News and Events => People news => Topic started by: LostInTime on August 14, 2006, 07:52:06 AM Return to Full Version
Title: Camp Trans Confronts Transphobia at Michigan Women's Music Festival
Post by: LostInTime on August 14, 2006, 07:52:06 AM
Post by: LostInTime on August 14, 2006, 07:52:06 AM
Article (http://www.mountainpridemedia.org/oitm/issues/2006/08aug2006/views03_transcamp.htm)
Camp Trans, which began in 1992 after a transsexual woman was thrown out of MWMF because festival staff found out that she was transsexual, is an annual protest against the festival's policy that bars transsexual women from openly attending. MWMF's so-called "womyn-born womyn" policy sets a transphobic standard for womenonly spaces across the country, and contributes to an environment in women's and lesbian communities that discrimination against trans women is considered acceptable.
[...]
Rahne Alexander, songwriter and comic performance artist from Baltimore, also observes, "The exclusionary policy is something that has fragmented a portion of the community, leaving feminist trans women like myself to feel isolated and endangered even within communities of feminists, lesbians and other women. To merely allow admission to trans women who have been able to afford genital surgery is at the very least a classist position, and at worst a reliance on a heteronormative understanding of gender, medicine, and financial status."
Camp Trans, which began in 1992 after a transsexual woman was thrown out of MWMF because festival staff found out that she was transsexual, is an annual protest against the festival's policy that bars transsexual women from openly attending. MWMF's so-called "womyn-born womyn" policy sets a transphobic standard for womenonly spaces across the country, and contributes to an environment in women's and lesbian communities that discrimination against trans women is considered acceptable.
[...]
Rahne Alexander, songwriter and comic performance artist from Baltimore, also observes, "The exclusionary policy is something that has fragmented a portion of the community, leaving feminist trans women like myself to feel isolated and endangered even within communities of feminists, lesbians and other women. To merely allow admission to trans women who have been able to afford genital surgery is at the very least a classist position, and at worst a reliance on a heteronormative understanding of gender, medicine, and financial status."