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“At the gates of woman’s land, volunteers wave the cars and campers through, to a place that is certainly no nation, just a summer haven for a few thousand women, and a temporary town that is also a profitable business for its owners. But when we ask, the women at the gate can’t tell us exactly what kind of women are welcome. Does the policy of woman-born-woman mean that if you are born female you are always a woman? Then the member of the group who is a female-to-male transsexual should be able to come in, though he makes it plain he doesn’t want to. As a man, he respects the boundaries of women’s space. But the male-to-female transsexual, who always felt herself to be a girl and was frequently called one by taunting boys, says “I am a woman, I belong here.” Another woman asks about her status as someone who was born with am ambiguity of male and female genitals. She was raised to be a woman, she lives as a lesbian. The gatekeepers hesitate. She asks, “Can only half of me come in?” Finally, you identify yourself as a butch lesbian. You speak of your transgendered existence between woman and man, born female, but male in gender expression. You explain that you can’t always live openly as a transgendered person, that you and I sometimes pass as husband and wife for safety. When you ask if you’d be welcome on women’s land, at first the gatekeeper says “We’d prefer if you didn’t come in.”

The last and only time I’d been at the festival, I’d walked uneasily around the temporary town of six thousand or so women, on paths that wound between tents, performance stages, and masses of ferns. This woman’s land, this refuge, felt unreal and dangerous to me. Finally, after walking by thousands and thousands of white women, I realized I’d never lived, even briefly, in a place that had so few people of color. The only space I’d occupied for any length of time that was more segregated was the whites-only schoolroom of my childhood.

Now, ten years later, I find that to be admitted here I and the other women have to pass a biological test: Are you a pure, natural-born woman? Surely I can’t be the only one who fears a sisterhood based on biological definitions, the kind that have been used in the larger world to justify everything from job discrimination (because women have smaller brains and aren’t as smart) to hysterectomies (because women’s wombs make us hysterical) And I can’t be the only one who grew up trained into the cult of pure white womanhood, and heard biological reasons given to explain actions against people of color, everything from segregation of water fountains to lynching. If this gathering of women in the dusty fields beyond the gate is a community based on biological purity, then if offers me, a “real woman,” no real safety.

At the front gate, the questioners are still asking the gatekeepers how they can be so sure of the boundaries of womanhood. It seems that anyone with experience in a male body need not apply, since they would be prone to violence. I wonder how many of the women who pass through these gates actually believe that any person born in a woman’s body inevitably knows how to be kind and fair? Eventually, after many phone calls to the higher-ups, the gatekeepers say they will admit, though perhaps only for today, anyone who self-identifies as a woman-born-woman– if, of course, these people have the money to pay for admission.

Inside the festival, after our group is invited to a workshop organized by the Lesbian Avengers, a lively discussion continues between women campers and those of us from Camp Trans. Suddenly a white woman approaches and says with outrage, “I was walking by here and felt boy energy, then I saw you. I came here to be with women only. You don’t belong here.” She is speaking to someone who she has selected as a transsexual because of the slogan on her T-shirt. You turn to the angry woman and ask quietly, “What about me? Do I have male energy? Am I a woman or a man?” She pauses, taken aback, and finally says, “I don’t want to talk about each person…” You reply, “But you do want someone to decide. You want someone to judge, and us to submit to judgement. So tell me, am I a man or a woman? Tell me how you can decide? The woman falls completely silent, all of us sit silent. She does not answer. She walks away.”

ALT

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