(no subject)
This is about the time of year when people start talking about the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (sic). For some women (use of conventional spelling intentional), MWMF, or simply "Michigan," is a weekend-long (rather expensive) expression of sisterhood.
For a small minority of women, including myself, it's a symbol of extremism. As anybody who's been reading me for the last year or so knows, like some tens of thousands of other women in this country, I was born male, and because of that accident of birth, I am a pariah at Michigan, because its proprietor, Lisa Vogel, and her friends, are followers of an outmoded philosophy, espoused most viciously by Janice Raymond in Transsexual Empire, that holds biological essentialism - that trans women are men and that trans men are women, in spite of our lived identities to the contrary. Many other women have been speaking and acting against Michigan for a much longer time than I have even been in transition, but the sad truth is that we're a tiny minority - trans women and our friends, loved ones and allies - and the MWMF is not beholden to anybody except its owners.
The essentialist argument is deeply flawed. It holds that the skin that you had between your legs at the time you were born is more important than the personality you show as an adult. That it is more important than the life that you lead, the way that you present yourself to the world, the particular mix of acceptance and prejudice that you encounter in your daily life. And it's a distortion of what "essential" even means. How can what is (or what used to be) between your legs be more essential to the person you are than what is between your ears?
This is not the last time I will visit this issue, because it's a sad example of one oppressed group finding a smaller group with which they share many essential characteristics to pick on.
"The easiest way to make yourself feel big is to make someone else feel small." - Matt Green, Dramacon Vol. 2 Ch. 4 (Svetlana Chmakova)
For a small minority of women, including myself, it's a symbol of extremism. As anybody who's been reading me for the last year or so knows, like some tens of thousands of other women in this country, I was born male, and because of that accident of birth, I am a pariah at Michigan, because its proprietor, Lisa Vogel, and her friends, are followers of an outmoded philosophy, espoused most viciously by Janice Raymond in Transsexual Empire, that holds biological essentialism - that trans women are men and that trans men are women, in spite of our lived identities to the contrary. Many other women have been speaking and acting against Michigan for a much longer time than I have even been in transition, but the sad truth is that we're a tiny minority - trans women and our friends, loved ones and allies - and the MWMF is not beholden to anybody except its owners.
The essentialist argument is deeply flawed. It holds that the skin that you had between your legs at the time you were born is more important than the personality you show as an adult. That it is more important than the life that you lead, the way that you present yourself to the world, the particular mix of acceptance and prejudice that you encounter in your daily life. And it's a distortion of what "essential" even means. How can what is (or what used to be) between your legs be more essential to the person you are than what is between your ears?
This is not the last time I will visit this issue, because it's a sad example of one oppressed group finding a smaller group with which they share many essential characteristics to pick on.
"The easiest way to make yourself feel big is to make someone else feel small." - Matt Green, Dramacon Vol. 2 Ch. 4 (Svetlana Chmakova)