On gender policies

"women and femmes"

Over the past few years, I’ve stopped going to events with exclusionary gender policies, which has really simplified things. When it comes to events or spaces that make a point about being only for men or women, there’s little ambiguity; they’re closed to me as an androgynous transsexual, for better or for worse. Things start getting a little hairy, however, when the event or space attempts to use exclusion in order to be inclusive of people like me.

How many event flyers have you seen with gender policies that use language like: “for women and femmes,” “for women and non-men,” or “for everyone but cis men?” For all that they probably mean well, these efforts to define the event against those who can’t come—rather than as for those who are invited—make me much more uncomfortable than women’s locker rooms or cis gay circuit parties. Just as some people prefer to interact with certain genders (or their idea of certain genders), I prefer not to submit myself to the scrutiny of the (invariably) cissexual person who thinks a flyer with “women and trans only” isn’t ignorant and disrespectful¹.

So where do I feel welcome? At events with expansive gender policies. Events with expansive gender policies may say they invite “all genders” or, are, like Bawdy, simply “a queer party.” They may advertise themselves as centering certain gender identities, such as women or dykes, but welcome all comers. Some, like Inferno, may acknowledge themselves as spaces where people who mostly identify a certain way come to cruise each other, while simultaneously making an effort to connect with attendees and organizers of more marginalized genders to make it more inclusive without losing what makes it special. While they can be imperfect, expansive gender policies do more to ensure that people with marginalized genders don’t have to work harder than anyone else to attend.

But isn’t “women and femmes” an effort, at least? Isn’t she/they’s heart in the right place? Wasn’t the original purpose of complicated door policies to make sure people with marginalized genders could come in the first place?

Sure. (And it’s here that I should point out that when deployed a certain way, “women and femmes” could very feasibly include me, a person who is never read as a woman or a femme in dyke spaces, while excluding a literal trans woman or trans femme. Or lbr, a fem/me cis guy!) But over the years and in my experience, that approach causes more problems than it resolves. If the language of a so-called inclusive event leaves trans people, especially women, wondering if they are truly welcome; if they will be scrutinized at the door; if they will be stared at, ignored, talked over, or degendered or sexualized against their will; if they will be presumed to be the aggressors in any conflict or abandoned if someone hurts or takes advantage of them, then what has it accomplished except further discrimination against trans people?

In my experience, the “women and femmes” lingo is often just window dressing, anyway. So no one too scarily masculine has made it past the velvet rope—now what²? What else are we doing to make sure that the dolls at our party are safe and respected and having a good time? Because I hate to break it to you, but cis women and people who can move through the world like them can be just as violent to trans people as cis men are. How often do Canva flyers with HR language advertise events that actually take tangible, material steps to make sure that trans people, women especially, are regarded as worthy of integration—and not just outsiders or tokens, useful for little more than virtue signaling?

I’m sorry if this is tedious. This gender policy thing isn’t an axe I grind very much, but I got to thinking about it again a few weeks ago when I went to Folsom for the first time in six years. I had fun, but the “no cis men” language among the dyke-adjacent leathersexuals in my vicinity was casual and frequent enough that I felt like I’d traveled back in time to my last visit, when “women and femmes” had more of a chokehold on dyke culture.

Folsom hosts countless groups, organizations, and meetups based on desire, identity, or affiliation, including the Playground, its formal space for “women of every kind and all trans and nonbinary folks.” While not for me, this language is pretty expansive³. And clearly I’m not alone, as it’s a popular destination among the, uh, non-cis men of Folsom. While many come and go, some stay there the entire time, protected from the sea of faggots and voyeurs and tourists surrounding them. I understand wanting to avoid cis men, but it does strike me as a choice to go out of one’s way—perhaps even flying across the country—to attend one of the nation’s premiere events of faggotry, one that began as resistance against the city of San Francisco’s shuttering of gay bathhouses at the dawn of the AIDS epidemic, only to make a lot of noise about escaping the cis male gaze (as if there’s only one) for the duration of your visit⁴.

Because listen, I’ve gotten into fights with cis men at Folsom. I’ve spent some time in public, where cis men famously are, and a fair number of them have a lot of feelings about me. But this effort to keep an entire gender out of gender-diverse spaces—not in order to create space for certain genders, but to circumscribe safe genders through the creation of unsafe genders—comes at the expense of trans people, especially those of us who are feminized, racialized, disabled, etc.⁵ It reminds me of means-testing for welfare benefits: efforts to weed out the people who don’t “need” or “deserve” food stamps will fail, with the bonus effect of also weeding out people who, according to your government’s totally unbiased standards, actually do “need” or “deserve” food stamps.

If your event is about celebrating, centering, or otherwise supporting trans people, just say that! Or if you want to do something without men around, that’s literally so fine. But the more convoluted gender exclusionary language gets, the more I feel like these events are more focused on hating the cis men who aren’t present than loving the people who are—and as a trans person, I can never help but wonder where that resentment is going to end up.

Not everyone agrees with me on this subject, and that’s okay. We can just go to different parties, which we do. But I’m tired of debating it with people who aren’t of the transsexual experience because their first argument is always this one: Well, I don’t want cis men at this event because I have been harmed by them before.

Over the years, it’s gotten more difficult to take this argument for what it is: the divulging of a very personal, sometimes very traumatizing experience of gendered violence. This is emotional and vulnerable, and for my two cents, gendered violence is a sound reason to find value in the exclusionary gender policy, at least initially. But I have to make an effort to keep all that in mind because it has begun to feel like an accusation in and of itself. Does this person think I haven’t considered that men as a group are incentivized to use their power over and against us? I wonder. That I can’t understand or relate to their fears? That I don’t come to this issue with similar experiences? That I haven’t also been assaulted by cis men, of all orientations, in gay and straight spaces alike? It’s difficult not to feel it as transphobia⁶, which in my case encreatures me as both a man, in that I can’t relate to women’s experiences, as well as a woman, in that my experiences don’t matter (I’m the woman’s woman). I can’t be trusted, as if I were a man, yet I don’t have the power over a woman that a man does. I’ve been assaulted by cis women, too—why is it that gender-diverse spaces must be forced to accommodate someone like me, but accepts as its natural guest the cis women who’ve taken advantage of our gendered power differential?

Personally, I actually manage a lot more hostility toward cis women than cis men because I’ve never expected loyalty from the latter—but that’s my trauma, and I can’t build trust and connection with that (you can read more of my thoughts on community here). We don’t know what a stranger will do when they enter our space, and to pretend that their gender can help us predict that isn’t just absurd, but counterproductive. We can only agree on which behaviors are unacceptable and remove those who behave unacceptably.

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1. “Women and trans” what, exactly? Do the people throwing these parties recognize that they sound like alt-right Facebook paid ads and no-pic Grindr accounts that say “passable trans only” in the bio? “Women and trans”—as if these things were mutually exclusive.

2. Or maybe they have, but they’re on notice.

3. Although I heard that blood and fucking wasn’t allowed there this year…!?

4. As if faggotry were only for cis men.

5. As if hordes of cis men are besieging the ramparts of dyke night—do you hear yourselves?

6. The kind shaped by my other identities, such as being white, being straight-size, being TME, etc.