i “Identity crisis” was a new concept theorized by Friedan’s graduate adviser, Erik Erikson.
CHAPTER SIX
TERF GATEKEEPING AND TRANS FEMINIST HORIZONS
Janice Raymond and Sandy Stone
To encounter the transsexual body, to apprehend a transgendered consciousness articulating itself, is to risk a revelation of the constructedness of the natural order.… As the bearers of this disquieting news, we transsexuals often suffer for the pain of others.… Though we forego the privilege of naturalness, we are not deterred, for we ally ourselves instead with the chaos and blackness from which Nature itself spills forth.
—Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix”
IN APRIL 1973, FIFTEEN HUNDRED WOMEN—SIMULTANEOUSLY ANGRY AND ECSTATIC—converged among the brick and palm trees of the UCLA campus. “It’s beginning. FAR OUT,” an organizer named Barbara McLean enthused backstage in her pocket journal as a Friday night concert opened the West Coast Lesbian Conference. “I feel as though I’m plugged into an outlet,” she relished, looking out at hundreds and hundreds of short-haired, bra-less, free-spirited, mostly white women clad in androgynous plaid filling all the seats and clogging the aisles of Moore Hall.1
McLean and her co-organizers created the largest queer women’s gathering yet held in the United States aiming to consolidate a unified political agenda for lesbians. To be a lesbian-feminist signified far more than whom one dated—it was a deep excavation of patriarchy from one’s body, desire, and community. Many lesbian-feminists aimed to construct a radically new mode of inhabiting the world, one perhaps coming to life that night at UCLA. The West Coast Lesbian Conference, however, would become famous for the roiling conflict that nearly broke it apart and foreshadowed decades of discord to come.
Two hours into the event, white folk singer–songwriter Beth Elliott walked onto the stage with her acoustic guitar slung across her torso. Beth was a twenty-one-year-old member of the conference steering committee who had served as vice president of the San Francisco chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, the oldest lesbian organization nationwide. She loved the playfulness, freedom, and aesthetics of lesbian-feminist culture, the way it nurtured deep love for women and their art and cultivated a sense of humor in the midst of rampant misogyny. “Well if you like sexist music” she crooned in one song, “then country music’s the best. The women sing of how men are king and how it’s fun to be oppressed.”2
But not everyone agreed that Elliott had a place in the movement. As she took her seat onstage, two women rushed the platform, grabbing her microphone away.
“He is a transsexual and a rapist!” one yelled. “He has no right to perform!”
“You’re wrong!” another woman protested. “She is a woman because she chooses to be a woman! What right do you have to define her sexuality?!”3
A melee quickly consumed the auditorium. A few women jumped the stage to attack Elliott, but two performers intervened and absorbed the blows themselves.4
Eventually, a small group took the stage and drew the line: “If Beth Elliott can’t perform, then no one performs.”5 To settle the crowd, an organizer polled the audience on whether or not Elliott would be permitted to play her set. One of her many allies sat next to her, holding her hand. The crowd overwhelmingly chose for her to continue.
Elliott began to strum her guitar. But a vocal faction caused an uproar, drowning out her sound. Once more, her right to be on stage was subjected to popular vote. Once more, the audience voted for her to perform, this time three to one. Elliott’s sweet voice rang throughout the auditorium even as her body shook and ninety angry women stormed out in protest.6
One member of the crowd was particularly incensed by Elliott’s presence at the Lesbian Conference: former child star Robin Morgan, famous for her writing on sisterhood. Morgan was to deliver the conference keynote the following day. In her view, “one smug male in granny glasses and an earth-mother gown” sowed discord in the middle of lesbian utopia. Morgan stayed up half the night rewriting her keynote. It was an important speech for her, intended to help set the political agenda of lesbian-feminism, and she joked the text was to be kept for posterity “in a secret safe deposit box guarded night and day by the spirits of Stanton and Anthony.”7
Morgan’s speech was held outdoors the next morning on the campus quad, her podium perched one-third of the way up an imposing set of eighty-seven stairs. She insisted on her own credentials as a “political lesbian,” though she was married to “a Faggot-Effeminist.”8 She deserved a place in the lesbian movement, she assured her audience. But Beth Elliott did not.
“No, I will not call a male ‘she,’” Morgan inveighed. “Thirty-two years of suffering in this androcentric society, and of surviving, have earned me the name ‘woman’; one walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which he may enjoy), and then he dares, he dares, to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers’ names and in our own, we must not call him sister. We know what’s at work when whites wear blackface; the same thing is at work when men wear drag.”9
Morgan had invented a new iteration of white feminism’s favorite rhetorical structure: the Black/woman analogy. In this version, racist mockery is equated with gender transition. The analogy would stick.
“I charge him as an opportunist, an infiltrator, and a destroyer—with the mentality of a rapist,” Morgan denounced. “You can let him into your workshops—or you can deal with him.” Her speech ran twice the length of her allotted time.10
The Gutter Dykes, a transphobic group from Berkeley, blocked Barbara McLean from her hosting duties at the mike and continued Morgan’s screed.
Trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who object to transgender rights in any form, had arrived at the lesbian-feminist revolution. Accounts of the showdown at the West Coast Lesbian Conference soon spread across the lesbian press, helping to kick off a firestorm that would burn for years. Many, like organizer and writer McLean, insisted upon Beth Elliott’s rightful place in the women-loving-women community. Others, especially those like Robin Morgan who had access to audiences far larger than readers of the photocopied newsletters produced by lesbian-feminist collectives, drew battle lines, framing Elliott as an enemy of the movement. Even as Betty Friedan came to gradually endorse lesbian rights, a new specter had emerged within white feminism: the transsexual woman.
TERF anger soon shifted from Elliott to another target within the women’s music scene. In the mid-1970s, the beloved lesbian music collective Olivia Records invited a recording engineer named Sandy Stone, a trans woman, to join their community.i Stone’s presence at Olivia became a point of violent contention, revealing the extent and depth of TERF opposition to trans women joining the lesbian-feminist movement. None of the objectors were as influential as Janice Raymond, a nun turned academic, who released a notorious study of transsexuality that set the TERF agenda for decades.
Though transsexual rights was a new topic in the 1970s, its opponents within women’s liberation drew on the long tradition of white feminist politics. Rallying around the fantasy that sex discrimination is the main factor that shapes women’s lives and that women are united by this shared experience, TERFs conceived of a starkly binary universe in which men only oppress, and women are only oppressed. Because trans women did not suffer the allegedly universal experience of growing up female, they maintained, they were, therefore, men and oppressors. Updating white feminism for the gay liberation era, TERFs developed a new cleansing agenda: removing trans women from the women’s movement and especially lesbian separatist communities.
But, as at UCLA where the majority of the crowd twice voted that Beth Elliott remain on stage, the TERF position was far from universally embraced within feminism. Today, 1970s feminism is often, incorrectly, understood to have been overwhelmingly transphobic. To this day, TERFism threatens to drown out the existence of the counterhistory, disappearing the role trans women themselves pla
yed in the movement and flattening a period of struggle into a single, white feminist history. Yet while trans women and their allies had far smaller platforms than Morgan and Raymond, they fought back against TERF insistence that there is only one way to be a woman.11 The more expansive accounts of sex, gender, and power they developed form an important current of intersectional feminism.
Two years after the West Coast Lesbian Conference and 350 miles to the north, a group of lesbian musicians from Los Angeles walked into a Santa Cruz stereo repair shop. The Wizard of Aud was a lesbian hangout, more of a collective than a store. Flyers adorned the walls and women draped on the sofa, catching up on each other’s lives. The shop owner, a polymath and technology whiz named Sandy Stone, taught the collective’s members how to repair audio equipment. In those days of cheap living on the California coast, fixing five stereos a month would enable them to make rent; selling used equipment brought in additional revenue.
Stone, buried in a stereo behind the counter, nonetheless felt eyes boring into her from the front of the store. A small sign hung above her: “Psychiatric Help 5¢.”
“Can I help you?” she asked, looking up at the small group of women, white and Black.
“We’re from Olivia Records, and we hear that you’re a recording engineer. We’re looking for a woman to engineer some music for us. Would you like to try doing that?”12 Olivia Records had been cofounded by members of the Furies when the DC house with Rita Mae Brown and others dissolved. Now it was the largest women’s music label in the country and a pillar of the lesbian separatist movement. Linda Tillery, Judy Dlugacz, and several other collective members had recently learned of Stone’s engineering prowess from Leslie Ann Jones, the first woman engineer hired at ABC Studios, so they drove up north to meet her.
“Yeah!” Stone affirmed. Olivia members had called her about a week prior, so she had been expecting the visit. “But I think I should tell you before we go any further that I’m a transsexual.”
“Yeah, we know,” they replied nonchalantly.13
Stone was a spectacular recording engineer. She had started about eight years prior, in 1968, when she bluffed her way into a job at the newly launched and soon-to-be legendary Record Plant studio in Manhattan. The studio needed a technician to repair their state-of-the-art equipment, and though Stone had never seen anything like their Scully twelve-track, she had a gift for technology. She had been part of a team building some of the first solid-state computers when fresh out of high school in 1955 and had also worked as an auditory researcher at the famous Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, teaching myna birds to stutter. In her early thirties, she wanted to break into rock ’n’ roll recording. She speed-read the twelve-track’s manual during her Record Plant interview, using a skill she had taught herself while still in elementary school. When she walked over to the machine, it took her two minutes to fix it. Once owner Gary Kellgren collected his jaw from the floor, he hired her on the spot. Stone had just arrived in New York to pursue her dream and didn’t yet have a place to live, so she slept on Jimi Hendrix’s old capes in the basement.14
Three weeks into her Record Plant gig, the head engineer recording Hendrix’s “Stone Free” and other songs fell sick in the middle of a shift. He insisted Stone take over. Though she was just the repair guy, everyone in the studio had seen her watching, rapt, while they recorded and mixed. When Stone sat at the console, she was electric. She felt that sometimes other people, including Jimi, could see the blue energy radiating off her.15
Eventually, Kellgren wanted her to head a subsidiary company, but Stone wanted her hands on the music itself. At an acid-fueled party in upstate New York, a well-heeled Timothy Leary supporter solicited adventurers interested in heading west, right then, in his chartered jet. Sandy raised her hand, and as she came down off the acid the next morning, she found herself sitting on the curb at the San Jose airport. She stayed in California and her engineering career took her to San Francisco and LA, where she recorded and mixed Crosby, Stills, and Nash; Jefferson Airplane; and Van Morrison’s album Tupelo Honey and did gigs with the Grateful Dead, The Byrds, and others, often under the name of Doc Storch.16
Doc Storch had realized his rock ’n’ roll dreams, but he was still sleeping on the floor regularly.ii And, he couldn’t shake a gnawing feeling that he would die in his body if he didn’t finally take action to address a knowledge he’d carried within him since the dreams that began when he was four or five years old: he always appeared as a girl. She began to transition, with the support of Marty Balin, founder and vocalist of Jefferson Airplane, and especially David Crosby and Graham Nash, along with other musicians she worked with. But needing a wider queer, feminist community, Stone moved north to famously free-spirited Santa Cruz in 1974. She found quick and easy work repairing stereos at a home electronics chain store in the town mall. When she carefully explained to her employers that she was transitioning sex, they immediately fired her. She responded by opening the Wizard of Aud right across the street. Within two years, she and her burgeoning collective put the corporate shop out of business. “They had multiple factors going against them,” Stone later reflected. “One of them was that no one went to them to have anything repaired anymore.”17
Olivia Records was a far cry from the Record Plant. Despite the epic, drug-fueled recording sessions with Hendrix and others, the Record Plant’s formal structure was more or less like a regular business, and its clients were among the country’s best musicians. Olivia, on the other hand, was a true collective, forging communal lesbian life among themselves while also circulating lesbian music around the country. Olivia Records rented three houses on a block of LA’s Wilshire neighborhood, where members lived and recorded, sharing all expenses and profits as well as rotating cooking and cleaning duties. The politics of their music, and the material conditions in which they produced and distributed records, were as important as the sound itself. This resulted in tracks with quiet, muddy instrumentalization, even as Olivia’s cofounders Meg Christian and especially Cris Williamson had resonant, luminous voices—Bonnie Raitt remarked that hearing Williamson sing for the first time “was like hearing honey dripped on a cello.”18
After that initial meeting at the Wizard of Aud, Stone began a yearlong trial period with Olivia Records, recording an album by the all-women rock band BeBe K’Roche, remixing Williamson’s breakout album The Changer and the Changed, and staying at Olivia’s LA houses.
At first, Stone, unused to making politics and music at the same time, kept saying the wrong thing in the studio.
“Well if she can’t play, we should get somebody who can,” she remarked during a recording session.
“Sit down, and shut up,” collective members replied.19
The sisterhood wasn’t new to her—Stone was part of a lesbian outdoors group called the Amazon 9 adventurous enough to be dropped by airplane north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska and kayak for thirteen days down the Kobuk River. But she hadn’t been able to combine her recording talents with her commitment to women’s culture, until now. Soon enough, Stone embraced what she saw as the Olivia ethos: “Learning the spirit of sisterhood was more important than technical perfection.” In 1976, having passed her vetting period, the collective developed a new vision together. Stone would convert one of the house’s living rooms into a school, and she would train a new generation of women recording engineers in sound design as well as developing and building recording equipment.20
Olivia Records made lesbianness itself a felt reality at a time when most gay life of any kind was conducted behind closed doors. Homosexuality was only removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of psychiatric pathologies in 1973, the same year the collective was founded. Yet Williamson’s sensual, woman-loving The Changer and the Changed was one of the nation’s top-selling independently produced albums for the next twenty years. Members took their role as liaisons for the lesbian sisterhood seriously. One crushed-out fan recalls writing an impassioned letter, at age sixteen,
to singer and collective member Teresa Trull and receiving a lengthy letter in reply—full of Trull’s recommendations to the women’s bookstores in the teen’s region.21
Lesbian-themed folk songs like “Wise Women,” “Leaping Lesbians,” and “Ode to a Gym Teacher” reclaimed as erotic and political what the mainstream saw as monstrosity in the eyes of the patriarchy. But folk was far from the only output at Olivia. With Black singers like Linda Tillery among its early members, the collective pushed women’s music beyond its acoustic comfort zone, releasing jazz, soul, gospel, funk, and poetry by white and Black musicians. Black lesbian Pat Parker’s 1976 spoken-word LP directly confronted the white feminist myth that the only oppressors were men. “Sister,” her narrator corrects her white girlfriend, “your foot’s smaller. But it’s still on my neck.”22 One show created a scandal. Teresa Trull wore lipstick onstage, an allegedly unacceptable mark of women’s oppression.
Olivia’s prominence meant that Stone’s presence became a lightning rod. One day, the collective received an eleven-by-fourteen manila envelope, the kind containing a college acceptance packet or a court summons. Janice Raymond, a former Catholic nun and now a PhD candidate in ethics at Boston College studying under famous feminist theologian Mary Daly, had mailed a chapter of her dissertation on transsexuality. Raymond’s chapter painted transsexuals—which for her meant men masquerading as women—as dangerous dupes of stereotypical sex roles and of an exploitative medical establishment. She alleged that transsexual lesbians in separatist communities were akin to rapists who possessed women’s bodies and invaded their spaces. Collective members were disgusted but quickly dismissed the writing, as Stone did, as “another weirdo writing a pseudoscientific paper.”23
But the envelope was a bellwether. Soon, Olivia Records began to receive hate mail. The initial letters stuck to a common theme: the new Olivia albums were awful because they had a “male” sound—the mixes included prominent drums, which writers found to be objectionable “throbbing male energy.” At first, Stone laughed at the preposterousness of the idea of sexed sound, for the entire collective was proud of the quality of the records they were releasing. The mail piled up as the months went on, however, reaching as many as forty to fifty letters a day. And the tone shifted. Increasingly, letters threatened Stone with death and pledged serious violence to the dozen women comprising the collective.24
The Trouble with White Women Page 23
