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Open Letter to Lisa Vogel you call your festival a "celebration of everything female" well, as one of the tens of thousands of trans women who are excluded from your event i am writing to challenge your sense of entitlement how dare you tell me that i am not a woman! you draw lines in the sand to mark where you believe woman begins and ends but your definitions are distorted with contradictions as they were designed specifically to draw me out of the picture tell me, how do you expect woman to grow beyond her old boundaries and into new roles when you are so set on patrolling her borders? feminist critiques of western science describe masculine perspectives as being reductionist and feminist approaches as being holistic so tell me, why do you revert to man-made labels and define me based on my organs and chromosomes? you, who no doubt cringes every time a woman is objectified every time a man fixates on her specific body parts how easily you turn around and reduce me to my genitals! and please tell me why a self-described feminist would insist on propagating the male myth that men's power and domination arises from the phallus? you choose to believe that my penis is the ultimate symbol of maleness but the truth is, like the rest of my body she is merely flesh and blood, nothing more and every time you fixate on my male past or what's underneath my pants you deny every other aspect of my person i am a woman every time i walk down the street dealing with cat calls and jerks trying to railroad me off the sidewalk i am a woman every time my opinions are dismissed and every time i fight back to make sure that somebody doesn't get away with it and i am a woman every time my lesbian life partner and i dare to hold hands and kiss in public you insist that all trans-women still have male energy but nobody ever senses it in me you falsely believe that you know the difference between woman and man but as someone who has transitioned from one to the other i can tell you first hand that when it comes to gender most people only ever see what they want to see so the question is why do you choose to see me as a man? what feminist goal is served by lumping me into the same category as the alpha males that you call your oppressors? doesn't the fact that i've risked so much demonstrate that i believe woman is something worth fighting for? have you ever considered embracing me as living proof that a woman's fate is determined not by the limitations of her body but rather the expansiveness of her mind? and if most straight men are scared to death about what i represent then tell me, as a feminist doesn't that mean that i'm doing something right? we could be allies but instead of acceptance you only offer me excuses when i say i want to participate in women's space you announce that i've come to destroy it when i insist that i am a woman you play word games and declare that the michigan womyn's music festival is all about girlhood you say that i will bring violence onto the land but the truth is that trans women aren't any more violent than other women you worry about me flaunting my penis but the sad truth is that most of us trans women have been made to feel such societal shame about our bodies that we find it difficult to undress in front of others and the most insulting excuse you use to exclude me from the festival is that my body might trigger abuse survivors when you make this callous claim you erase the fact that trans women are verbally and physically abused for being women too i know what it's like to have men force themselves upon me and there are no words in your second wave feminist lexicon to describe the way that i have been raped by male culture every trans woman is a survivor and we have triggers too they come in sets of two like pronouns and public restrooms designed to remind us of every time someone else has had the audacity to define our genders for us and "womyn-born-womyn" is one of my triggers too "womyn-born-womyn" is your attempt to normalize yourself in opposition to me it is the same strategy that heterosexuals use when calling themselves "straight" and everyone else "queer" "womyn-born-womyn" is your attempt to create another hierarchy another class system between "born" and trans women well i refuse to be a second class citizen and as far as i'm concerned this debate is no longer about my body it is about your bigotry your gender issues your contradictions your tired-ass thirty year old dogma this debate is no longer about my male privilege i gave that up years ago this debate is about is your birth privilege and how you devalue woman by taking for granted that fact that people see you as female both inside and out it's your birth privilege that allows you to consider "don't ask don't tell" to be a reasonable festival policy it's your birth privilege that entitles you to hurl epithets at me without ever considering what it might be like to be in my shoes without ever imagining how angry you would be if someone thought they had the right to tell you that you are not a woman how frustrating it would be if every time you acted feminine it was dismissed as parody and every time you acted butch it was seen as a sign of your true male identity i can't understand how any lesbian who has struggled against patriarchal ideals about what makes a "real" woman can turn around and use the word "real" against me that is not feminism it is merely hypocrisy i hear many women say that they are tired of this debate well unlike them, i dont have the luxury of being bored with this issue because it is me who is being discriminated against and since practically all of the discussions they have had about Michigans "womyn-born-womyn-only policy have taken place in the absence of trans women their claims that they have participated in a true debate are clearly illegitimate some of my queer women friends make apologies on your behalf they say they feel torn between respecting my identity as a woman and understanding your protectiveness of women's space but i tell my friends that they are not the ones who are torn i am the one who is being torn in half stripped of my identity and all of my life experiences stripped of the person that i am and reduced to just my penis and male past i tell my friends that they don't feel torn they just feel uncomfortable about the decision that every single one of them has to make they can either support a trans woman-phobic policy or call other women out on their prejudices because it is not feminist to ignore discrimination within your own community and no place can ever truly be called "women's space" until all self-identified women are included. |