At approximately 2 in the afternoon on Saturday, July 6, there were one dozen people sitting on the grass in Healey Willan Park. Mostly women, trans and two-spirited folk, they were engaged in such activities as fashioning flowers out of tissue paper.
Over the course of the next two hours, the group in the southeast corner of the Euclid-and-Ulster green space more than doubled in size and moved on to other endeavours like sharing personal stories about the criss-crossing of the struggles for women’s rights, trans rights and sex worker rights – as well as race, class and indigenous issues.
A banner reading “Celebrating Our Feminisms” was slowly being painted, in both the literal and figurative senses.
The organizers were careful to point out that this was not a protest. And while that may have been true insofar as the event was a tranquil affirmation of solidarity, it was certainly being done in protest.
A few blocks away from Healey Willan Park was the RadFem Rise Up! conference. Taking place in a private residence from Friday to Sunday, it was a symposium for and by self-described radical feminists. “Thirty women meet for a weekend misogynist heads explode,” read the title of a blog post published by the conference organizers the next week.
Unlike the emphatically inclusive congregation in the park, the RadFem conference maintained a strict “womyn-only” policy. And by “womyn,” they meant “womyn-born-womyn,” i.e., not trans people.
To say the very least, this is a point of contention.
Radical feminism is a somewhat older strain of feminism that views the issue of gender through a fairly straightforward lens: there are men and there are women the patriarchy which permeates all of society situates men firmly on top and that is a fundamental problem.
Perhaps useful up to a point, this model does not function quite so well when confronted with trans identities and gender fluidity. Liminality doesn’t have much of a place in an ideology premised on a binary understanding of the world.
(It’s a similar situation with radical feminist understandings of sex work and pornography, which begin from the idea that the women who take part in such things are necessarily subject to oppression.)
While the organizers of RadFem Rise Up! explained on their site that “as feminists, we would like to reiterate that we support full human dignity and rights for trans people,” at least two of the people speaking at the conference have a history of statements and presentations that proudly dismiss, mock and/or erase trans people altogether.
Unsurprisingly, people do not take well to being explicitly excluded from an event at which their very identities may be a subject of vitriolic discussion.
For the RadFems, the “womyn-only” rule was a necessary step to claiming space – free from “the threat of violence or harassment” – for discussions that they believe could only be truly understood by women who were “female-assigned at birth.”
For trans folk and their allies, this is an expression of bigotry, or at least an example of discrimination.
Because those on each side were certain that their identities were being rejected by the other, things got ugly. And it probably says something that it’s easier to write about this conflict on an abstract, cerebral level than it is to attempt to untangle the unholy mess of accusations and counter-accusations and alleged threats and general paranoia.
Many statements from both groups are tinged with an anxiety bordering on “Those people are crazy, and you don’t know what they’re capable of.”
I emailed Trish Oliver, one of the conference’s organizers, with a request for a phone interview. She replied with a statement instead, alleging that Rise Up! was subject to “intimidation” and “threats” that “can only be described as ‘extreme terrorism.'”
A spokesperson for the counter-event, with whom I talked at the park (but who later requested her name not be used due to safety concerns), stressed the peaceful nature of the assembly and the intersectional values it was celebrating. But she did describe the RadFem’s anti-sex-work views as “a form of extremism.”
I asked Tera Mallette, who was at the park shooting the event for a documentary on the broader subject, whether she thinks radical feminism never really went away or if it’s something that went away and then came back. “Well, like most things, I think it’s always been around, but it has grown a little bit lately,” she says.
“There’s just a lot of women-consciousness coming around again in the mid-2010s. And so some people are jumping on one bandwagon, other people are jumping on another. It happens. Philosophies go in and out of style. Maybe we’ll be existentialists next year.”
jonathang@nowtoronto.com | @goldsbie
