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Racism in the Trans Inclusion Debate Excerpts from Koyama, Emi. (2000). Who’s Feminism
is it Anyway? Unspoken Racism in the Trans Inclusion Debate. Retrieved
from http://www.eminism.org/readings/pdf-rdg/whose-feminism.pdf
These are excerpts from articles by a writer and activist named Emi Koyama. The articles centre on the politics and views surrounding the Trans-Inclusion debate at Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. The Michigan Women’s Music festival is an enormous music and arts festival that has taken place every august for 30 years on privately owned land in Michigan. One of the policies of Michigan is that it is “women’s only” space, no men are allowed to attend. However it is also a “women-born-women” space and the festival actively refuses to accept transwomen. The basis for this policy is essentially that the presence of transwomen at Michigan would threaten the safety inherent in women’s only spaces. This policy is backed up by arguments stating that: transwomen were “born male” and a have “male privilege”; that transwomen’s bodies will trigger abuse survivors and other women at the festival; or simply that they “are not women”. Music festivals are a different context than VAW women’s shelters but the discussions around privilege and oppression, who gets access and inclusion, who makes those decisions, and how they are made, are relevant to discussions that arise at women’s shelters and other VAW services. Koyama offers up a challenging and enlightening argument around the intersections of transphobia and racism and raises questions about who is safe in women’s only spaces and who is not. “Speaking from the perspective and the tradition of lesbians of color, most if not all rationales for excluding transsexual women are not only transphobic but also racist. To argue that transsexual women should not enter The Land [re: Michigan Women’s Festival] because their experiences are different would have to assume that all women’s experiences are the same, and this is a racist assumption. Even the argument that some transsexual women have experienced some degree of male privilege should not bar them from our communities once we realize that not all women are equally privileged or oppressed. To suggest that the safety of The Land overlooks, perhaps intentionally, the ways on which women can act violence and discrimination against each other. Even the argument that “the presence of a penis would trigger women” is flawed because it neglects the fact that white skin is just as much a reminder of violence as a penis. The racist history of lesbian feminism has taught us that any white woman making these excuses for one oppression have made and will make the same excuse for other oppressions such as racism, classism, and ableism.” “One of the common mistakes made by people organizing women's spaces is that they assume that women-only space is safe because sexism is the most damaging of all oppressions for all women, and therefore women should feel safe in a women-only space. As Cherrie Moraga pointed out two decades ago, “the danger lies in ranking the oppressions. The danger lies in failing to acknowledge the specificity of the oppression." “We need to start from the acknowledgement that women-only spaces are not necessarily safe. The myth of safety perpetuates the invisibilization and denial of domestic violence and sexual assault that occur between women, as well as ways in which white women have power over women of color, middle-class women have over working-class women, able-bodied women have over women with disabilities, etc. Instead of using the myth of safety to justify the exclusion of trans people, we should be using the trans inclusion debate as an opportunity to examine myths we hold about our communities and ways they privilege a certain group of women over others.” “Gloria Anzaldua wrote: "A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary... the prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants... Do not enter, trespassers will be raped, maimed, strangled, gassed, shot. The only 'legitimate' inhabitants are those in power, the whites and those who align themselves with whites. Tension grips the inhabitants of the borderlands like a virus. Ambivalence and unrest reside there and death is no stranger." While Anzaldua was mainly discussing the physical borderland created by the Mexico-U.S. border, trans people are also "raped, maimed, strangled, gassed, shot" as a result of the society's attempt to enforce an unnatural boundary.” “Like Gloria Anzaldua’s New Mestiza, Transsexual people occupy the borderland where notions of masculinity and femininity collide. ‘It is not a comfortable territory to live in, this place of contradictions’. But speaking from the borderland, from its’ unique ‘shifting and multiple identity and integrity’ is where transsexual activists can find the most authentic strength. This borderland analogy is not meant to suggest that transsexual people are somewhere between male and female. Rather the space they occupy is naturally and rightfully theirs, as the actual Texas-Mexico borderlands belong to the Chicano/as and I am calling attention to the unnaturalness of the boundary that was designed to keep them out.” “I sincerely believe that, if we insist on drawing the national boundaries along the Rio Grande, dividing the region into the U.S. and Mexico, the people who have come from this region have the right to cross the borders freely at any time with or without documents. I also believe that if we insist on creating gender-specific spaces under the faulty binary view of genders, those who are marginalized and erased by the same faulty binary system have the right to be on whichever side of the line they want to be at any given time in order to maximize their safety and comfort.” “… I must remind them that it is never
feminism when some women are silenced and sacrificed to make room for
the more privileged women.”
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