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Thursday, February 22, 2007
Women's Oasis or Transphobic Spaces?
I really, really, really, really like this post by PG on women-born-women spaces and how they discriminate against Male-to-Female transsexuals. I've talked about exclusivist spaces before (in blogging, actually), and I've also discussed the plight of internal minorities, that is, people who are a marginalized minority within yet another marginalized minority group (e.g., transgendered women, Black conservatives, lesbian Jews). There are extraordinarily thorny questions involved in how the super-minority group (in PG's post, women) treat the sub-minority group (transsexuals). PG's treatment of those issues, and her reminder that internal suppression of sub-minority groups hurts both the movement as a whole as well as coalition-building with outsiders, is very well argued and essential reading.
The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, which is where a transsexual was made to leave and given a refund, is a fundamentally selfish and intolerant environment anyway. Its purpose is to advance lesbian feminist politics (aka me-hating). There is far more wrong with it than its exclusiveness.
ReplyDelete*men-hating* (correction)
ReplyDeleteNow that (above) is a Freudian slip worth celebrating!
ReplyDeleteI'm assuming that "anonymous" is male, of course.
I am a lesbian and have attended the Festival. I was happy to be in an all-female space for a few days. It's a rare experience.
Yeah, being in all-female space is nice. It's harder for me to attain that, though.
ReplyDelete