MWMF: Allies In Understanding, Pt 1

Breakfast was had in the tent. Peanut butter in granola, thick in my mouth. There was loneliness and anxiety for what was to come.

I walked down the long winding path past the crafts womyn, past the community tent, past Gaia girls. And as I walked flashes of red fabric added to the viscosity of the morning.

Womyn born womyn (WBW). As if these words could only mean one thing to anyone. WBW, an organized response to a push for inclusion of all womyn at this festival. A push for understanding that womon is a broad and beautiful thing. A thing that we each come to, or don’t, in our own way. Red was their color, these womyn born womyn. And red came to mean many things for me that week.

Red came to mean blood and the sacredness and separateness of a body that bleeds. Red was anger, fear, passion and fire. Red was life itself, my roots and also the wound that kept weeping.

That small meadow my path emptied me into was heavy in red but not dominated by it. I found others with soft white cotton shirts or pins that said Trans Womyn Belong Here. That white read to me as a softening, a peace flag. Not surrender but no longer sharp suspicion. Though many couldn’t, or wouldn’t, know that. There were many others there in jeans or dresses, bare breasted or swaddled against summer heat. They flagged no color. I could hardly see them at all. My eyes stuck to the red.

There was a nervousness, a tension, a closeness. We had gathered for a workshop, Allies in Understanding: Womyn-Only Space, the Shifting Concepts of Gender, and Trans-Inclusion. The workshop was facilitated by two people, one grey haired and one baby faced. They set a tone of honesty, humor and challenge. They spoke to the nervousness and all the womyn in that meadow laughed together. That was significant. It meant beginning this conversation knowing that our voices could join in a joyful unison. It was possible. It was already happening.

They explained to us that we would be pairing up with someone and asked to watch people model respectful dialogue. It seemed trite but it was welcome. They asked us to consider where we stood on this issue and to line ourselves single file down a long dirt path. People who felt strongly that the space should include trans womyn on one end, people who strongly felt this should be a ‘WBW’ only space on the other, and all those unsure in between. The line stretched long as I would say there were 100+ womyn there. I could not see which side was longer or how full the middle was. I could only feel trepidation trickling under my skin, the heat on my neck and the force it required to keep my feet still.

I stood perhaps 4 people from the end of this binary and the facilitators asked that we fold the line in half, with the WBW folks walking their end of the line towards ours. This is how we would find our pair. One on one with the same level of passion, commitment and fire. And so it was that I waited to meet my match. And so it was that I met her...