Hey-a,

Sorry for joining the tribe and straightaway-posting without first getting to know you all. I wrote the following recently for a white, suburban-raised transwoman activist audience, but hadn't figured out yet where or how to distribute it. It's a bit long and contentious. Thought that this tribe would be as good as any to look for discussion and feedback. If you care to pass it on, feel free to do so. Please let me know where it heads and please give credit to "catuskoti." I hope you're all doing well and that I'm able to get to know some of yoos later.

All best wishes,

Amy

For a long time, I've been pretty outraged by the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival's prohibition against transwomen. It is weird, and wrong, I thought, for one group of marginalized and activist folk to preemptively exclude another group of marginalized and activist folk, especially on grounds that apparently appeal to retro-2nd wave feminist conceptions of essential womanhood.

Recently, I changed my mind, not because I no longer think it's depressing when marginalized people go all aggro against other marginalized people, but because I'm thinking that transwomen like me shouldn't uncritically claim marginality. I'm not saying that transwomen can't be marginalized, but that to the extent that we truly are, it's probably because of causes, like class or race, that have little if anything immediate to do with white suburban transwoman identities.

The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (www.michfest.com/) is a long-running, radical feminist festival where, I've heard, thousands of primarily white, suburb-raised women gather in the Michigan woods, grow and work together over the course of a week, listen to fan-friggin-tastic music, and party like Dionysian earth goddesses without having to police their bodies. The MWMF "experience," which is designed to tear down society's masculinist-domination structures and to create a space if only for one week of the year that affirms rather than subjugates women, wouldn't be possible if the festival wasn't strictly female-only.

In the 90s, with the growth of a vocal transgender civil rights movement, MWMF faced the same problem as other gender-segregated institutions (e.g., bathrooms, categories on driver's licenses and passports, etc.): how to respond to transgender people like me who refuse either to cover our identities or to suffer discrimination quietly. One of the main goals of our political movement has been to secure safe access to jobs, bathrooms, homes, etc. Radical feminist and LGBT organizations have been among our strongest supporters in this effort. But in the early 90s, MWMF coordinator and owner Lisa Vogol specified (specifically to bar transwomen) that invitations to attend MWMF extend only to "womyn-born womyn." Transgendered activists, who seem initially to have been primarily white, suburban-raised, and woman-identified, extended their/our usual arguments and activist program against the MWMF. Since we're all trying to overcome systems of gender policing, we argued, the MWMF policy is counter-productive and reactionary. Some claimed that it's just another instance of transphobic discrimination, straight-up. Others say that it's reinstituting the very gender categories that oppress women in the first place, or that it's trying in an outdated identity politics sort of way to "rank" marginalizations.

Some of our leading transwomen activists set up a protest site in the woods down the road from MWMF (camptrans.squarespace.com). For the past decade plus, the issue has bitterly divided sincere people in the radical feminist, lesbian, transgender, gender queer, etc. communities. It's also unfortunately injected a lot of bad blood into an otherwise kick ass and empowering music scene.

In hindsight, I think that transactivists have been wrong to think that any social institution that preemptively excludes transwomen is reactionary or discriminatory. Such a wholesale, one-size-fits-all political agenda ignores the possibility that white bourgeois people who are marked ideologically as female from birth and white bourgeois people who later adopt female significations may need different types of postcolonial healing.

I was caused to reflect recently on colonial and masculinist appetites after sitting in on a talk in Honolulu about the politics of dining rituals in British colonial-era India. It occurred to me, in a weirdly profound and immediate way, i.e., a lot more than it did before, that power locations not only structure the places we have open to us at or around dining tables, however metaphorically we want to think of these, but also our specific subconscious appetites. It's a lot easier, I realized, for people like me who were raised with gender/class/race, etc privilege to change our gendered bodies, the places that are open to us at dining tables, than it is to change our sub-consciousnesses, our particular hungers and styles of eating. Because of this, I'm thinking now that I and other transwomen who come from backgrounds similar to mine should perhaps think a bit more critically about our socio-cultural standpoints before we self-identify as marginalized with respect to women-born-women and/or presume that it's our business to go places we've been asked to stay out of.

At this specific time in America, normative white suburban masculinity is experienced as a series of internalized and projective prohibitions. My pre-transition white suburban transgendered identity was also experienced as this series of internalized and projective prohibitions, which I couldn't help but flaunt more or less in private. Several pretty intense traumas that weren't consciously related to my gender finally caused me to give up on the effort to keep this flaunting secret. What ever else it may be, my transgendered body is a symptom of this disillusionment. As much as it represents an effort to live without this internal and external policing, it also symbolizes a white suburban masculinity whose appetites and ideals have been traumatized by failed confrontations with reality. Maybe it's not how I would choose to self-identify, but it wouldn't be wrong to say that I am a walking, or typing, embodiment of white suburban American masculinity's nausea with its own colonialist appetites.

White suburban transwomen and white suburban woman-born women are both dumped on to preserve masculinist society's presumed invulnerability and inevitability. We've both been subject to this sort of disciplining from birth. We have, however, experienced it from different positions at society's colonial dining table. While people raised ideologically as white suburban men are taught habits of subconscious self-aggrandizement with respect to pretty much anyone else, people raised ideologically as white suburban women are taught to subconsciously indulge white suburban men's self-aggrandizing fantasies (while engaging in their own self-aggrandizing fantasies with respect to pretty much everyone else). We may therefore need different types of psychological, political, and spiritual healing with respect to one another. The MWMF gives womyn-born womyn political and psychological space to counter subconscious self-negating habits. Perhaps, to thrive as transwomen, people like me need space to counter our self-aggrandizing habits in relation to womyn-born-womyn? And, perhaps, any self-aggrandizing habits that we (surely) have left, could potentially spoil the MWMF for those who need the specific type of rehabilitation it offers?

Please do not think that I am in any way making light of transgendered women's healing needs. I don't know a transgendered woman who doesn't understand profoundly what it means to hurt. We are students of pain, delivered by our own hands, by our families and by society. But this doesn't mean that our hurts are caused, in the same way that the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival is prompted, by marginalization. Whatever else it may have going for it music and fun-wise, the MWMF gives people who have been raised to subconsciously abnegate themselves in relation to white bourgeois men space to affirm their bodies, their voices, and themselves. Though transwomen like me may have self-deprecating habits, this may not be the particular space that our suburb-raised psyches need to go for healing. Perhaps our healings need to involve a certain willingness to sometimes be kicked out of certain clubs.

Though it is not any less painful, perhaps our hurt is not of the marginalized but of the tragic. Oedipus walked blind like other beggars. But his experience was not a straightforward symptom of socially repressive conventions, because he wasn't born into that social location. He was power pushed by nausea to hold itself to account. Because there is this persistent subconscious difference, I'm thinking now that I, and people who tread a life path similar to mine, shouldn't presume a right to participate in white suburban women's' healing festivals simply because we have recoiled, to some extent, like Oedipus, from conscious recognition of the gluttonies that are inherent to the social positions that were our unnatural birthright.

The crux of this claim rests, I think, in the realization that all white suburban masculinist identities, and not just repressed white suburban transgender ones, are both self-disciplining and inevitable failures. The stock masculinist response is to cover up these failures, to push them into the private, into the subconscious, and to simultaneously project them onto external others, who only then become marginalized. This psychological strategy allows white suburban males to feel safe and secure in what are ultimately artificially sustained and purely ideological social fantasies.

White suburban-raised transwomen need healing festivals, like white suburban raised genetic women, and self-loathing definitely isn't an enviable place to be. But I'm thinking of these thoughts, and of my body, now more as a critique of white surburban masculinism, and a tangibly scarred one at that, than as something pitiable or regretful. This isn't, I don't think, especially or signficantly self-loathing. I think of it as a caution to myself and to other white suburban transgender women. Since the stock masculinist response to white suburban masculinity's failures is to push these failures into the subconscious, and to project them on to others, I worry that when we white suburban transwomen disassociate ourselves entirely from masculinity, and unreflectively claim marginalized status, we risk allowing this covering up and projecting work to take a new form, while enabling our colonialist appetites to stay intact.

By recognizing ourselves as tragic, rather than as marginalized, maybe we could lay out the contours for a productive social, political, and spiritual agenda for ourselves, which would, I think, complement but still be importantly different from, the healing agendas needed by other populations? White suburban masculinity needs increased habits of vulnerability to break out of its gluttony for perpetually safe spaces. But this is definitely not what "marginalized" people, people who have been brought up to be subconscious incitements to violence, need. Maybe the "tragedy" of post-hoc marginalization is for us productive, even desirable, and the only thing separating suburban white men from white suburban transwomen is that, unlike Oedipus or Lear, the former haven't had the courage to accept the inescapable tragedy of their existences?

I've used a lot of "we" language here, though I don't care for it. This is because I want to stress that this isn't just about my "own" angst with white suburban masculinity, or my "own" white suburban masculine subconscious. I'm talking about a masculinity that is necessarily social. It will be consciously understood and experienced differently by particular white, able-bodied, suburban transgendered women. But because we live in a gender-structured society, and we were marked bodily as white, suburban, and male, we can't help but to have experienced some of its aspects. We'd be fooling ourselves, I think in a dangerously self-aggrandizing way, to think that we hadn't "really" experienced white suburban masculinity or hadn't been shaped to some extent subconsciously by it. If we have internalized transphobia, we have this internalized masculinity, and it is our psychological, political, and spiritual calling, the calling of all suburban white men, to get over it. I'm thinking these days that subconscious bodywork that helps to accept inevitable tragedy may be one way to do this. But greater tolerance for uncertainty and loss of control is not the "healing" that the intended participants of the MWMF need. We should therefore stay out and hope the people who are welcome at MWMF have fun at the party.