Michigan to transfolk: “Talk To The Hand.”
Turns out we rejoiced too soon. The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival has announced that the womon-born-woman policy remains in force. The fact that some ticket sellers let transwomen in during the festival doesn’t change the Festival’s policy. Let’s just be clear about what this means:
- You cannot go to MWMF unless you were born a woman. It’s not enough to have been born as a girl. To gain entry, you must display baby pictures which prove that you had breasts, teeth, and hair, immediately after birth. Or a letter from your mother which attests to the fact that you hit puberty before your umbilical cord was cut.
- You must know how many Ys and umlauts there are in the word “wimmyyn.”
- This policy is all about the shared experience of growing up female. You will be quizzed about home ec, Sadie Hawkins day, corsages and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. If your formative experiences are deemed to have been insufficiently female, then you may have to go back and repeat your childhood until you get it right.
But while I’m mocking people, I should point out that the Camp Trans advocates are doing the cause no favors with their latest acronym: WBT. Apparently it stands for “women-born trans,” and it means transwomen. Because, you know, some of us were always female inside. It sort of makes sense if you think about it a bit, but it also sounds really, really dorky. Sorry.
pulling my hair out!
dudette, don’t encourage the mangling of the English language any further..!
:-)
And even if I didn’t grow up feeling like a girl, I’m still a womon born womon, apparently.
I get it that some trans people grew up from earliest memory feeling like another gender, but it bothers me that there is pressure to fit everyone’s story into that story, so that if that wasn’t how it was, then one isn’t “real”. The more that story becomes The story, the more people sort of twist their own history to fit it. Anyway it’s weird to see even Vogel give validation to the idea that somehow certain trans people are more trans than others.
…and apparently next year there will be DNA testing before ticket sales. Admission of intersex individuals will be decided upon by an Admissions Committee and will include pee-pee inspections.
I volunteer for Chief Pee-Pee Inspector!
I’m often quite torn in my emotional response to things like this. My primary response is an impassioned, “Oh, hell no!”; exclusion and oppression is wrong, particularly if the oppressors have been oppressed themselves. But as a nonbinary transperson, there’s that impossible to quiet voice in my head that reminds me that all parties are engaged in binarist ideology and dialogue, and that there is no stated position that does not exclude me. As I tend to say all too often, I’m willing to fight the good fight, but I get tired of being collateral damage.
Yeah, I totally hear you about the enforced binary thing. Even though I define myself as a woman, it’s never a precise definition. But I guess if people are determined to say there’s this category called “woman” and we’re going to herd people into it or out of it, then you should at least let people decide for themselves whether that label fits. Otherwise, it’s just the boundary police whacking people upside the head as usual. (See issue #3 of other for more about the boundary police thing.)
Okaqy, Charlie, dudette – go read the comments that have been piling up over at La Gringa in reference to this post. I am utterly disgusted that in this day and age there are so many hateful human beings within our own LGBT community.
Lisa Vogel is also invited to kiss my big fat hairy Irish ass.
Hi,
I was one of the writers of the camp trans press release earlier this week. I don’t remember using WBT.
Where did you see this?
Julia Serano has added more analysis to her earlier post …. take a look!
\”Unfortunately, this recent slight policy tweak could turn out to be a stroke of genius for Lisa Vogel. By upholding the \”womyn-born-womyn\” policy, she avoids alienating the most hard-core anti-trans faction of
festival goers, while at the same time potentially duping pro-trans queer women into believing that the festival has changed its ways.\”
Serano articulates crucial points about political manipulation (by Vogel), power, spin, and safety for trans women. Great stuff.
Hey Emilia, I didn’t see the term “WBT” in any official release from Camp Trans. I did see it being used a fair bit by transwomen posting on the MWMF message boards.
I think WBT is an east coast affectation among more normative-gender alligned transwomen (I’ve heard both straight and lesbian transwomen use it). I originally heard it from a trans woman in NYC. The attitude behind is is pretty old though. “My gender is authentic and normative because…” kind of explanation.
I also think that its related to how other trans women refer to themselves as “trans women”. Such as myself.
My difference I’ve found between myself and those who would refer to themselves as woman born trans is that I tend to be more queer and involved in queer culture. Whereas, those who use woman born trans still align themselves with normative heterosexual and lesbian communities.
The issue becomes, what comes first, the trans or the woman in your identity.