The Man Who Led the Charge Against Michfest and Later Renounced Trans Activism
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The Man Who Led the Charge Against Michfest and Later Renounced Trans Activism
Davina Anne Gabriel had an unlikely change of heart
Davina Anne Gabriel was one of the most influential trans activists of the 1990s. He was the founder, editor, and publisher of TransSisters: the Journal of Transsexual Feminism, and he helped organize and participated in protests against the “womyn-born-womyn” policy at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival from 1992 to 1995.
Surprisingly, in 1996, Gabriel discontinued the journal and dropped out of trans activism altogether. By the end of his life, he rejected and denounced all of his previous activism completely.
TransSisters was launched in the fall of 1993. Gabriel had been inspired to start the journal after reading an essay by influential trans activist Sandy Stone titled, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto.” Stone had been at the center of a controversy in the 1970s when he was hired as the sound engineer for Olivia Records, an “all-women” recording company.
According to Jessica Xavier, a trans-identified man who also wrote for TransSisters, “Davina envisioned a journal that would extend Sandy's ideas, offering us a means of redefining ourselves in our own voices.”
Xavier continued:
So when Issue #1 appeared in the fall of 1993, transsexual feminists suddenly found something that crystallized our thoughts, focused our rage and gave us a voice. Rather than quietly acquiescing to the self-hatred implied by cultural feminists like Raymond and Daly, we could explore some ways and means of resisting them. Rather than seeing ourselves as enemies of feminism, it became possible to be empowered through articulating our own version of it.
However, he also admitted that:
TSisters came to embody our obsession with access to women-only space and particularly with Michigan's infamous "womyn-born-womyn" only policy.
In the very first issue of TransSisters, we get an origin story that sheds light both on how the T got stuck to the LGB and how the protests against Michfest began.
“‘We’re Queer Too!:’” Trans Community Demands Inclusion,” reads the title of an article penned by Gabriel that recounted his experience at the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. In the piece, he detailed how trans activists had tried to get “transgender” included in the title of the march by “confronting local organizers,” promising to “disrupt the march if their demands were not met,” and blowing whistles when they did not find the organizers’ answers acceptable.
Later on in the piece, Gabriel wrote of how he met and marched with Nancy Jean Burkholder, a trans-identified man who had sparked controversy upon his expulsion from Michfest in 1991 and who served as inspiration for Gabriel to attend the festival himself a year later to undertake “a variety of consciousness-raising activities.”
Gabriel had found his cause. Issue #2 of TransSisters, which came out later in the fall of 1993, was devoted entirely to Michfest, as summarized in the introductory blurb on page three. The journal came out strongly against the festival’s "womyn-born-womyn" policy, which it characterized as exclusionary, irrational, elitest, and patriarchal throughout the issue.
The next few issues (Issue #3, Issue #4, and Issue #5) branched out into other topics but continued to touch on the Michfest policy and informed readers about the upcoming protest at the 1994 festival because:
As the producers of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival have made clear that they have no intention of changing the festival’s policy of discriminating against transsexual womyn, the effort to change that policy that has been conducted at the previous two festivals will continue this year.
Issue #6, which came out after the festival, triumphantly published an article with the headline, “Transsexual Protesters Allowed to Enter Michigan Womyn's Music Festival.”
The piece begins:
Six openly transsexual women were allowed to enter the nineteenth annual Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival near Hart, Michigan on Saturday; 13 August 1994, following a week-long protest of that event's "womyn born womyn" only policy. The six transsexual women were: Zythyra Anne Austen of Winchester, Virginia; April Fredricks of New York City; Rica Ashby Fredrickson of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Davina Anne Gabriel of Kansas City, Missouri; Riki Anne Wilchins of New York City; and Jessica Meredith Xavier of Silver Springs, Maryland.
Released in the winter of 1995, Issue #7 ran a long story by Gabriel, “Mission to Michigan III: Barbarians at the Gates,” which detailed the events of that protest.
It all began with the creation of “Camp Trans.”
We decided upon an entirely different course of strategy than we had adopted in the two previous years. In 1992 and 1993 we had entered the festival with the specific intention of directly challenging the exclusionary policy. In 1994 we decided to make creating greater visibility for our cause to be our top priority, with the expectation that that greater visibility would translate into greater support for our cause and thus enable us to be in a stronger position to challenge the exclusionary policy directly in the future. To that end, we decided that we would create a highly visible presence outside the festival, one that could not possibly be overlooked by anyone entering it, and one that conveyed a powerful statement, as well as would draw significant numbers of women outside to it
With the help of female gender activist Leslie Feinberg, who confused festival security by telling them that she identified as a woman and as a lesbian but that her driver’s license said male, the camp trans contingent was able to purchase tickets and enter the festival. They “paraded” through the festival before returning to Camp Trans for dinner.
Gabriel finished the article with a call for donations, writing:
Plans are already underway for next year’s protest against the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival’s “woman born womyn” only policy. Great progress was made toward eliminating that policy this year, but much work remains to be done.
Issue #8, released in the spring of 1995, once again informed readers that protests against Michfest would continue:
Despite the successful entry of several transsexual women into the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival last year, it is expected that the brochure for the 1995 Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival will again contain the same discriminatory language as it has in the previous three years; that is, that “MWMF is a gathering of mothers and daughters for all womyn born womyn.” Festival producer Lisa Vogel has explicitly indicated that the decision to allow transsexual women to enter the festival last year does not signal an end to the discriminatory policy and that she has every intention of retaining the discriminatory policy this year and in future years.
Indeed, Issue #9 confirmed that the brochure for the upcoming festival still contained this policy.
However, the 9th issue of TransSisters also contained an interesting article by Gabriel which was beginning to show his dawning realization of a new strain of trans activism. Titled, “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss,” the article expressed his shock that some pre-operative men who identified as lesbians were trying to force their way into women’s spaces, including Michfest. He also expressed full support for women and lesbians who thought that women’s spaces should be penis-free zones:
Based on the activities that I have been involved in at MWMF and the literally hundreds of women whom I have spoken to, l have absolutely no doubt that the overwhelming majority of them favor the inclusion of postoperative transsexual women at that festival. But I can also say with the same degree of assurance that an even greater percentage of them — in fact, virtually all of them — oppose the inclusion of preoperative male-to-female transsexuals, or anyone else with a penis, at that festival. In fact, I can count on one hand the number of nontranssexual women who have attended MWMF whom l have spoken to who have stated to me that they think preoperative male-to-female transsexuals should also be allowed to attend that festival.
Nevertheless, Gabriel continued to protest for post-operative inclusion at Michfest in 1995, as detailed in Issue #10 in an article titled “Mission to Michigan IV: No Room at the Information Table.”
Despite the success of the protest in 1994, the 1995 protest almost didn’t happen due to the growing issue of preoperative inclusion. The protest group was divided, with some wanting to advocate for “allowing anyone who identified as a woman, regardless of anatomy, to attend the festival.”
“This was not something that I felt that I could support or participate in,” Gabriel wrote, noting that it caused him to split from the Camp Trans group. Instead, he entered the festival to hold workshops like “Confronting Transphobia” and “Accepting Gender Diversity.”
Though still committed to his cause, the cracks were beginning to show. Gabriel wrote of how he met with two women from Canada who:
talked about a controversy involving a transsexual woman working at a rape crisis counselling center that they also work at. This person had just been recently outed as a transsexual while on vacation, and they did not know how to handle this situation. This was a situation that I had not anticipated having to address, and one that I found to be quite challenging, more than what I had come prepared to deal with.
I think that it’s rather simplistic to attribute every criticism of transsexuals by lesbians to merely “transphobia,” and that sometimes nontranssexual women can have very legitimate concerns about transsexual women in certain kinds of women-only space. After discussing the particulars of the situation, I felt that this might indeed be such a case, and had to admit that it very well might not be appropriate for this person to be working as a rape crisis counselor, that maybe the staff there did have legitimate concerns about this person. I said that I was even unsure if I would have the necessary qualifications to be a rape crisis counselor.
(The shelter in question is Vancouver Rape Relief, which continues to draw ire from trans activists to this day.)
A bit later on in the piece, Gabriel wrote:
It’s become quite surprising to me, but one of the results of all of my transsexual activism over the past six years has been to make me much more sympathetic to the concerns of the feminist critics of transsexuals, while still disagreeing with most of what they say. But my involvement in this kind of activism has led me to no longer see this as a black and white issue at all. It’s not a matter of one side being entirely right and the other being entirely wrong. Unfortunately, a great many transsexuals have come to regard it as exactly that. For instance, I acknowledge as a very legitimate concern the fear that some women have about the disappearance of women-only space, particularly now that there are some transsexual activists who are, in fact, actually advocating the elimination of women-only space, or at least insisting that women-only space can exist only if woman is not defined, a situation that would essentially render women-only space meaningless.
TransSisters never released another issue after this, with Gabriel calling it quits in March 1996 due partly to health problems. But, according to Xavier, Gabriel had become “increasingly disillusioned with the course of the 'transgender movement.’” He also lamented that “the overwhelming majority of the transsexual community is simply not interested in feminism or feminist values.” Camp Trans ended that year as well.
However, Gabriel’s disillusionment grew when Camp Trans was restored as the infamous Son of Camp Trans in 1999.
(Son of Camp Trans would later be attended by trans-identified male murderer Dana Rivers, who killed a lesbian couple and their son in 2016 and who is now being held in the Central California Women’s Facility.)
In 2000, Gabriel sent an e-mail to Lesbian Connection Magazine (which I thank XX Amazons for preserving) about Son of Camp Trans, writing:
Soon after the 1995 action, I dropped out of all involvement in the “transgender movement” in disgust because I saw that it was increasingly moving in a very hostile and belligerent direction of advocating that women who don’t want to have to see a penis at a women’s festival should just get over it… I was deeply saddened and disturbed, but not surprised, to learn that Riki had finally achieved her phallocentric objective of putting penises in women’s faces that she has long been advocating and working toward.
Gabriel also commented that the idea of “gender deconstruction,” meaning anyone can claim their own “gender identity,” was “self-serving balderdash.”
“The objective of any kind of deconstructionism,” he wrote, “is to distinguish between what is socially constructed and what is not; it is not to arrive at whatever preconceived conclusion that one wishes to arrive at.”
Sadly, Gabriel died in 2016. According to XX Amazons, it was “by his own hand.” But, before he died, he prepared a letter refuting and repudiating all of his activism, writing:
I no longer believe in any of it. The fact is that I utterly despise everything about being a transsexual, and I consider having been one to be a curse on my life that has brought nothing but pain and misery into it, and prevented me from realizing my full potential as a human being. If I could do it all over again, I would not do it. I curse the day that I ever decided to have sex reassignment [surgery], and consider it to be the worst mistake I ever made in my life…
I also regret all of my previous activism on behalf of transgender causes, because I regret doing anything that might have encouraged anyone to follow in the same mistaken path that I have taken…
The fact is that gender dysphoria is the most extreme form of being uncomfortable in one’s own skin; and a profound [state] of dis-ease; and is based on an assumption of mind/body dualism that is not supported by either science or philosophy. Moreover, it is a form of self-hatred, because it is a hatred of one’s natural biological sex, which is never in any kind of intrinsic conflict with any internal trait, or mode of thinking or feeling.
Remember me instead for those things of which I am proud. Remember me as an intellectual, a scholar, and a bohemian…
But, most of all, remember me as someone who never gave up my search for truth or accepted a comfortable illusion instead of truth.
I encourage you to read the whole letter, as it is really quite beautiful. It is a terrible shame that Gabriel’s wishes to have the letter published on his Facebook page were never honored.
In researching Gabriel and reading his words, I found someone for whom I had a lot of sympathy and respect. It would have taken immense courage to come out later in life and contradict all of his earlier writing and activism, but I think the signs of that kind of honest and thoughtful individual were always there.
In his advocacy for a policy to allow post-operative men into Michfest and other festivals, Gabriel was at least attempting to appeal to what he thought the majority of women could agree with. I do not agree with the rationale behind it, and it seems like the later Gabriel would not have either (a man without a penis is still a man), but it was a form of activism quite distinct from the activists that followed, who insisted that a penis is female if the owner identifies as a woman and that women who had a problem with that should be harassed, or worse.
Others reading about Gabriel’s activism are under no obligation to forgive—you could say he directly paved the way for exactly the kind of delusional activism that he came to be so repulsed by. But I still think his story is of utmost importance. What we are going through today with gender ideology is nothing new, it’s just on a much bigger scale. Gabriel should be a cautionary tale for activists today who think they are on the progressive cutting edge. He did it first, and he bitterly regretted it all.
But more than that, he should serve as a reminder to all of us to listen to the inner voice that tells us something isn’t right and to pursue the truth even if it costs us a comfortable illusion.
The Man Who Led the Charge Against Michfest and Later Renounced Trans Activism
What a fascinating deep dive into an individual about whom I knew nothing. Thank you. I'm glad that Gabriel eventually evolved to understand "gender dysphoria is the most extreme form of being uncomfortable in one’s own skin; and a profound [state] of dis-ease," and to renounce his earlier activism. However, you are correct in noting that he opened the door (perhaps unwittingly) to the extremism we are seeing today. (The fact that a later "transwoman" protestor who helped bring down MichFest murdered a lesbian couple and their son, and is now in a female prison, is nauseating.) I attended MichFest in 1984, barely out and still dealing with internal as well as external homophobia. It was a powerful refuge and symbol of community for lesbians, and we owe a great debt of gratitude to its founders, who discontinued the festival after nearly four decades largely because of relentless bullying from transactivists and boycotts from allied organizations that had previously stood for lesbian and gay rights. The loss of MichFest is symbolic of the egregious, narcissistic trespass of male-identified transsexuals into female -- and particularly lesbian -- space. What they aren't allowed to claim as their own, they are more than willing to destroy.
In 1993 the transgender really were all transgender. There was no cult of Rapid/Late Onset Gender Dysphoria comprised of brats whining about misgendering, gender identity and pronouns. That wasn't to start until the 2000s.
I remember well the kerfuffle in the "Womyn's" festival. As the affected word clearly implies, this was an adamantly misandristic organization, I never read a word about music, the emphasis in all public statements was about how horrible men were and the Festival was to enable "healing" from having to live in the same world as males. There was a lot of nudity and the "womyn" didn't want males, intact or not, transgender or otherwise, around them at all.