[CherylNYC]

@BBinNYC and nycfem- As Nedra eloquently explained in her blog post, not every place is appropriate for everybody. Besides her extraordinarily lucid points about our lived experience as girls and women being an important qualifier for WBW space, there's another important physical reason why I have very few issues with MWMF's trans policy. Even though I only attended MWMF once, I can say from what I've recently read that some things haven't changed.

MWMF shares a similarity with women's BDSM play parties in that women feel safe walking around without their clothes. As a matter of fact, that's one of the defining features of both of those events. This is relevant because many trans people don't have surgery, and most trans inclusion policies are no longer based on anatomy. In other words, we no longer rely on whether or not a person can leave their 'dick in the drawer'. It would be foolish not to acknowledge that there are good reasons for that policy change. Some trans people aren't good surgery candidates, or their health insurance policy won't cover the expensive surgeries. It makes sense, BUT it means that if MWMF were to change their policy to include all trans women, a person who has had no surgery and may not have taken any hormones could demand entrance to MWMF, and then would be free to walk around without their clothes. As you might have guessed, I don't feel safe and happy in women's space if I'm seeing bio-dick. Period. In fact, if I have to see dick, it's not women's space anymore.

Make a policy that 'if a person has a bio penis, please keep it covered', you say? I have been vilified internationally as a transphobe and a generally horrible person for proposing just such a thing for our women's BDSM play parties. A trans woman friend who supported this party rule because she never wanted to see another dick as long as she lived was called a transphobe by people who had never been trans. Irony free. You can't make this s**t up.

'A trans woman would never show the most male part of herself!' I used to hear that reassurance, and I actually believed it until I had multiple experiences with people with very male bodies, unmodified by hormones or surgery, who had no problem exposing their penises at women's BDSM play events that welcome trans women who live their lives 24/7 as women. This occurred at events in both California and in NY. One clearly very male person I'll call N demanded and gained admittance to our NYC women's BDSM group. He asserted that he was a woman because he felt like one, and that taking hormones or having surgery would be participating in medical fascism, or something. Physically he was a very large and tall male, and he did absolutely nothing at all to change any single thing about himself. For instance, he wore the same clothes and shoes, and he went to the same barber and got the same traditionally male haircut as he always did. Obviously, gender is not based on clothes and hairstyle, but this guy was treated like a man in every aspect of his life because he gave no cue whatsoever to anyone that he might be anything other than male. Deliberately. And then he demanded and received access to women's space. My trans friends were NOT happy to see him. My close sister-friend, A, was horrified. She took her transition from male to female very seriously. She sacrificed a great deal to become a woman. She tried to speak to N about her concerns, but he was, uuh, intransigent.

A worried that N would reflect so poorly that her own acceptance as a woman in our community could become endangered. I hoped we would be able to reassure her that we had an individual problem with N, as she did, but horizontal hostility reigned and it got very ugly. Other women had a problem with N, but they were afraid of being called transphobes and none of them spoke up the way A and I did. Trans activists, some of whom had never been trans, had no problem calling A, a trans woman who had been so active in the fight for trans rights that she was gifted by the Governor with one of the pens used to sign a bill securing trans rights, a transphobic bigot. I was also called a misogynist because trans women are women, so my obvious hatred of other women made me a misogynist. One woman told me that her girlfriend's penis was a female sex organ because her girlfriend, (a trans woman who hadn't had surgery and didn't take hormones), was a female, so her penis was therefore female. Once again, you can't make this s**t up.

Finally, some of those people who were so active in advocating for a male bodied person to be allowed to attend our women's events with no restrictions on their intact penis, told me straight up that they were dedicated to obliterating women's space. Because it's exclusionary and discriminatory. Against men. No, I'm not making this up.

It's easy to propose policies in the abstract, but the reality on the ground can get messy. I described N to friends who, it turns out, thought I was overreacting. Until they met N in person. Then the reality of a large, male MAN at the women's party stared them in the face, and they didn't like it one bit. One of the sweetest moments came when my closest sister-friend, who considers herself a huge trans supporter, was visiting from Canada with her trans-boi partner. Both of them asked me, "Why did you let that man into the party? Did you have to let him in because he's the owner of the space?"

The answer is that we were forced to let that man into women's space because he claimed to be a woman, and inclusive trans policies leave women's space open to abuse by entitled men.