of female experience in the discussion of 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.

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 this statement, Vogel also responded to the boycotts against the festival:

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.

"Myths and the Truth" website

A website titled "Myths and The Truth", which was, in the creators' words, "collectively compiled By the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival community" addresses several points of contention, including whether the festival is transphobic, whether there is an intention or a policy, and what the festival itself is like.

See also

• Camp Trans

Further reading

• Eaklor, Vicki L. (2008). Queer America: A People's GLBT History of the United States. New York: New Press. ISBN 978-1-59558-636-0.
• McHugh, Erin; May, Jennifer (2010). The L life: Extraordinary Lesbians Making a Difference. New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang. ISBN 978-1-58479-833-0.
• Morris, Bonnie J. Eden Built by Eves: The Culture of Women's Music Festivals, Alyson Publications, New York City, April 1999. ISBN 978-1-55583-477-7
• Shneer, David; Aviv, Caryn (2006). American Queer, Now and Then. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. ISBN 978-1-59451-171-4.

External links

• Michigan Women's Music Festival
• Festival letters and statements to the community
• Wiltz, Teresa XX Marks the Spot, Washington Post, August 16, 2001
• Lo, Malinda "Behind the Scenes at the Michigan Women's Music Festival" After Ellen, April 20, 2005