these kids today (also, bitch and the boston dyke march)

[sophiaserpentia]

Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

I just came back from the Dyke March. My clothes had to be peeled off (it was a warm and rather muggy evening) and so i am sitting here naked trying to cool off. Whoo, naked tranny-girl flesh!

Ahem. Anyways. The Dyke March is a living embodiment of the affinity politics i wrote about a while ago. “Dyke,” at least as it manifests here in Boston, is a term of affinity and not of identity. Tonight, a “dyke” was anyone reasonably woman-centered who showed up and participated in this vibrant community. (Except for one guy who was there to pass out Jesus tracts.)

My girlfriend Cowgrrl was with me, and she explained that she had been in Dyke Marches over 20 years ago. Things were, of course, much different back then: then, there was big controversy over whether to invite bisexual women along. She wasn’t even sure when the Dyke March had become trans-friendly; it was after the last time she’d been.

How had things changed so much? We had only to look around to see the answer. These kids! These kids today. Let me tell you. They’re freakin’ awesome, and they have worked out all this stuff that we oldsters are still tripping over. So i am preparing myself for the switch to being one of the “community elders,” which basically means standing back and watching while these amazing young people do things we never dreamed of doing when we were that young.

These kids have a friend who is an Asian-American lesbian who does boy-drag and reads erotic poetry for GenderCrash; they have another friend who’s a lanky gay boy with bleached-blonde hair, who’s dating someone who just came out as a transman; they have another friend who’s dating a boy and a girl at the same time and who wears size 20 but dresses in a bellydance costume to dance on stage with Big Moves; and they have another friend who is a Latina transgirl who had to change schools when she transitioned.

And you know what? When they go to an event, they want all of their friends to be welcome there. They don’t want to see any lousy racism, they don’t want to see any lousy sexism, they don’t want to see any lousy sizeism, they don’t want to see any lousy homophobia, and they don’t want to see any lousy transphobia. It’s even better if things are handicapped-accessible, environmentally friendly, not too corporate, and generally pro-peace.

Before the March started i spoke with Gunner Scott of MassTPC to, you know, say hi, and find out what he knew about the decision to pull Bitch from the artistic programming.

For those who don’t know, Bitch was controversial because of statements like this about the policy of galla-exclusion at MWMF:

[I]t’s not trans people being marginalized. It’s people who were born as men. The festival is for people who suffered a girlhood. That’s all it is. They’re not trying to redefine what women are. … I’m so over it. I think it’s totally the patriarchy and it’s complete ageism. … If my elders want to say for these six days only these kinds of women can come, then I need to respect that. It is so against our nature to respect women for having boundaries. I think that’s exactly what’s happening.

Gunner told me the decision was made at the last minute because of considerable agitation in the community — but none of it had been started or directed by transactivists. MassTPC, he said, specifically stayed out of it. Transfolk had been involved of course; but Gunner didn’t know who started it. The person he’d first heard about it from was a woman-born-woman. At first it was just a call of attention to the incongruence between the Dyke March’s policies and Bitch’s politics. The movement to ask the committee to disinvite Bitch appears to have been basically spontaneous.

Once it started, though, it picked up momentum; MassTPC was going to pull out of the event; so was The Network La Red; probably others as well; it sounds like things became very intense in just a few hours. Finally the committee pulled the invitation to Bitch.

But iiiiiiii know who it was. Not specifically, i mean, but figuratively.

At the Dyke March i saw something i’d never seen before: most of the people there doing volunteer work to support trans rights (we have a bill before the Massachusetts legislature right now) were non-trans.

That’s big, folks. Big. These were kids who were tired of seeing their transgender friends being messed with and having their options limited for no good reason.

And they were the ones behind the withdrawal of the committee’s invitation to Bitch. Not Teh Evul Transfolk.

(Gunner was also pretty sure that my vision of Bitch “leav[ing] here talking about having had a great experience in a community that welcomes and includes gallae” was a pipe dream. I maintain that it would be better if things could go that way. I know. I’m a freakin’ hippie. It’s my nature.)