Unless you’ve spent some time as a lesbian or perhaps are the sort of straight lady who enjoys the music, politics, and occasional abandoning of the menfolk that a particularly earthy strain of “women’s culture” offers, you’ve probably never heard of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MWMF). It ran for forty years, taking place each August on a lush chunk of woodland in northern Michigan, planned to coincide with summer’s final full moon. While womyn’s music is the festival’s alleged purpose—the guitar stylings of folksters like Holly Near and Cris Williamson as well as post-riot grrrl acts like Bitch and Animal, the Butchies, and Le Tigre, to draw in the younger generation—the real purpose is to hunker down in a forest with a few thousand other females, bond, have sex in a fern grove, and go to countless workshops on everything from sexual esoterica to parading around on stilts, processing various oppressions, and sharing how much you miss your cat. The festival aims to be a utopia, and in most ways, it hits its mark. Performers are paid well and all are paid the same amount, regardless of whether they’re the Indigo Girls or some virtually unknown girl band. You can come for free as a worker, taking on jobs like childcare, kitchen work, or driving shuttles on and off the land, but even women who pay hundreds of dollars to attend are required to pull their weight by picking up a couple of work shifts. The only dudes allowed in the space are the ones who rumble in late at night in giant trucks, to vacuum the sludge from the hundreds of porta potties, called porta Janes. They are preceded by a woman who hollers, “Man on the land! Man on the land!”—a warning to skittish nymphs to hop into a tent or bush. I’ve been to the festival four or five times and can attest to the deeply stunning feeling of safety and peace there. The absence of guys does make for an absence of threat; everyone’s guard is down, finally, and a relaxation level is hit that is probably impossible to access in the real world. Pretty much everyone who attends bursts into tears at some point, saddened at all the psychic garbage that females are forced to lug around and grateful for a week of respite. It’s no wonder the women who come to the festival are zealots about it, live for August, and get totally obsessed with and protective of the culture that springs up within its security-patrolled boundaries.
In 1991 a transgender woman named Nancy Jean Burkholder was evicted from MWMF. Nancy Jean’s eviction is famous in Michigan lore, for it sparked a fierce debate about the inclusion of trans women, which has been raging for decades. A lot of cis women inside the festival want to keep them out. Some staunchly insist that these individuals are not women but men in dresses trying to ruin the feminist event. Others concede that trans women are women, but because they were “born boys” and may still have penises, the festival is not the place for them. Trans women and their growing number of allies say these “feminist” justifications are straight-up discrimination and no different from the rest of the world, which routinely denies that trans women are “real” women and bars their access to everything from jobs to housing, domestic-violence counseling, and health care. Off and on for the past decade, a small group of trans people and their supporters have set up a protest camp, Camp Trans, across the road from MWMF, in the hopes of changing the policy that left Nancy Jean stranded in the Midwest twelve years ago.
“I appreciate women’s space, and after checking with festival literature, I couldn’t see that I wasn’t welcome. I had talked to people, and their opinion was, if you think of yourself as a woman, you’re welcome. I’d gone with a friend of mine, Laura. We drove out together, and we were number thirty-three in line. We got there early; we were really excited about going. We set up camp up in Bread & Roses. It’s kind of the quiet area. Then we each did a work shift, shuttle duty. Hauling people from the front all the way back. That evening Laura was having a friend come in on the shuttle bus from Grand Rapids, so we walked down to the gate about nine p.m. to meet the bus. Turned out the bus was late and didn’t get there till about eleven. We were hanging out at the fire pit, [we] just kind of joined the group of people who were hanging out and talking. When the bus came in at eleven, Laura went up to the gate to meet her friend, and I waited by the fire pit. At that point a couple of women approached me and asked if I knew that this was a festival for women. It kind of surprised me. I said, ‘Yeah, uh-huh.’ About that time Laura was coming back, so I asked her to come over; something didn’t seem right about what these women were asking. I think one of them asked me if I was transsexual. I said, ‘My history is none of your business.’ I asked, ‘Why are you asking?’ and she said that transsexuals weren’t welcome. I think I remember saying, ‘Are you sure? How do you know?’ And so she went at that point and talked to the festival producers. She came back in about an hour; it took a while. She said that transsexuals were not welcome at the festival, and was I transsexual? At one point I offered to show them my driver’s license, which said female, and also to drop my drawers, and she said, ‘I wouldn’t be comfortable with that.’ Which I thought was kind of off, given the amount of nudity at the festival. She asked again, ‘Are you transsexual?’ and I said, ‘It’s none of your business.’ At that point she said, ‘Well, I’m empowered to expel any woman, at any time, for any reason. You have to leave.’ I knew there was no arguing with them.
“They wouldn’t let me leave the area around the main gate. Instead, Laura went with a couple of festival security guards back out to my campsite, scooped up all of my equipment, and brought it back to the main gate. It must have been about one o’clock in the morning by then. They arranged for us to stay at a motel in Hart [Michigan]; I think we got there around two o’clock. And it was a dump. It was cold, there was mildew in the carpet, [it was] wet, trucks running by on Route 10. I couldn’t believe it. I was devastated. The next day, Laura took me down to Grand Rapids, and I paid for a plane ticket and flew home to New England. I flew to Worcester, Massachusetts, and Laura’s partner arranged for a taxi to take me back to their house, where my car was. Laura went back to the festival for two reasons: she was doing a workshop, and also she went back to tell my friends what happened to me. Otherwise I would have disappeared without a trace. One of the friends she told was Janis Walworth. Janis and Laura spent the rest of the festival talking to people and telling them what happened. I was back in New Hampshire, and I called Gay Community News, a newspaper in Boston, to tell them what happened. I think they were a little taken aback and weren’t quite sure what to do with this. They did say, ‘If you want to write an editorial, we’ll publish it.’ So, Laura wrote a letter to the editor, and they published it with my editorial, and we took up a whole page in the newspaper. That kind of started the whole controversy.
“The important piece that doesn’t always get reported is that Janis organized a bunch of people to go back in 1992. She brought her sister, a male-to-female post-operative transsexual, and also an intersex person and a butch female. They distributed buttons and leaflets and did a survey. The survey indicated that seventy-two percent approved of transsexuals being at the festival. Twenty-three percent did not, for a variety of reasons. Out of that, Janis categorized the reasons why people didn’t want transsexuals, and she compiled gender myths, twenty-four of them.”
I’m reading Jane magazine because my plane could, of course, crash; this could be my last moment alive, and I will not deny myself the small delight. Jane is the most innocent of the guilty pleasure that is women’s magazines, as it at least aspires toward a sensibility affirming that women shouldn’t look starved for cheeseburgers and that gay people are cool. Printed beneath a small column in which the actor who plays the exchange student on That ’70s Show gives advice to lovelorn teenage girls is this bit of information:
Wesleyan University now offers the nation’s first “gender-blind” dorm for students who don’t label themselves as male or female.
I am headed to Camp Trans, now in the tenth year of its on-again, off-again standoff with the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival across the road. Started by Nancy Jean and friends in the years after her eviction, the protest camp faded away in the mid-nineties. A new generation of young transgender activists picked up the torch in 1999 and resumed the confrontational face-off. In the scant four years since, there has been an unprecedented boom in people openly identifying as trans, mostly female-assigned people transitioning to male or staking out genderqueer territory. Flocking to Camp Trans for both the political struggle and the party, these new activists have changed the outpost in significant ways. The focus of the Camp Trans struggle in recent years has drifted from its original intention of getting trans women into women-only and lesbian spaces. Trans men have generally been welcome, if not totally fetishized, by contemporary dyke communities, particularly in young, urban enclaves. The same is not true for trans women, even lesbian trans women. This influx of trans guys and their lesbian admirers at Camp Trans has not only alienated many of the trans women there but it’s also blown up attendance so high they can no longer set up across the street from the festival gates. The encampment is now located up the road a bit, in a forest-lined field between the music festival and a nudist camp.
I’ve never been to Camp Trans, though I stopped attending MWMF a few years back, too conflicted about this exclusion of trans women. Today I’m picked up at the airport by a girl named Ana Jae who volunteered to get me so she can get the hell out of the woods. Ana hates camping; she says the bugs are attacking like mad and it’s really bad when you drop your shorts to piss and they start fluttering around your bare ass. Ana can’t use the porta potties because she’s been traumatized by the 1980s B-horror flick Sleepaway Camp II, in which terrible things happen within one fetid plastic chamber, so she is forced to piddle among the bugs. I’m antsy to hear about the mood at Camp Trans, and Ana confirms that trans men far outnumber trans women. She also complains about a general devaluing of femininity in the young, post-dyke queer scene, and tells me about a sex party the night before that somehow went awry, which is this morning’s main drama. Our immediate drama is that we get outrageously, wildly lost on the way back to the woods, careening through quaint Michigan townships for hours, hopelessly passing farm stands selling fresh vegetables, rows of exploding sunflowers and cornstalks, trees and trees and more trees, gigantic willows with long whipping branches that drape and swag, and large single-family homes with porches and pools and tractors in their front yards. We know that we’ve unscrambled our cryptic directions when we pass a gas station that has a flapping sign that says, WELCOME WOMYN in its parking lot and loads of sporty females loading cases of beer into their cars. We follow a camper with a bumper sticker that reads SEE YOU NEXT AUGUST down a road so heavily traveled that the foliage lining it is coated with a thick dusting of brown dirt like an apocalyptic snowfall. We pass the front gates of MWMF and see its huge parking lot crammed with vehicles, women in neon-orange vests directing the flow of females through the entrance, and we keep going. It’s a disappointment not to see Camp Trans boldly stationed there at the mouth of the festival, and I wonder how saliently its political point can be made tucked out of sight, around the curving road. The former vigil has turned into a sort of alternative festival, one that’s free of charge and that a lot of MWMF attendees mistake for a happy, friendly, separate-but-equal campsite. A place for dykes who think trans guys are hot to spend a night cruising and partying and then return to their gated community up the road. For the trans women relying on Camp Trans as a site of protest, this new incarnation—as a sort of spring break for trans guys and the dykes who date them—has been infuriating. Which is why Sadie Crabtree, a trans woman and activist from Washington, DC, has emerged as the sort of leader this year. It is her intention, backed up by the other organizers, to bring the focus of Camp Trans back on the trans women it was originally meant to serve.
Everyone who comes to Camp Trans, either to camp or visit from MWMF on a day pass, has to pause at the welcome tent and check in, and the MWMF attendees who arrive tonight for entertainment are charged three dollars. Behind a table made from boards and sawhorses sit a couple of Camp Trans welcomers, women doing their work shifts and acclimating visitors to their new environment. Like the festival across the way, everyone here is expected to lend a hand. The camp isn’t nearly as large as the music festival—MWMF’s parking lot is bigger than Camp Trans’s entire area—but it still takes a lot of work to make it run. I spy a kitchen tent with a mess of pots and pans and water jugs strewn before it. Another tent is garlanded with Christmas lights that are beginning to shine as the hot summer sun sets. This is the performance area, bulked out with DJ and other sound equipment. There’s a medic tent and a roped-off area for “advocates,” armbanded individuals whose job is to answer touchy questions, listen to complaints, and defuse conflicts.
At the welcome tent, I sign in on a form that doubles as a petition to drop the MWMF’s womyn-born-womyn policy. I’m handed a slip of paper welcoming me to Camp Trans. It reads:
Camp Trans is an annual protest against the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival’s policy that bars transsexual women from attending. MWMF’s so-called “womyn-born-womyn” policy sets a transphobic standard for women-only spaces across the country, and contributes to an environment in women’s and lesbian communities where discrimination against trans women is considered acceptable. For trans women who are consistently refused help from domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centers, this is a matter of life and death.
Some poster boards are stuck with Post-it notes that outline each day’s workshops and meetings, another is cluttered with bright notes soliciting amour in the woods. One bemoans a throat atrophied with lack of use and another is looking for couples to participate in a Floridian-retiree role-play. Interested parties can respond by slipping scrawled replies into corresponding envelopes. There are zines for sale, silk-screened patches that say, “Camp Trans Supporter” in heavy-metal letters, buttons that squeak, “I ♥ Camp Trans,” and T-shirts that say, “Not Gay as in Happy but Queer as in Fuck You.” There is also a notebook labeled “Letters to Lisa Vogel.”
Lisa Vogel is the sole captain of the SS Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. There is no one but her behind the wheel; she wrote the policy, and she is the only one who can lift it. Of the many rumors I hear this weekend, most involve her. One says that she offered Camp Trans a sum of money somewhere between $7,500 and $75,000 to start their own damn festival. This is totally unlikely, as her own festival is suffering financially. Another rumor quotes Vogel as saying trans women will be allowed into her festival over her dead body, an extreme pledge. Who knows what’s true. Vogel is famously tight-lipped about the whole controversy and has never made an attempt to negotiate with Camp Trans. In the face of past protests, she has simply reiterated the policy, which, I also hear, has suddenly been removed from all MWMF web pages. There is a lot of speculation on what this means, but no one is naive enough to believe that the policy has been dropped and trans women are now welcome. More likely the immense controversy, which now involves not only a boycott of the festival but also of the performers, is wearing on festival producers and targets for attack are being shuffled out of the line of fire.
Behind the tree line is the campsite, and the arc of green has been segmented into “loud substance,” which means campers are getting bombed and fucking right outside your tent; “loud no substance,” meaning sober people lashed to trees and moaning loudly; and “quiet no substance,” which means everyone sleeps. This is where I camp. I actually unknowingly plop my tent right in the center of a sand patch being used for AA meetings. Next to me is a camper van all tricked out with a sink and a fridge, the outside painted checkerboard. It looks straight out of Fast Times at Ridgemont High and, lo and behold, is occupied by my friend Chris, who is out on his makeshift patio smoking a lot of pot and triggering the substance-free campers. He’s sharing his pipe with a lesbian named Mountain, who lives on a women-only commune in Oregon that has successfully integrated trans women into their home. Essentially, it is no big whoop. Life goes on, wimmin are still wimmin, they still tend their organic garden and print their lunar calendars and life is good. Mountain is one of those women who live for Michigan, so it’s a real big deal that she’s not there this year. She’s here at Camp Trans in solidarity.
People are scurrying around, full of excited purpose. Tonight is the big dance and performance, and an influx of girls from MWMF will increase the number of people on the land. Camp Trans’s population, which hovers at around seventy-five, will shoot up to over a hundred with the visitors, which is nothing compared with the eight thousand or so women hunkered down in the vast woods across the way. Sadie is dashing around, all stressed out. She’s got a sweet, kind face with sparkly eyes and short hair; her all-black outfits seem like military gear, especially with the big, black women’s-symbol-clenched-in-raised-fist tattoo on her shoulder. She’s still dealing with fallout from last night’s sex party, and now she’s just found a note from a Camp Transer looking to host a Camp Trans workshop inside MWMF, where trans women can’t go. There is a feeling that the action is spinning out of the organizer’s hands, and she’s upset that a so-called Camp Trans event would happen somewhere trans women aren’t allowed. Sadie, needing a drink, bustles off with tears in her eyes.
“One problem was that some festival attendees were unclear on the mission of Camp Trans and didn’t see it as a protest but rather as a part of their Michigan experience. Kind of a suburb of MWMF where fest attendees could go to hang out with hot tranny boys. That’s another problem—the fascination with and fetishization of FTMs in some dyke communities makes trans women even more invisible. At least one fest attendee last year spoke openly about how she totally supported Camp Trans and loved trans guys but just didn’t like trans women. We tried to solve some of those problems this year by having a very clear mission statement on all of the Camp Trans materials, providing suggested talking points for all campers, and having discussions about the experiences of trans women at Camp Trans. We had volunteer advocates whose job it was to listen to people’s concerns—especially those of trans women—and help organizers plan solutions. Another thing we did was designate certain workshops and decompression areas ‘wristband-free zones’ where MWMF attendees were asked not to go. Having a space to retreat from interactions with fest attendees was a need that had been expressed by trans women last year, but it also sent a message. It wasn’t to stigmatize festival attendees, but to help people think a little more critically about what it means to give hundreds of dollars to a transphobic organization for permission to do activism inside, what it means to speak in a space where others’ voices are forbidden, what it’s like to have a space that specifically excludes you. When people asked about the wristband-free spaces, we offered them scissors. You have that choice. Some people don’t.”
Another MWMF policy forbids male voices on the land, meaning no one is allowed to slip a Michael Jackson tape into their boom box and start moonwalking. Perhaps it also means the porta-potty men take a vow of silence when they roar through the gate, who knows. This rule has been broken, or bent, with the rise of drag kings—female performers who costume themselves as men, both lampooning and celebrating masculinity in a sort of burlesque, often via lip-synchs. When, some years back, the Florida drag king troupe House of Ma took a MWMF side stage during a talent show, the audience was given warning that a male voice would boom from the sound system shortly. Offended women hightailed it out of the vicinity, one step ahead of Neil Diamond. This, of course, is not an issue at Camp Trans, so the music is a little more varied—better—on this side of the road. The dance party underway on the patch of sandy brown earth designated as both “stage” and “dance floor” is shaking to Dr. Dre and Gossip, Motörhead and Peaches, Billy Idol, Northern State, Ludacris, and FannyPack. I’m standing beside Benjamin, a genderqueer boy. His hair is an architecture of multiple pieces that look like feather dusters protruding from his scalp in feathery pom-poms. “Everyone is so beautiful,” he muses at the crowd, and he is right. Mostly young, like late teens and twenties, they are kicking up Pig Pen-sized clouds of dust as they dance in their silver plastic pants and marabou-trimmed spandex, their starchy crinolines and pink ruffled tuxedo shirts, their neon-orange nighties, push-up bras, and outfits constructed from shredded trash bags and duct tape. Everyone is gleeful, happy to be smashing the gender binary, to be partying down for a cause, to be part of a revolution of good-looking gender-ambiguous people. In the process of deconstructing gender identity, I muse, sexual preference may become obsolete. Maybe I’m just trampy, but I’m attracted to pretty much everyone here.
Showtime starts with an introduction by an organizer named Jess who instructs the crowd—part Camp Transers, part festiegoers—on proper behavior while in such an unusual space, a space where trans people outnumber cis people. Because last year’s visitors didn’t understand how to act, this year we get a tiny schooling. Do not assume anyone’s pronouns. There’s really no way of guessing at who is a “he” and who is a “she,” and besides all that, there are loads of genderqueer people promoting the use of a third pronoun, “ze.” Others say to hell with pronouns altogether and dare us to be more creative in how we refer to them. Also, Jess instructs, do not ask anyone rude questions about their bodies. If you’re bursting with curiosity or just freaking out, please see an armbanded advocate.
First there are skits, one of which demonstrates the simple cruelty of turning trans women away from the festival gates. Another enacts the traumatizing experience of having perfect strangers trot up to you and inquire about the state of your genitals because you are transgender and expected to answer this. Last-minute creations, the skits are shaky but effective. The audience ripples out from the spotlighted performance area, sitting in the dirt, getting hopped on by grasshoppers and crickets and weird brown beetles with little wings folded beneath their shells. A moth as big as a sparrow keeps charging into one of the light dishes glowing up from the ground. A gang of women come out, all dressed in trash bags and duct tape. They are the Fat-Tastics, and they deliver a smart performance about fat power and fat oppression, ending in an empowering cheer replete with pom-poms fashioned from more shredded garbage bags. A duo of either trans boys or genderqueers dressed like Gainsborough’s Blue Boy enact a randy ballet. Nomy Lamm, an artist who has organized a petition for artists who oppose MWMF’s policy, howls heartbreaking songs into the warm night, accompanied by a honking accordion. The camp feels like some medieval village on a pagan holiday, bodies close in the darkness, being serenaded by a girl in striped tights and crinoline, harlequin eye makeup shooting stars down her cheeks. Benjamin is a total trooper when the CD he’s lip-synching to keeps skipping and skipping and skipping. Eventually Julia Serano reads. Julia is a trans woman and spoken-word poet. She’s got a girl-next-door thing going on, with strawberry-blond hair and a sprinkling of freckles. She performs a piece about her relationship with her girlfriend. It’s got sweet and honest humor, and it charms the crowd. Then she recites another, “Cocky”:
and if i seem a bit cocky
well that’s because i refuse
to make apologies for my body
anymore
i am through being the human sacrifice
offered up to appease other
people’s gender issues
some women have a penis
some men don’t
and the rest of the world
is just going to have to get the
fuck over it
Julia gets a standing ovation, everyone hopping up and brushing the dirt off their asses, brushing crickets from their chests, hooting and hollering at the poet as she leaves the “stage” and falls into a hug with her girlfriend and Sadie.
“As part of Camp Trans, so much of our work is dedicated to convincing the women who attend MWMF that trans women won’t flaunt their penises on the land or that we won’t commit acts of violence against other women. I have yet to meet a trans woman who has acted violently toward another woman and/or flaunted their penis in public, but I know I need to take the MWMF attendees’ concerns seriously in order to gain their trust. At the same time, to borrow an analogy, it’s like someone of Middle Eastern descent having to convince every person on a flight that s/he won’t hijack the plane in order to be allowed on board.
“Having talked to several festivalgoers, I was distressed at how often people centered the debate around ‘the penis.’ Everyone talked about the significance of penises’ being on the land, without much acknowledgment that these so-called penises are attached to women’s bodies.
“Like most trans women, I have a lot of issues surrounding both my penis and the fact that I was born a boy. I have worked through too much self-loathing about these aspects of my person to allow other people to throw salt on my open wounds. It has taken me a long time to reach the point where I can accept my penis as simply being a part of my flesh and tissue, rather than the ultimate symbol of maleness. I find it confusing that so many self-described feminists spend so much effort propagating the male myth that men’s power and domination arises from the phallus.
“It was surreal to have MWMF festivalgoers talk to me about their fear that transsexual women would bring masculine energy onto the land one minute, then the next tell me that they never would have guessed that I was born a man.
“I also found it distressing that so many women would want to exclude me (a woman) from women’s space, under the pretense that my body contains potential triggers for abuse survivors. That line of reasoning trivializes the abuse that trans women face day in, day out. I have been verbally and physically assaulted by men for being who I am. Like other women, I have had men force themselves upon me. In addition, I can’t think of a more humiliating way to be raped by male culture than to be forced to grow up as a boy against one’s will. Every trans woman is a survivor, and we have triggers too. The phrase ‘womyn-born-womyn’ is one of my triggers.”
One thing I made damn sure to do before leaving civilization was to brew a two-liter container of coffee, and it is this I reach for when I wake up. My tent is already starting to bake as I scramble into some jeans, grab my toothbrush, and stumble out into the searing sunlight. I am the only camper—the only camper!—who did not camp in the shade behind the tree line. I set up in front of the trees—the scary trees that I imagined were dripping ticks, ticks poisoned with Lyme disease, the disgusting trees where many spiders live, the trees with their carpet of old leaves slowly rotting away, where mice no doubt burrow and any number of things that bite can be found. No, I arranged my borrowed tent right in the direct sun. Not so smart.
The smart campers are emerging from their shaded glens, getting right into their cars, and driving the fuck to the lake. There’s a lake nearby and a creek too, and everyone I speak to confirms that going to the lake is definitely part of the “Camp Trans experience” I am hoping to document and they urge me to hop in for a swim. I am beyond tempted to ride along, to float in the lake in my underwear under the guise of journalism, but I am too scared of missing out on some crucial bit of drama. The vibe at Camp Trans is intense, flammable like the parched ground beneath our various feet. Something is bound to happen, and I can’t be splashing around like a fool when it does.
I’m standing at the welcome tent when two MWMF workers show up. One is a femme girl with curly red hair, a cowboy hat, and glamorous sunglasses; the other is a butch girl in thick horn-rims and a baseball hat. They carry a box of zines they’ve made, a compilation of the various opinions held by the women who work the festival across the road. The femme girl hands it off to the Camp Trans welcome worker. “It’s our effort at having some dialogue,” she says, or something like that. She seems a little shy, scared probably, and I have a few thoughts watching the welcome worker accept the gift, a caul of skepticism on her face. I think the festies are brave to come over with a box of MWMF opinions, I think the opinions are probably already well known to Camp Trans campers, I think shit is going to hit the fan and these workers and their good intentions are going to get creamed. The two festival workers walk off to the side, lean against a parked car, light cigarettes, and hang out. I stick a zine in my back pocket and head over to a tent for the morning meeting.
The morning meetings are a rundown of what’s happening that day, a space for people to make announcements. A sort of exhilaration is blowing through the crowd as word of the zine, or the zine itself, hits them. People are hunched over, their faces stuck in the xeroxed pages, gasping. It doesn’t look good. Simon Strikeback, a camp organizer and one of the activists who resuscitated Camp Trans after Nancy and company let it go, is facilitating the gathering. He says yes, there can be a circle to process the zine. He announces some other events—a workshop called “Feminism and the Gender Binary,” which I plan to check out despite its terrifying title. A dreadlocked white girl with facial piercings announces that she has anarchist T-shirts for sale and is looking for partners to hitchhike to Mexico for an anti-globalization rally. Someone else holds up a silk screen emblazoned with a Camp Trans image designed by the cartoonist Ariel Schrag and asks for help screen printing T-shirts. I announce that I’m attending the festival as a member of the press. It’s a good-faith thing I did at Sadie’s request, so that everyone knows what’s up and people who think it’s terrible and exploitative that I am writing about their camp can glare at me from afar and not wind up in my story without their consent. I’m even wearing a dorky sticker that says PRESS in red Sharpie. I try to remedy suspicious looks by volunteering to help clean up breakfast over at the kitchen tent.
There’s not much to do until the water gets here. There are various pans covered with muck swiftly getting baked on by this relentless sun of ours. There is a giant bucket of beets that people are wondering what to do with. I move it into the shade, sure it’ll keep a bit longer. In another bucket a whole bunch of beans soak, plumping up for tonight’s chili dinner. I’m told to cull the rotten vegetables from the vegetable boxes, so I join the others inside the tent. There is an abundance of vegetables, mostly donated from a co-op several states away: cardboard boxes of squash, zucchini, bulbs of garlic. I deal with a plastic bag filled with liquefying basil, pulling the top leaves, still green, from the blackening herb below. The stuff that’s no good—the dried-up rosemary and yellowed cilantro, the split tomatoes and the peppers sprouting cottony tufts of mold—all get tossed into the compost. A woman is picking beets as large as a child’s head and slicing off their wilting greens with a knife. When she discovers a mouse inside the beet box, she shrieks. “Oh, that’s no good,” says the person culling squash beside me. “You can get really sick. I ate food contaminated with mouse shit once, and I got really, really sick.” We try to scare the mouse away, but it just burrows deeper into the beets. I leave the tent, walk behind it, and pull the beet box out backward, into the grass. The mouse leaps out and scrambles into the forest. We look for visible mouse turd, but everything is sort of brown and crumbly from the dirty beets. I decide not to eat a bite of the Camp Trans food while I’m there. I’m too worried about getting a tick in my armpit to take on the additional neurosis of hantavirus. I’ve got six energy bars stuffed in my suitcase, two packs of tuna, and a few cans of chili. That’s what I’ll be eating.
Deciding that I saved the day by ridding us of the mouse, I retire from my cleanup duties. It’s too hot; I need some tuna or I’ll get heatstroke. I stop by Chris’s stoner van to glob a bit of cool, refrigerated mustard into my tuna and listen to his instructions that I gulp down at least fifteen gulps of water each time I hit my bottle. That’s the number: fifteen. “Till your stomach’s all bloated,” he advises. I do as he says. His little dog Poi, who looks just like Benji, has burrowed a cool hole beneath the van and lies there, panting.
I am very glad I didn’t go to the lake. Now we sit in a ring, in a small, shaded clearing not far from where I’ve camped, a bunch of Camp Trans campers and the two festival workers who delivered the box of zines. The zine is called Manual Transmission, and people hate it. It’s an anthology, essentially, of festival workers’ opinions on the trans-inclusion issue. There is talk about throwing the box of them onto that evening’s campfire, a good old-fashioned book burning. Ana Jae is set to facilitate the discussion, and Benjamin is by her side, “taking stack,” which I think means keeping a list of everyone who raises a hand to speak so that everyone gets a chance to.
Excerpts from Manual Transmission:
Let’s be clear about what womyn born womyn means. It’s not about defining a goddamn thing. It is about saying this is what I’m gathering around for this particular moment. It is saying that this festival, this period in time, is for women whose entire life experience has been as a girl and who still live loudly as a woman. Period. How is that defining you? Why do you think we are so ignorant as to not “get” that, to not figure out that we also have privilege for not struggling with a brain/body disconnect? But can you be so obstinate, can you be so determined to not understand that we have an experience that is outside yours? And that that experience, even though we have greater numbers, still entitles us to take separate space?
Dicks are not useless signifiers. Even unwanted ones. You who I love and call my community of political bandits, you who grew up being seen as, treated as, regarded as boys (and perhaps miserably failing that performance) you did not grow as I. You did not experience being held out as girl and cropped into that particular box. You gotta understand, you are my sister, but you don’t have that experience. And taking my experience and saying it is yours don’t make it yours, [it] makes it stolen.
“This is bullshit, in my opinion,” Ana Jae states. The overall feeling about the zine and its arrival is, first, “We know this already,” and second, “How dare you bring it into this space that we are trying to keep free from such hurtful sentiments?” People take turns expressing themselves.
HITCHHIKING ANARCHIST GIRL: takes issue with a passage defending MWMF’s $350 entrance fee, calling it classist.
SIMON: is frustrated, only open to discussing changing the policy, sick to death of back-and-forth arguing about penises and girlhoods.
GUY TO MY LEFT: generously concedes that the festie workers had good intentions but delivered a flawed product.
FESTIE WORKERS: admit they were rushed and that, though they specified no submissions degrading or attacking trans people would be published, they did not get to read all of the writings. They feel bad for the discord their zine has caused but maintain that these are the opinions of workers inside the festival, like it or not: they didn’t feel it was proper to censor anyone’s thoughts—who can dictate what is right and what is wrong?
SADIE: maintains that, as an activist, it’s her job to declare her views the good and right and true views; she is only interested in talking to people who agree and want to help further the cause.
FESTIE WORKERS: weakly remind everyone of their good intentions.
GIRL TO MY RIGHT, IN A WHEELCHAIR: offers that she is hurt every day by people with good intentions.
FEMME FESTIE WORKER: cries; doesn’t know how to help this situation.
GIRL I CAN’T SEE: says that it’s everyone’s responsibility to educate themselves on trans issues.
GIRL WITH CAMOUFLAGE BANDANNA: sympathizes with how painful the education process can be; urges please don’t let that stop you from learning.
There’s a lot of fear here, people afraid of each other, afraid of their own ability to do the wrong thing from simple ignorance, their own ability to bungle a peace offering, to offend the person they sought to help. It starts to rain. Light at first, and then heavy. The weather out here can turn violent in a finger snap, the dust suddenly flooding into muddy ponds, the sky cracking thunderbolts and sending threads of lightning scurrying across the cloud cover, occasionally touching down and setting a tree on fire. I run back to my tent and fling the rain cover over it, and by the time I get back to the circle it’s over—the process, the rain, all of it. I talk briefly with a girl I know from my previous Augusts at the festival where she’s usually been a worker. Last year she caught a lot of shit for taking a festival van over to Camp Trans for a date, so this year she’s camping here, back in the trees where everyone seems to have gone. I go back to my tent to grab a notebook. Inside it is hot and smells strongly of sulfur, like hell itself. I take my notebook back to the now-empty clearing, sit in someone’s abandoned camp chair, and write some notes.
Geyl Forcewind is a lanky punk rock trans woman with a red anarchy sign sewed onto her ratty T-shirt. A good radiance sort of shines off of Geyl. Her combat boots are patched with gummy straps of duct tape; she spits a lot and cracks jokes. She collapses into the chair next to me and asks how my “project” is going. She’s teasing me, I think, but her timing is perfect because I wanted to talk to someone about the proliferation of trans men and the small numbers of trans women or genderqueer people who enjoy the trappings of femininity. I love girls, I love girl-ness, and though I love trans men—my boyfriend is trans—I wish there were more females around these genderqueer parts. The face of the trans revolution is, presently, a bearded one. “Riot grrrl made being a dyke accessible,” Geyl reflects, “and now those people are seeing that they can be genderqueer and it’s not so scary. There’s none of that for MTFs.” Pam, a trans woman who had been quietly strumming her acoustic guitar in the woods behind us, strolls up and joins our conversation.
PAM: Trans women get abused a lot more in our society.
She’s right, of course. Because it’s often harder for them to pass as women in the world, and because they’re likely to get way more shit for it, lots of would-be trans women just don’t come out.
GEYL: Being a girl is not as cool. I actively try to recruit.
PAM: Yeah, there must be something wrong with you if you want to be a woman.
GEYL: I tried to be really butch when I first came out.
MICHELLE: I tried to be really butch when I first came out, too. It seemed cooler and tougher, and safer, to be masculine.
Pam looks like just the sort of woman the music festival across the way embraces—smudgy eyeliner, long brown hair, rolled bandanna tied around her forehead and that acoustic guitar in tow. She’s even a construction worker, and isn’t that one of the most feminist jobs a woman can work? After Pam came out as a trans woman, her coworker threatened to toss her from the very high building they were working on. When she complained, her foreman said, “You should expect that sort of thing.” She was soon fired from the job, for “being late.”
PAM: If I watch Jerry Springer, I don’t want to come out.
GEYL: All the trans women on that show aren’t really trans. They’re a joke.
PAM: I think Jerry is a tranny chaser. And I think he’s resentful of it and wants to take it out on the community.
Soon we’re informed that we’re sitting smack in the middle of the space reserved for the “Feminism and the Gender Binary” workshop.
GEYL: I’ll feminize your gender binary. If anyone quotes Judith Butler, I’ll punch them.
There’s that girl Mountain again, on the mic this time, letting everyone know that if her feminist separatist farming commune can let trans women in, anyone can. “I always have said that if I didn’t go to the festival each year I’d die,” she tells the crowd. “Well I didn’t go, and I didn’t die, and I’m not going until they change the policy!” Everyone cheers. Sadie’s on the mic, revving everyone up by insisting that we’re going to change the policy. I guess it’s impossible to engage in any sort of activism with a fatalistic view, and who knows, maybe MWMF will surprise us all and roll out the trans carpet, but I just don’t see it happening. I remember glimpsing Lisa Vogel in the festival worker area years ago, after Camp Trans had brought a protest onto the land. They’d been kicked off, of course, and a reiteration of the womyn-born-womyn policy was swiftly typed up, xeroxed, and distributed throughout the festival. Lisa was smoking, and she looked pissed. Someone told me that she saw it as a class and age issue. Camp Trans was made up of a bunch of teenagers freshly released from liberal New England colleges, with their heads full of gender theory and their blood bubbling with hormones and rebellion. Lisa Vogel is loved by the women who attend her festival the way that saints are loved, and why shouldn’t she be? She’s provided them with the only truly safe space they’ve ever known. She’s a working-class lesbian who built it all up from scratch, with her hands and the hands of old-school dykes and feminists, women who claim, perhaps rightly, that no one knows what it was like, what they went through, how hard they fought. It has taken a lot of work to create the MWMF that’s rocking across the way, sending its disembodied female voices floating into our campsite. It’s taken single-mindedness and determination. Lisa Vogel, I fear, is one severely stubborn woman.
Emily is speaking and she’s saying things that could turn around some of the more stubborn festival women. Unfortunately, I don’t think anyone has come over from the fest who wouldn’t love to see the policy junked. Emily is preaching, as they say, to the choir. She’s talking about her girlhood, how the girls all knew she was a girl like they were, and how powerful and lifesaving it was to be recognized like that, your insides finally showing through. A young friend wished Emily would get a sex-change operation so she could come to her slumber party. It’s a great response to the festival’s insistence that trans women didn’t have girlhoods. Anna speaks next. (Not Ana Jae—this is a brand-new Anna you haven’t met yet.) She’s got big, dark eyebrows and wide lips painted red; she’s holding the mic, and she’s come to lecture the lesbians for dating trans men but justifying this shades-of-hetero behavior by saying, “He’s not really a guy.” Sacrificing trans men’s maleness so that their lesbian identities can stay intact, sheepishly explaining, “He’s trans”—again invalidating real masculinity so as not to be confused with a straight girl. For fetishizing, as a community, this sexy new explosion of trans men, but remaining unwelcoming to trans women. It’s all so true my frickin’ eyes well up. I’d spent the first year and a half of my boyfriend’s transition explaining to everyone—women on the bus, strangers in line at Safeway, people I sit next to on planes—that my boyfriend, he’s transgender. So don’t go thinking I’m some stupid straight girl, the confession implies. I’m QUEER. OKAY? It tended to be more information than anyone wanted. It’s all so fucked up and heartbreaking and overwhelming. Or maybe I’m just really sleep-deprived from a night on bumpy ground, sleeping atop sticks and hard mounds of dirt. Before me are the Gainsborough Blue Boys, lying side by side on separate chaise lounges, now in wiggy tennis outfits. They clutch paper bags concealing what I assume are beers and make out. Seriously—who are they? I love them. I wipe my soggy eyes, grab Anna as she shuffles past with her boyfriend, and thank her for her speech. I confess my past as an ashamed FTM-dating lesbian; I heap upon her how sad and scared I get when my dyke friends start talking shit about trans women. I want Anna—beautiful, strong Anna with the microphone—to absolve me and also solve all my social problems. She seems so capable. I think I overwhelm her. She gives me her contact information, including her phone number and email address. “She loves being interviewed; it’s her favorite thing,” her boyfriend encourages. Of course she does, she’s a genius. She walks away into the darkness, her beaded, sequined shoulder bag glinting in the night.
Two people—girls, trans guys, genderqueers, I can’t really tell in the light, so bright it turns them into silhouettes—are whirling across the dusty makeshift dance floor, doing a dance routine to a medley of songs from the movie Dirty Dancing. Here is my proof that this gender-smashing revolution is a generational thing: someone walks across the stage holding a cardboard sign reading Nobody puts Baby in a corner and everyone roars. I have no fucking idea what they are talking about. Patrick Swayze? Come on. But I like watching these two spinning into each other, knocking each other down, and crawling all over each other. At the very end of their act, after dancing close, they pull apart and draw the audience in, and everyone responds; they move into the brightness, becoming silhouettes that dance and raise their hands into the light and it’s beautiful like a dark kaleidoscope, all the bodies coming together under the light. My eyes well up with tears again, Jesus. Chris asks me to dance, but I can’t. I’m a mess. It’s been such an emotional day, and I’m spent. A trans man is giving a lap dance to a girl in a bright green dress, straddling her lap as she sits on a folding chair. Two others are making out on the dance floor, and many booties are being freaked. It’s time for bed. I hike back to my tent, following the small spot of light my flashlight tosses into the weeds.
“I asked you to dance and you disappeared,” Chris complains. We’re on his patio. He’s making real hot coffee on his camp stove, but I had to swear I would tell no one about this luxury because he’s almost out of gas. He starts talking about how confused he was about Camp Trans, how he thought it was a bunch of trans men trying to get into the women’s festival, and he wasn’t down with that. “You gain a few privileges, you lose a few,” he laughs. “Go cry on your own damn shoulder; get over yourself.” Once he realized it was about getting trans women some women-only privileges, he was down for the cause. He’s glad he’s here. “I’m so comfortable,” he says. “My tree keeps getting closer.” He means the tree he pees on. Maybe he also saw Sleepaway Camp II and is scared of the portas, maybe he’s lazy, or maybe it’s just such a rarity to be a trans person who can take a piss in the woods without fear.
It’s the last day of Camp Trans and things are unraveling before my eyes. Cars and trucks are rolling out of the parking lot, which is just a different part of the field we’ve all been living in. People wave out of their windows as they pull onto the road. All day long the population shrinks. The planning meeting for Camp Trans 2004 is repeatedly interrupted as vacating campers lavish goodbye hugs on their friends. I am sitting back and listening to participants who raise their hands and offer compliments on what they felt went well at this year’s gathering, and what needs to be fine-tuned for next year. Everyone is generally pleased, and the renewed focus on trans women’s needs and overturning the policy was a success. There are concerns about how white Camp Trans is, but no one is naive about seeking out token people of color. Geyl suggests travel scholarships for trans people who want to come but can’t afford the time off work or the travel expenses to the Middle of Nowhere, Michigan. People are happy about trans women being in charge, are happy that there was essentially no rain in a region known for violent summer thunderstorms, and want greater accountability from women who say they are organizing within the MWMF gates. There will be greater fundraising this coming year, though Camp Trans did come out ahead by $500. Incredible, really, since at the start of the week ziplock baggies had been duct-taped inside the portas asking for spare change each time you took a whiz. It cost the camp eighty dollars each time those monsters got cleaned.
Everyone is called to help dismantle what’s still standing of Camp Trans. Intimidated by the architecture of the tents and lean-tos that need to be torn down, I busy myself gently untying the neon plastic ribbons that have been knotted, for some reason, around a rusting cage which, for some reason, contains a stunted apple tree. Perhaps there’s a hornets’ nest in the crook of its branches. A large swath of our field has been roped off all week with that same neon plastic, to keep everyone away from a burrowing hornet encampment. That’s being torn down now as well.
Over by the portas is a structure made of tarps that all weekend I’d thought was someone’s wicked punk rock campsite. Tarps spray-painted with anti-policy slogans, tied and duct-taped to stakes driven into the ground. I’d had a brief fantasy that it was Geyl’s squat-like queendom. But as I pass it, Chris sticks his head out from the plastic, and asks, “Did you know there was a shower here?!” He is delighted. The shower is a little pump with a thin hose attached; it looks like the pesticide tank an exterminator lugs around. You pump the top like a keg, click a switch at the end of the hose, and a fine stream of water mists all around you. It looks like a feeble shower, but a great way to cool off. Later I’ll help Geyl and a person named Cassidy tear the whole thing down, and have great fun squirting myself with all the leftover water in the little tank.
Later that night the final campfire roars, with Cassidy—somehow an expert on the various ways wood can grow—strategically loading branches into the flames. Chris is burning marshmallows on a long stick, Simon is shaving pieces of potato and garlic into an aluminum foil pouch to be roasted. Someone passes around cold pizza, someone else passes around a bottle of Boone’s Farm. It’s the first time alcohol has been visible all week, though many revelers have been visibly under its influence. Another of the national forest laws.
I don’t want to leave the circle, ’cause I know this is it. In the morning I will ride into Grand Rapids with a girl named Katina, a festiegoer who has spent basically all of her time over at Camp Trans, much to the dismay of the girls she’s camping with. “You know how every time you leave Michigan, you think, I’m coming back next year?” she asks. “Well this year it wasn’t like that. I know I can’t come back next year.”
We don’t know it at the time, but the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival is doomed. Over the coming decade the trans rights movement will grow, and the amount of male-assigned individuals who begin to publicly identify somewhere on the trans feminine spectrum will increase. The exclusion of trans women from the festival will become more and more absurd and upsetting, with headliner acts such as the Indigo Girls withdrawing their support from the festival. It could, I believe, be perceived as a victory, but the institution’s decision to implode rather than shift with its culture feels like one last kick in the jaw before expiring. The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival was magic, there could be no denying it from anyone allowed to romp within its hallowed forests. That it committed suicide rather than sharing its magic with some of the most deserving of safety within our culture is bitterly spiteful. One can only muster a good riddance, I suppose, and hope that as the TERFs (trans-exclusionary “radical” feminists—quotes mine) age and die off so will their fearful, reactionary points of view. But the earth, goddess willing, will be slower to go, and so the land—the open, accepting, magical land—remains, awaiting whomever might have the gumption to create an ambitious, enchanting, and truly inclusionary festival for all of us who need it.
A version of this piece was published in the Believer in 2003.