Though I own and sometimes wear a Transexual Menace T-shirt, I did not participate in either the 1994 or the 1999 direct action events known as Camp Trans staged outside the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. But I do have strong opinions on the issues involved.
I have never wanted to go to the MWMF. Situations organized around strongly constructed notions of personal identity frighten me, because such situations tend to dictate to me who I am, with no respect for who I already know I am.
To help you understand from where I'm coming, let's do a thought experiment. Say you and another person suddenly find yourselves on an isolated island, just the two of you, with no hope of rescue. Who are you now? How would you determine your relationship with the other person? How much of who you are depends on factors outside yourself?
Let's say the two people on the island are what we call male and female. How much of what we call gender would exist or have meaning in that situation? What would change if both people were the same biological sex? (Remember, there is no one else to see what happens on the island.)
How much of what we call sexual orientation would make sense if there were only one other human being available who you could touch, and who could touch you? (Remember, there is no chance of rescue, no one will ever know what you do.)
I'll answer some of my own questions about life on Identity Island.
There would be no gender, simply the different personalities of two people. Gender is a statistical abstraction from the behavior of a large population, which is turned around and used to prescribe and predict the behavior of individuals. With a population of two, most statistics have no meaning.
As for sex, I'm certain I could fall in love with anyone who cared about me, no matter what their body was like. I bet I could learn new desires, and new satisfactions. Why not?
Would I still be transsexual? I suppose so. But on the island what would depend on my body? In a population of two, even biological sex is simply an aspect of one's personality.
Try extending this experiment. Imagine the other person is not your color, your age, your height. What would that difference mean on the island?
It's a fact that no two individuals are exactly the same, but what those differences mean to us depends largely on forces you will not find on Identity Island. Add just one more person to the island, however, and concepts such as taller than, older than, male, female, masculine, feminine, heterosexual, and homosexual take on meaning, because they allow two people to form an alliance against the other person. (Most of us have seen exactly this happen with the behavior of a friend, lover, or family member when what seems to be fine one moment changes completely when additional people enter the scene.)
So what the heck does all this have to do with the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival? MWMF is at least as much about identity as it is about music. What identity does MWMF construct for womyn? Who is excluded? (I bet the answer to the latter is much broader than 'men and trans people.')
Identity politics can serve a useful function if it enables people to realize that a situation exists, needs to be, and can be changed. But identity politics can also become a trap that prevents situations from changing past a certain point.
Has the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival painted itself into a small corner defined by the patriarchy? If the concept of 'womyn' cannot be expanded beyond the boundaries set by simplistic biology, what then is the goal of modern feminism?
I personally will not challenge the intent of the MWMF owners "for the Festival to be for womyn-born womyn, meaning people who were born and have lived their entire life experience as female." But I find it tragic that MWMF relies on a person's life experience passing as a woman in patriarchal society to certify them as a real womyn for the festival.
For many intersex, transgender, transex, and gender queer people, passing is the silence that equals death. I suggest that everyone who believes this put belief into practice and find other ways to lay the groundwork to build a future that can include everyone.
"Only the intervention of someone else can establish an individual as an Other." — Simone de Beauvoir
[Published in the fall 1999 "National Coming Out Days" issue of Q-News at Michigan State University.]