On The Land: MichFest and Camp Trans, Part 2
Guess what, I didn't even get to all of it. Part 3 incoming.
On August 1st, 1991, Nancy Jean Burkholder arrived on the land of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. It was her second time attending, and she’d driven all the way from New England with her friend Laura. Around 9:00 AM, theirs was the 33rd car to arrive. The two women set up their tents, chatted with other attendees, began a work shift as part of the festival’s shuttle service. In Burkholder’s words, they “joined women in joyous enthusiasm, camaraderie, and expectation” in the hours leading up to the official start of the festival.1
After welcoming attendees to the land, answering their questions, and shuttling women and their gear for several hours, Burkholder and Laura walked over to a campfire by the main gate to await the arrival of another friend on a 10:00 PM bus. It was there, by the fire, that Burkholder was approached by two women, Chris Coyote and Del Kelleher. Coyote told her that they had to speak to her about a sensitive matter.
The festival was a women’s-only event, Coyote told Burkholder. She asked Burkholder if she was a man. No, Burkholder said, and showed Coyote her driver's license, bearing an “F.” Coyote then asked if she was a transsexual, and told her that transsexuals were not permitted to attend the festival. “She said that MWMF policy was that the festival was open to ‘natural, women-born-women’ only,” recalls Burkholder. “I replied that nowhere, in any festival literature or the program guide was that policy stated.” She asked Coyote to confirm the policy with festival producers, Lisa Vogel and Boo Price, who affirmed that this was the official policy.
Burkholder writes,
I continued speaking with Del. Del stated that the reason the policy was not in any literature was because the issue of transsexuals had never come up as a problem before. Del added that the policy was for the benefit of the transsexuals’ safety and the safety of the women attending the festival. When I pointed out that there were other transsexuals on the land she acknowledged that this was true. Then she added, “We haven’t caught them yet, but we did catch you.”
Burkholder argued back. She offered Coyote to let her inspect her vagina, and, when Coyote said that she didn’t feel comfortable doing so, she pointed out that public nudity was commonplace at the festival, asking how this was any different. After a certain point, though, she realized that there was no use. "I realized that Chris and Del were expelling me in spite of all the irrefutable legal and anatomical proof that I was a woman,” Burkholder writes. “I knew there was nothing more I could say to these women. I resigned myself to the fact that these women were expelling me from the festival.”
Burkholder and her friend left the festival after midnight. She describes a feeling of utter devastation and numbness as she left. Little did Boo Price, Lisa Vogel, and Chris Coyote, or Nancy Jean Burkholder know, but this would be the beginning of the festival’s long, slow, and painful end.
Camp Trans in the 90s
Though the festival organizers hustled Burkholder off the land in the dead of night, her friends took notice that she had been ejected from the festival. They quickly began to respond, and to push back against the injustice of the situation. Janis Walworth, a cis friend of Burkholder’s, took it upon herself to become involved in agitating against the festival’s anti-trans policies and she later recollected much of this 90s activism in a post for Trans Advocate here. My descriptions of events from 1991-1994 are heavily drawn from Walworth’s account.
In 1991, Walworth saw Burkholder on the first day of the festival and remembers looking out for her over the following days, but not finding her. When she learned of what had transpired, she called Burkholder and the two agreed that word needed to be spread within the festival of Burkholder’s expulsion; keep in mind, at this time the now-famous “womyn-born-womyn only” policy was not written or publicized anywhere. Walworth recalls that she spent the rest of the festival roaming the land and talking to as many women as possible about what had happened. Most, she remembers, were horrified.
The following year, in 1992, Walworth, in conversation with Burkholder and trans activists in their circles, decided that somebody needed to return to the festival and push back against the newly enshrined policy. As a cis woman, Walworth would be able to enter the land uncontested. She traveled to Michigan with her sister and a few other companions, including the editor of TransSisters Davina Gabriel.2 With them, they brought stacks of literature, including a series of brightly printed flyers Walworth had created called “Gender Myths,” which addressed the myths and misconceptions that cis festivalgoers might have about trans people. These they used to plaster porta-potties all over the land.
What are those buttons covering the intrepid flier-poster’s vest above, you may ask? Take a closer look:
Walworth and company also created a “Gender Survey” to poll festival goers about their opinions on trans inclusion at the festival. The survey had four questions: Do you think male-to-female transsexuals should be included at the festival (Y/N), and if not, “what would be the best way to determine if a person is a male-to-female transsexual?,” and then the same two questions pertaining to FTM trans people.
Walworth gives some very interesting and detailed analysis of the survey results in her interview that I can’t relay in full due to length constraints - if you’re interested, I highly encourage you to read her full account! Suffice it to say, even adjusting for the bias element of who felt comfortable approaching the table, a significant majority of women surveyed supported the inclusion of trans people at Michigan. The open-ended question of how to determine if attendees were transsexual drew attention to the absurdity of the exclusion policy; one woman surveyed suggested that all attendees should be genetically tested! Insane.
Walworth and a crew of three trans women friends returned to table again in 1993. “Some people in the festival began harassing us,” Walworth recalls, “and then around noon on Wednesday or Thursday, the festival security stopped by and told us that the trans women in our group would have to leave, ‘for their own safety.’” They had come to the festival prepared to be thrown out, and they packed up and decamped to a spot just outside the festival gates.
The group slowly made their way to the festival gate, frequently stopping to answer questions about why they were leaving. As they made their way, a leather dyke stopped them. “The leather Dykes were trying to convince our folks to not leave the festival,” Walworth recalls. “They said that they would provide body guard protection for our group, in their camp. They were very adamant that the threatened violence was wrong, that forcing the victims of the threatened violence to leave was wrong, and that the entire policy was wrong.” Despite this generous offer, the trans women decided to leave. The crew agreed that Walworth would return into the festival to continue the education campaign, and the trans women set up the first Camp Trans. They erected this sign to announce their presence:
Anyone entering or leaving the festival was confronted by the sign. In the remaining days of the festival, Walworth recalls a supportive vibe as women from inside brought them food, water, and flowers, and the camp fostered lots of productive conversations with festival goers. Meanwhile, inside the festival, her table was repeatedly vandalized and her flyers torn down.
1994 was year that Camp Trans really crystalized; it was the first year that Camp Trans was set up with intention at the beginning of the festival. The trans activist Riki Anne Wilchins, who is credited with inventing the term “genderqueer,” attended the proto-Camp Trans in 1993 and helped to organize the camp in 1994; Walworth thinks that Wilchins may have come up with the name. That year, 28 people formed the core of Camp Trans, including Wilchins, Burkholder, and Leslie Feinberg and hir partner Minnie Bruce Pratt. There were children and grandmothers in attendance.
To enter the festival, you had to pass Camp Trans, and they tried to speak to everyone coming and going. Unsurprisingly, the festival did not appreciate this and Walworth recalls a range of harassment and intimidation techniques from festival organizers, including calling the sheriff on them and blaring loud music at 5:00 am to wake the Camp Trans campers up.
Cis women also came and went between the festival and Camp Trans. Two women attending the festival came out to Camp Trans to be married by a trans woman minister. Lesbian Avengers members moved in and out of the festival and invited Camp Trans attendees to collaborate on a workshop with them inside the festival. All of the cis women from Camp Trans went into the festival together, surrounded by Lesbian Avengers beating drums and forming a security detail, led a workshop, and then were safely returned to Camp Trans by the Avengers.
As Cristan Williams points out here, Burkholder’s expulsion and the response by Camp Trans were part of a larger wave of conversation within lesbian/feminist communities in the early 90s about trans inclusion. 1991 was the year that Sandy Stone, a trans woman who had been part of the women’s music collective Olivia Records and who I wrote about here, published her groundbreaking essay “The Empire Strikes Back” in 1991, which was a response to Janice Raymond’s anti-trans screed The Transsexual Empire, a 1979 book that accused Stone by name of infiltrating women’s community. “The Empire Strikes Back” would become a foundational text of trans studies. Meanwhile, The Transsexual Empire was reprinted in a second edition in 1994 and found a new generation of readers. Proto-TERF politics and the movement for trans liberation were both in a moment of swell, locked in opposition to one another.
Son of Camp Trans
After its 1994 showing, Camp Trans died down for a few years, but was revived in 1999 under the name “Son of Camp Trans.” Emi Koyama’s “Handbook on Discussing the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival for Trans Activists and Allies,” archived on the Wayback Machine, offers a helpful timeline here, as well as a plethora of documents that fellow MichFest and Camp Trans history obsessives will be interested in pawing through.
Son of Camp Trans was organized by GenderPAC and the Transsexual Menace, two groups largely organized by Riki Anne Wilchins. The Lesbian Avengers were also heavily involved in the new Camp Trans. In Koyama’s characterization, the original Camp Trans was, by and large, narrowly focused on the inclusion of trans women (and particularly post-operative trans women) in the festival, but the revived Camp Trans took a wider scope and a larger range of tactics.3 For example, Camp Trans organizers began reaching out to musicians directly to ask them to boycott the festival until it became trans inclusive (with mixed results). This era also began to expose rifts within the trans activist community. Davina Gabriel and some other trans women activists and public figures, such as Beth Elliott, advocated that the festival should admit trans women if (and only if) they had received bottom surgery, while Wilchins and other Son of Camp Trans organizers advocated for a more expansive vision of trans inclusion at the festival that was not based in genital status. Gabriel, Elliott, and other published an open letter condemning Wilchins for arguing that pre- or non-operative trans women should be allowed at the festival, leading to a backlash against the letter writers characterizing their position as racist and classist.4
Interestingly, around this time, the festival also created an official policy not to interrogate ticket buyer about gender identity, though it reserved the right to deny entrance to known trans women. Lisa Vogel maintained, as expressed in a statement published in 2006, that
From its inception the Festival has been home to womyn who could be considered gender outlaws, either because of their sexual orientation (lesbian, bisexual, polyamorous, etc.) or their gender presentation (butch, bearded, androgynous, femme - and everything in between). Many womyn producing and attending the Michigan Festival are gender variant womyn….Michigan provides one of the safest places on the planet for womyn who live and present themselves to the world in the broadest range of gender expression.5
Accordingly, in 1999, a group of openly transgender individuals from Camp Trans bought tickets and were admitted to the festival. This is recounted both Clare Howell in a statement by GenderPAC and in a statement by Lisa Vogel on behalf of the festival (both republished in Koyama’s handbook). According to Vogel, this group then proceeded to the group shower area and disrobed, revealing that the trans man and two of the women had penises.6 This act of protest, according to Vogel, reverberated quickly throughout the festival, and, according to Howell, the festival organizers quickly instated a “no penises on the land” policy.7 A description of that event from one of the participants in that action, published in an essay by Michelle Tea in McSweeney’s, presents things differently. Simon Strikeback, a Camp Trans organizer and part of the 1999 action, recounted it thusly:
First Tony [a trans man] went on the land, to put the womyn-born-womyn only policy to the test. He identified as a post-op trans man, with bottom surgery (I forget the kind). He was saying that his dick was made out of the skin on his arm—I think that’s a rhinoplasty?—anyway. He said, ‘Hey, if my trans women friends are still men because they were assigned male at birth, then I must still be a woman.’ So he went into the fest and took a shower. He asked consent of the women showering, telling them what kind of body he had. They said OK, but because the showers were public, new folks came in and freaked. By the time the ticket-buying action happened the next morning, the rumor was that something like six non-op trans women flashed their erect penises at the girls camp. Gross, eh?
The ticket-buying action: At noon on Saturday, Riki led a ticket-buying action at the fest. A bunch of the avengers, myself included, bought tickets to the fest. The young trans woman who was with us also bought a ticket, though at the time she could have been ‘read’ other than a womyn-born-womyn. This was a great victory for us and there were certainly tears. Then the trouble began. A woman started walking in front of us, shouting, ‘Man on the Land!’
We did have some support from festie-goers who walked with us. We got to the main area, and it was very overwhelming. We were asked if we wanted to have a mediated discussion in the kitchen tent….So we started this ‘mediated’ discussion and the setup was such: We (us avengers, maybe four of us, and Riki) were sitting on folding tables in the front, while seven rows of angry lesbians yelled at us, audience-style. I kid you not. People called us rapists, woman-haters, said we were destroying their space by just walking on it, that we had no respect for women, that we had no respect for rape survivors, etc. Three hours this lasted, and the mediation was so one-sided we didn’t get out of there with any confidence that anyone heard what we had to say. That was my first festival.8
Tea’s essay, which recounts her experience at the 2003 Camp Trans and includes lengthy statements from others at the camp, is seriously worth reading if you’re interested in this stuff; there are so many great details that I can’t include here, but in general it really captures the spirit of trans and genderqueer activism of that era. Tea, if you don’t know, is a queer memoirist and poet who’s a longtime fixture the queer/punk literary world. She’s a cis woman who’s dated and married trans men, and in the essay she talks about how she had attended a few times MichFest in the past but, as of 2003, hadn’t gone the last few years because of her objection to its trans-exclusionary policies.
The Camp Trans captured in her essay is horny, sociable, and fraught. There was tension over the ballooning number of trans men at Camp Trans, leading some trans women to feel invisiblized and like the original goal of their organizing had been overshadowed. There was tension, too, over the fact that trans men had been embraced much more readily by the lesbian community than trans women, and in some cases were fetishized by lesbians. By the early aughts, some festival-goers would bop over to Camp Trans at night to party, and in 2003 Camp Trans created an area off-limits to festival-goers to protect the Camp Transers from an ongoing litany of exhausting interactions.
When Tea arrived at Camp Trans, the camp was buzzing from some sort of orgy gone awry the previous night. Tea describes the attendees as largely young, very beautiful, and mostly white. Julia Serano was there and did a poetry reading. “Ze” pronouns were in use. At night, the dance parties were a swirl of dirt and glitter. “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 maribou-trimmed spandex,” she writes, “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.”9
Her first morning there, some festies came to bring a box of zines produced down the road at MichFest. The zine contained writings by festival workers on their feelings on issue of trans inclusion; the Camp Trans people were instantly exasperated, as they already knew well the various arguments, perspectives, and anxieties that MichFest attendees repeatedly aired. “Girlhood and penises” were the two common refrains: the first being that “womyn-born-womyn” meant that MichFest was a space dedicated to women who had experienced the particular traumas and struggles of girlhood, and the second that women who had experienced sexual violence had a right to be in a space where they could rest assured there were no penises present. Camp Transers felt that their counter-arguments (some trans women do have girlhoods; women traumatized by sexual assault are traumatized by the men who assaulted them, not disembodied penises) had been made clear, and they were fed up. The workers stayed for a fraught processing meeting. It’s a familiar scene:
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 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.10
In Tea’s description of Camp Trans, there is some cause for optimism: for example, a cis woman named Mountain, who lives on a women-only separatist farm that has integrated trans women into its community, is in attendance. Mountain is a die-hard festie, and she says that she’d always thought she’d die if she didn’t make it to Michigan, but this year she can’t turn a blind eye to the transphobia of the policy any more, so she’s at Camp Trans. Still, Tea was ultimately found it unlikely that the festival would change course. Of Lisa Vogel, she writes:
Lisa Vogel is loved the way that saints are loved by the women who attend her festival, 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.
Though I’d venture that Tea would have loved to be wrong about Vogel’s ultimate tenacity in maintaining the womyn-born-womyn only policy, she was, as we now know, correct. There will be one more part to this series, and it will be about the dissolution of MichFest in 2015. Thank you for reading! XO
This account and quotes from Burkholder are drawn from a first-person account she wrote of her experience at MichFest for Trans Advocate, published here.
It’s unclear to me from Walworth’s account whether Gabriel entered the festival grounds; there was not yet an organized Camp Trans. It’s also clear from various accounts that, even after the policy became widely known, a good number of trans women did still attend the festival.
Koyama, “Handbook,” 9.
Lisa Vogel, “MICHIGAN WOMYN'S MUSIC FESTIVAL SETS THE RECORD ‘STRAIGHT,’” 2006.
Lisa Vogel, “Festival Reaffirms Commitment to Womyn-Born Space,” in “Handbook,” ed. Emi Koyama (1999), 29-30.
Clare Howell, “No Penis on the Land,” in “Handbook,” ed. Emi Koyama (1999), 28.
Michelle Tea, “Transmissions from Camp Trans (2003),” McSweeney’s (2003).
Tea, “Transmissions from Camp Trans (2003).”
Tea, “Transmissions from Camp Trans (2003).”
I'm about to go full "Letters to the Editor" mode:
In regards to endnote 2, as stated in TransSisters Journal Issue 2 article "Mission to Michigan", Davina Anne Gabriel entered MichFest 18 in 1992 with no issue, and in fact stayed for the entire festival despite coming out as trans at multiple workshops. She was, however, among the trans women kicked out the next year, which also included Nancy Jean Burkholder (again), a woman named Wendy Kaiser of Berwick, Maine, and Rica Ashby Fredrickson of Philadelphia, PA.
Gabriel is sort of a curious niche trans lesbian figure in her own right. She was the sole editor of TransSisters Journal, all of which can be found on transgenderdigitalarchive.com, and you can read in real time her growing cynicism and bitterness with the direction the Trans Liberation Movement is taking -- this is especially cognizant in her eventual interview with Sandy Stone, her idol whose essay "The Empire Strikes Back" inspired TransSisters to exist, where she attempts multiple times to get Stone to agree that trans activists are "going to far" in certain directions. Stone refuses to answer the way Gabriel wants.
Gabriel was possibly the originator of the term "transphobia", which she harbored an (un)healthy dose of.
Now, Gabriel is more a patron saint of modern TERFs than modern transsexuals, as she completely disavowed all of her activism and trans identity prior to ending her life in 2016, in an open letter I can only find published on the website of a TERF group which, coincidentally, I protested the inclusion of an ad for in a recent issue of "Lesbian Connection", the oldest surviving lesbian newsletter (they responded basically saying "we don't police that").
Gabriel's life is tumultuous, tragic, and not for the faint of heart to get lost in, but TransSisters Journal is a fascinating resource for anyone interested in what one facet of American trans activism at the time looked like. It notably has a lot of the same stories written here from a trans perspective, as well as plenty of other interesting little historical tidbits, and the aforementioned Sandy Stone interview that most people never get to see.
TransSisters Issue 2 here: https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/files/b8515n434
A quick aside on Rica Fredrickson because she's Philly. Couldn't find much, but did find this archived 1993 usenet post from Janis Walworth being forwarded by Fredrickson to some kind of online lesbian network, asking for support and funds to attempt their consciousness-raising within MichFest: https://groups.google.com/g/soc.motss/c/zw6L0c5VDWI/m/hx7WRadabE0J?pli=1
As well as this interview (https://exhibits.lgbtran.org/files/original/7122fbd0bd8268942a17a508ccd9b03b.pdf) in the Fall 1996 issue of "Open Hands Magazine", a magazine for Christians in support of diverse sexualities. Evidently Fredrickson is a Lutheran. She also mentions another 90s trans magazine, "gendertrash", as well as one of its editors Xanthra Phillippa. You can see how you can get into a hole with this stuff.
Loving these posts, thank you!