Changing the T for LGBs

While there has been much ferment in the political arena recently, with marriage equality oral arguments at the Supreme Court and Caitlyn Jenner’s public coming out to 17 million viewers as a trans woman, there has been significant change going on beneath the surface in the evolution of the cultural landscape. This has occurred in the context of the changing perception of trans women from both the lesbian and gay male perspectives. I’ll begin with the lesbian side.

Recently Smith College — the grande dame of women’s colleges, the first female college founded by a woman, and the leader among the Seven Sisters — voted to admit trans women. The board of trustees stated:

“The board’s decision affirms Smith’s unwavering mission and identity as a women’s college, our commitment to representing the diversity of women’s lived experiences, and the college’s exceptional role in the advancement of women worldwide.”

Smith had ceded the lead to Mills College, then Mount Holyoke and a string of others, and dithered in terms of welcoming trans women as applicants, even while students who came out as trans men after admissions were allowed to stay. Such a differential within Smith’s policy had made it seem to trans activists that Smith was mired in a trans-exclusionary radical lesbian separatist philosophy, which views trans men as deluded cisgender lesbians and refuses to see trans women as real women. This very welcome action doesn’t simply add Smith to the list of the other women’s colleges; it kills that separatist argument in administrative academia once and for all.

Smith’s decision followed very closely on the decision to end the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, a venerable lesbian institution for the past four decades, held annually on “The Land” in upper Michigan. MichFest has been mired in conflict regarding trans women since 1991, when a trans woman was escorted off the land for the first time.

The festival, like Smith, often hosted trans men who had once been lesbian women, but officially asked out trans women to stay home. While many women, including trans women living under the festival’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, experienced life-changing and life-affirming weeks during 40 Augusts past, the larger LGBT community last year had finally spoken out against the discriminatory admissions policy with a petition, created by Emily Dievendorf (then executive director of Equality Michigan), calling for a boycott of MichFest until its exclusionary policies were changed.

Maybe as a result of fatigue and the simple passage of time, or the behind-the-scenes efforts of Dievendorf, Kate Kendell of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and Rea Carey of the National LGBTQ Task Force, as well as from trans advocates nationwide — or most probably a combination of all of the above — Lisa Vogel, the co-founder and lifetime executive director of the MWMF, chose to signal this summer’s festivities as the last. Unfortunately, rather than going out on the right side of history, Vogel has remained defiant until the end. Surviving intact as a separatist movement will be a Pyrrhic victory, and the demise of the festival, along with the increasingly public recognition by prominent national cisgender lesbians that trans women are women, is another signal that lesbian society is growing in its understanding of the meaning of gender identity and the lives of trans persons.

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