“Sisters together’: Antiracist activism and the fight for trans inclusion at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival

(Press-News.org) The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, hosted from 1976 to 2015, brought together lesbian feminists for a celebration of culture and activism. Today, the festival is perhaps best known for its controversial "womyn-born-womyn” attendance policy, which excluded trans women from participation. A new article in Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society examines the fight for trans inclusion at Michfest and positions it within a rich history of activism at the festival, including antiracist activism by women of color.

In 1991, a woman named Nancy Jean Burkholder was expelled from the Michfest grounds on the basis of her being trans. In response to her protests that there was no policy explicitly denying entry to trans women, festival organizers released a statement codifying the womyn-born-womyn attendance guideline.

While many found the womyn-born-womyn policy offensive and exclusionary, Michfest producers framed it as a way to ensure their intended community was protected. Supporters of the policy often invoked the Michfest Womyn of Color tent, founded in 1986 as a refuge from the racism of the predominantly white festivalgoers. A trans woman attempting to enter the festival, these supporters argued, would be as invasive as a white woman attempting to enter the Womyn of Color tent.

However, writes article author Jessica Pruett, this rhetoric demonstrates an ignorance of “the racialized policing of gender as another effect of the festival’s womyn-born-womyn policy.” In the festival’s early years, Pruett writes, “attendees frequently misgendered butch Black women in particular, reporting them as men to festival producers.”

Attempts to resist the womyn-born-womyn policy built on a tradition of antiracist activism at the festival. A counter-festival, “Camp Trans,” was inaugurated in 1994, and held just outside the Michfest gates. Additionally, workshops on trans inclusion were held within the festival itself, many of which addressed the intersection of race and trans identity. “While trans women were often depicted as uniformly white and powerful in arguments against trans inclusion,” writes Pruett, “workshops like this exposed the hyperfocus on white trans women as a misrepresentation of a large and diverse community.”

Eventually, backlash to the womyn-born-womyn policy contributed to the end of Michfest. Yet, Pruett writes, to reduce to the festival to white and trans-exclusionary feminism “would be to erase the antiracist, trans feminisms that were also part of the festival community.” The gathering was once an experiment in utopia, writes Pruett. By studying its conflicts and its complexities, we revive this sense of possibility, and “see Michfest for what it was: a series of contested dreams for a future that we have yet to realize.”

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