When Cathy Brennan recently published her transphobic missive to the UN at radfem Hub, it reminded me of a similar kind of radical feminist transphobic screeds from the past.
In 1977 Sandy Stone was the focus of a controversy concerning her inclusion into the Olivia Records women’s collective. The following letter, “Open Letter to Olivia” and Olivia’s response were posted in “Sister: West Coast Feminist Newspaper” in the June-July edition of 1977.
“Dear Olivia: We are writing concerning your decision to employ Sandy Stone (formerly Doc Storch) as your recording engineer and sound technician. We feel that it was and is irresponsible of you to have presented this person as a woman to the women’s community when in fact he is a post-operative transexual. The decision to work with a transexual is one issue in itself; but the omission of this information from the public of women who support you was an unwise choice. We feel that it was deceptive not to share this process with the women’s community. Many women give you their financial support precisely because they trust you to work with women exclusively, and you are not being accountable to these women.
As performers, sound technicians, radio women, producers and managers- women who put most of our energy and commitment into the field of our energy and commitment into the field of women’s culture-we are particularly concerned because of the effect this has on us. We were told that Stone was going to be doing sound at an upcoming concert billed as a women-only event. This seemed an odd choice, since there are more than a few competent women sound technicians in the Bay Area. In this instance a transexual was taking away work away from women who have to struggle to gain access to these skills and whose opportunities are extremely limited.
Given the narrow options available to us, it is also likely that many of us would have to work with Stone. Some of us have already done so without the knowledge was not a woman. When we did discover the truth about Stone and tried to discuss this with you, we were told that you considered him very much a woman, a lesbian, and that you trusted him more than middle class, heterosexual women. This was very painful to hear and indicated a great lack of respect and love for women and our struggles.
We do not believe that a man without a penis is a woman any more than we would accept a white woman with dyed skin as Black woman. Sandy Stone grew up as a white male in this culture, with all the privileges and attitudes that that insures. It was his white male privilege that gave him access to the recording studio and the opportunity to gain engineering practice in the first place. He has never had to suffer the discrimination, self-hatred or fear that a woman must endure and survive in her life. And he cannot possess the special courage, brilliance, sensitivity and compassion that derives from that experience. How can we share feelings of sisterhood and solidarity with someone who has not had a woman’s experience?
We are aware of the unfortunate necessity to call upon male knowledge or skills on occasion, because women have been so excluded from certain fields. But we would like to trust that it is only used as a last resort, when there are no women available to do the job, and that it is done honestly–not as a hushed up secret. It was not our intention to discredit or trash Olivia. we Request that you publish a statement on this issue, and hope that you are open to further discussion so that we might reach agreement on this difficult problem.”
The response from the Olivia Records collective was nothing short of amazing:
Recently a leaflet has been circulated here concerning Olivia’s relationship with Sandy Stone, who since spring of 1976 has worked with Olivia as a recording engineer. Sandy is a transsexual, and Olivia is being criticized for not making that fact widely known immediately on beginning to work with Sandy. It is further being said that we are ripping women off by calling ourselves a women’s recording company while working with a transsexual engineer. In the following paragraphs we would like to explain, for those who may not know, what a transsexual is; to recount our process in hiring Sandy Stone; to clarify our politics around working with Sandy; and to answer specific criticisms that have been brought forward.
A transsexual is a person, from an early age (perhaps from birth), identifies as the opposite gender from her or his genetic sex. In the case of Sandy Stone, this means a person who grew up outwardly as male, but who inwardly experienced being essentially female. In many cases this includes feminist identification, which, because of imposed stereotypes, as well as the intolerable position of being female inside a male body, results in an extremely painful life situation. For many women, evolving a consciousness of class and sex oppression involves uncertainty, anger, and the turmoil which accompanies any major life process. For transsexuals, who are simultaneously evolving through confronting their true sexual identity, these processes are doubly difficult.
Medical technology has recently provided, for those with the means to afford it and the guts to withstand it, a way to surgically transform the genitals from those of birth to those of the opposite gender. Persons like Sandy, who have undergone sex reassignment surgery, are technically known as male-to-female postoperative transsexuals and live lives no different from other women. However, although a great deal of attention is usually focused on the surgery itself, it is not generally understood that the process of sex reassignment is a long, grueling and painful one, requiring years of hard work prior to surgery, and this too-well publicized step is merely the confirmation of a process that has already gone to near completion by that time. The impression fostered by the media, that sex reassignment is effectuated by a single operation, simplifies and distorts an extremely complex and subtle process to which the preoperative transexual must address most of her life for years prior to genital reassignment. Sandy Stone was referred to us as an excellent woman engineer, perhaps even the Goddess-sent engineering wizard we had so long sought. In our second meeting, when Sandy told us about her transsexuality, we had to reassess our commitment to her, and her for us. We did this, as we do everything at Olivia, collectively and from the point of view of our politics. In our first reaction to the situation, we had these reservations: Should we validate a process (sex reassignment) that, seemingly, only the privileged have access to? Should we hire someone who had male privilege? Could we accept and trust Sandy as a woman?
We reasoned that while it requires some material means to undergo the sex reassignment process, a person does not gain privilege by doing it-quite the contrary (a very few well-publicized transsexuals aside.). Because Sandy decided to give up completely and permanently her male identity and live as a woman and a lesbian, she is now faced with the same kinds of oppression that other women and lesbians face. She must also cope with the ostracism that all of society imposes on a transsexual. In evaluating whom we trust as a close ally, we take a person’s history into consideration, but our focus as political lesbians is on what her actions are now. If she is a person who comes from privilege, has she renounced that which is oppressive in her privilege, and is she sharing with other women that which is useful? Is she aware of her own oppression? Is she open to struggle around class, race, and other aspects of lesbian feminist politics? These were our yardsticks in deciding whether to work with a woman who grew up with male privilege. We felt that Sandy met those same criteria that we apply to any woman with whom we plan to work closely. Because of our politics, and despite our initial feelings of strangeness around the situation (feelings which, alas, it seems many women must go through when confronted with a transsexual woman), we were able to begin working with Sandy. Our daily political and personal interactions with her have confirmed for each of us that she is a woman we can relate to with comfort and with trust.
As to why we did not immediately bring this issue to the attention of the national women’s community, we have to say that to us, Sandy Stone is a person, not an issue. Our judgment was that her transsexualism was a fact that might be a concern to any woman who would work closely with her (such as the women Olivia would record.) We felt fine about telling those women, because there was a context for it, and because we have a struggle relationship with them. Beyond that, we saw no way to communicate the situation to the greater women’s community without Sandy being objectified. And if Sandy were to become the focus of controversy, we all felt we needed a period of time in which to develop a foundation of mutual trust and support and a solid working relationship, to help us withstand that turmoil. We see transsexualism as a state of transition and we feel that to continue to define a person primarily by that condition is to stigmatize her at the expense of her growth process as a woman. One unfortunate consequence of this decision has been that we did not demystify to the community at large how Sandy was able to acquire her skills, and we regret this.
Our hopes for sharing skills and providing women access to work are much closer to fulfillment because of, not in spite of, Sandy Stone. The women in our technical department are thrilled that Sandy has joined them. She has contributed to our group not only her many technical skills, but also a vision of ways to share them that goes beyond what we were able to imagine. For example, besides training women in sound engineering, she will actually be building our recording studio and will be apprenticing other women in the techniques of designing and building electronic equipment. She is also in the process of writing a book for women which will be a step-by-step explanation of the recording process.
Almost a year has passed since we started working with Sandy, during which she has been our colleague in hard work, struggle, wonderful accomplishments and even finer plans. All of us are looking forward to the day when work can begin on our studio and Sandy can start training other women. As we do of each other, we ask everything of Sandy, and she gives it. She has chosen to make her life with us and we expect to grow old together working and sharing. -Women of Olivia Records
I interviewed Stone recently, which you can listen to here. I took away some valuable lessons from Stone’s words. I learned that the “deceptive transsexual” narrative is not new. It’s been repackaged and re-sold, but it’s not new. That while I appreciate and commend both Mercedes Allen and Cristin Williams for their iron clad rebuttals of Cathy Brennan’s frontal assault, I have no desire to respond to Cathy Brennan personally. Some words that Stone said, really seem to apply to this.
“The difference today being that now we as transsies have a voice, and we can speak back from a position of power. That’s the only thing that’s changed, as far as I’m concerned. Hate is always with us and always will be. Ignorance will always be with us. People are always going to be afraid of things they don’t know or understand.”
“The difference is that we have more ways to speak back to that now. I think also we have more of an understanding of how hate works. I think more of us understand now that you can’t engage hate with reason, even when hate presents itself in the guise of reason. If you try to reason back, you’re wasting your time. What you need is to build your power base.”
The problem in the community is that part of the “power base” in the LGBT community is infested with leaders who’ve supported or currently support radical feminist perspectives of people like Janice Raymond and Cathy Brennan. People in positions of power need to come out strong, in public and refute this harmful ideology (or publicly support it) that seeks to deny protections to people who need it most.
One voice that’s been silent is Lisa Mottet. Mottet is the author of the language many people use today in anti-discrimination legislation. Her work is being attacked as an attack on women’s safety. A rebuttal from Mottet would be a good first start. Other voices including Mara Keisling of NCTE, Denise Leclair of IFGE, and Rea Carry of NGLTF need to be heard on this issue too. This issue is taking hold in the Maryland legislature’s halls as we speak. This isn’t just a debate among different factions of the community, it’s a fight for the lives of gender variant people who may die without these protections.
If we truly are an LGBT community, we must support one another. Public condemnation of this sort of hatred is a good start. This worked for Olivia Records; how about for LGBT leaders?
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The Olivia Response really felt erasing to me, what with my non-operativeness and all, but it’s, well… disappointing to realize I can’t expect better even from some trans women, like Beth Elliot.
tl;dr, it’s still all about the genitalia to some people and I refuse to be one of them.
I’d be happy to have a dialog about that with you if you’d care to be more specific. Olivia’s handling of Sandy Stone is, actually, still a sore point with me. She’s a brilliant, brilliant engineer; if you’ve ever compared Cris Williamson’s “Changer and the Changed” “Sweet Woman” with the “Lesbian Concentrate” remix, you’ll know what I mean. I met Sandy at a Goddess conference at UC Santa Cruz a few months after she’d been let go by Olivia, when I was realizing nobody was going to touch my “Kid, Have You Rehabilitated Yourself?” sessions. I was impressed with her, but unsettled about what was going on in women’s music.
So, you’ve really, really, picked the wrong context in which to mention me so dismissively.
I don’t even know why you’re bringing up whether genitals matter in this context. In some situations, they really do matter. I don’t see the point of criticizing a known lesbian activist for believing that, transsexual history notwithstanding.
I have struggled all my adult life against being erased from lesbian community and history. (If you don’t believe me, go to Amazon and pick up a copy of the new edition of “Mirrors.”) What we’ re talking about here is “You’ll never be a woman, pussy or no pussy.”That”s very different from “I’m keeping my penis, and expect to have access to all women’s space, including public nudity space and dating.”
Maybe that’s not your attitude. But how do I know? You’ve given me nothing to go on. If you’re “non-op” by choice (and your use of that term suggests that’s the case), what are you doing complaining about not being included where female-bodiedness is a an essential value?
You can’t possibly be serious about expecting me to advocate for inclusion of non-female-bodied individuals where there’s a controversy between cissexual and transsexual female-bodied women over which of them belong.
So, if you’d care to elaborate …
There is nothing male about my womanhood… there is nothing mutable about her… cutting her will not make her more or less female, there is nothing essentially male about her, and, like the rest of my female body, she’s responded well to having her blood chemistry set right. The nerves are still there, the walls, the clitoris, the labia… that I have not slipped under the knife does not invalidate my womanhood, and it was really upsetting to learn for myself earlier this year, that you did not feel the same way. Womanhood cannot be bought, it is innate.
I will not degender my youth. I will not degender the bookish, tunnel-digging, big-wheel-riding, dress-modelling, tomboy, who felt the need to try on heels for the challenge to my balance at age six, who was beaten for not being man enough, just to please the cissexist standards of women who say that women are not the sum of our parts by reducing myself to a vagina.
It hurt to learn that you would sell your sisters out if it would create peace for you and other operative women.
Would that be a sufficient elaboration? Also, don’t play the activist cred game with me. One, it deflects from what you consider the merits of your argument, and two, between three general election runs, service on the SA of a university, working with an LGBT student group to publicly criticize the editorial policy of a right-wing magazine that equated homosexuality to pederasty, seven political conventions, and another federal campaign as a volunteer, one general election doing head-hunting for Progressive candidates, as well as trans politics, all while having a four-year burnout after dysphoria threatened to eat me alive, I think I’ve paid something approximating my rent to age twenty eight.
It is disappointing.
You still haven’t told me what act of “selling out my sisters” I’ve allegedly committed. It’s difficult to respond to something that vague. So, what you’ve been posting is some mere assertion … of something … without proof.
If you’re referring to my belief that women’s public nudity space is for female-bodied women (as in my willingness to defend Osento before the San Francisco Human Rights Commission), that is a belief that is fully inclusive: I expect that transsexual women, no matter how bodied, will understand that *as women* in the same way that cissexual women understand it.
If this is the issue, you could prove that you have a womanhood that is innate regardless of whether your genitals reasonably conform to the female standard, by thinking and acting like a woman. That does mean understanding the need and desire for space where a woman can be safely naked among other women without someone walking around displaying a penis. Even a penis someone calls her clitoris.
It’s like the classic definition of free speech that says your right to swing your fist ends where my face begins. If you have a penis, your right to believe in the femaleness of your body ends where your zipper begins. I would be more likely to believe in your womanhood if you had the sense of modesty to keep it zipped around me (unless I gave you permission to unzip it around me).
I felt and practiced bodily modesty before surgery, it was noticed, and it earned me credibility as a woman among cissexual lesbians. This was about more than “creating peace with cissexual women”; it was about belonging among the sex of which I believed myself to be a part. Contrast that with the assertion of a “right” to be accepted as a woman on a par with female-bodied women, even in public nudity venues, without earning recognition as “oh, one of us, bummer about that birth defect.”
The Olivia Records controversy was about whether someone female-bodied, and now experiencing life the way cissexual women experience it, should be condemned exclusion for not being “woman-born.” It was also about the secondary issue of Sandy Stone’s life circumstances when she gained her considerable technical skills. “Exploiting male privilege,” or engaging in the feminist act of deconstructing the male priesthood and making those skills accessible to “the people” (in this case, to the women the industry would have dismissed as “chicks” good only for vocals)?
How you negotiate the world as a woman is different from how I negotiate the world as a woman. How I negotiate the world has more in common with how cissexual women negotiate it than with how pre-/non-op transsexual women negotiate it, dealing with transphobia notwithstanding. What about my sisterhood with cissexual women? What about my freedom of choice? How, precisely, do I owe you agreement with and advocacy for your worldview just because we share having disputed our birth sex assignment?
Or, if I’m misunderstanding you … please provide more specifics. This is my second request that you do so.
Well since you’ve proclaimed that defending the rights of all women to be able to access women’s space is ‘not thinking and acting like a woman’ I have no frame of reference from which to offer a reply that will be taken in good faith. I find it ironic that reading Whipping Girl both taught me about the cissexist and trans misogynistic way in which you were treated when the call came up to have you, quite wrongly, expelled from Daughters of Bilitis, and the double-bind that transmisogynists use to dismiss assertive trans women, claiming that we are not ‘acting like women’ and turning womanhood from birthright into exclusive club policed by those who inherited their memberships without a fight.
You seem to know exactly what I’m replying to as well, so to ask me to tee-up the particular issue in question so that you can unleash a response that you are sure is going to be a corker is rather disingenuous. Anyway, I’m talking about the operative-essentialist ‘compromise’ letter written regarding the trans-exclusion policy at michfest, where the dividing line between acceptable and unacceptable trans women was to be demarcated by scalpel.
At this point I expect you would have mentioned the brazen (along the lines of ‘hey does anyone mind if…’) display of a penis in the showers on the land, probably, if I hadn’t mentioned beforehand, neglecting to add that it belonged to a trans man.
I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the painful paralells with the cis-essentialist arguments that your assertions build upon:
“What about my sisterhood with cissexual women? What about my freedom of choice?”
Michfest and their cis-essentialist policies are frequently defended as just ‘cis women wanting a space away from men and trans women,’ never mind that they don’t write trans women as two words as a point of practice… free association is one thing, but to legitimate ‘women with vaginas’ as ‘all women’ well… that’s when it becomes my problem as well as other people’s.
“I felt and practiced bodily modesty before surgery, it was noticed, and
it earned me credibility as a woman among cissexual lesbians.”
I am not surprised that the less challenging to cis-supremacy the easier it was to be ‘accepted as a woman.’ Again, any acceptance by cis society as the gender you are is conditional… and it is this conditionality which is the basis of cissexism. Do you mean you didn’t run around nude or take public showers? Neither do I. I’ve always scurried to some isolated corner when I could help it (one of the many things that singled me out for some particularly heinous bullying when I was young)… I’m not sure how your argument gains by constructing me as someone itching to have access to women’s spaces so that I can be a flasher.
“If you have a penis, your right to believe in the femaleness of your body ends where your zipper begins.”
It is a view I hold and share with others that surgery should not be a requirement of access to a shelter if I am abused or raped or homeless. It should not be a requirement of safe access to public accommodations. That you and Congressman Frank and Cathy Brennan do not share this view is regrettable. I expect better from all three of you. Especially you.
Wow! All this for supporting the proposition that SEX-segregated, meaning GENITAL SEX-segregated facilities where public nudity is a necessary, customary and universal occurrence, are both appropriate and something to which female-bodied women are entitled.
No mention of other public accommodations. In fact, I put forth the proposition in my Brennan-Hungerford rebuttal that it would not be likely that the discreet use of public restrooms by transgender (meaning non-female-bodied) women would rise to the level of actionable hostile environment sexual harassment.
So, what you’re on my behind about is my refusal to support integration of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival for other than female-bodied people, rather than for transsexual female-bodied women. I will see your Michfest and raise you Osento. There, Summer, the owner who was very much a “dyke” in every sense of the word, including her politics, didn’t merely suffer female-bodied trans women to bathe, but welcomed all female-bodied women without asking their histories.
You may be as much a woman as female-bodied women for most intents and purposes. For the purposes of bathing in a communal bath, or running about nude on private land, you’re not. If you are going to say you are, then you may as well say that you are for a further purpose in which nudity may become involved, dating. Would you insist that someone date you and become intimately involved with you, rather than decline on the simple basis that you are not female-bodied (genital wise), on the ground that you have the same rights as any other woman?
I recall GLAAD went after the TV show “Ally McBeal” because a straight male character broke off a relationship with a pre-op transsexual woman because he didn’t want dating to progress anywhere near sexual involvement. With that example in mind, what I am asking you is not a rhetorical question.
I analyzed the hostile environment sexual harassment angle of the Brennan-Hungerford petition, and, if pushed, could do the same for pre- and non-op transsexual women’s insistence on access to women’s public nudity venues.
Please don’t make me go there.
“Would you insist that someone date you and become intimately involved
with you, rather than decline on the simple basis that you are not
female-bodied (genital wise), on the ground that you have the same
rights as any other woman?”
If she said it that exact way, I wouldn’t want to sleep with her either… good goddess, what is this obsession with a few grams of erectile tissue?
And if someone that I’m into finds out that I’ve got a genital configuration that she’s hung up over? That’s fine. I’m not her type… it’s sort of like finding out that someone I’m attracted to is very down on the idea of a relationship where both partners are somewhat dependent upon one another. That would end the relationship. But it wouldn’t cause me to degender her or call her a bigot.
If she doesn’t like women, again women, with penises, that’s perfectly fine. If she doesn’t because she cissexistly constructs these women as men, well, she’s wrong. Is she obligated to examine that construction? Yes. Date me or any other trans woman? No
Do you see the difference?
And as to public showers, all I can say is that the logic of your position dictates that every non-or-pre-operative trans man should be showering in the women’s showers.
Really though, you would just rather ban us from all public accommodations, as we should know our place… sorry, I mean practice bodily modesty.
And by all means, go there. Continue to dig. If you’re going to alienate people who used to look up to you, by all means, commit to it.
If people only look up to me to the extent they can use me to advance their particular agenda, they’ve never really looked up to me. It’s the whole Margaret Deirdre O’Hartigan thing from the mid-1990s, in which someone turned on me because I wasn’t taking her oppositional approach to the lesbian community (because, as flawed as it was/is, it’s my community).
Here, you’re telling me I’m supposed to make myself some kind of trans ambassador to my lesbian sisters to sell them on the idea that a trans identity somehow makes a penis as much of a vagina as our actual vaginas, and that if we’re not down with visual or other interaction with penises it’s because we’ve got hang-ups.
Yeah … right …
People with this expectation are my community, to which I owe allegiance above all other affiliations?
Yeah … right …
Any decision about SRS involves trade-offs, especially the decision to be “non-op.” You can experience your body any way you choose. You’re just not going to get many takers for the notion that it’s some oppressive “cissexist construction” when women in general expect someone who wants them to accept them as a woman, meaning as pretty much like them, to have an interest in being as female-bodied as possible, in order to share as much as possible the physical experience of being female.
“Woman” is more than an identity and a social experience. The thing about kicking Sandy Stone out of the Olivia Collective was the notion that to be a woman you had to be female-bodied from birth, not just needing to be female-bodied for body-mind congruence and busting your rear end to make that happen. Sandy Stone proved herself at Olivia, but outsiders got her kicked out. I proved myself in the Daughters of Bilitis, but outsiders got me kicked out.
Bodies matter among strangers in the shower, because you can’t know strangers’ intent if they bring a differently-sexed body in there. Women are vulnerable in that situation, and demonstrating an understanding of that and a commitment to making that safe space is what puts someone on the “safe” side when the mind’s pattern recognition acts.
Ponder on this, Grasshopper.
As trans women, how can we define woman in any principled way based on genitals? Any argument that we might make based on our willingness to have surgery can also be used against us – if you let it be necessary for us to have surgery to be women, then the fact that it is then recognised as necessary can be used to call us not women. Our enemies can and frequently do say that a neo-vagina is a different thing from a vagina.
If we are to say that we are women, then we must find a definition of “woman” that does not pay heed to genitals. Surgery does not, after all, make one a different person – merely a differently shaped person.
“If this is the issue, you could prove that you have a womanhood that is
innate regardless of whether your genitals reasonably conform to the
female standard, by thinking and acting like a woman. ”
I see. So, you get to set the rules on what a “woman” is, and the only way to prove she’s a woman is to agree with you?
Unfortunately, this same argument can be used against you by cis women, if they were trying to exclude you from… well, anywhere they might try to exclude you from. They might suggest that if you were really a woman, you’d understand that they didn’t want to be around someone who was raised and socialised male (and hence was more dangerous than cis women). I’ve seen this argument before, so surely you you have? Surely you think it flawed?
Why then are you using it?
Also a friend of mine introduced me to an Olivia compilation last year, and yes, one can definitely feel the palpable quality of her music.
I’m reminded of seven years ago… I had one of those very po-mo roomies who, after I discovered The Indigo Girls said that I couldn’t be into them, as I wasn’t a lesbian…
With irony I would note that I can’t be into them now because I’m a conscientious lesbian. Pity. I really loved “Leeds,” and “Caramia.”
I recommend that folx visit: http://www.tsroadmap.com/info/victoria-brownworth.html and peruse the 1981 item – not Raymond, not Daly, not Vincent and not Brennan, but a point on the arc of exterminationism nevertheless and one that has thus far managed to hide from the gaze of history.
You’ll be hearing a bit more about it in the days to come, however.
I think it is incorrect to call these views “radical feminist Perspective”. I am a radical feminist and a long time advocate for all facets of the LBT & G communities. I had to learn about Transgender issues and come to a place of acceptance as part of my learning process. I was fortunate that I was friends with Phyllis Frye in Houston who patiently educated myself and many others, I also got to know and work with those who are of transidentity and active in the movement. The core of feminism is equality ‘regardless’ of sex. To deny others equality is not feminist.
Too many rad fems have been silent in the face of other rad fems hatin’ on transwomen or actively working to oppress transwomen.
Want to stop that impression that rad fems hate transwomen, then more have to get vocal in their spaces, blogosphere and elsewhere about calling the transphobia out.
This, except you missed the space bar a couple times.
And yet, there’s no cis counterpoint to Raymond, Daly, Greer, Jeffreys, Steinem of equal prestige… it’s fair to say that much of the feminist community, myself and yourself excepted, has voted with it’s feet… don’t get me wrong, if you’re willing to work to expel these leading lights from the movement, I’ll be there by your side, but you’ll have a harder time with that than Buckley did taking on the Birchers.