An enormous social media campaign was launched last week over Victoria‘s Seven Sisters Festival, an alternative women’s festival that, “provides you and a select few women with an extravagant wonderland to EXPLORE, GROW AND EVOLVE”.

The social media campaign was to eradicate the transphobic rules of the festival, which stated that only transgender women who had undergone gender reassignment surgery could attend. (While the festival has since said that they’ve never had a policy about the inclusion of transgender women, an email exchange between a patron and a festival tells quite a different tale.)

This was discovered by a woman called Kylee, whose partner Belle was in the early stages of her transition. When Kylee emailed the festival to ask if Belle would be welcomed, she received this response:

After Kylee posted the email to the Seven Sisters event page, many of the attendees started expressing their outrage at the discriminative policy.

Now, after a massive amount of back-and-forth, misunderstandings and offensive commentary, the festival has finally changed their policy, and chosen to become inclusive of all women. HALLELUJAH.

This is obviously great. There may not be a heap of transgender women who feel super dooper comfortable attending due to the shitfight it took to get there, but it’s some sort of progression at the very least.

Honestly though… what on earth does “provocative transgender campaign” mean? Asking for all women to be included in a women’s festival ain’t exactly the dictionary definition of ‘provocative’, ja feel?

But w/e, high five for people power, ya’ll.

Source: Facebook.

Photo: Facebook.