Trans women are women

WE FELT it was important to respond to the author of the letter "Mistaken on Michfest" and would argue that opinions such as those that Rabbi Anna Maranta holds greatly contribute to the violence that trans women face in their daily lives.

If these women are not given "safe space" in the women's rights community or the queer community, where can they go? Forcing trans women to splinter off into their own "safe space" doesn't actually create a safe environment for them--it excludes them and isolates them. It others them and puts needs specific to them in the background of whatever else is going on. In fact, their needs are never addressed because they aren't important to the women's or LGBTQI movements.

Growing criticism of Michfest over the years is a positive thing, because it means that feminism as a movement is alive and breathing and evolving. It means that an extremely oppressed and marginalized section of the population is finally seeing some change beginning to happen. The fact that Michfest has been going on for 39 years despite its transmisogynist "womyn born womyn" policy is not a testament to the moral fortitude of the festival organizers and attendees, it's a testament to how vile and stubborn they are.

The politics behind Michfest have given rise to the extremist transphobia of people like Cathy Brennan, a woman that has reportedly stalked and outed young trans girls to their high schools, sometimes resulting in alleged harassment and physical violence towardsthe girls from teachers and students.

Trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) like Brennan and the organizers of Michfest actually make the world LESS safe for women, because any trans woman, intersex woman, or woman who is perceived to be trans can be excluded and victimized under the rationale and politics perpetuated by Michfest.

Arguments that trans and other mis-gendered-at-birth women have "male privilege" and were socialized as male don't hold up when you actually listen to what the real lived experiences of these women are. They are catcalled, harassed, beaten and murdered because of their gender's relative lack of privilege in society. Hate crimes toward these women occur at much higher rates than any other group in society. They have higher rates of unemployment, suicide and homelessness, and often find it impossible to even obtain health care due to most doctors' unwillingness to treat trans patients.

HOW DOES this group of women not belong in a movement for justice and equality, and in "women-only safe spaces"? The last thing women need is for more people to tell them they're "not woman enough" based on arbitrary criteria. If you would argue against the idea that women should not be judged based on how they look, why are genitals excluded from that? What if you were born with a larger-than-average clitoris? Would that make you a man? No, you know you are a woman because of the way you feel about yourself, your body and the way society treats you.

Many trans and intersex women feel exactly the same way, and yet are scrutinized and categorized as lesser versions of women, or not "real" women at all, due to biological variations deemed inappropriate for women to have. They know they are women, and have always been women--someone just made a mistake when they were born and assumed they were male because of how their external genitalia looked, or forced them to have mutilating, "normalizing" surgery because their bodies were not easily put into a binary.

We're going to go out on a limb here and assume that Maranta's chromosomes and hormone levels were not extensively tested to make sure she passed some sort of arbitrary criterion of "femaleness" when she was born. What if all presumably cisgender women were required this testing to prove their womanhood at this very moment in their lives? Do you know how many would "fail" these types of invasive tests? Would that then mean that they suddenly were not women? Of course not, because they know they're women, they have lived and breathed their own experience of being female and don't question it. Why should trans women not be understood in the same way?

Further, many of these girls are now being recognized as girls at younger and younger ages, and are in fact growing up as girls. But those that embrace trans-exclusionary radical feminism feel that those trans and intersex women who are allowed to grow up as girls should still be excluded, which implies there is more to the beliefs that these women should be excluded than just them having "different experiences" growing up.

There are many kinds of women--trans women, intersex women, Black women, queer women, immigrant women--and all these identities intersect with each other, creating layers of experience and overlapping oppressions. It is absurd to assume they all have some universal experience of womanhood across race, culture, religion, age, gender and sex assigned at birth. And yet this is the assumption--that one particular class of women (cisgender and dyadic women) have a universal experience, and that another class of women (trans and intersex women) have a less valuable, less legitimate experience that somehow excludes them from "true womanhood."

Trans people absolutely belong in feminist and queer communities--especially trans and mis-gendered-at-birth women, who have for so long been excluded from these spaces and struggles because of bad politics and a very surface level understanding of sex, gender and biology.
Jae Southerland and D. Tyler, Winston Salem, N.C.