Responding to the recent interview with Diane DiMassa
Feministing.com (feminist website)
by Jos
February 12, 2010
http://www.feministing.com/archives/019983.htmlFollowing our publication of an interview with DiMassa about her paintings, I feel I have to address the pain she's caused me and other members of the transgender community.
In 2004 DiMassa became involved in the controversy surrounding Michigan Womyn's Festival, which has a policy of excluding trans women, when a musical based on "Hothead Paisan" was scheduled to be performed there (the comic contains a character, Daphne, whose gender history is left ambiguous but who many assumed was a trans woman). DiMassa was pressured to denounce the festival's exclusionary policy. Instead, she wrote a letter in support of MichFest's discrimination. In the letter, DiMassa is dismissive of trans women's experience of oppression:
