MichFest published this statement on Facebook a few days ago, their latest response to the perennial criticisms of their “Womyn born womyn” policy. Let’s fisk it, shall we?

The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival was created in 1976 as a space to gather in celebration and exploration of the experiences of females.

Right off the bat, they start seeding the ground for a disingenuous denial of trans women’s identities. Here they are implicitly conflating being female with being cis. They state their goal is “the celebration and exploration of the experiences of females” and then spend the rest of the statement arguing, essentially, that some females are more female than others.

For almost 40 years, it has been a welcoming space for revolutionary womyn and girls who personify a broad spectrum of gender.

If by “broad spectrum” they mean “lots of different kinds of cis people.”

Anyone who has been to the Festival knows firsthand the truly radical and diverse nature of our community. There is no greater variety of embodied womyn’s gender expression anywhere else in the world.

This statement only begins to hold water if one considers that the subset of “womyn” doesn’t include trans women. Otherwise, any average trans girl twitter circle is probably just as if not more diverse.

However we express our individual gender identity, for this one week, we recreate ourselves outside the margins of female socialization, and use this sanctuary to examine and unpack the very real oppression of being born and raised as females in our male-defined culture. We carve out this space to turn our attention toward ourselves and toward one another in a culture created and defined by us.

Here we get to the real meat of their argument, the “born woymn” clause. It’s fatuous for two reasons. First, it presumes that trans women are never born female, which is wrong on its face. Many of us assert our gender identity as soon as we are old enough to be able to make such assertions. The trans experience is vast and multifaceted, so I won’t go so far as to say we’re all aware of our gender that early, but clearly some of us are “born female” as much as any cis woman.

Second, it presumes that there is no real oppression faced by young trans girls as they grow up in that very same male-defined culture that MichFest decries. I promise you, there is. I was emotionally abused for years as a child, in large part, I believe, because I did not really fit into the gender role that I had been assigned. Even though I only became aware of being trans in my early 20s, I was never “one of the boys.”  I was very bad at being male, and I paid a severe penalty for that. Trans girls are ground up and spit out by the patriarchy at a horrifying rate. We know gender based oppression as well as any other group on the planet. 

We have said that this space, for this week, is intended to be for womyn who were born female, raised as girls and who continue to identify as womyn. This is an intention for the spirit of our gathering, rather than the focus of the festival. It is not a policy, or a ban on anyone.

You know what it’s called when you do something abusive, and then deny that you’re doing it? It’s called gaslighting. MichFest is trying to gaslight the entire trans community.

We do not “restrict festival attendance to cisgendered womyn, prohibiting trans women” as was recently claimed in several Advocate articles. We do not and will not question anyone’s gender.

Oh really? Nancy Burkholder will be shocked to hear that. MichFest chased her out of the festival all the way back in 1991, and hasn’t apologized or changed its stance since then.

Rather, we trust the greater queer community to respect this intention, leaving the onus on each individual to choose whether or how to respect it.

This is one of the most noxiously passive aggressive sentences I have ever read. Basically, they refuse to call their policy a policy, refuse to provide any specifics or details on it, and then try to push off responsibility for it onto the heads of the people it is discriminating against. Their whole womyn-born-womyn stance is clearly meant to be inhospitable towards trans women, and it is disingenuous in the extreme to pretend otherwise. To then act as if it is the responsibility of trans women to sort through all the doubletalk and innuendo and police themselves on top of this is a really gross kind of cognitive judo throw.

Although this sentence is notable for how blunt and forward it is about its greasy manipulation, this tactic is not unknown to us: this is exactly how patriarchy operates. By attempting to create cognitive dissonance (you’re not banned, you’re just unwelcome!) to define the boundries, and then acting as if the oppressed have some kind of moral obligation to respect those boundaries is the foundational tactic of patriarchy, and it is deeply ironic that MichFest embraces it to such an enthusiastic degree.

Ours is a fundamental and respectful feminist statement about who this gathering is intended for, and if some cannot hear this without translating that into a “policy”, “ban” or a “prohibition”, this speaks to a deep-seated failure to think outside of structures of control that inform and guide the patriarchal world.

Or, you know, an ability to understand your words as you have said them.

Trans womyn and transmen have always attended this gathering.

Except for all the times they were kicked out, of course. And the times when they are not kicked out, what is their experience like? The authors do not say. Are they welcomed? Are they scorned? This is kind of an important point to clarify if they wish to claim trans women are granted full participation in the festival.

Some attend wanting to change the intention, while others feel the intention includes them. Deciding how the festival’s intention applies to each person is not what we’re about. 

Again, this is clearly disingenuous. MichFest has repeatedly stated that womyn-born-woymn refers to women who were “born and raised as girls” and has a history of asking trans women to leave the festival. They very much are in the business of deciding how the festivals “intention” (read: policy) applies to the attendees, even if they have moved on from expulsion to passive aggressive shaming. That lovely healing energy they’re so hot to talk up sure does clash with the scowls and intimations they send our way, doesn’t it?

Defining the intention of the gathering for ourselves is vital. Being born female in this culture has meaning, it is an authentic experience…

Okay, first of all, “authenticity” is a chimera that white liberals came up with. Beyond being snooty about what kind of salsa you’re willing to eat, it doesn’t really exist.

…one that has actual lived consequences.

Oh fuck you. Last year, I was fired for being a woman. Trans women endure all the consequences of being our gender that cis women do, only more severely and more frequently. We are one of the most at risk groups in the United States for rape, murder, and discrimination. Don’t fucking talk to us about consequences. We know consequences. Our attempted suicide rate is higher than any other demographic in the country. I do not know a single trans woman, not a single fucking one of us, who hasn’t been suicidal. Being suicidal is a rite of passage for us.

These experiences provide important context to the fabric of our lives, context that is chronically missing from the conversation about the very few autonomous spaces created for females.

Again, the conflation of being female with being cis. Here “autonomous spaces created for females” is implicitly cast as a trans-exclusionary concept. This right here is the nub of the trans community’s objection to MichFest. You cannot claim to be “for females” if you arbitrarily exclude a category of women. You cannot claim to be sympathetic to us while simultaneously denying our womanhood, our very identities.

This erasure is particularly mindboggling in a week when 276 girls were kidnapped and sold into sex slavery solely because they were female. This is the world females live in.

Can we pause and marvel for a moment at the chutzpah it takes for an organization made up of predominantly middle and upper class white American women to appropriate the pain and horror of an atrocity that happened to a poor black community halfway around the world?

There are many who are trying to forge a conversation that is based on open dialogue – both as a political value, and as the best tool to reduce divisions and build strong empathetic understanding and alliance.

Again, you cannot claim to be interested in anything even resembling empathy if your baseline position is that we are not female, that we don’t belong in female spaces, that we should not have access to the same celebration and healing as cis women.

We cannot allow the tactics of fear, bullying and harassment to control our community. We cannot stand by as people are harassed on Facebook and Twitter, as feminist artists and events are boycotted, communities are censured, and threats of violence are bandied around as acceptable speech.

Threats of violence are never acceptable, full stop. That there have been such incidents is despicable and destructive and I condemn them in the strongest possible terms. That being said, it is dishonest and unfair to speak of these incidents as if they are endorsed by the wider trans community. We do not accept this. We categorically reject it.

As is true in all of our home communities, the Michigan community is of many hearts and minds in this conversation, and we are committed to shifting our focus towards building alliances across our multi-faceted identities and beliefs.

How, exactly, does this concern us? Our objection is not that MichFest doesn’t do enough community; it’s that we are implicitly barred from entry. And further, I sincerely doubt the organizers of MichFest do care about building alliances, at least not with trans women, as they have again and again given us the cold shoulder.

We organized a series of workshops last year on the land that were a beautiful living model for how to forge dialogue, to speak to and hear one another through difference, to practice radical listening and to aid community building.

Sounds wonderful. What a shame trans women were shunned out of attending.

Hundreds of womyn participated, including trans womyn, and some of the most radical and healing work was created by womyn representing the full spectrum of perspectives on this and other complex gender identity issues.

Okay, when MichFest say trans women here, do they mean trans men? FAAB Genderqueers? What? Because given their emphasis on what people were “born as” (that is to say, assigned as upon birth) it sort of sounds like they mean “trans people who we think are women” but are actually men/something else. They throw this out here at the very end as if it means something, but they are so vague on the specifics, and so fanatically dedicated to avoiding making a clarifying statement about how trans women are to be treated while in attendance, or even if attendance is in fact allowed, that it really can’t be taken to mean anything.

Again and again we hear about their intention, but their commitment to avoid making specific policy declarations and calling them that means that the de facto policy cannot be criticized head on. Any time somebody tries, MichFest can just slip aside from the point by shrugging and saying “Policy? What policy?” It’s a dodge to avoid getting nailed down to a position that they might have to change. Instead they hare content to muddy the waters and rely on cognitive dissonance and a general sense of being unwelcome to keep the tranny population down. It’s a remarkably similar tactic to the ones used in male dominated spaces to marginalize women. Think of all the times you’ve heard about tech spaces saying they want to be “informal” and maintain “community standards” that don’t rely on codes of conduct. It’s the exact same thing.

We will continue this work at the 2014 Festival as we carry on our longstanding tradition of positive and radical discussions.

Yes, there will be endless conversations, endless dialog. Of course there will, because that is one of the best stalling tactics of a status quo.

We will continue to have these conversations face-to-face, heart-to-heart, not walled off from this difficult conversation or standing behind anonymous computer screens and keyboards.

My name is April Marlin Daniels and my email is on the contact page. There is no anonymity here.

We remain committed to always approaching at times complex and even divisive issues with compassion, love and respect.

Are you fucking kidding me?