MWMF II

I wrote some thoughts on the Michigan Women's Music Festival explicitly excluding transwomen, even legally recognized (post-transition) women, except they haven't said how they enforce that policy when "those" women have essentially female brains and a vagina, and that some of "those" women have actually attended the events, one even pre-surgery.

That said, I was struck by the thought the organizers use for the exclusion and about women's life experience being from birth, and obvious with a vagina, like children really think about it. They argue one point which anyone, especially women, would disagree, when Cristian Williams wrote:

At its core, Thompson’s argument — and Vogel’s — is essentially based on gender identity and socialization. It contends that being assigned female at birth is a life experience that differs from that of being assigned male. “The internal struggles and social pressures are different,” says Thompson. “We live in a patriarchy. That is still true. And that has real, cultural effects.”

This assumes women have a universal, maybe even generic, life experience being born female. Are Ms. Thompson and Vogel are arguing the fact of a certain physicality creates the exact same life experience that is a unique cultural experience to these people, meaning women?

That, to me, is the underlying fallacy to her decision and the discrimination - let's call it what it is which is a policy of discrimination they wouldn't tolerate if it applied to them with excluding women from anything because they were born female.

The diversity of women's life experience is as diverse and men's life experience, or really anyone's life experience regardless of the sex or gender. I won't argue boys and girls are treated differently through their childhood and youth, but that doesn't take away each boy and girl has their own take on that and their experience.

I also won't argue puberty is a different experience for boys and girls, both personally and socially, but let's not forget transgender children are equally different for having the identity of a gender different than their sex. They don't have the female reproductive system of girls but they have everything else.

And just having a female reproductive system doesn't make all girls the same or give all girls the same life experience. We know this in part because some girls grow up hating being female and some of those transition to become legally male.

These transmen deny their own female body and life experience. And we know that many women simply take being female as something to live with and engage in a life they want regardless and even in spite of being female. Being female is just something they life with and don't have the life experience Ms. Thompson and Vogel suggests.

But what also bothers me about their argument based on female anatomy is that they're applying the same logic the feminist movement used to gain freedom for women which they're applying it to discriminate against the freedom of women.

They can't have it both ways, or else men could equally use their own logic against them to exclude women from what the feminist movement gained which is equal rights regardless of one's sex or gender.

The MWMF seems to have forgotten their own history and using it to do what has been done to them.