Unless you’ve spent some time as a lesbian, or perhaps are the sort of straight lady who enjoys the music, politics, and occasional abandoning of the menfolk that a particularly earthy strain of “womens’ culture” offers, you’ve probably never heard of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. It’s been happening for the past twenty-eight years, taking place each August on a lush chunk of woodland in northern Michigan, planned to coincide with summer’s final full moon. While womyn’s music is the festival’s alleged purpose—the guitar stylings of folksters like Holly Near and Cris Williamson as well as post-riot-grrrl acts like Bitch and Animal, the Butchies, and Le Tigre, to draw in the younger generation—the real purpose is to hunker down in a forest with a few thousand other females, bond, have sex in a fern grove, and go to countless workshops on everything from sexual esoterica to parading around on stilts, processing various oppressions, and sharing how much you miss your cat. The festival aims to be a utopia, and in most ways it hits its mark. Performers are paid well, and all performers are paid the same amount, regardless if they’re famous like the Indigo Girls or some virtually unknown girl band. You can come for free as a worker, taking on jobs like child care, kitchen work, or driving shuttles on and off the land, and even women who pay the hundreds of dollars to come in are required to pull their weight by picking up a couple of work shifts. The only dudes allowed in the space are the ones who rumble in late at night, in giant trucks, to vacuum the sludge from the hundreds of Porta-Potties, called Porta-Janes. They are preceded by a woman who hollers, “Man on the land! Man on the land!”—a warning to skittish nymphs to hop into a tent or a bush. I’ve been to the festival four or five times, and can attest to the deeply stunning feeling of safety and peace there. The absence of guys does make for an absence of threat; everyone’s guard is down, finally, and a relaxation level is hit that is probably impossible to access in the real world. Pretty much everyone who attends bursts into tears at some point, saddened at all the psychic garbage that females are forced to lug around and grateful for a week of respite. It’s no wonder the women who come to the festival are zealots about it, live for August, and get totally obsessed with and protective of the culture that springs up within its security-patrolled boundaries.

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In 1991 a transsexual woman named Nancy Jean Burkholder was evicted from MWMF. Transsexual women, for those not up-to-date with the growing transgender revolution, are women who were born in male bodies and have been fighting against that ever since. They may or may not be on hormones, which can be costly or unavailable. Same goes for sex reassignment surgery, which is often prohibitively expensive and not covered by insurance. Nancy Jean’s eviction is famous in Michigan lore, for it sparked a fierce debate about the inclusion of transsexual women, which has been raging for over a decade. A lot of women inside the festival want to keep trans women out. Some staunchly insist that these individuals are not women but men in dresses trying to ruin the feminist event. Others concede that trans women are women, but because they were born boys and may still have penises, the festival is not the place for them. Trans women and their growing number of allies say these feminist justifications are straight-up discrimination, no different from the rest of the world, which routinely denies that trans women are “real” women and bars their access to everything from jobs to housing, domestic-violence counseling to health care. Off and on for the past decade a small group of transpeople and their supporters have set up a protest camp, Camp Trans, across the road, in the hope of changing the policy that left Nancy Jean stranded in the Midwest twelve years ago.

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