NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #30/NN_1992_30.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/9489

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From: [e-mail] (Workers World Service)
Subject: Passing Women Slideshow Stirs San Fran
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Via The NY Transfer News Service * All the News that Doesn't Fit


PASSING WOMEN SLIDE SHOW STIRS SAN FRANCISCO

By Brenda Sandburg
San Francisco

Leslie Feinberg presented her remarkable, groundbreaking slide
show on passing women to a crowd of 200 people in San Francisco
Dec. 13. It was a widely diverse gathering of people from the
transgender and lesbian/gay communities.

Saul Kanowitz of the lesbian and gay caucus of Workers World
Party chaired the San Francisco meeting. He explained that the
fight for transgender liberation is an important part of the
struggle for socialism.

Kanowitz said an effective fight to build socialism requires
unity. "We feel the best way to achieve such unity is for people
to understand each other's oppression," he said. The capitalist
system "ensures its existence when it successfully pits us
against each other in a conscious divide-and-conquer strategy."

Feinberg's collection of photographs shows that transgendered
people were honored and respected by ancient societies on every
continent. Introducing the slide show, Feinberg explained that it
is a "framework to our transgender history, to rendering our
lives visible again, to fueling our pride."

"When our history is stolen from us we fall victim to deep
misunderstandings," Feinberg said. "Those who fear that
male-to-female transvestites, for example, are mocking women's
oppression have never been allowed to see the volumes of
information about the solidarity between women and the
male-to-female berdache before both groups were subject to
institutionalized oppression."

Native American transgendered men and women, called berdache by
the colonialists, were held in high esteem by their people. In
the 1670s a Jesuit priest wrote that the berdache were summoned
to the council and "nothing can be decided without their advice."

Transgendered people were also an accepted part of society on the
European continent before the rise of patriarchal slave
societies, Feinberg said. She noted that there was ritual
cross-dressing by transgendered gods and goddesses, and that
peasants had a high regard for transgendered people.

The church and feudal landlords particularly attacked
transgendered people in their campaign to wipe out anyone who
challenged them. Feinberg said peasant men and women
cross-dressed as a protest against feudalism.

"By the time of industrialization, the prejudices unleashed
during the Middle Ages were woven into the tapestry of
exploitation," she said.

Feinberg's slide show highlights Joan of Arc, who was burned at
the stake by the Inquisition of the Catholic Church because she
refused to stop dressing as a man, and many others.

Feinberg also paid tribute to male-to-female transsexuals. She
said Marsha Johnson, who fought in the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion
and was a founder of Street Transvestite Action Revolution, was
recently found dead in the Hudson River. Johnson's friends
investigated her death and found evidence of violence.

Kate Bornstein, a well-known Bay Area writer and transsexual
activist, joined Feinberg on the platform. She read from her
essay, "My Girlfriend Is Becoming the Man of My Dreams," to be
published in Ten Percent magazine in January. With wit and humor
she exposed biases about gender, saying it is crucial to
eradicate those biases.

Bornstein said she underwent surgery seven years ago to become a
woman and now her lesbian lover of three years is becoming a man.
She said that in desperation she devised a label for herself: "I
figured out that I was a bisexual heterosexual lesbian gay male
transsexual woman in a committed relationship with a lesbian man
named David."

"Every deck has a pair of jokers. Wild cards, fools, if you
will," Bornstein said. "Jokers come from the fool card in the
tarot deck and the fool is said to embody all the other cards in
the deck, which is why today's joker is wild and can be used as
any other card. I think we're all of us jokers if we want to be.
I think if you scratch any relationship you'll find a pair of
jokers."

Bornstein said gender is only one aspect of identity. "All
identities change to some degree over time," she said, "and if
we're going to base a community on identity, we'd be well advised
to make it flexible enough to accommodate those changes."

Feinberg also read a moving passage from her novel, "Stone Butch
Blues," which is to be published by Firebrand Books in February.

(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if
source is cited. For more info contact Workers World, 46 W. 21
St., New York, NY 10010; email: [e-mail]; "workers"
on PeaceNet; on Internet: "[e-mail]".)


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