@prefix vivo: . @prefix edm: . @prefix ns0: . @prefix dcterms: . @prefix dc: . @prefix skos: . vivo:departmentOrSchool "Education, Faculty of"@en, "Educational Studies (EDST), Department of"@en ; edm:dataProvider "DSpace"@en ; ns0:degreeCampus "UBCV"@en ; dcterms:creator "White, Caroline"@en ; dcterms:issued "2009-09-22T22:58:44Z"@en, "2002"@en ; vivo:relatedDegree "Master of Arts - MA"@en ; ns0:degreeGrantor "University of British Columbia"@en ; dcterms:description """This thesis examines the work of sexual assault centres, transition houses, community educators and activists, in educating for trans, transsexual, and intersex access to sexual assault centres and transition houses. Results of a questionnaire sent to 104 sexual assault centres and transition houses in British Columbia revealed that 45 of the 62 organizations that responded identified as being accessible to transgendered women, clearly refuting the popular perception that the majority of sexual assault centres and transition houses are inaccessible. Interviews with eleven educators and activists showed that trans, transsexual, and intersex education in sexual assault centres and transition houses was generally divided into three distinct areas: "Trans" 101, which provides the foundation for all subsequent education; the development of policy; and anti-violence education. The educators and activists identified various trends in their work including: the conflation of all trans, transsexual, and intersex identities under the rubric "trans"; and the privileging of gender over sex variances, male-to-female (MTF) identities over all others, and gender over all other forms of identity, including race, class, sexuality and ability. Some educators and activists argued that the degree to which some identities are privileged over others, is the degree to which "trans" will continue to be perceived as synonymous with white, middle-class, straight and able-bodied MTF transsexuals, and the degree to which all other identities and related issues will be rendered (in)visible. Educators and activists also examined the relationship between opposition to trans, transsexual, and intersex access and inclusion to sexual assault centres and transition houses, and dominant feminism's continued privileging of sex and gender over all other analyses such as race, class, heterosexism, and ableism."""@en ; edm:aggregatedCHO "https://circle.library.ubc.ca/rest/handle/2429/13046?expand=metadata"@en ; dcterms:extent "11899901 bytes"@en ; dc:format "application/pdf"@en ; skos:note "R E / D E F I N I N G G E N D E R A N D S E X : E D U C A T I N G F O R T R A N S , T R A N S S E X U A L , A N D I N T E R S E X A C C E S S A N D I N C L U S I O N T O S E X U A L A S S A U L T C E N T R E S A N D T R A N S I T I O N H O U S E S by Caroline White B .A. , University of Waterloo, 1985, B . E d . , University of Western Ontario, 1998 A T H E S I S S U B M I T T E D IN P A R T I A L F U L F I L L M E N T O F T H E R E Q U I R E M E N T S F O R T H E D E G R E E O F M A S T E R O F A R T S in T H E F A C U L T Y O F G R A D U A T E S T U D I E S Department of Educational Studies W e accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard University of British Columbia July 2002 © Copyright by Caroline White, 2002 In p resen t ing this thesis in partial fu l f i lment o f t h e requ i rements fo r an advanced d e g r e e at t h e Univers i ty o f Brit ish C o l u m b i a , 1 agree that t h e Library shall make it f reely available f o r re ference and study. I fu r ther agree that permiss ion f o r extensive c o p y i n g o f this thesis f o r scholar ly pu rposes may be g ran ted by the head o f my d e p a r t m e n t o r by his o r her representat ives. It is u n d e r s t o o d that c o p y i n g o r p u b l i c a t i o n o f th is thesis f o r f inancial gain shall n o t b e a l l o w e d w i t h o u t my w r i t t e n permiss ion . D e p a r t m e n t o f - ^ hwLuU) The Univers i ty o f Brit ish C o l u m b i a Vancouver , Canada Date DE-6 (2/88) Abstract Re/defining Gender and Sex: Educating for Trans, Transsexual, and Intersex Access and Inclusion to Sexual Assault Centres and Transition Houses This thesis examines the work of sexual assault centres, transition houses, community educators and activists, in educating for trans, transsexual, and intersex access to sexual assault centres and transition houses. Results of a questionnaire sent to 104 sexual assault centres and transition houses in British Columbia revealed that 45 of the 62 organizations that responded identified as being accessible to transgendered women, clearly refuting the popular perception that the majority of sexual assault centres and transition houses are inaccessible. Interviews with eleven educators and activists showed that trans, transsexual, and intersex education in sexual assault centres and transition houses was generally divided into three distinct areas: \"Trans\" 101, which provides the foundation for all subsequent education; the development of policy; and anti-violence education. The educators and activists identified various trends in their work including: the conflation of all trans, transsexual, and intersex identities under the rubric \"trans\"; and the privileging of gender over sex variances, male-to-female (MTF) identities over all others, and gender over all other forms of identity, including race, class, sexuality and ability. Some educators and activists argued that the degree to which some identities are privileged over others, is the degree to which \"trans\" will continue to be perceived as synonymous with white, middle-class, straight and able-bodied MTF transsexuals, and the degree to which all other identities and related issues will be rendered (in)visible. Educators and activists also examined the relationship between opposition to trans, transsexual, and intersex access and inclusion to sexual assault centres and transition houses, and dominant feminism's continued privileging of sex and gender over all other analyses such as race, class, heterosexism, and ableism. ii Table of Contents Abstract ii Table of Contents iii List of Tables vi Acknowledgements vii Chapter One: Transgressions of Gender and Sex in \"Women-Only\" Spaces 1 Introduction 1 A Historical Overview of Trans, Transsexual, and Intersex Activism with Specific Attention to Women's Organizations and Spaces 7 The 1950s and 60s 7 The 1970s and 80s 10 The 1990s to Early 2002 12 Focus on the Michigan Womyn Music Festival 18 Key Arguments Raised by Women Against Trans, Transsexual, and Intersex 26 Access to Women's Organizations and Spaces Chapter Two: Research Design, Theories, and Methods 35 Research Design 35 Personal Experience 35 Design Overview 40 Research Theories 42 Social Practice Theory 43 Popular Education Theory 44 Feminist Postmodern Theory 46 Feminist Anticolonial and Antiracist Theory 49 Queer Theory 53 Trans, Transsexual, and Intersex Theory 54 Transfeminist Theory 56 Violence Against Women and Feminist Anti-Violence Theories 58 Research Methods 60 The Questionnaire 61 The Interviews 64 iii Confidentiality 66 Questionnaires 66 Interviews 67 Data Analysis 67 Questionnaires 67 Interviews 68 Reflecting on the Design 69 Language 69 Questionnaires and Interviews as a Form of Education 71 Follow-up Interviews 71 Chapter Three: Building a Foundation for Access and inclusion: B.C. Questionnaire and \"Trans 101\" Education 73 The Questionnaire 73 An Overview of The Results 73 Accessible Organizations 74 Inaccessible Organizations 77 Discussion 78 Comparing B.C. to Ontario 80 Interviews with Educators and Activists 85 \"Trans\" 101 88 Privileging Specific Identities in \"Trans\" 101 90 Privileging Gender over Sex Variances 90 Conflating All Identities under \"Trans\" and Privileging MTF Trans and Transsexual Women over FTM and All Other Identities 91 Reproducing Gender, Sex, and Other Binaries 96 Confronting the Limitations and Contradictions of Dominant Feminist Truisms 100 Women's Space is Safe Space 102 Responses to \"Trans\" 101 105 Lesbian and Queer Staff, Board, and Volunteers 108 Educator and Activist Leadership 111 iv Chapter Four: Building on the Foundation: Policy Development and Anti-Violence Education 113 Policy Development 114 Determining Eligibility for Access and Inclusion 116 Addressing Specific Concerns 119 Anti-Violence Education 121 Overview of Trans, Transsexual, and Intersex Violence 125 Absence of a Gendered and Sexed Analysis 127 Hate Crimes 127 Intimate and Sexual Violence 129 Fearing the Loss of Gendered Analyses and Services 131 The Need for Gender and Sex Specificity 131 MTF Survivors 132 FTM Survivors 135 I ntersex Survivors 136 Gender as an Inadequate Framework for Violence 138 Possible Implications of T/TS/IS Anti-violence Analyses 140 Chapter Five: Summary and Conclusion: \"Dayenu v' lo Dayenu\": It's Enough and It's Not Enough 143 Recommendations for Future Work 149 \"Trans\" 101 149 Policy Development 150 Anti-violence Education 151 General 152 References 154 Appendix A: Letter of Introduction for Questionnaire 166 Appendix B: Questionnaire 167 Appendix C: Agency Consent Form for Questionnaire 171 Appendix D: Sample Interview Questions 172 Appendix E: Original Participant Consent Form for Interview 178 Appendix F: Revised Participant Consent Form for Interview 180 v List of Tables Table 1: Overview of Questionnaire Results 74 Table 2: Overview of Accessible Organizations 74 Table 3: Number of Years Accessible 76 Table 4: Overview of Inaccessible Organizations 77 vi Acknowledgements It is with deepest respect and gratitude that I acknowledge the work and activism of trans, transsexual, and intersex survivors, volunteers, staff and activists inside and outside of sexual assault support centres and transition houses, who have made this thesis possible. Were it not for your courage and strength to—ironically— \"break the silence,\" the oppression of gender and sex variance within women's organizations would continue in silence. I would also like to send specific appreciation to K.; K., I will not forget. The generosity of many people helped to build this thesis. Foremost, I would like to thank the many sexual assault centres, transition houses, educators and activists who participated in this research. Your time, knowledge, experiences and vision, unequivocally built this thesis and I am grateful for your participation. I am especially grateful to the educators and activists who agreed to be interviewed: Allison Cope, Connie Burk, Diana Courvant, Julie Darke, Kimberly Nixon, Leah, Mirha-Soleil Ross, Sacha, Sherry Lewis, and Stella. The integrity and analyses of your work has inspired, sharpened, and deepened mine; thank you. Special thanks to Diana Courvant, Kimberly Nixon, and Mirha-Soleil Ross whose writing and activism influenced and directed me years before 1 had the privilege of meeting them. The work of this thesis actually began long before it was a thesis, and long before it was specific to trans, transsexual, intersex, gender and sex activism. I am indebted to past and present colleagues, fellow activists, and friends who have shaped and continue to shape, my thinking and activism, and whose collective voices guided me—sometimes haunted me!—throughout this thesis: Alicia Excell, barbara findlay, Carol Pinnock, Chris Saava, Colleen Wiltshire, Da Choong, Joshua Goldberg, Judy McKenzie, Laura Masters, Mo Johnston, Sheila James, Yvonne Brown, and past and present members of the Women/Trans Dialogue Planning Committee, especially Dean Dubick, Joan Meister, Mary-Woo Sims, Monika Chappell, romham gallacher, vii Susan Christie, Tracy Porteous, and WG Burnham. I would also like to acknowledge Emi Koyama, whose work is one of my greatest influences. As a community activist I was uncertain whether this thesis was possible within the realms of a university program, but thesis advisor Dr. Deirdre Kelly, committee members Dr. Becki Ross and WG Burnham, and external reader Dr. Shauna Butterwick's collective dedication to community work and activism, assured me that it was. I do not take the blending of community and university work for granted, and I am grateful for their guidance, incisive feedback on my work, encouragement, and ongoing support. I am particularly grateful to community activist, WG Burnham, for agreeing to join the advisory committee; thank you. I am also grateful to Dr. Deirdre Kelly for support that extended beyond the scope of the thesis. Sometimes it's the smallest, most common, or otherwise unnoticed of gestures, that make a difference; I would like to thank Angela Evans, Fran Moore, Habiba Rashid, Jeannie Lowe, Jeannie Young, Lu Ripley, Richard Chan, Roweena Bacchus, and Shermilla Salgadoe for making a difference. For constant, unfailing, and day-to-day support, I would like to thank longtime friends Anne Fleming and Cindy Holmes. Anne, I really appreciate your computer and grammar related support, the endless rides to the garage and the wonderful stories en route, and both your empathy and guidance regarding the writing process; thank you! Cindy, as usual, I appreciate the comfort of a shared analysis and the space that that creates to not only try out new ideas, but also to vent! I also appreciate your help in easing me into a new community, as well as for sharing resources and contacts; thank you. I am deeply grateful to Dianne Seager whose constant support, love, and sharp wit—despite the distance—continues to guide and nourish me. Thank you for all that you have done and continue to do for me; I value your ongoing presence in my life. I am also grateful to my family, Annelie White, Arthur White, Tanya White, and Lawrence White. It is your faith, love, and belief in me that pulled me through to the end. In this viii way, this thesis is for you; thank you! You are my pillars and I am deeply grateful for your ongoing support. Finally, my deepest respect and appreciation, to Zahara Suleman, for sustenance, rigorous analyses, critical feedback on my work, humor, love, endless faith, and mostly, for all things possible or yet to be imagined. ix Chapter One: Transgressions of Gender and Sex in \"Women-Only\" Spaces In the nasty back closets of feminism is a lot of biological determinism, and what surprises me from a lot of feminists who would say that, \"Oh no, I'm not a biological determinist in any way,\" when you get right down to it, when you've got female anatomy, that is your destiny. And all that we've talked about social construction of gender seems to go right out the window and it all comes down to estrogen and ovaries and breasts and that's about all; that's who we are. So we need to get beyond that; we need to get beyond biological determinism which seems to have rooted itself in feminism, and once we do that we're going to really be freed up (Allison Cope, educator/activist interviewed for this thesis). I think that people sometimes feel resistance because they feel like, \"Now we're being told that we don't know anything,\" and particularly in terms of a feminist agency, I think some of the resistance happens because it's true that there's really real gender analysis that second wave feminism never did; they never really looked at the full implications of what does it mean when you say biology isn't destiny. It doesn't mean that they didn't come up with biology isn't destiny; doesn't mean it wasn't really important analysis, but they never really took it nearly as far as where intersex and trans analyses are taking it now (Diana Courvant, educator/activist interviewed for this thesis). Introduction Second wave dominant Western feminism marks an incredible era of feminists organizing for social change. Feminist activism in this period included scrutiny of a broad range of issues such as \"equal pay, birth control, the right to unionize and to strike, child care and an end to violence against women\" (Wall, 1982, p. 16). Violence against women, although one of numerous issues, was a critical organizing force. And, as with all of the other issues, feminists debated both the causes of violence against women, as well as the best strategies for ending it. From the debates, several competing perspectives on violence against women emerged. Of these perspectives, two of the most influential were radical feminism and socialist feminism. Radical feminism viewed patriarchy and male dominance as the sources of violence against women (Coomaraswamy, 1999, p. 254; Adamson, Briskin, & McPhail, 1 1988, p. 10). Radical feminists also \"identified] fundamental emotional, social, and political differences between men and women,\" and, as such, argued for an \"anti-militaristic, non-hierarchical co-operative society organized on the female values of life-giving and nurturance\" (Adamson, Briskin, & McPhail, 1988, pp. 10 & 11). Adamson, Briskin, and McPhail write that \"strategically, radical feminism [was] largely responsible for the development of a woman-centred culture that takes the form of alternative business, art, music, living arrangements, and so on, and that provides a contrast to 'male-stream' institutions and culture\" (1988, p. 11). In anti-violence work specifically, \"women-centred culture\" was built through \"rape crisis centres, Take Back the Night demonstrations, shelters for battered wives, and anti-pornography actions, among others\" (Adamson, Briskin, & McPhail, 1988, p. 11). Socialist feminism viewed economic inequities, coupled at times with patriarchal oppression and male dominance, as the sources of violence against women (Coomaraswamy, 1999, p. 254; Adamson, Briskin, & McPhail, 1988, p. 11). Although socialist feminists recognized differences between men and women, they also recognized commonalities. As such, socialist feminists often built alliances with men working on similar issues —particularly as related to economic inequities. Influenced by both radical and socialist feminisms, a critical outcome of second wave dominant feminist anti-violence activism, was to \"name,\" \"break the silence,\" and make \"public\" the widespread occurrence of male violence against women. Women's consciousness raising groups of the 1960s and 70s were one of the few forums where women felt \"safe\" to publicly disclose the male violence they experienced in their private lives. Increased public disclosure revealed the pervasive and ubiquitous nature of male violence against women and through shared experiences women began to build theoretical frameworks for why the violence occurred, and what women could do to protect themselves from—and ultimately stop—it. Theories linking the source of male violence to the subjugated, second class position of women were 2 developed. Gender and sexi—frequently conflated at the time—became the central analytic tool(s) not only of violence against women theories, but also of the dominant movement at large. As theories were being built, so too were safe houses, shelters for battered women and rape crisis centres, all spaces that would offer women safety from male violence, as well as support in healing and planning for the future. These same spaces would also become safe spaces to further develop theories of male violence against women, as well as other theories pertaining to the dominant Western women's movement (Bannerji, 1997; Fitzgerald, Guberman, & Wolfe, 1982; hooks, 1984; Hull, Scott & Smith, 1982; Maracle, 1993; B. Ross, 1995; Timmins, 1995). The leaders of the movement at this time were predominantly white, middle-class women with limited consciousness or analyses beyond their own specific circumstances. As a result, the movement and its attending theories largely reflected the well-intentioned perhaps, but none-the-less racist, classist, heterosexist and ableist values, life experiences and visions of these women. What it meant to \"name\" the violence, \"break the silence\" or make it \"public,\" as well as what constituted \"safe\" space, were constructs defined by dominant Western feminism and yet assumed to have value and meaning to all women despite their location. Likewise with the constructs of sex and gender, which were positioned as the cornerstone of the movement, binary, ahistorical, fixed and mutually dependent. Women of color and Aboriginal women, working class and poor women, sex trade workers, lesbian and bisexual women, women with disabilities and other women would all come to challenge the dominant analyses with varying degrees of success. Despite successes, however, the core of the analyses would remain fundamentally the same (Bannerji, 1997; Fitzgerald, Guberman, & Wolfe, 1982; hooks, 1984; Hull, Scott & Smith, 1982; Maracle, 1993; B. Ross, 1995; Timmins, 1995). 11 use the term \"sex\" to refer to \"a set of biological characteristics (chromosomes, hormones, and anatomy)\" (Darke & Cope, 2002, p. 110) that are identified as male, female, or intersex. I use the term \"gender,\" as a separate term, to refer to a person's self-identity as, for example, a man, woman, trans or transsexual man or woman, bi- or pan-gendered person. I view both terms as socially constructed, non-binary, historical, impermanent, and evolving. 3 While dominant Western feminism was shaping and strengthening its movement—and specifically its analysis of male violence against women—some Western trans and transsexual people were also immersed in a growing collective consciousness and activism. As with dominant feminism, trans and transsexual activism included a broad range of issues including access to employment, housing, health care, and other social services, including, but by no means limited to, women's organizations and services. Here, too, gender and sex—which were, again, often conflated—were the central analytic tools as was, to a lesser degree, sexuality. 21 use the term \"trans\" as an umbrella term to include anyone who self-identifies as trans and who transgresses dominant Western views of sex and gender as binary (female/male, woman/man), co-dependent (where physiological sex determines gender), fixed (despite how one self-identifies, the use of hormones or surgical intervention, one's sex nor gender can \"really\" be changed), ahistorical, and where any transgressions from these norms renders the mental stability of the individual as psychologically suspect. The term \"trans\" can include but is not limited to: female-to-male (FTM) and male-to-female (MTF) transsexuals who may/may not choose to use hormones and/or seek sex reassignment surgery (SRS) (I do not use the terms \"pre-, post-\" and/or \"non-op,\" unless specifically used by an author or activist or in Human Rights references, believing, like activists Emi Koyama (2000a) and Zachary Nataf, among others, that these terms are most often rooted in classism; that they privilege MTF experience; \"contribute to the suppression and erasure of intersex people,\" and are generally \"irrelevant\" (Koyama, 2000a, pp. 7-8)), drag kings and queens, \"masculine\" women and \"feminine\" men, females who live as men, and males who live as women, female and male cross-dressers, boy-dykes, girlfags, intersex people (\"people who develop primary or secondary sex characteristics that do not fit neatly into society's definition of male or female\" (Survivor Project, 2000, p. 1), bi-genders, pan-genders, shape-shifters, passing men, passing women, bearded women, women body builders, bulldaggers, diesel dykes, Marysjwo Spirits, butches, femmes, transgenderists (\"...people who live full time in the gender opposite to their anatomy\" (Prince quoted in Feinberg, 1996, p. X), androgynists, male-to-males (MTM) and female-to-females (FTF) (people who identify as having been assigned the wrong gender at birth and who have reclaimed the gender they should have been assigned with), and third genders (Feinberg, 1998, p. 98; Feinberg, 1996, p. X; Namaste, 2000, p. 273; Stryker, 1998, p. 148; Survivor Project, 2000, p. 1). By using the term \"trans\" instead of \"transgender,\" I follow the lead of trans and transsexual activists who cite historical references of heterosexual male cross-dressers who were both homophobic and anti-transsexual and who \"historically sought their acceptance denouncing gays, drag queens and transsexual people\" by using the word \"transgender.\" (Transfeminism, 2002, p. 2). I use \"trans\" and \"transsexual\" rather than \"trans\" only because the terms are often used synonymously —which they are not—and synonymous usage erases either all non-transsexual trans identities (e.g., pangendered, intersex people, and individuals who do not identify by gender) or transsexual identities, depending on how it is used. The conflation of the two terms can also lead to a great deal of confusion —particularly when used in policies or references to human rights cases or the law. I also follow the lead of activists by using \"trans, transsexual and intersex,\" whenever historically possible, because sex variance and intersex people are frequently excluded in \"transAransgender,\" which is usually specific to gender variance (Survivor Project, 2000, p. 1). 4 However, gender and sex were not perceived nor understood as necessarily universal, binary, ahistorical, fixed or mutually dependent. Leadership was also critically different from the dominant feminist movement in that trans/transsexual activism was led in large part by of color and white working poor and working class sex trade workers and bar performers, many of whom identified as male to female (MTF) (Feinberg, 1996; Members of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California, 1998). Predictably, as both dominant feminism, and trans and transsexual activism, became more widespread and organized, they would eventually intersect and conflict, given their divergent views on gender and sex. Also predictable is the spaces where the conflict would become most obvious—and consequently most contested—is in \"women's spaces\" where gender and sex—despite the efforts of women of color, Aboriginal women, working class women, women with disabilities, among others—are still generally seen as the organizing principles of the space and the work within the space. My interest in writing this thesis was to learn how trans, transsexual, and intersex (T/TS/IS) educators and activists and non-TVTS/IS educators and activists are currently educating for T/TS/IS access to women's organizations and spaces3 —specifically sexual assault centres and transition houses. I was interested in learning how the diametrically opposing positions on gender and sex stemming from the dominant Western women's movement and trans, transsexual, and intersex movements, were being reconciled and/or advanced within these specific spaces. I also wanted to examine the impact—or potential impact—that a trans, transsexual, and intersex understanding of sex and gender would have on Western dominant and non-dominant analyses of violence against women, as well as on interconnecting analyses of oppressions. 3 In referring to women's organizations and spaces, I include any organization, service, or space that is mandated specifically for women including: university and college women centres; women's health care centres; prisons for women; women's washrooms; women's cultural events; and women's organized sports. 5 The remainder of this chapter is divided into two sections; the first section provides a brief overview of American and Canadian T/TS/IS activism with specific attention to women's organizations and spaces, and the second section reviews the key arguments raised by women against T/TS/IS access to these same spaces. The purpose of the historical overview of T/TS/IS activism is to provide some context to what activist Emi Koyama calls the \"inclusion/exclusion debate\" (Koyama, 2000a, p. 2) currently widespread in women's organizations. The historical overview is limited and incomplete because I rely on publicly accessible accounts of history which, as is frequently the case, reflect the most privileged of voices. It is widely documented, for example, that African-American and Latina trans and transsexual sex trade workers and bar performers led the Stonewall rebellion of 1969, and yet little is documented about these leaders. On the other hand, much is documented about T/TS activism at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (MWMF), a predominantly white, lesbian, middle-class venue. Relying on public documents is especially difficult when documenting T/TS/IS history in women's organizations and spaces where neither T/TS/IS nor women's organizations have the resources to record their history and then make it public. For example, public knowledge holds that many women's organizations are involved in dialogue and/or confrontations regarding T/TS/IS access, and yet few of these processes are ever publicly documented. In the absence of such documentation, the value of such highly recorded processes such as the Michigan Women's Music Festival (MWMF), takes on a greater significance. As the most documented, and consequently, most cited source of the \"inclusion/exclusion debate\" within women's organizations and spaces, the MWMF debate is inarguably the single most widely known debate within dominant Western feminist discourse and activism. For this specific reason, I have included a considerable review of the proceedings at the MWMF—as pertaining to trans and transsexual activism—at the end of the historical overview. 6 Chapter two discusses the design, theories and methods used to implement and interpret the research for this thesis. Chapter Three is divided into two parts. The first part provides an overview and discussion of the results obtained from a questionnaire distributed to sexual assault centres and transition houses in British Columbia. The purpose of the questionnaire was to learn whether sexual assault centres and transition houses identify as accessible to trans, transsexual, and intersex women, whether they had supporting policies, and whether they had formally educated their membership prior to becoming accessible. The second part of the chapter turns to the interviews conducted with educators and activists educating for trans, transsexual, and intersex access and inclusion in sexual assault centres and transition houses. This section specifically addresses what most of the educators and activists referred to as \"Trans\" 101 education. \"Trans\" 101 education provides the conceptual framework and foundation for the development of accessible policies and anti-violence education as outlined and discussed in Chapter Four. Chapter Five concludes with a summary of the research and recommendations for future work. A Historical Overview of Trans, Transsexual, and Intersex Activism with Specific Attention to Women's Organizations and Spaces The 1950s and 60s Author and activist Leslie Feinberg (1996) and other trans, transsexual, and intersex authors and activists with interest in historical documentation have made clear that although our language and understanding about sex and gender is always evolving, the presence of T, TS, and IS people is not unique to contemporary society—at least no more or less so than any other group of people. In the United States and Canada, however, it wasn't until the story of Christine Jorgensen, an American who went to Denmark to arrange for sex reassignment surgery (SRS)—unavailable in the United States or Canada at the time—was leaked in 1952, 7 that geographical pockets of a trans/transsexual movement—with specific emphasis on male-to-female (MTF) transsexual rights—began to galvanize (Califia, 1997, p. 23). Although the American popular press had reported on '\"sex reversals,' 'sex changes,' and 'sexual metamorphoses'\" since the 1930s (Meyerowitz, 1998, p. 159), no single person had caught the media's—and consequently the public's—attention to such a widespread degree. Stories about Jorgensen, as well as accompanying stories about sex reassignment surgery (SRS) procedures, abounded, and the impact of these stories on the readership was enormous. Jorgensen wrote that she received \"some twenty thousand letters\" (Jorgensen quoted in Meyerowitz, 1998, p. 174) shortly after her story was made public, and that a large number of the letters came from people who saw themselves in Jorgensen, and who had \"a seemingly genuine desire for alteration of sex\" (Jorgensen quoted in Meyerowitz, 1998, p. 175). For all the thousands of people who wrote Jorgensen, there were thousands more who did not, but who were no less impacted. Leslie Feinberg (1996), for example, writes: In all the years of my childhood, I had only heard of one person who seemed similarly \"different.\" I don't remember any adult telling me her name. I was too young to read the newspaper headlines. Adults clipped their vulgar jokes short when I, or any other child, entered the room. I wasn't allowed to stay up late enough to watch the television comedy hosts who tried to ridicule her out of humanity. But I did know her name: Christine Jorgensen (p. 6). Mario Martino, in his autobiography also writes how he felt at the age of fifteen when he first learned about Jorgensen: At last I had hope. There were people like me. And they were doing something about it. Now I had a plan: I must hurry through school, graduate, make a lot of money, go to Denmark. I'd not tell anyone. I'd simply leave this country as Marie, leave this girl-form in Denmark, return to the States as a man with a new name, and lead a new life (Martino quoted in Califia, 1997, p. 39). And Agnes, a client at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Clinic, reports that \"she may have learned about its [SRS's] medical and technological viability from the publicity 8 surrounding the case of Christine Jorgensen\" (Namaste, 2000, p. 193). The extensive coverage of Jorgensen's story—at the cost of her personal freedom and privacy—broke feelings of isolation and alienation for thousands of people, while at the same time offering concrete options for change—specifically SRS. Media coverage also meant that more people learned about, and thus sought out, the hormonal services provided by endocrinologist Harry Benjamin, a long time advocate for trans and transsexual people. Along with providing medical services, Benjamin also started introducing his clients to one another so that by the mid 1950s \"a small group visited and corresponded with each other, shared information on doctors, traveled together for surgery, compared surgical results, and occasionally lived together\" (Meyerowitz, 1998, p. 177). The decreased isolation of clients and the increased demand for services, would contribute to the opening of the first American \"gender-identity clinic\"—clinics that provide SRS among other services—in 1966, and several more clinics shortly thereafter (Members of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California, 1998, p. 353). And, although clinics would be criticized on many fronts—for example, accessibility (most of the clients were white MTFs), reinforcement of gender stereotypes (clinics frequently perpetuated a conservative understanding of what it meant to be a woman), and the formation of a \"rather hegemonic notion of 'proper' transsexual identity\" (Members of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California, 1998, p. 354)—they would provide services previously unavailable in North America, and in turn, contribute to keeping the experiences, issues, concerns and activism of trans and transsexual people at least somewhat public. By the time the first clinic opened, trans and transsexual people in some of the larger American cities had already started to formally organize beyond smaller social circles. By 1967, for example, San Francisco had \"an unprecedented network of transgender-specific social resources and self-help groups\" (Members of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California, 1998, p. 357) organized by trans and 9 transsexual sex trade workers and bar performers from the Tenderloin district in the city. On June 28, 1969 \"gender outlaws,\" specifically \"African-American and Latina drag queens, kings and transsexuals,\" (Feinberg, 1996, p. 97) led the Stonewall Rebellion, which would officially mark the beginning of the Gay and Lesbian Liberation movement in the United States and Canada. The activism up until this time—again, at least in public records—is specific to trans and transsexual issues. Although intersex activism does not appear to be publicly documented until the 1990s, intersex activist Cheryl Chase writes how \"twentieth-century medicine moved from merely labeling intersexed bodies\" at the turn of the century \"to the far more invasive practice of 'fixing' them to conform with a diagnosed true sex\" in the 1920s and 30s, to \"the principle of rapid postnatal detection and intervention for intersex infants... with the stated goal of completing surgery early enough so that a child would have no memory of it\" by the 1950s (Chase, 1998, pp. 190-191). By the 1960s the birth of an intersex child was routinely seen as a \"medical crisis\"—even though intersex genitals are \"in and of themselves neither painful nor harmful to health\" (Chase, 1998, pp. 191-192). Chase adds that since the medical establishment knows more about \"removing and relocating tissue\" rather than building new \"structures\" (\"You can make a hole, but you can't make a pole\") and because of the establishment's inherent sexism and heterosexism which views \"the feminine as a condition of lack [of penis],\" 90% of intersex children were—and continue to be—assigned as female (Chase, 1998, p. 192). In the 1960s this medical procedure was \"openly labeled as 'clitorectomy'\" (Chase, 1998, p. 192). The 1970s and 80s Despite the overall scarcity of information on trans, transsexual, and intersex people in the dominant women's movement, there is some public documentation of transsexual women who were involved in women's organizations during the seventies. In 1973, for example, Beth Elliot was \"ejected from the West Coast Women's 10 Conference in Los Angeles and subsequently thrown out of DOB\" (Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian organization in the United States) (Faderman, 1991, p. 148), where she served as \"San Francisco chapter vice president and editor of the chapter newsletter, Sisters ,\" because she self-identified as a \"lesbian-identified transsexual\" (Califia, 1997, p. 113; Members of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California, 1998, pp. 365 & 367). In the late 1970's Olivia Records, an American lesbian feminist business, asked Sandy Stone, who self-identified as a transsexual woman, to leave their organization after ongoing pressure from the lesbian community (Califia, 1997, pp. 106-107). In Canada, the formal application of a self-identified MTF lesbian transsexual (the name of the woman is not documented) in 1978 to join the Lesbian Organization of Toronto (LOOT) was rejected on the basis that \"poisoned by a residual heterosexuality, 'he' would only separate lesbians from each other and wreak havoc within the organization and the larger community\" (B. Ross, 1995, p. 134). For all the \"out\" transsexual women involved in the dominant women's movement of the 1970s and 80s, presumably—although there is no way of knowing—there were a great many more who were not out. Although there is no formal documentation of any \"out\" trans, transsexual or intersex men who were active in the women's movement (not unlike today), it is most likely that they were involved, but that they were identified—or self-identified—as lesbians, specifically as butch or stone butch lesbians, bull daggers, diesel dykes, and so on (again, not unlike today) (Halberstam, 1998a; Halberstam, 1998b).4 Further formal documentation of trans and transsexual women working or volunteering in women's organizations or accessing related services does not seem to appear again until the 1990s. Susan Stryker and Joanne Meyerowitz, member archivists of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California, hypothesize that faced with the rise of \"cultural feminism\" among lesbians, the increasing disparagement of drag among gay men, and pandemic hostility, apathy, 4 For a d iscussion of lesbian and fema le mascul in i t ies see Halbers tam, 1998a; 1998b. 11 and ignorance from society at large, transgender activists found themselves increasingly cut off from participation in other progressive social movements. The focus of transgender political activism turned increasingly inward throughout the second half of the 1970s and all of the 1980s. Not until the queer movement erupted in 1990 did a new generation of transgenders begin to find allies in a broader cultural struggle to redefine the possibilities of sexed and gendered embodiment (Members of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California, 1998, p. 367). The 1990s to Early 2002 As the trans and transsexual movement reemerges in the 1990s, so too does it reemerge within the specific context of women's organization and spaces. In 1991, for example, the National Lesbian Conference in the United States publicly held a ban on \"nongenetic women\" (Rubin, 1992, p. 474; Wilchins, 1995, p. 17) and the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (MWMF)5 expelled Nancy Jean Burkholder from the Festival grounds (Califia, 1997; Nancy's Story, 1992; Wilchins, 1997). In 1993, Cheryl Chase founded the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA), a political support network which advocates against medical surgical intervention on intersex children unless there is \"medical reason (such as blocked or painful urination)\" (Chase, 1998, p. 198). The ISNA would recommend that intersex children be assigned both a gender and a sex without resorting to surgery. Chase explains. Advocating gender assignment without resorting to normalizing surgery is a radical position given that it requires willful disruption of the assumed concordance between body shape and gender category. However, this is the only position that prevents irreversible physical damage to the intersex person's body, that respects the intersex person's agency regarding his/her own flesh, and that recognizes genital sensation and erotic functioning to be at least as important as reproductive capacity. If an intersex child or adult decides to change gender or to undergo surgical or hormonal alteration of his/her body, that decision should also be fully respected and facilitated. The key point is that intersex subjects should not be violated for the comfort and convenience of others (Chase, 1998, p. 198). 5 The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival is \"the largest and longest running womyn's Festival in the United States... with over 6,000 womyn attending annually from every U.S state, Canadian province and over 30 countries\" (Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, 2000a, p. 1). 12 Although the focus of ISNA, and later Hermaphrodites with Attitudes was primarily on the medical establishment (versus women's organizations), the broader trans and transsexual movements began to incorporate an analysis of intersex issues and rights into their work. In the late 1990s, for example, some activists started to use the language of \"trans and intersex\" rather than only \"trans\" as a way of ensuring that sex, as well as gender, would be included in \"trans\" activism. For the most part, however, it seems that the emphasis still remains on gender, such that the shift in consciousness is not yet reflected in the documentation found in women's organizations where the discussion still centres on \"trans and gender\" rather than \"trans and intersex, and gender and sex.\" In 1997, for example, the American National Organization for Women (NOW) passed a resolution stating that the organization \"encourage education and dialogue within NOW and with other organizations on gender and sex stereotypes, including the issues of those who are transgendered and transsexual\" (NOW, 1997, p. 9), but it was not until 2001, that NOW resolved to support GenderPAC and ISNA in the struggle to end secrecy and shame surrounding intersex women and girls' rights to choose and be fully informed about medical decisions involving their bodies and genitals... (NOW, 2001, p. 10). Since even less is documented about intersex people's access to women-only organizations than trans and transsexual people's access to these same spaces, it is difficult to know what the discussions within these organizations—if any—look like. However, if the NOW resolutions are any indication, women's organizations may be less resistant to intersex people accessing women's organizations than transgender or transsexual women: the transgender and transsexual resolution in 1997, for example, focuses on \"education and dialogue\" (rather than a definitive statement on transgender and transsexual people's rights to accessing women's organizations), whereas the intersex resolution in 2001, definitively focuses on and supports, the 4 Hermaphrodites with Attitude is \"an ad hoc group of militant intersexuals\" first known for their protest at the 1996 \"annual meeting of the American Academy of pediatrics in Boston—the first recorded instance of intersex public protest in modern history\" (Chase, 1998, p. 200). 13 \"right to choose.\" And V-Day, the popular American \"global movement to stop violence against women and girls, endorsed the mission of ISNA to end shame, secrecy and unwanted genital surgeries on children born with intersex conditions\" (ISNA, 2002, p. 1), but has not issued a similar endorsement on trans, transgender or transsexual issues. This difference in acceptance—if in fact there is one—may have to do with the involuntary medical violation of intersex children at birth rather than the voluntary medical interventions trans and transsexual people choose as adults. To date, there is no national women's organization in Canada that has adopted similar trans/ transgendered or intersex resolutions. In Canada, in 1994, the High Risk Project Society, a Vancouver downtown East-side \"support group serving a hot meal to street engaged transgender persons involved in the sex-trade, and drug and alcohol abuse\" was established (findlay, Laframboise, Brady, Burnham & Skolney-Elverson, 1996, p. 5). 1997-98 statistics for the program show that of the approximately 100 transgender people served, 75 identified as MTF transsexuals.? Also in 1994, Mirha-Soleil Ross and Xanthra Phillippa (M. Ross, 1995), distributed a questionnaire to 20 women's shelters in Toronto asking them whether they accepted transsexual women as clients and/or as staff; whether they had requests for services from transsexual women; whether they knowingly provided services to transsexual women; and whether they had any policies regarding transsexual women's access to their organizations. Of the 5 shelters that replied, three stated that they were accessible to transsexual women but with specific restrictions (the client must identify as a woman, have completed SRS, or both), one answered that they assessed admission for transsexual women on a case by case basis and one responded \"other\"; three shelters stated that they had had requests from transsexual women for shelter and two of these three actually provided services to transsexual women; one shelter had a policy, two did not, one was in process of writing one, and one did not answer (M. Ross, 1995, pp. 8-9). 7 Statistics obtained through personal correspondence November, 2001 with High Risk Project Society founders Sandra Laframboise and Deborah Brady. 14 In 1996, the YWCA of Metropolitan Toronto commissioned an extensive report (Cowan, C. & Lopes-lraheta, R., 1996) on \"whether services should be extended to pre-operative male-to-female transsexuals\" (YWCA Staff, 1996, p. 1). Subsequent to the report, the staff recommended \"shifting programme admission criteria from sex to gender categories—to lived identity rather than physical attributes. This means that those who live as and identify as being 'woman' would be eligible for our services\" (YWCA Staff, 1996, p. 2). In 1999, Allison Cope and Julie Darke, distributed a survey to all transition houses in Ontario, asking about transsexual women's access to their organizations and services, accompanying policies, and perceived barriers preventing organizations from becoming fully accessible (Cope & Darke, 1999, pp. 97-103). The information returned from this questionnaire was later developed into a manual called the Trans Accessibility Project: Making Women's Shelters Accessible to Transgendered Women. Also in 1999, Trans/Action, a \"coalition of representatives from the trans community,\" organized Canada's first \"Transgendered Justice and Equality Summit,\" where approximately 100 people gathered to discuss and strategize on various issues including: gendered spaces, legal issues, health care, poverty, racism, and ableism (Trans/Action, 1999). In 2000, Trans/Action struck a group called the \"Women/Trans Dialogue Planning Committee\" (W/TDPC),8 which was formed to encourage and foster dialogue between the women's and trans, transsexual, and intersex communities. The W/TDPC sponsors various educational initiatives, one of which was the production of the Trans Inclusion Policy Manual for Women's Organizations, also written by Darke and Cope (2002). In Canada, several Human Rights rulings have started to lay the framework for trans, transsexual, and intersex women's legal right to accessing women's spaces and organizations. In 1999, for example, the BC Human Rights Tribunal ruled in favour of Tawni Sheridan, a patron of B.J.'s Lounge, a gay and lesbian bar. The Tribunal was 8 Note that the W/TDPC is not specific to T/TS/IS women. 15 told that Sheridan was refused continued entry because her picture identification did not match and because \"there had been complaints from lesbian customers...about transsexuals in general, and the Complainant in particular, using the women's washroom\" (BC Human Rights Tribunal, Sheridan vs. Sanctuary Investments, 1999, p. 6). The Tribunal concluded that \"transsexuals in transition [sex reassignment surgery] who are living as members of the desired sex should be considered to be members of that sex for the purposes of human rights legislation\" and \"are protected on the grounds of sex and physical or mental disability\" (BC Human Rights Tribunal, Sheridan vs. Sanctuary Investments, 1999, pp. 24 & 25). Also in 1999, the BC Human Rights Tribunal ruled in favour of Susan Mamela, citing sex as the basis of discrimination when Mamela was suspended from her volunteer duties at the Vancouver Lesbian Connection (VLC), a lesbian community centre open to transgendered women at the time of the complaint: \"In my view, this order would require the VLC, should it resume operating, to ensure that it does not discriminate against transsexual lesbiansAvomen who would otherwise be entitled to use its services because of their sex\" (BC Human Rights Tribunal, Mamela vs. Vancouver Lesbian Connection, 1999, p. 28). In the same year, the Canadian Human Rights Commission, ruled that Synthia Kavanagh, incarcerated into a prison for men although having lived as a woman since the age of 13, had been discriminated against by Correctional Service of Canada (CSC), \"because it did not take into account the special vulnerabilities of transsexuals as a group,\" and its \"absolute ban on sex reassignment surgery was unwarranted\" (DAWN, 2001, p. 1). In January 2002, the BC Human Rights Tribunal ruled in favour of Kimberly Nixon, who had been expelled from Vancouver Rape Relief's (VRR) volunteer peer counseling training program when a training facilitator determined that Nixon had \"not been a woman since birth and had lived some portion of her life as a man\" (BC Human Rights Tribunal, Nixon vs. Vancouver Rape Relief Society, 2002, p. 7): Rape Relief drew a formal distinction between Ms. Nixon and other 16 women based on a personal characteristic. In so doing, they failed to take into account Ms. Nixon's already disadvantaged position within Canadian society as a member of a group that has been marginalized. They applied their stereotypical view that, despite her self-identification as a woman, and her legal status as one, she was not a woman as far as they were concerned. Rape Relief made an assumption about Ms. Nixon that was not based on any assessment of her individual capabilities or her life experience. They reached conclusions about her because she was a member of a defined group—transsexual women (BC Human Rights Tribunal, Nixon vs. Vancouver Rape Relief Society, 2002, p. 41). In June of 2002, Vancouver Rape Relief Society \"filed a petition for judicial review of the decision\" (Vancouver Rape Relief, 2002). Although these Human Rights rulings are specific to transsexual women (rather than trans or intersex women, T/TS/IS men, pan-gendered or non-gendered people) who are either in the process of, or have completed SRS, and are specific to volunteer positions or public recreational spaces (versus employment), there is definitely a trend supporting the right of T/TS/IS women to women's organizations. In addition, the cases all demonstrate the inadequacy of the existing grounds of Human Rights protection—sex, disability and sexual orientation—available to T/TS/IS people, supporting the urgent need for \"gender identity\" as a distinct and specific category as first put forward by then BC Human Rights Commissioner, Mary-Woo Sims, in 1997, with the guidance and support of BC trans and transsexual activists. In 1998, shortly after gender identity was proposed as grounds for protection, an anonymous one page flyer warning \"Lesbians, Wimmin and Girls!\" that \"Males masquerading as females (transsexuals) are polluting our communities worldwide with their Lesbian-hating/ Womyn-hating poison,\" and encouraging readers to contact Sims to protest, was found in Xtra West and other free alternative publications in Vancouver (Personal Files). British Columbia was the first province to recommend gender identity as a grounds for protection, followed by Ontario in 1999. To date, however, it has yet to be included in either province. I turn now to a more detailed account of trans, transsexual, and intersex activism at the Michigan Women's Music Festival, beginning with the first 17 record of transsexual activism in 1991. Focus on the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, became the most widely and frequently documented contestation of women-only space in the nineties and continuing into the 2000s. Although the Festival welcomes all \"womyn,\" it is predominantly a white, middle-class, lesbian venue which has served as a \"magnet for the debates and disputes of the larger [dominant Western] feminist and lesbian communities\" (Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, 2000b, p. 1) for over twenty five years. As such, it has acted as a \"petri-dish in which the popular discussions of the lesbian community are incubated\" (Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, 2000a, p. 1) and frequently tested out in practice. Over the years, women who attended the Festival, but who fell outside of the dominant white, middle-class, majority of attendees, forced the Festival to examine its racism, classism, ableism and biphobia, among other forms of oppression, and to struggle with issues such as SM, pornography, and violence between women/womyn. Although a cultural event, both the demographics (either white and middle-class, or white, middle-class and lesbian) and the political frameworks of MWMF reflect the demographics and the political frameworks of many dominant Western feminist, and lesbian feminist, organizations and spaces. As such, the Festival frequently reflects and/or predicts emerging trends in dominant lesbian/feminist communities outside of the Festival grounds such as in transition houses and sexual assault centres. For this reason, and because the MWMF is the single most public and widespread account of trans and transsexual women in women's space, it is necessary to consider the history of trans and transsexual activism at the Festival in greater detail. In 1991 the Festival became the testing ground for the inclusion of women who were not \"womyn born womyn\" when Nancy Jean Burkholder was questioned by Festival security about whether she was a man: 18 She answered that she was a woman and showed them her picture ID driver's license. One of them asked if she was a transsexual. Nancy asked why she was being questioned. The woman replied that transsexuals were not permitted at the Festival because the Festival was for \"natural, women-born women\" only. Nancy pointed out that nowhere in any Festival literature was that policy stated and asked security women to verify it. Festival producers Lisa Vogel and Boo Price were called and confirmed that transsexuals were not permitted to attend... Nancy asked for proof to substantiate the security women's allegations that she was transsexual. They said that they didn't need proof, that they were \"empowered to expel anyone from the land for any reason that we feel appropriate.\" Nancy was told that she had to leave the Festival at once, was not allowed to return to her campsite to collect her belongings, and once expelled, had to find transportation home at her own expense (Nancy's Story, 1992, p. 1). In 1992, Burkholder and other activists distributed a \"gender survey\" to Festival attendees. The survey asked whether male-to-female and female-to-male transsexuals \"should be welcome at Michigan.\" Of the approximate 7500 attendees at the Festival that year, 633 attendees responded to the survey (8.3%). Seventy-three percent of the respondents answered that MTFs should be welcomed to the Festival, with 48 or 9.6% specifying \"that only those who have had genital surgery should be welcome,\" and 80% of the respondents answered that FTMs should not be welcomed (Walworth, 1993, pp. 21-23). Walworth notes that although the sample of respondents was not random, that \"even if half of the yes [answers] are attributed to the bias of the sample and eliminated from the calculation, there is still a better than 999 in 1000 chance that most Festigoers would welcome transsexuals.\" In 1994, sufficient resources had been rallied to organize \"Camp Trans,\" a camp for approximately 25 trans, transsexual, and intersex people and their allies, which was situated directly across the road from the entrance to the Festival. Camp Trans people, which included activists Leslie Feinberg and Riki Anne Wilchins, led numerous workshops on gender and transsexuals' right to access women-only spaces, which attracted a significant number of women from the MWMF. Camp Trans activists also met with MWMF organizers to discuss the \"womyn-born-womyn\" policy, 19 arguing—politics aside—that the policy made no logical sense. Kodi Hendrix, for example, informed organizers that \"he was born with both male and female genitalia, and asked if 'only half of [him] could come in\"' (TransSisters, 1994, p. 10). James Green, a FTM activist also at the Camp, recounts meeting with the Festival personnel and how \"visibly relieved\" MWMF organizers were when they learned that he was present to \"support his transsexual sisters\" rather than seek admission onto the grounds, but how shocked they were when he stated that he did, however, given their womyn-born-womyn policy, certainly qualify for admission: \"'there's something I don't understand about your policy. If in fact your policy of exclusion is based on your belief that once a man, always a man, then you must also believe once a woman always a woman, [pause] And I don't think you want me in your Festival.' They were shocked. They looked like I had just slapped them in the face\" (Califia, 1997, p. 228). Despite the meetings, however, the policy would remain intact (Gendertrash, 1995, pp. 13-16; TransSisters, 1994, p. 9). The Camp was held again in 1995 and every year until 2000 (Camp Trans, 2000), and each year Camp Trans activists hoped to raise awareness and support by distributing educational materials at the Festival entrance; organizing information tables and workshops on and off the Festival grounds; and by entering onto, and circulating, the Festival grounds in order to talk to Festival attendees. In 1999, when MWMF organizers learned that there would be another Camp Trans, they issued the following statement: We do not and will not question any individual's gender. The Festival is an event organized by, for and about womyn. Our intention is for the Festival to be for womyn-born womyn, meaning people who were born and have lived their entire life experience as female. We ask that the transsexual community support and respect the intention of our event (Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, 1999, p. 1). The statement attempts to further clarify the \"womyn-born-womyn\" policy by specifying that for Festival purposes, \"womon\"9 means having i) been born female, and ii) having 9 \"Womon\" is the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival's spelling of \"woman.\" 20 lived one's \"entire life experience as female.\" The expanded definition, although it is clear that this is not the MWMF organizers' intent, continues to grant Festival admission to trans, transsexual, and intersex men. In this year, like in previous years, Camp Trans activists purchased Festival tickets and entered onto the Festival grounds. According to MWMF organizers, two of the activists \"took off their clothes and it was apparent to the womyn in and near the showers that two of the Son of Camp Trans^o activists were anatomically male. The word began to spread that there were men on the land that had shown their penises in the showers\" (Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, 1999, p. 1). Tony Barreto-Neto, the man referred to, wrote a statement called Statement from Tony Barreto-Neto, Camp Trans FTM or...THE SHOWERING PENIS S-P-E-A-K-SW, in which he explains his account of what transpired, as well as why he has earned the right to access women's-only space (Barreto-Neto, 1999). In an effort to address the concerns circulating throughout the Festival, MWMF organizers distributed a statement called \"Festival Update on 'Son of Camp Trans'\" (Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, 1999, p. 2). The statement restated that the Festival would not question any individual's gender identity—\"Many of us move about in a world that questions our femaleness every day. This is not an experience we want any single womon to have on this Land\" and asked that Festival attendees do the same. The statement also reiterated that despite the \"political energy being directed at tearing down womyn's space, instead of at the external institutions that still concentrate power and control in patriarchal hands,\" that MWMF organizers would \"remain united in our commitment to the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival as womyn's space...This is the experience we are committed to celebrating at next year's 25th Michigan Womyn's Music Festival\" (Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, 1999, pp. 3-4). In addition to the shower controversy, 1999 was, according to Camp Trans organizer Riki Wilchins, also notable because it marked a shift from the protest being 1 0 Camp Trans activists use \"Camp Trans\" and \"Son of Camp Trans\" interchangeably. 21 between \"transsexuals and the Festival\" to \"lesbians struggling with other lesbians\": After a shouting match, I thanked one of them for her outspoken support, and she responded, 'I wasn't supporting you. If you're not welcome, I'm not safe here either. This is my issue too.' Her sentiment was echoed by a growing chorus of women who took up the cause as their own (Camp Trans '99, 1999, p. 2). In 2000, MWMF organizers distributed a two-page handout outlining the Festival's admission policy and related procedures. The handout, called Festival Affirms Womyn-Born Womyn Space was given to each Festival participant as they entered the Festival site and \"reaffirmed\" the Festival's position from previous years. The statement outlines six guidelines including the following four: 1. The Festival is womon-born womon space. That means it is an event intended for womyn who were born and who have lived their entire life experience as female - and who currently identify as a womon; 2. We ask the transsexual community to respect and support this intention; 3. We ask all Festival-goers and staff to honor our commitment and that no womon's gender will be questioned on the land. Michigan must remain a space that recognizes and celebrates the full range of what it means to be a womon-born-womon. Butch/gender-ambiguous womyn should be able to move about our community with confidence that their right to be here will not be questioned; and 4. We also have a commitment to run the Festival in a way that keeps faith with the womyn-born womyn policy, which may mean denying admission to individuals who self-declare as male-to-female transsexuals or female-to-male transsexuals now living as men (or asking them to leave if they enter) (Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, 2000c, p. 1). Building on the 1999 addition of a womon having to have \"lived [her] entire life experience as female\" the policy now adds that she must also \"currently identify as a womon.\" Although the criteria addresses the point raised back in 1994 by Kodi Hendrix and James Green that the \"womyn born womyn\" policy would entitle them admission onto the land even though they identified as trans men, it still fails to address that one can meet all of the criteria set out by the Festival policy despite one's male, female or intersex genitalia. The appeal to attendees not to question one another's gender would become known as the \"Don't Ask, Don't Tell\" policy in keeping with the Clinton administration's policy of gays being accepted in the military as long 22 as they don't declare that they are gay (Fogel, 2000, p. 16; Taormino, 2000, p. 1). Also notable in the 2000 Festival is that, unlike in earlier years when most Camp Trans activists identified as male-to-female transsexuals, Camp Trans 2000 activists identified as \"trannie boys, dyke boys, transwomyn, female-to-male transsexuals (FTMs), boyz, andros, and tranz who shook everything up.\" And whereas \"many of them [the protesters] fit the 'woman-born' criteria; it was the 'woman-identified woman' label where things got a little sticky\" (Taormino, 2000, p. 1). Festival attendee Tristan Taormino explains that \"these Gen Xers don't identify as women, but they don't necessarily identify as men either,\" but that the protesters fit in \"just fine, since there were plenty of butches, girlfags, drag kings, bois, diesel dykes, masculine women and other gender outlaws around,\" and that the only way the protesters could be identified from the Festival attendees was because \"Camp Trans-ers refused to keep their mouths shut\" (Taormino, 2000, p. 1). Adhering to the \"Don't Ask, Don't Tell\" policy, Festival organizers admitted, and then later evicted—when the activists \"outed\" themselves—eight protesters marking the first time that protesters with identities other than \"transsexual\" were expelled from the land (Camp Trans 2000, 2000; Taormino, 2000). Shortly before the 2000 Festival a statement was issued by \"Transsexual Women and their Women Friends\" (Elliot, et al., 2000, p. 1) urging Lisa Vogel, MWMF owner and organizer, and Riki Anne Wilchins, one of the key Camp Trans organizers, to reconsider their respective positions. Quoting the results of the survey distributed to Festival attendees in 1992, where 73% of the survey respondents said that they \"had no objection to including transsexual women, as long as they had undergone sex reassignment surgery,'\"iwriters of the statement called upon Vogel to drop the \"womyn born womyn\" policy and for Wilchins to refrain from bringing \"pre-operative transsexual women\" and \"post-phalloplasty female-to-male transsexual men\" to the Festival in order to support the views of the majority of Festival attendees. H My own understanding of the 1992 survey results is that only 9% of respondents specified \"that only [MTFs] who have had genital surgery should be welcome\" to the Festival (Walworth, 1993, p. 22). 23 Writers of the statement, Beth Elliott, Davina Anne Gabriel, Anne Lawrence, Gwendolyn Ann Smith and Jessica Xavier, support the MWMF as a—as they call it—a \"penis-free\" zone, clearly reinforcing the view that gender and sex are correlated, and that both gender and sex are binary. Elliott et al., argued for a \"post-op only/no-penis\" policy stating that the policy cannot address issues of race and class: specifically, the exclusion of women, especially women of color, who are not able to afford sex reassignment surgery. This is simply the best and fairest policy possible, one that balances inclusion of transsexual women with legitimate concerns for the integrity of women's culture and safe women's space... We agree with Ms. Wilchins that freedom of gender expression for all is important. But, as feminists, we also believe it is important to acknowledge the reality of sex differences and of how they structure human society in critical ways. The Festival is a feminist event that celebrates femaleness, and the love and creativity of the sisterhood of women. We resent anyone attempting to co-opt it for a competing purpose. We resent anyone confronting our sisters in a disrespectful way, or suggesting we share Ms. Wilchins' adversarial relationship to the women's community. She should find a different party to crash (Elliot, et al., 2000, pp. 1-2). In response to the statement, transfeminists Liby S. Pease, Nicole Storm, norrie mAy-welby, Sadie Crabtree and Emi Koyama (Pease, et al., 2000), write how Elliott et al., \"however unconsciously, are framing the debate in blatantly classist and racist terms\" and how it \"is objectionable to suggest that surgical procedures beyond the means of many are a proper price of inclusion into womyn's culture\" (Pease, et al., 2000, p. 1). Further, the authors write how a \"no-penis\" policy \"falls on many intersexed womyn as well as transsexual womyn, and that these womyn are being ignored in the debate. As intersexed people face extreme forms of patriarchially-generated social and medical abuse in their daily lives, we can scarcely find a more poignantly feminist cause than the right of intersexed people for self-determination\" (Pease, et al., 2000, p. 1). The response ends by reiterating that while some of the authors agree with Wilchins and others don't, all of the authors are united on the issues of racism and classism raised in the Elliott et al. statement. 24 The response by Pease et. al., seems to be the first time since Jean Burkholder's expulsion in 1991 that the issues of racism and classism are addressed in any document, statement, or response, written by either MWMF organizers or by T/TS/IS activists. And a subsequent article written by Emi Koyama (2000a) about the racism and classism in the Elliott et al., statement, as well as at the Festival itself, is one of the less than a handful of public documents that addresses racism, classism and \"the trans inclusion debate\" inside or outside of the Festival context. In the article, Whose Feminism is it Anyway? The Unspoken Racism of the Trans Inclusion Debate, Koyama writes how speaking from the perspective and the traditions of lesbians of color, most if not all rationales for excluding transsexual women are not only transphobic, but also racist. To argue that transsexual women should not enter the Land because their experiences are different would have to assume that all other women's experiences are the same, and this is a racist assumption... Even the argument that \"the presence of a penis would trigger women\" is flawed because it neglects the fact that white skin is just as much a reminder of violence as a penis. The racist history of lesbian-feminism has taught us that any white woman making these excuses for one oppression have made and will make the same excuse for other oppressions such as racism, classism, and ableism (Koyama, 2000a, p. 5). Koyama also asserts that it is time that we stop pretending that transsexual women are \"just like\" other women or that their open inclusion will not threaten anybody or anything. The very existence of transsexual people, whether or not they are politically inclined, is highly threatening in a world that essentializes, polarizes and dichotomizes genders, and the Michigan Womyn's Music festival and lesbian-feminism are not immune from its power (Koyama, 2000a, p. 6). Although the authors of both the statement and the response disagree (as do the MWMF organizers for that matter) on how to define \"women\" and which women should be granted admission into the Festival, they do seem to agree, however, that the discussion is specific to women, since no mention is made of trans men, bi-gendered or pan-gendered people or people who do not identify by gender, in either 25 of the documents. Interestingly, as of January 23, 2002, neither the MWMF or Camp Trans web site—the same web sites cited throughout this section—had any update on what transpired at the 2001 Festival. Even on the MWMF bulletin board, search words \"trans,\" \"transsexual,\" and \"transgender,\" revealed only one hit for transgender which was in reference to an article in the October 09, 2001 issue of The Advocate. The article discusses the experience of the punk band Le Tigre, which played at the MWMF, which is not trans, transsexual, and intersex inclusive, and then subsequently thereafter at the Ladyfest Festival, which is. Despite the over ten years of the trans, transsexual, and intersex activism at the MWMF, it is clear that Festival organizers remain in a position of defining who a \"womon\" is, and subsequently, who can officially gain admission into the Festival. It is also clear that the \"trans inclusion/exclusion debate,\" for the most part, does not include an analysis of racism or classism or any other oppression. Again, given that many of the demographics and philosophies of the Festival parallel those of dominant feminist organizations in the West, we can anticipate that the arguments and trends documented at the Festival will also parallel or portend the arguments and trends within these same organizations. Key Arguments Raised by Women Against Trans, Transsexual, and Intersex Access to Women's Organizations and Spaces Remarkably, arguments against trans, transsexual, and intersex access to women's organizations have changed very little since the 1970s, when they first appear in public documentation with the ejection of Beth Elliot in 1973. From 1973 until today, arguments have unequivocally positioned T/TS/IS people as being on the outside ot women's organizations \"wanting to get in,\" not allowing for the fact that there have always been T/TS/IS people who were already inside women's organizations, but who did not identify as T/TS/IS for fear of reprisal. A recent case in point, for 26 example, is Pat Lyne, a member in good standing on the Canadian National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC) executive, until self-identifying as pan-gendered. A technicality prevented NAC from removing Lyne from the executive and refusing to be included on a technicality, Lyne resigned: the technicality was that they (NAC) would except me if I could/would state that I define as \"only woman\" which I can not for I am pan-gender. They (NAC) would except me as a Lesbian woman, but not as pan-gender.12 Likewise, T/TS/IS men—often identified by others as butch lesbians—who already work or volunteer in, or use the services of women's organizations, risk losing their employment or access to services by identifying as T/TS/IS. Dean Dubick, who identifies as a \"First Nations trans-guy\" who was \"encouraged\" 13 to leave his job, shares his experience: I was involved in working in a women-only space. Going to an AA meeting that was a women-only meeting. The clubs I went to were women-only. So I had to change my world. But I am a guy. Not only am I a guy now, I always was a guy. When I marched in rallies carrying banners, and worked in women-only spaces, I've always been a guy. It seems that they are telling me to just pretend I'm not a guy. How screwed up is that? (quoted in Cross, 2001, p. 41) In the early years, like with the MWMF, the arguments were specific to transsexual women but, as language and understanding expanded, the arguments were expanded to transgender—and even more recently—trans women. Although the focus remains on trans and transgender women, the use of the umbrella terms \"trans\" and \"transgender\" has made it difficult to ascertain who women are referring to. Virginia Woo, Jeanne d'Arc, Maria N. Penn and Clara, for example, acknowledge that although contemporary usage of the word transgender serves to function as an \"umbrella term\" and includes any and all \"people who are inclined to cross the gender line, including transsexuals, cross-dressers and gender benders together,\" some individuals \"use the word transgender as a synonym for transsexual\" (Woo et. al., 1 2 p a t Lyne, persona l c o r r e s p o n d e n c e July, 2002 . 13 D e a n Dubick, persona l c o r r e s p o n d e n c e September , 2 0 0 1 . 27 1998, p. 15). Sometimes, when used synonymously, transgender and transsexual are positioned as opposite to \"queer,\" which is seen as reproducing conventional gender, sexuality and sex norms. At other times, however, transgender and queer are used as synonyms in which case they are positioned as opposite to transsexual, which is seen as reproducing gender, sex and sexuality norms (Stryker, 1998, p. 149). Janice Raymond (1994) is one of the most vocal feminist proponents of this latter position. Raymond is the author of The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-male (1979, 1994), a book which began with a conference paper in 1972, and which remains to date a critical reference for many women who are against T/TS/IS access to women's organizations, while for others it is viewed as hate literature. Raymond's views are shared by other feminists such as Mary Daly (1978) and Sheila Jeffreys (1994, 1997), and at least in the 1970s, Gloria Steinem (1977). 14 Raymond, Daly and Jeffreys view transsexual women as men and believe that without medical intervention, transsexuals could not, and therefore previously did not, \"exist.\" Further, given that the medical establishment is a patriarchal one, transsexuality in turn is a patriarchal tool constructed to reinforce gender and hetero normativity. In the introduction to the second edition of The Transsexual Empire, (1994) Raymond explains further: The medical framework and the plethora of professional experts that have colonized so-called gender dissatisfaction have been incapable of annexing race, age or economic dissatisfaction. Even the word, dissatisfaction, individualizes rather than politicizes what causes the so-called dissatisfaction. And so we talk about gender dissatisfaction in the transsexual realm, rather than gender oppression; whereas there is no comparable psychologizing of racial, age, and economic discrimination and oppression for which the individual solution would be medical treatment. The conglomerate of medical and other professional practitioners who coalesce to institutionalize transsexual treatment and surgery on the medical model—the transsexual empire—become shapers of acceptable and permissible gender-related behaviour (Raymond, 1994, pp. xvi). Another variation of Raymond's argument is described in Judith Halberstam 1 4 1 could not find any material that indicates Steinem's current position. 28 and Jacob Hale's work, which they describe as the \"Butch/FTM Border Wars\" (Halberstam & Hale, 1998). In these wars \"some lesbians seem to see FTMs as traitors to a 'women's' movement who cross over and become the enemy. Some FTMs see lesbian feminism as a discourse that has demonized them and their masculinity. Some butches consider FTMs to be butches who 'believe in anatomy,' and some FTMs consider butches to be FTMs who are too afraid to transition\" (Halberstam, 1998, p. 287). Women-only organizations have attempted to resolve the difficult issues of identity and language by granting admission to \"women born women\" (Woo et. al., 1998, p. 16), \"womyn-born-womyn\" (Califia, 1997, p. 228), \"woman-born-woymn\" (Gabriel, 1994, p. 13), and various other terms rooted in biological determinism, into their organizations. Biological determinism, it is argued, is fixed and stable, and consequently would serve as a useful marker of who could/could not gain entry into \"women-only spaces.\" Here, biological determinism is always reduced to binary chromosomal determinism (XX/XY), disregarding the occurrence of other chromosomal patterns-XXY, XYY, XXXY, XXXXY and XO-and thus other possible identities based on chromosomes alone. Consequently, intersex activists are quick to dispel the notion of biological determinism as stable and hence a reliable indicator of \"womanhood.\" In her essay Hermaphrodites with Attitude: Mapping the Emergence of Intersex Political Activism (1998), Cheryl Chase writes that \"one in a hundred births exhibits some anomaly in sex differentiation, and about one in two thousand is different enough to render problematic the question 'Is it a boy or a girl?'\" (p. 189). In addition, T/TS/IS activists argue that the \"women born women\" determinant is a moot one since chromosomes are only one of several factors that determine sex, and regardless, sex is independent of gender. Still, the notion of \"women born women\" persists as the conceptual gatekeeper for entry into \"women-only organizations.\" In March of 1998, Kinesis, a Canadian women's periodical produced in Vancouver, featured a discussion by four women \"involved with various Lower 29 Mainland women's organizations\" on the \"huge\" impact that \"gender identity\" as a grounds of protection in the BC Human Rights Code, would have on \"the existing structures of women's organizations, or how it could cancel out existing protections that currently allow [women's organizations] to organize women-only centres and groups\" (Woo et. al., 1998, p. 15). The four women, Virginia Woo, Jeanne d'Arc, Maria N. Penn and Clara, who \"collectively represented] women in terms of race, sexual orientation,disabilities and other marginalizations\" chose to remain anonymous for \"fear of reprisals and violence\" (Woo et. al., 1998, p. 15). Of central concern to Woo et. al. were MTF transsexual women who were seeking entrance into women-only organizations and spaces. Their discussion includes the following arguments against transsexual women's access and inclusion: i) MTF transsexual women can never be women because they were socialized as boys/men, and consequently, have experienced, learned, and exercised male privilege; ii) male privilege is intrusive and disruptive and is why \"women-only spaces\" were created to begin with; iii) claims that \"women\" are discriminating against transsexuals, that they are in fact \"transphobic,\" are unfounded because \"women\" themselves—as oppressed peoples—lack the institutional power necessary to discriminate; iv) queer theory undermines feminist political organizing by deconstructing the very identities required to organize; \"queer theory destroys and collapses valid differences\"; v) \"the issue of transgendered 'inclusion' in women-only spaces is part of a bigger challenge facing women's organizations [i.e.,] the backlash against the women's movement and feminism\"; vi) transsexualism is the result of \"male-dominated systems controlling people's bodies\"; vii) the large number of MTF transsexuals, as well as the near perfection of MTF surgery, is evidence that the state readily supports MTF transitions because females have less worth in our society than males; viii) the female/male binary imposed by the state forces MTFs into choosing between female and male when they are neither; ix) the imposition of a female/male 1 5 For d iscussion of lesbian and non- lesbian feminist op in ions about t ranssexua l w o m e n , see Kendel , 1998. 30 binary results in inadequate support for MTF transsexuals, rendering women-only organizations/spaces, by default, as the testing ground for \"MTFs trying to transition to 'womanhood'\"; x) women-only organizations have nothing to offer MTFs because they do not understand the \"particular experience TGs [transgendered people] have been through.\" As well, women's organizations \"are still trying to meet the needs of lesbians, women of color, Aboriginal women, [and] women with disabilities;\" and finally, xi) admission of transsexuals will lead to the admission of transgendered men, who will claim that they are \"female in a man's body'\" (Woo et. al., 1998, pp. 15-16). The arguments put forth by Woo et. al., in 1998—save perhaps the queer argument which has only surfaced with the emergence of the queer movement in the 1990s—reflect the popular arguments that have circulated—and continue to circulate—in women-only spaces and organizations for the past thirty years. Sheila Jeffreys, for example, continues to argue that \"transsexualism\" should be seen as a \"political, medical abuse of human rights\" (Jeffreys, 1997, p. 59), which violates \"such people's right to live with dignity in the body into which they were bom\" (Jeffreys, 1997, p. 60). For Jeffreys, like Raymond, Daly and others, \"transsexualism\" pathologizes the body and subsequently mutilates it, in order to satisfy societal codes of gender, sex and sexuality. Jeffreys explains how in Thailand and Brazil, for example, the sex trade industries encourage \"transsexualism\" because \"'heterosexual' men require access to prostituted men but wish those men to resemble women so that they can maintain a heterosexual identity\" (Jeffreys, 1997, p. 62). Quoting Janice Raymond from the introduction of the 1994 edition of The Transsexual Empire, Jeffreys writes that even Johns Hopkins, the first institution to perform sex reassignment surgery (SRS) in the United States, \"has abandoned such work after discovering that the outcomes for those who had the operation were no better than those who did not\" (Jeffreys, 1997, p. 63). Like Woo et. al., Jeffreys asserts that \"male-to-constructed-female transsexuals\" form an image of \"womanhood\" that is based on performance and fantasy rather than on the experience of growing up a girl, and becoming a woman, in a society that is 31 misogynist (Jeffreys, 1997, p. 66). For Jeffreys, the issue of access to women-only organizations and spaces is further complicated, when a transsexual woman identifies as a lesbian. Like with male privilege, a lesbian transsexual has, according to Jeffreys, only ever experienced heterosexual privilege, and thus has always, and will always, love women from a heterosexual standpoint. This same argument would also necessarily apply to heterosexual women who now identify as lesbians, but Jeffreys does not comment on this. Further, Jeffreys warns lesbian communities of the increasing—and to her disturbing—trend of butch lesbians seeking to transition to \"surgically constructed men\" (Jeffreys cites an Australian study which documents 5 FTM sex reassignment surgeries out of a total of 60, but states that this number appears to be growing; see Jeffreys, 1997, p. 68). Jeffreys claims that these transitions are largely motivated by a \"woman hating\" culture and instead urges a political response to the hatred that does not include \"self-mutilation.\" Other feminist theorists and activists, however, including Leslie Feinberg (1996; 1998), Davina Anne Gabriel (1994), Eleanor MacDonald (1998), and Viviane Namaste (2000) counter the arguments put forth by Woo et. al., Jeffreys, and others. Some argue, for example, that many MTF transsexuals were raised as girls, while others \"have felt like females as long as they can remember, and consequently have not had the experience nor subsequently the benefit of 'male privilege'\" (Walsworth, 1994, p. 8). Others activists argue that \"a trans woman may have limited male privilege... but at the same time she experiences vast emotional, social, and financial disadvantages for being trans\" (Koyama, 2000b, p. 3). With regards to trans women exercising their \"male privilege\" and behaviour within the confines of women-only space, Gabriel writes that \"there are in fact, 'women-born-women who are more patriarchal in their values and perspectives than some men, yet this is not regarded as an impediment to women-only space. Even 'women-born-women' who consciously reject patriarchal values and perspectives and identify as feminists can retain unconscious patriarchal 32 attitudes and behaviors\" (Gabriel, 1994, p. 15). The premise is that women-only organizations and spaces have rules of conduct which all members must observe or, alternatively, run the risk of having their group membership revoked. Therefore, women-only organizations need not permit disruptive or intrusive \"male behavior\" from a MTF woman any more than they would from a \"woman-born-woman.\" In any case, focusing on \"male behavior\" and \"male privilege\" without equally focusing on white skin privilege works to once again, privilege and reaffirm sex and gender as the priorities in women's organizing and organizations (Koyama, 2000b). Feinberg et. al. argue that the inclusion of trans, transsexual, and intersex women into women-only spaces cannot simply be reduced to an essentialist versus non-essentialist argument. The arguments that Woo et al. and Jeffreys put forth, for example, contend on the one hand that gender is a patriarchal construct that can be destabilized, while on the other hand, that gender is assigned according to one's sex at birth and therefore stable and irrefutable! Further, the struggle to define the essential \"woman\" is not new nor unique as Aboriginal women, women of color, bisexual women, lesbian women, women who practice SM, women who are violent, women who work in the sex trade, women with disabilities, poor women, and others, have fought, and continue to fight, to include their identities in the definition of \"woman\", inside and outside of women-only spaces and organizations. Despite the thirty-year struggle to define \"woman\" from a trans, transsexual, and intersex experience and framework, and the parallel struggle for trans, transsexual, and intersex women's access to women's organizations, there are very few public documents that address the struggle in a practical—versus theoretical—way (Namaste, 1996a; MacDonald, 1998). In fact, the Cope and Darke manuals, the Trans Inclusion Policy Manual for Women's Organizations (2002) and the Trans Accessibility Project: Making Women's Shelter's Accessible to Transgendered Women (1999), mentioned earlier, might very well be the most practical public guides to date. The dearth of practical resources becomes increasingly critical as the number of trans, 33 transsexual, and intersex people accessing women's organizations increases and as Human Rights Tribunals continue to rule in favour of transsexual women accessing women's organizations. The absence of public and practical resources, however, does not mean an absence of resources entirely—more likely an absence of funding, time, and other resources to make them public. It is generally known, through word of mouth, for example, that many trans, transsexual, and intersex activists and women's organizations are engaged in practical efforts to make women's organizations accessible to T/TS/IS people, but the tools and processes used are rarely made public for the reasons mentioned above. This practical, usually unseen, undocumented work, is the work that I hope to make more visible by way of this thesis in hopes of adding to the limited practical, public information available to trans, transsexual, and intersex people and women's organizations working toward trans, transsexual, and intersex people's access to women's organizations. 34 Chapter Two: Research Design, Theories, and Methods Once you see transgender or transsexual, once you see the possibility, you can never not see it again (Allison Cope, educator/activist interviewed for this thesis). In this chapter I describe my personal experience within a women-only organization and my/our struggles with definitions of \"woman\" and trans, transsexual, and intersex accessibility, and how these experiences shaped the design of this thesis. I also briefly describe the various theories that further influenced and guided my work. Finally, I outline and discuss the different decisions I made and approaches I took in order to complete and interpret the research. Research Design Trans, transsexual, and intersex (T/TS/IS) survivors, activists and allies continue to work toward making critical services and related volunteer and employment opportunities provided by \"women-only\" organizations accessible to T/TS/IS people. Some \"women-only\" organizations have responded by becoming completely (and formally) accessible, while others are engaged in a process of determining their position. For the most part, neither T/TS/IS survivors, activists and allies nor service providers (which also includes T/TS/IS survivors, activists and allies) are benefiting from practically oriented research and writing since—despite the ever increasing availability of research and resources on T/TS/IS issues and lives—the greater part of this information remains theoretical and without any practical foundation (Namaste, 1996a; MacDonald, 1998; Tayleur, 1995). Personal Experience My own interest in this study stems from the lack of such relevant and practical resources; in 1994, I had been working toward T/TS/IS access to the sexual assault 35 centre (SAC) I worked at in southern Ontario, and I needed help. I didn't know of any other SAC, transition house, or \"women's\" organization, or of any T/TS/IS activists—inside or outside of these spaces—who were doing work toward T/TS/IS access and inclusion, and, likewise, I didn't know of any practical resources that addressed access from a SAC and/or transition house perspective and context. Still, I knew that there had to be other \"women-only\" organizations and \"out\" T/TS/IS activists who were doing this work, and I wanted to find them and talk to them about what kinds of things they were doing. I wanted to learn how they were talking about gender from within the specific context of a women's organization which is principally organized around a fixed, ahistorical male/female binary; how they were complicating sex, gender and sexuality; and if, and how, they were using an interlocking framework of race, class, ability, and other oppressions in their analysis. I also wanted to learn whether the work they were doing was resulting in policies, and, if it was, what kinds of policies, and what the implications of the policies might be. Finally, I wanted to learn if by doing this work their understanding of violence against women had shifted, and if so, how. After three years of work as the Public Education Coordinator at the SAC—and consequently after many talks, panels, and workshops on male violence against women, dating violence, child sexual assault, sexual harassment, dissociation, ritual abuse, and various forms of oppression, among others, later—I had become deeply dissatisfied with my/our centre's analysis. In order for our talks to fit neatly into the one to three hour time frames we were most often allotted, I felt that my/my centre's analysis had become \"pat\" and was sounding more and more like convenient sound bytes rather than a reflection of the complexities, and often, contradictions of violence against women as experienced and understood by our work at the Centre. These complexities and contradictions included perpetrators of violence against women who were women; women whose identities did not easily match working definitions of gender and sex; and forms of behaviour that were considered 36 oppressive, but not violent. When such analyses were included, for example an analysis of violence in lesbian and other woman-to-woman relationships (such as those between women in a women-only centre), it would still be organized around the dominant white heterosexual male/female binary where: the \"butch\" (male) lesbian/ woman was the assumed perpetrator and the \"femme\" (female) lesbian/woman was the assumed victim; \"butch\" was coded to mean all working class women, while \"femme\" was coded to mean middle-to-upper class white women (Crowder, 1998; Inness, 1998); and violence did not include racism. But how exactly, I wondered, in a colonial, heteropatriarchal culture, is the gender of a working-class white butch lesbian the same as a middle-class straight white woman? Or the gender and sex of a Two Spirit working-class woman the same as a white middle-class intersex lesbian? And how does our understanding of gender reflect both the male and female identities of women survivors who are dissociative (e.g., Dissociative Identity Disorder), but who do not identify as trans, transsexual or intersex? Or how do we understand violence in bisexual women's lives without reducing it to hetero or homo violence depending on the gender of the perpetrator? And what new meaning does \"bisexual\" have when considering gender identities other than \"woman\" and \"man\"? I also found that all negative behaviours by women in the SAC that transgressed agreed upon modes of conduct were labeled as \"male.\" For example, a woman might have \"male energy\" or be taking up space by acting \"like a man.\" But again, in a dominant white heteropatriarchal culture and in a women's organization that organizes specifically around gender, when is \"acting like a man\" more of a euphemism for racism or heterosexism than gender? Also, because racism, heterosexism, ableism, and classism, for example, were not understood as forms of violence, women who were racist, heterosexist, ableist, or classist were seen as oppressive perhaps, but not as violent. Behaviour that was considered violent was explained as an outcome of a patriarchal system of which women are victims rather 37 than a white heteropatriarchy which allocates some race-based agency and power to white women. It seemed to me that our analyses successfully reiterated an uncomplicated heterosexual and colonial view of violence against women that: i) could only make sense of identities from within a male/female binary and so, in a self-fulfilling prophecy, worked diligently to make all identities fit into the binary; ii) saw women as victims who never carried any personal agency; and iii) understood violence against women from within a patriarchal framework rather than, for example, a white heteropatriarchal and class-stratified one. Despite the more complicated analyses that we would develop, the initial frameworks persisted. In 1994 I read Leslie Feinberg's book, Stone Butch Blues, and I became clearer about my frustration and discontent with my and my Centre's analysis of violence against women (and by this time our definition of violence included racism, heterosexism, and other \"isms\") that permeated all of our work at the SAC, and why it was so inadequate. Stone Butch Blues is a loosely autobiographical story about a person who struggles with gender identity within the male/female dichotomy, and the interconnections of gender identity with sex, sexuality, ability, race, and class. By way of the character's struggles with these interconnections, I came to see our analysis of violence as inadequate because it at times insisted on, while at other times defaulted to, binaries across gender (man/ woman), sex (male/female), sexuality (hetero/homo), race (white/of color), and ability (able-bodied/with disability), among others, that did not, in and of themselves, exist. I also saw that there were specific instances when we chose not to use the binaries, such as in the construction of the \"universal\" woman which in theory represented all women, but which in reality, only represented white, heterosexual, able-bodied, middle-class women successfully. I saw more exactly how and when these binaries reconstituted themselves in my and my centre's analyses, and I specifically wanted to examine how these binaries functioned in our work through our analyses of gender and sex, since this was the \"cornerstone\" of our work. 38 I expressed some of my concerns regarding our analyses to the SAC staff group and proposed that I develop a workshop for our biannual volunteer, board, and staff training that would examine gender, sex, and sexuality from outside of the traditional manAvoman, male/female, hetero/homo binaries. I also argued that we had the opportunity to self-educate and be proactive rather than reactive when a T/TS/IS staff person, volunteer or service user came \"out,\" was \"outed,\" or otherwise sought services or work opportunities at our Centre. Staff agreed, and I immediately began the research and development of what I would call the Deconstructing Gender workshop. By 1995, the workshop was developed and was subsequently offered several times to all SAC members before it was incorporated into our regular training sessions. In the same year a woman who had just joined our organization confided in some staff members regarding her gender and sex identities at birth. Although the woman did not self-identify as trans, transsexual or intersex, she was concerned that her gender/sex might be challenged. The Deconstructing Gender workshops continued, but now with an urgency to develop a position policy on T/TS/IS women's access to our centre as quickly as possible. Within a year of joining the Centre, the woman's presence was scrutinized, and shortly thereafter she resigned under duress, feeling that, given the hostility and venomous anger of some of her colleagues at the Centre (with whom she had previously had good relationships), she had no choice but to do so. In 1996—not long after the woman's resignation—a policy stating that the Centre would not \"discriminate against transgendered individuals who self identify as women\" was instituted (Personal Files). This experience led me back to the very concerns that initiated the development of the Deconstructing Gender workshop, that is, that our analyses were too simple, and that part of the simplicity was our reliance on binaries that did not exist in our work, or conversely, that we made exist by way of our faulty analyses. The most obvious example was how \"woman\" was being defined and who got to define it, and, by 39 extension, how \"violence\" was being defined, and who got to define it. The problem was how to make sense of what was going on in the absence of practical theory and resources that addressed the limitations of existing gender frameworks. As staff at a centre where a male/female gender analysis is essential to all the work that you and your centre does, how do you begin to challenge that very analysis that all services rely on? Faulty analysis is neither innocent nor idle, and actively and forcefully bars (in this case) T/TS/IS people from accessing critical services or from working in them. The working power of analyses and theory in \"women-only\" organizations is very clear and is consequently difficult to slough off as something only relegated to privileged \"academics\" in ivory towers. Design Overview I decided to seek out others who were working toward redefining and broadening definitions of gender and sex within women's organizations and who were working toward formalizing T/TS/IS access to these organizations. I decided to seek out activists, survivors, frontline workers and other staff, who were working toward access for the following reasons: i) I am interested in learning how popular understandings of gender and sex are expanded rather than defended; ii) I believe this information could be useful to SACs, transition houses, and other violence against women organizations and services who are either in a process of deciding whether to make their organizations accessible or who are in the process of making them formally accessible; iii) I knew from my personal experience that many—if not most—of the issues and concerns raised by educators/activists working against T/TS/IS access were also raised when working toward T/TS/IS access and consequently would be addressed; and iv) Human Rights tribunals are ruling in favour of T/TS women having access to women's organizations (Cope & Darke, 1999; Darke & Cope, 2002), and consequently, there is some urgency in centres/transition houses providing relevant and practical education on T/TS/IS access issues. 40 I decided to do the bulk of my research in British Columbia assuming that, because there was a lot of T/TS activism, and because of the number of T/TS Human Rights complaints in British Columbia, that many SACs and transition houses would be involved in educating their memberships on T/TS access to their organizations. Based on these assumptions, I divided the research into two parts. The first part was the development of a questionnaire, which was distributed to 105 women's anti-violence organizations (13 SACs, 84 transition houses including second stage housing programs, and 8 services which offered both sexual assault and transition house services) in British Columbia. The second part was to interview eleven educators/activists/SAC and transition house workers who were involved in making SACs and transition houses formally accessible to T/TS/IS people. Of the eleven people interviewed,16 two were from BC, seven were from Ontario (including myself), and two were from the United States. All but two of the participants work, or have worked, as staff and/or volunteers, in a SAC, transition house, or centre for survivors of domestic and/or sexual violence. Eight of the activists and educators described experiences from organizations they had worked at and/or were currently working at. Of these organizations, four were transition houses, three were SACs, and three were domestic violence centres. Although the design of this research is a direct outcome of my personal experiences, these experiences are shaped by my personal location as a white, able-bodied, mixed-class, first generation Canadian, non-T/TS/IS, lesbian woman. As a non-trans, transsexual, or intersex woman, I necessarily scrutinized my motives for doing this research. Of foremost concern was whether this project would in any way appropriate trans, transsexual and intersex women and people's voices and experiences. At the same time, with the ongoing \"inclusion debate\" within sexual assault centres, transition houses, and other women-only spaces, there are very few opportunities for trans, transsexual, and intersex people to use their voices from within 16 The selection process is described in the Research Methods section of this chapter. 41 these spaces. I believe, that in the absence of trans, transsexual, and intersex access and inclusion to women's organizations, it is the responsibility of those who can use their voice and privilege—such as myself—to do so. And to do so in coalition with trans, transsexual, and intersex communities—such as the Women/Trans Dialogue Planning Committee—whenever possible. Further, to the degree that sex and gender is integral to both our own identities, as well as to our work as anti-violence workers, trans, transsexual, and intersex \"issues\" are everyone's issues. It is in this vein that I offer the following research. My experiences and research are further defined by various oral and written theoretical influences, which I describe in the next section. Research Theories The possession of a term does not bring a process or practice into being; concurrently one may practice theorizing without ever knowing/ possessing the term, just as we can live and act in feminist resistance without ever using the term 'feminism' (hooks, 1994, p. 61). This thesis is not neutral; it was built on the day-to-day work and experiences of anticolonial, antiracist, anti-oppression, and T/TS/IS social change activists, frontline anti-violence workers and survivors of violence with whom I have had—and continue to have—the privilege of working and organizing. The knowledge that comes out of our collective work and experiences is rarely formally documented and/or published, and as such, is rarely formally recognized, acknowledged, or valued as \"theory.\" I borrow from bell hooks (1994, p. 65) when I refer to this body of oral undocumented/ unpublished knowledge as \"social practice\" theory. This thesis was also built on the work of popular education, feminist post-modern, feminist anticolonial and anti-racism, queer, trans, transsexual, and intersex, transfeminist and feminist anti-violence theorists, some of whom are also social change activists, frontline workers, and survivors of violence, and all of whom are published. 42 Together, both the unpublished and published theories have guided and shaped this thesis—from its inception, to its design and methodology, and finally to its analysis—and have actively and directly informed what I valued, considered and included. Social Practice Theory When our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to processes of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice. Indeed, what such experience makes more evident is the bond between the two—that ultimately reciprocal process wherein one enables the other (hooks, 1994, p. 61). In a discussion of theory and experience, Chris Weedon writes how \"many feminists maintain an open hostility to theory\" (1987, p. 6), and in a similar discussion of theorists and practitioners, Robin Usher, Ian Bryant, and Rennie Johnston write how practitioners are often \"suspicious\" of theory (1997, p. 122). With the institutionalization and production of feminist thought through universities, and with a dominant Western culture that values the written over oral form, \"theory\" is often synonymous with \"published academic theory.\" And \"published academic theory\" has often come to mean theory which is privileged by race, class, sex, gender and ability; inaccessible by both language and availability; and either insufficiently related to our lives, or directly related, but insufficiently acknowledged that the source of information for these published theories was, in fact, our lives (Christian, 1990; Rebolledo, 1990; hooks, 1994). Not all social change activists, frontline workers, survivors and \"practitioners\" create theory in their daily practice, but many do. And, although it may not be called \"theory,\" it functions in the same way as written theory in that it helps us to make sense of our experiences and to build on these experiences in ways that matter. Volunteers who resist traditional definitions of gender and/or se in women-only spaces, First Nations women and women of color staff who continually confront white privilege and 43 racism in the work and analyses of women's organizations, and survivors who challenge anti-violence talks that make no mention of same-sex abusers, are all examples of theory as social practice or \"theory as liberatory practice\" (hooks, 1994, p. 59). In these, and like examples, it is difficult to distinguish \"theory\" from \"practice.\" How is this determined? And in whose interest is it to label some work as \"theory\" and other work as \"practice,\" or to value written and published work over oral work? Social practice theory acknowledges that the distinction between theory and practice is often a false one. It also recognizes and values the oral tradition of knowledge production and circulation. The critical role of social practice theory is especially evident when printed or published theory is either limited or entirely absent. For this thesis, for example, I found few written theories on domestic and sexual violence against trans, transsexual, and intersex people, or on how expanding notions of gender might impact existing theories on violence against women. The absence of theories in written form, however, did not mean the absence of theory in general, rather that the theories existed in the oral narratives, activism, and work of trans, transsexual, and intersex survivors and the anti-violence workers and activists—both trans, transsexual, and intersex and not—who supported them. This is a very clear example of how, as hooks describes above, practice and theory can move seamlessly one into the other, so as to appear indistinguishable, yet informing and enabling the other (hooks, 1994, p. 61). By its very nature, the manner in which social practice theory is applied is very personal and individual. For this reason I have found the tools and theory of popular education—as related to critical pedagogy theory—to be helpful in providing a practical conceptual framework. Popular Education Theory Theory is not inherently healing, liberatory, or revolutionary. It fulfills this function only when we ask that it do so and direct our theorizing towards this end (hooks, 1994, p. 61). 44 For my research I draw specifically on the theory and tools of popular education as developed by Paulo Freire (Freire, 1982 & 1985). Popular education—unlike most dominant Western education—makes no claim of being neutral or objective. To the contrary, popular education is rooted in the knowledge that social inequities do exist, and that people can, and do, band together from within these inequities and injustices to self-educate, organize, and implement strategies that will change the circumstances of their lives. The belief that marginalized and oppressed peoples can and do effect social change is central to the philosophy and practice of popular education. Condensed, this is education and social change \"by the people for the people.\" bell hooks refers to popular education, specifically Freire's work, as liberatory education. hooks and other scholars acknowledge the limitations of Freire's work. Of central concern is the underlying sexism in Freire's work in what hooks calls a \"phallocentric paradigm of liberation\" (hooks, 1994, p. 49), and what is sometimes considered to be a soft, liberal approach to oppression i.e., \"we are all oppressed\" (Fischer, 1997, p. 11) or conversely, \"we\" (the facilitator, organizer, researcher, etc.) must \"empower\" the oppressed (Fischer, 1997, p. 71). I share these concerns. At the same time, however, I believe popular education, coupled with a feminist critique and practice, can ameliorate these and other concerns. In turn, popular education can serve as a spring board into a new hybrid practice, but one which remains true to its original tenets of people as critical thinkers who are the authorities of their experience, and who, as the authorities of their experience, can best determine and effect the desired and necessary social change for their lives. Feminist participatory action research is one example of such a hybrid (Barnsley & Ellis, 1992). The popular education/feminist hybrid has guided my work in a number of very significant and practical ways, beginning with whether a thesis can even play a role in popular education and if it can, what needs to be in place for this to happen. It seems that the interests of popular education and academic theses (among other academic forms of knowledge production) are often diametrically opposed: Christian (1990), 45 hooks (1994), and Rebolledo (1990) all write about how their work is devalued and/or rejected by frontline workers and activists for being \"too\" academic and not grounded in the day-to-day business of life, and at the same time devalued and/or rejected by fellow academics for not being academic, theoretical or scholarly \"enough.\" For my own purposes I have defined both \"too\" academic and not theoretical \"enough\" from a popular education perspective, which values social practice as theory; acknowledges the many other forms and voices that theory can take; recognizes both oral and written forms of language as types of action; and which values accessibility in terms of language. Popular education theory offers a critical, but very general, framework: \"ordinary people are critical thinkers and can, and do, effect social change.\" It also—by definition—shapes itself to the immediate needs of the people using it, and consequently, may or may not reflect certain values from group to group. For these reasons, popular education theory is usually accompanied by other supporting theories. For this research I have complemented it with feminist postmodern theory. Feminist Postmodern Theory All our discourses are 'politically' uninnocent. They occur within a shifting and dynamic social context in which the existence of multiple sets of power relations are inevitable (Lather, 1991, p. vii). Feminist postmodernism, along with other anticolonial and anti-racism, post-modern, queer, trans, and popular education theories in varying degrees, argues that knowledge is never innocent; that the way in which knowledge is perceived and conceived, produced and circulated is never value-neutral, ahistorical, or independent from power. There is no fixed or essential meaning, no one single truth, no one story or grand or meta-narrative that explains or accounts for everything. Further, there is no fixed or universal identity or subjectivity, and, as such, we are all always inherently implicated in the production and distribution of knowledge (Haraway, 1991; Lather, 46 1991; Weedon, 1991; Flax, 1992; Usher, Bryant & Johnston, 1997). The question then becomes not whether neutrality and objectivity exist, rather \"how to make overt how power permeates the construction and legitimation of knowledges\" (Lather, 1991, xvii) and conversely, the delegitimation of knowledges, and how to expose the overt and covert, conscious and unconscious assumptions, choices, deletions and omissions that shape our understanding and knowledge. Post-modern theorist Michel Foucault states that our task is to unmask the \"regimes of truth\" —the truths so deeply embedded and ingrained in our personal knowledge and in the knowledge of our institutions that they are regarded as neutral, objective, and as universal—so that we can begin in earnest the work of social change (Foucault, 1984). Foucault argued that without the necessary tools, practice and experience of recognizing and dismantling regimes of truth, any new theories would only be regulated by existing regimes of truth since, by definition, regimes of truth will recirculate and reproduce what already is. It is as Audre Lorde so succinctly writes: \"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house\" (Lorde, 1984, p. 110). Two of the tools that postmodern theory offers for examination of these truths or meta-narratives are \"deconstruction\" and \"discourse analysis.\" Janice Ristock and Joan Pennell define deconstruction as the \"taking apart [of] social categories as a way of seeing how one's world is constructed\" and discourse analysis as the practice of \"examining language and ideologies as a way of understanding how meanings are produced\" (Ristock and Pennell, 1996, p. 6). Whereas the tools of deconstruction and discourse analysis are meant to break down truths and meta-narratives, some activists, educators and theorists such as Paula Moya argue that they actually create a new homogenizing and universal meta-narrative. Moya explains: the institutionalization of a discourse of postmodernism has spawned an approach to difference that ironically erases the distinctiveness and relationality of difference itself. Typically, postmodernist theorists either internalize difference so that the individual herself is seen as 'fragmented' and 'contradictory' (thus disregarding the distinctions that exist between different kinds of people), or they attempt to 'subvert' 47 difference by showing that 'difference' is merely a discursive illusion (thus leaving no way to contend with the fact that people experience themselves as different from each other). In either case, postmodernists reinscribe, albeit unintentionally, a kind of universalizing sameness (we are all marginal now!) that their celebration of 'difference' has tried so hard to avoid (Moya, 1997, p. 126). Still other criticisms of postmodernism centre around the lack of economic and practical/ material analysis and integration, or, as one professor of mine asserted: \"post-modernism never put any food on anyone's table.\" Feminist postmodernists (Razack, 1998; Ristock and Penneli, 1996; Grewal and Kaplan, 1994) agree that postmodernism without this economic and practical/material analysis and integration merely serves to recentre the universalizing sameness ubiquitous in Eurocentric theory. Their argument, however, rather than dismiss postmodernism, is to ensure that these analyses are included by examining: \"the place of women in the nation-state, resistance to revivals of 'tradition,' the complex issue of fundamentalism, the situation of workers in multinational corporations, and the relationship between gender, the nation-state, and mobile, transnational capital\" (Grewal & Kaplan, 1994, p. 22). Some feminist postmodernists (Ristock and Penned, 1996; Phelan, 1993; Fuss, 1989) also use what Gayatri Spivak calls \"strategic essentialism\" (Fuss, 1989, pp. 30-33), to address the universalizing sameness that Moya criticizes: we have to stand where we are, acknowledging the links and contradictions between ourselves and other citizens of the world, resisting the temptations to cloak crucial differences with the cloak of universality and to deny generalities for fear of essentialism. Only this way will be free from the domination that lives both within and around us (Phelan [1993] quoted in Ristock & Penneli, 1996, p. 8). Postmodern theory has guided my work in several significant ways, the most critical of which is the premise that identity is not fixed or universal. When applied specifically to gender and sex identity, normative constructs of gender and sex as binary, fixed, and mutually dependent are disrupted, and their racist, heterosexist, classist, and ableist underpinnings exposed. Although I have found postmodernism 48 helpful in disrupting and exposing universal and stable notions of gender and sex, I have found it inadequate as a tool for understanding what the disruptions actually mean. Here I turn to the interlocking analyses of feminist anticolonial/antiracist theory to help provide context and meaning. Feminist Anticolonial and Antiracist Theory The patriarchal nature of the state has different meanings and consequences from the vantage point of Aboriginal Peoples. Understanding how patriarchy operates in Canada without understanding colonization is a meaningless endeavour from the perspective of Aboriginal people (Monture-Angus, 1995, p. 175). In the building of a popular women's movement, Western feminists— predominantly white, middle-class, heterosexual and able-bodied women—adopted the broader and dominant societal understanding of gender as universal and essential when they positioned gender and sex without the inclusion of race, class, ability, sexuality, and other elements of identity, as the cornerstone of their work (hooks, 1984; Maracle, 1993; Hull, Scott & Smith, 1982). Although the gender essentialism of dominant Western feminism departed from mainstream essentialism in that it argued that biology was not destiny, the principal understanding of the universal and essential woman and man remained intact and all subsequent theories, working principles and practices were informed and developed with this understanding. From its earliest inception, however, Aboriginal and women of color feminists have challenged the premise of the universal and essential woman and man, as well as the positioning of gender/sex as the cornerstone to feminist theory and practice, bell hooks (1981), for example, writes that despite the predominance of patriarchal rule in American society, America was colonized on a racially imperialistic base and not on a sexually imperialistic base. No degree of patriarchal bonding between white male colonizers and Native American men overshadowed white racial imperialism. Racism took precedence over sexual alliances in both the white world's interactions with Native Americans and African Americans, just as racism overshadowed any bonding between black 49 women and white women on the basis of sex (p. 122). The white racial imperialism inherent in the colonization of First Nations lands and people, enslavement of African people, internment of Japanese people, indentured labour, head taxes, quotas, definitions of violence, and countless other examples from a white supremacist past and present, have reduced the understanding of what it means to be a \"man\" and \"woman\" in dominant Western thought to \"white man\" and \"white woman,\" where \"white\" is understood as \"natural,\" \"normal,\" and assumed, and \"non-white\" is understood as \"unnatural,\" \"deviant,\" and the \"exception\" (Bannerji, 1997; hooks, 1981; Stoler, 1996; Ware, 1992). Ware (1992) argues that it could be said that where a colonial elite presided over an indigenous population the differences between the lives of white women and black women and between the ways in which they perceived each other were so great that it is less useful to view them as a single category —women—rather than each as a compound of sex and race. The same would apply to black and white men, creating at least four categories of difference (p. 236). At the same time sexual imperialism, while not the racially imperialistic base of colonization, was integral to its maintenance. Coupled with racial imperialism, colonial bureaucracies and systems became both \"raced\" and \"sexed,\" and as an immediate and inevitable result of this joint regime, so too did gender. And, whereas \"no degree of patriarchal bonding between white male colonizers and Native American men overshadowed white racial imperialism\" (hooks, 1981, p. 122), nor, by extension, did it between white female colonizers and Native American women. Consequently, systemically institutionalizing and thereby sanctioning white people's supremacy over Aboriginal people and people of color, in addition to white men's supremacy over white women (Bannerji, 1997). The anticolonial and antiracist theoretical frameworks developed by Aboriginal women and women of color feminists are firmly rooted in Aboriginal women and women of color's resistance to colonialism. Shelby Lewis (1997), quoting Angela Davis, for example, writes \"that the revolutionary consciousness of the slave woman 50 was honed in the bestial realities of her daily experience and that her oppression necessarily incorporated open forms of counter insurgency. Enslaved women became part of overt and covert movements to overthrow oppression. They wanted to destroy the system of slavery and the state that sanctioned it\" (p. 46). Consequently, enslaved African women developed strategies of resistance that reflected the complex contradictions of their lives: intimately caring for the children of the \"master,\" while struggling to make time for her own children; witness to the economic wealth within the \"master's\" house, yet having no access to this wealth herself; desexualized in order to work the fields alongside men in order to produce, but sexualized when ordered to reproduce or when raped by white men; covertly maintaining and nurturing African traditions and culture, while overtly denying them; united with Black men by race, but divided from them by gender. Patricia Hill Collins (1991) refers to this lived experience of contradictions as a \"curious outsider-within stance, a peculiar marginality that stimulated a special Black women's perspective\" (p. 11), and asserts that \"as outsiders within, Black women have a distinct view of the contradictions between the dominant group's actions and ideologies\" (p. 11). The outsider-within standpoint held by Black women subverts white colonial ways of thinking and producing knowledge in that it fosters a non-linear, non-dichotomous, and non-hierarchical world view. Collins (1991) and Henry (1998), among other scholars, refer to this form of consciousness as a \"both/and\" conceptual orientation rather than the \"either/or\" orientation common in most of dominant Western thought. A both/and world view they argue, has more nuances, and exposes \"worlds full of paradox and uncertainty where close inspection turns unities into multiplicities, clarities into ambiguities, [and] univocal simplicities into polyvocal complexities\" (Patti Lather quoted in Henry, 1998, p. 126). Lewis (1997) explains how the revolutionary consciousness of the enslaved African woman and the historical racism of white women inevitably shaped American 51 feminism into two distinct feminisms: a white American feminism that is more gender focused, liberal, and reformist in purpose; and an American revolutionary feminism initiated by enslaved African women in response to the dominant white feminism, that is focused on the interconnection of gender, race and class, and is inclusive rather than exclusive in purpose (p. 44). As a result, where dominant white American feminisms tend to universalize and essentialize women's experiences producing a white feminist hegemony of knowledge and \"truth,\" American revolutionary feminism works to decentre and subvert these universal truth claims. Feminist anticolonial and antiracist theories make clear that theorizing gender without theorizing an interlocking analysis of race and class, and without theorizing the impact of colonialism and imperialism (past and present) is a colonial act in and of itself: \"The simple truth is feminism as an ideology remains colonial\" (Monture-Angus, 1995, p. 171). By exposing the racism and classism inherent in dominant Western feminisms' notion of the universal or essential woman (or man), anticolonial and antiracist feminist theories have expanded dominant Western feminisms' understanding of gender. At the same time, however, they have done so—almost exclusively—by relying on traditional definitions of gender, sex and sexuality as mutually dependent, binary and fixed absolutes, and by excluding differences outside of the race/gender/class paradigm most frequently used. This has resulted in a paradox where dominant views of gender are infinitely expanded by virtue of a race/class/gender analysis and yet at once rigidly maintained by definitions of gender, sex and sexuality that are mutually dependent, binary and fixed, and by maintaining analyses that fail to include differences outside of the race/gender/class paradigm. For definitions of gender, sex and sexuality that are not mutually dependent, binary or fixed absolutes, I turn to queer theory. 52 Queer Theory Categories like \"woman,\" \"butch,\" \"lesbian,\" or transsexual\" are all imperfect, historical, temporary, and arbitrary. We use them, and they use us. We use them to construct meaningful lives, and they mold us into historically specific forms of personhood (Rubin, 1992, p. 477). In the early 1990s a new discipline of study called \"queer studies\" emerged (Jagose, 1996, p. 4). Strongly informed by postmodernism, lesbian feminism and the gay liberation movement, queer theory works to dismantle the regimes of truth that position sex, gender and sexuality as dependent, binary and fixed absolutes, and male/female, man/woman and heterosexual identities as \"natural,\" thereby rendering all other identities as \"unnatural.\" Queer theory—borrowing from postmodernist theory—seeks to expose how queer as \"unnatural\" only has meaning in relation to its binary opposite of heterosexuality as \"natural\" (Goldman, 1996). Without the binary opposite of \"natural,\" \"unnatural,\" in and of itself, has no reference points and consequently becomes meaningless and ceases to exist (Weedon, 1991). Destabilizing the \"natural\" necessarily becomes a central function of queer theory. Queer theorist Eve Sedgwick adds that the deconstruction of sex, gender and sexuality definitions must occur within an \"entire cultural network of definitions\" in order to significantly disturb their original meaning. For example, the homo/ heterosexuality binary is accompanied by other binaries such as \"secrecy/disclosure, knowledge/ignorance, private/public, masculine/feminine, majority/minority, innocence/initiation, natural/ artificial...\" (1990, p. 11), all of which must simultaneously be deconstructed when deconstructing the original definition of sexuality itself. To date, many queer theorists (Butler, 1990 & 1991; Sedgwick, 1990; Seidman, 1996; Duberman, 1997; Martindale, 1997) have largely focused on gender and sexuality as related to the binary of hetero and homo sexualities. This specific focus has, much like Moya's (1997) criticism of postmodernism in general, ironically collapsed all of the \"unnatural\" identities—both those named (such as lesbian, gay, bi, trans, intersex, Two-Spirit, boy-dykes, girlfags) and those yet to be named or even 53 imagined—into one \"unnatural\" yet essentialized identity such that \"queer\" has frequently come to mean white, middle-class, able-bodied lesbians and gays (Ault, 1997; Goldman, 1997; Lee, 1997; Namaste, 1996), and some would argue, ultimately \"white gay men\" (Goldman, 1997, p. 171). Ruth Goldman refers to the absence of these other identities and binaries as \"constructed silences\" (again the postmodern influence) and writes \"if queer theory is to truly challenge the 'normal,' it must provide a framework in which to challenge racist, misogynist, and other oppressive discourses/norms, as well as those that are heterosexist and homophobic. We must not simply challenge heteronormativity but instead must question the very system that sustains heteronormativity\" (1997, p. 174). Whichever regime of truth is dismantled under the banner of \"queer,\" it must be done within an interlocking framework of race, class, ability and other forms of oppression and/or identity, or it will inevitably remain intact —albeit it in a somewhat disguised or altered state. In addition to the homogenization of queer identities and the absence of interlocking analyses, queer theory is also often criticized for lacking a real-world application (yet another legacy from its postmodern roots) and for being a self-generated, lucrative academic commodity. For these reasons I turn to a \"second\" group of queer theorists and their work, and which, in order to distinguish from this first, more homogenized and stable body of work, I refer to as trans, transsexual, and intersex theory. Trans, Transsexual, and Intersex Theory I have too often been obliged to speak my name in and through the political category of transgender, because, as I was told, people like me transgressed gender, when it is manifestly the case that it is gender which has transgressed all over me (Wilchins, 1997, p. 134). Under the umbrella of queer theory is a \"second\" group of theorists who concentrate on the many sex and gender identities—e.g., pan-, multi- and bi-54 gendered, transsexual, intersex—generally found on the periphery of queer theory. It also appears that this group of theorists is more inclined to include an interlocking analysis with other identities such as race, class, and ability. What strikingly distinguishes this \"second\" group of theorists from the first one is the large number of theorists who also identify as activists. Leslie Feinberg (1996, 1998), Ki Namaste (1996a, 2000), Pat Califia (1997), and Cheryl Chase (1998), for example, all identify as sex and gender activists, which may account for the increased presence of interlocking analyses —particularly with regards to daily concrete concerns. Namaste comments further: Critics in queer theory are fond of writing about the ways in which specific acts of gender transgression can help dismantle binary gender relations and hegemonic heterosexuality. While such an intellectual program is important it is equally imperative that we reflect on what aspects of transgendered lives are presented and how this discussion is framed. For example, critics in queer theory write page after page on the inherent liberation in the transgression of gender codes, but they have nothing to say about the precarious position of the transsexual woman who is battered, and who is unable to access a woman's shelter because she was not born a biological woman (Namaste, 1996a, p. 183). Many of the decisions that T/TS/IS activists and allies must make to determine the best strategies for securing human rights protection dictate an interlocking analysis. Consider, for example, the absence/presence of an interlocking analysis in the following examples: discussions regarding the use of disability, sex/gender or sexual orientation—in the absence of a \"gender identity\" category—as grounds for human rights protection for T/TS/IS people (findlay et al., 1996, pp. 24-27); Human Rights Tribunal decisions that rule in favour of transsexual women—who are \"fully transitioned,\" or who are in the \"process of transitioning\"—accessing women-only services versus trans women or trans people (Darke & Cope, 2002, pp. 57-62); and how \"access\" and \"transitioning\" are even defined. In the following excerpt, for example, Marcelle Cook-Daniels, who identifies as a \"queer-identified transgendered feminist,\" and Loree Cook-Daniels, his partner of 14 years and who identifies as a 55 \"queer-indentified feminist\" (Atkins, 1998, p. xvii), discuss how transitioning is raced: L: Has being black had any effect of how you see gender? M: Yes, I think it has. In the back of my mind I always knew that gender re-alignment would make me a black male in a society where black males are tolerated at best and hated and feared at worst.... If anything, being black has stood in my way of accepting my maleness. L: It would have been easier for you to have your gender feelings if you had been white— M: Oh, definitely! M: ...Maybe that's what I have to do now to accept the male—somehow downplay the \"black\" part. L: Because it's too scary to be a black man in this society? M: Maybe. Or because I'm challenging what is male and female and whether one has to be one or the other, and that's making me wonder about all the categories (M. Cook-Daniels & L. Cook-Daniels, 1998, p. 194). Although an interlocking T/TS/IS analysis might also encourage a feminist analysis, it does not guarantee it. For this reason I refer to yet another sub-set of queer theory called transfeminist theory. Transfeminist Theory Transfeminism believes that a society that honors cross-gender identities is one that treats both women and men fairly, because our existence is seen as problematic only when there is a rigid gender hierarchy. In this belief, it is essential for our survival and dignity that we claim our place in feminism... (Koyama, 2000b, p. 8). It is difficult to trace the origins of transfeminism since, like the early history of many other grassroots movements, much of T/TS/IS activism and theory, is not formally documented. Diana Courvant, a founding member of \"Survivor Project,\" 17 however, first recalls having used the terms \"transfeminism\" and \"transfeminist' in 17 Survivor Project is an American \"non-profit social justice organization of survivors and their allies dedicated to addressing the needs of intersex and trans survivors of domestic and sexual violence\" (Survivor Project, 2001, p. 3). 56 1996. Although Courvant had never heard of these terms prior to using them herself, she is uncertain whether other activists in the States and abroad were also using them at the same time.18 By 1999 Courvant and colleague Emi Koyama were regularly using the term in their writings on and off the Survivor Project website. In her article The Transfeminist Manifesto (2000b), Emi Koyama describes transfeminism \"primarily [as] a movement by and for trans women who view their liberation to be intrinsically linked to the liberation of all women,\" but open to anyone who \"considers] their alliance with trans women to be essential for their own liberation\" (Koyama, 2000b, p. 1). The primary tenets of transfeminism are: i) \"that each individual has the right to define her or his own identity and to expect the society to respect them. This also includes the right to express our gender without fear of discrimination or violence\"; and ii) that we all have \"the sole right to make decisions regarding our own bodies, and that no political, medical or religious authority shall violate the integrity of our bodies against our will or impede our decisions regarding what we do with them\" (Koyama, 2000b, p. 2). Whereas many feminists view gender as socially constructed, transfeminists view both gender and sex as socially constructed and note that the \"distinction between sex and gender is artificially drawn as a matter of convenience\" (Koyama, 2000b, p. 4). Koyama argues that adhering to sex as biologically determined versus socially constructed fails to \"address the realities of trans experiences where physical sex is felt more artificial and changeable than their inner sense of who they are\" (Koyama, 2000b, p. 4). Likewise, viewing sex as biologically determined fails to acknowledge the lives of intersex people whose \"anatomical characteristics do not neatly fit into male or female\" and who are \"routinely mutilated by medical professionals at infancy and manipulated into living as their assigned sex\" (Koyama, 2000b, p. 4). What differentiates transfeminism from other T/TS/IS theory is the explicit context of feminism and the role of transfeminists within the broader feminist 1 8 Diana Courvant, personal correspondence September, 2001. 57 movements: We believe that it is imperative that more trans women start participating in the feminist movement alongside other women for their own liberation. Transfeminism is not about taking over existing feminist institutions; it contributes what it can to the advancement of feminism as a whole. It stands up for trans and non-trans women alike, and asks non-trans women to stand up for trans women in return. Transfeminism embodies the coalition politics where women from different backgrounds stand up for each other, because if we do not stand for each other, nobody will (Koyama, 2000b, p. 1). Queer theory, like feminism, is actually a number of theories where T/TS/IS and transfeminist theories are to queer theory what, for example, feminist anticolonial and liberal theories are to feminism. \"Queer theory,\" with its emphasis on gays and lesbians, its lack of interconnecting analysis, and its lack of concrete applications is severely limited. Consequently, I specifically include and draw on T/TS/IS and transfeminist theories for my work. Finally, given that the specific context of this study is sexual assault centres and transition houses, I necessarily include an overview of violence against women and feminist anti-violence theories that have shaped my work. Violence Against Women and Feminist Anti-Violence Theories Organizing against a single violence—men's—is not a 'luxury' I have experienced. The general definition of violence against women is too narrow to capture all of the experiences of violence that Aboriginal women face. This narrow definition, relied on by dominant institutions, structures and groups, constrains my expression of violence and the reality within which I live in a way that is most counter-productive. In fact, the constraint feels very much like ideological violence. The fragmentation of violence and the social legitimation of only the wrong of physical violence results in a situation where I am constrained from examining the totality of my experience within a movement that is advanced as offering the solution to that violence. The simple truth is feminism as an ideology remains colonial (Monture-Angus, 1995, p. 171). In 1851 at a the National Convention on Women's Rights in Akron, Ohio, Sojourner Truth asked \"And ain't I a woman?\" (Carty, 1999, p. 43; Collins, 1990, p. 14). 58 In 1977 Demita Frazier, Beverly Smith and Barbara Smith (authors of the Combahee River Collective Statement which outlines the values, commitment and direction of a Black feminism) wrote that \"sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women's lives as are the politics of class and race. We also find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously (The Combahee River Collective, 1986. p. 12). In 1985 in a talk presented at Florida State University, Angela Davis stated that \"we will never get past the first step in eliminating the horrendous violence done to women in our society if we do not recognize that rape is only one element in the complex structure of women's oppression. And the systematic oppression of women in our society cannot be accurately evaluated except as it is connected to racism and class exploitation at home and imperialist aggression and the potential nuclear holocaust that menace the entire globe\" (Davis, 1989, p. 50). Monture-Angus, Truth, Frazier, Smith and Smith, Davis and countless other First Nations and women of color feminist activists, educators, theorists and survivors have said, and continue to say, that because dominant Western theories on violence against \"women\" are not positioned within an anticolonial, race and class analysis, they are really only theories on violence against certain \"white women.\" Whereas the absence of anticolonial, race and class analyses has rendered violence against women theories to mean violence against white women, the assumed, albeit unstated, presence of heterosexuality—where violence is understood to occur between men and women and where men are the perpetrators and women are the victims—has further rendered them to mean violence against heterosexual, white women (Ristock & Pennell, 1996; Holmes, 2000). Here heterosexuality is understood on the premise of gender and sex as both binary and fixed, and consequently does not include heterosexual T/TS/IS women. And while more recent woman-to-woman and lesbian abuse theories sometimes make reference to transgendered women and/or transgendered people, the focus remains almost 59 exclusively on non-T/TS/IS women. In other cases, T/TS/IS violence (domestic/intimate, sexual, and other forms) is collapsed under the lesbian/gay/bisexual and trans (LGBT)19 umbrella (National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs [NCAVP], 2001; Nickel, 1998) where again the emphasis is almost exclusively on violence in the lives of lesbians and gay men. A small group of activists, survivors and theorists, however, are researching and writing on trans, transsexual, and intersex violence specifically. This group includes work done by Courvant (1997a; 1997b), Courvant and Cook-Daniels (1998), Koyama (2000b), Namaste (1996b; 2000), Nixon (1997a; 1997b), The Northwest Network (1997), M. Ross (1995), and Weston (n.d). And most of this work focuses on making critical social services—specifically services for women who have experienced violence—accessible to T/TS/IS women and/or people. Since few women's organizations are publicly accessible to T/TS/IS people, most of the theory on violence against T/TS/IS people remains in the realm of social practice where T/TS/IS survivors turn to trusted friends, lovers, and/or family for support. The Survivor Project in Portland, Oregon is a notable exception, since its mandate is to work with trans and intersex survivors specifically. For this thesis I have drawn on the feminist anticolonial/antiracist and woman-to-woman and lesbian abuse theories from above to further add to, and shape, the work of the activists, writers and survivors who are looking at T/TS/IS violence specifically. Research Methods For this thesis I employed both quantitative and qualitative research methods. Quantitative methods allowed me to collect data on a large scale, whereas qualitative methods provided the conceptual space for information to arise that is difficult to capture via quantitative means. As well, qualitative methods provided a forum for exchange that quantitative research did not. The use of qualitative methods allowed 1 9 Sometimes also written as LGBTT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/trans and Two-Spirit) or LGBQTT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/queer/trans and Two-Spirit). 60 me to respond to, and build on, information that was raised. The research thus resembled an ongoing dialogue, with ideas and/or issues raised by an educator/activist in one interview, then by me in the next interview. Given both my theoretical and political orientations, I assumed that educators, activists, survivors, and frontline workers (both T/TS/IS and non-T/TS/IS identified) who were working toward T/TS/IS people's access to women's sexual assault centres and transition houses (both from inside and outside of these spaces) would provide feedback and direction to the overall research design, as well as the selection and development of the research methods that I would use. In the following section I describe why I chose to use a questionnaire and interviews as my primary methods for research, and how they were both developed and employed. I also describe issues of confidentiality and data analysis for both methods. Finally, I reflect on specific aspects of the research design and methods including language, questionnaires and interviews as a form of education, and the absence of follow-up interviews. The Questionnaire Although many \"women-only\" organizations in Canada—specifically sexual assault centres and transition houses for women—are currently engaged in discussions regarding T/TS/IS accessibility to centre/house services and related volunteer and employment opportunities, few of the discussions are formally documented. Consequently, it is difficult to know what is happening from one province to the next. From what little we do know, however, it seems—but it is difficult to know for certain since community research is frequently difficult to track—that the research done by M. Ross (1995), and Cope and Darke (1999) on T/TS/IS access to women-only organizations, might, in fact, be the only publicly documented sources to date (in both Canada and the United States). Both Ross' and Cope and Darke's projects involved the distribution of 61 questionnaires to women's transition houses in Ontario. The questionnaires sought out, among other things, information regarding trans and/or specifically transsexual women's ability to access services, and, in the case of Cope and Darke's work, what shelter workers perceived as the barriers preventing trans access and inclusion from occurring. The information collected from the Cope and Darke survey was then developed into a practical, user-friendly manual for transition house workers interested in formally making their organizations accessible to T/TS/IS women. Given that British Columbia is commonly perceived as being at the forefront of T/TS/IS activism and education in Canada (Gilbert, 1999, p. 11), and given that some work assessing trans and transsexual women's access to transition houses for women had already been done in Ontario (the perceived second most active province according to Gilbert, 1999, p. 11), it seemed it would be useful to begin some documentation in BC that would build on the work of Ross and her colleague Xanthra Phillippa, and Cope and Darke. Such documentation would: i) reveal the numbers of BC SACs and transition houses actually engaged in the discussion of T/TS/IS access to services; ii) reveal any geographical trends both within BC and between BC and Ontario; iii) link SACs and transition houses—both within BC, and across the two provinces—who are interested in networking on this issue; iv) link or strengthen links between SAC and transition house activists and educators and community T/TS/IS activists and educators within BC, as well as across the two provinces; v) reveal general and preliminary information about T/TS/IS activism and education conducted in BC SACs and transition houses; and vi) identify BC SACs and transition houses that might be interested in participating in interviews regarding their work. Although the questionnaire (see Appendix B) builds on those done by M. Ross, and Cope and Darke, it differs in one significant way: it includes SACs in addition to transition houses. I decided to include SACs because I knew, from my own experience, and from the Kimberly NixonA/ancouver Rape Relief Society case (BC Human Rights Commission, 1995), that discussions regarding T/TS/IS access were 62 also happening in SACs, and I wanted to build a more complete picture of what was happening in women's anti-violence services. I also wanted to learn whether SACs were approaching T/TS/IS access work in a different way than transition houses. I included the questions on educational work to learn whether organizations involved in discussions regarding T/TS/IS access were organizing formal educational/training sessions prior to, or during, discussions. A follow-up question asked if organizations involved in educational processes would be interested in being interviewed about their experiences. Four resources were used to compile the list of British Columbia SACs and transition houses (including second stage housing) in BC: the Ministry of Women's Equality web site lists of SACs and transition houses (2000a; 2000b); the National Clearinghouse on Family Violence (NCFV) web list of transition houses (2000) as referred to by the BC/Yukon Transition Houses web site; the Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centres (CASAC) web list of centres in BC (2000a); and the Ministry of Attorney General Victim's Services Directory (2000). Once completed the list included 104 organizations, of which 13 were SACs, 83 were transition houses (including second stage housing programs), and 8 were services which offered both sexual assault and transition house services. Although all of these organizations provide services to women, it cannot be assumed that they do not also offer some services to men. As well, it cannot be assumed that all organizations identify as feminist (although CASAC members do; see CASAC: About Us, 2000b). Questionnaires, including a stamped return envelope, were sent out on August 17, 2000, with a request for return by September 08, 2000. Organizations that did not respond by September 08 were given a follow-up call. Sixty-two of the 104 questionnaires were returned equaling a return rate of 60%. Of these 62 questionnaires 10 were from sexual assault centres, 50 from transition houses, and 2 from sexual assault centre/transition houses, indicating that 76.9% of all sexual assault centres, 60.2% of all transition houses and 25% of all sexual assault centre/transition 63 houses responded. The Interviews Whereas the purpose of the survey was to provide a snapshot of the sexual assault centres and transition houses working toward formalizing T/TS/IS access to their organizations, the purpose of the interviews was to illicit deeper, more specific information about the educational processes that these organizations were using in order to facilitate T/TS/IS access and inclusion. My original hope had been to interview two organizations from both BC, and Ontario, and two organizations from the United States. And, if the SAC and/or transition house had an external educator/activist helping them with their educational process, then I would interview them as well. My interest in interviewing organizations from both provinces was to learn whether there were any geographical differences in how organizations were approaching the work. My interest in including the two organizations from the States was specific to their mandates: the one organization, the Survivor Project, is the only organization in Canada or the United States whose single mandate is to support trans and intersex survivors of domestic and sexual violence (Survivor Project, 1999). The second organization's mandate, although a bit broader in that it supports lesbian, gay, bi and trans survivors of domestic and sexual violence, is still also quite specific to the needs and interests of trans survivors. The work that these two organizations do has put them at the forefront of the anti-violence movement as it pertains to trans, transsexual, and intersex survivors. That they were American organizations was also of some interest—in the same way that I was interested in interviewing organizations from two different provinces—but was not the reason for their inclusion. Participants from the provinces were going to be chosen in two ways: in BC, organizations which had completed the questionnaire, indicated interest in being interviewed, and which had the longest history of doing T/TS/IS education would be 64 selected; in Ontario, I would contact Ross, Cope and Darke, and other contacts, for names of women's organizations which they knew from their own research, had the longest history of doing this work. In each case, organizations would determine who I would interview. I also wanted to include myself as a participant and since my experiences stemmed from Ontario, I would include myself in the Ontario category. This strategy was based on the assumption that there would be at least two organizations in each province that were: i) engaged in educational work toward making their organization accessible to T/TS/IS people; and ii) were interested in being interviewed. Four organizations identified as having been engaged in some type of educational process toward making their organization accessible to T/TS/IS women. None of these organizations, however, indicated interest in being interviewed. I did, however, know of two BC educators/activists who had done, and were doing, some educational work on T/TS/IS women's access to women's intimate and sexual violence organizations and services through their staff and/or volunteer positions in various women's organizations in BC. In order to include a BC perspective in this thesis, I decided to approach them directly, and they each agreed to participate in an interview. And, since no other names of BC educators/activists came forth at the time, I increased the number of interviews I would do in Ontario. In total, eleven educators/activists were interviewed: two from BC, seven from Ontario (including myself), and two from the United States. All but two of the participants work, or have worked, in a SAC, transition house, or centre for survivors of domestic and/or sexual violence. Eight of the educators and activists described experiences from organizations they had worked at or were currently working at. Of these organizations, four were transition houses, three were SACs, and three were domestic violence centres. The educators and activists were asked how they identify in terms of gender, sex, sexuality, \"race\", and class. In response to gender identity, eight of the educators/activists identified as women, one identified as femme, one as a transsexual woman, and one as a transsexual woman \"for political reasons.\" For sex 65 identity, nine of the educators and activists self-identified as female, one identified as a transsexual woman, and one responded that she \"did not know how to answer that.\" Five of the educators/activists identified as lesbian, five as heterosexual and one as \"all over the map.\" Nine of the educators/activists identified as white, one identified as biracial, and one as Aboriginal. One of the educators/activists identified as poor, four as working-class, three as mixed-class, and three as middle-class. Eight interviews were conducted in person (two at the participant's office, four at the participant's home, and two at an agreed upon public place) and three were conducted by telephone due to geographical location. Interviews took between two and four hours, and all were conducted by myself except for my own interview. My interview was conducted by a fellow graduate student, who is generally familiar with issues regarding T/TS/IS access to women's organizations but unresolved with regards to her position. I purposefully asked this person to interview me because of her unresolved position, thinking that it might lead to more probing questions than someone who had already taken a \"pro\" or \"anti\" position. Interviews, although structured, were quite informal, following—but not necessarily adhering to—the predetermined interview questions (see Appendix D); new questions and themes were pursued as they emerged. Confidentiality Questionnaires Organizations that responded to the questionnaire were guaranteed strict confidentiality in the covering letter that accompanied the questionnaire (see Appendix A). As well, organizations could choose to respond anonymously, which would further protect their privacy —especially if responding from a town or city with more than one SAC or transition house. A consent form stressing confidentiality was also attached to the questionnaire for those individuals requiring formal consent from their organization before completing the questionnaire (see Appendix C). 66 Interviews Participant consent forms outlined the measures that would be taken to ensure confidentiality —something which I assumed would be of paramount importance given how politically charged the question of T/TS/IS access to women's services currently is (see Appendix E). Several of the educators and activists, however, indicated that they wanted to waive confidentiality because of the political importance of this issue, stressing that they wanted to be both acknowledged and accountable for their words and ideas. Consequently, consent forms were rewritten to include this option and to give educators and activists the choice of: full confidentiality; waiving confidentiality entirely; or of partial confidentiality that is, waiving confidentiality on some parts of the transcript, but not all of it. In the end, three of the participants chose full confidentiality while eight chose to completely waive it (see Appendix F). Complete transcripts were sent to each educator/activist for review. Three participants returned their transcripts with minor changes. Data Analysis Questionnaires Questionnaires were first tabulated in terms of overall return rate, numbers of organizations that identified as accessible, how the organization identified (SAC or transition house), and geographical location. Responses and subsequent analyses were then organized according to whether an organization identified as being accessible or not. Within the broad categories of \"accessible\" and \"inaccessible\" organizations, responses to each question were tabulated and then calculated as a percentage of the total number of responses (i.e., 45 or 72.5% of the total number of respondents indicated that their organizations were accessible to transgendered women). Responses to individual questions were then examined in the context of other responses (e.g., of the accessible organizations how many identified as rural or urban, how many had supporting policies, and so on). Whenever included, comments 67 were referred to for further information and/or context. The numerical data and accompanying comments were reviewed repeatedly for patterns and themes. Since the purpose of the questionnaire was to provide a snapshot of sexual assault centres and transition houses working toward transgendered women's access and inclusion, no statistical analyses were conducted. Interviews Like with the questionnaire data, interview transcripts were reviewed repeatedly for themes and patterns. It became immediately apparent that educators and activists generally organized the trans, transsexual, and intersex education that they conducted in SACs, transition houses, and related anti-violence services for women, into three categories: i) introduction —or what most educators and activists referred to as \"Trans\" 101 education; ii) policy development; and iii) anti-violence education. I proceeded to organize emerging patterns and themes according to these categories. The interviews were then read for parallels, differences, and/or inconsistencies between categories, as well as with the questionnaire data. While I examined the transcripts for themes and patterns, I also noted experiences or viewpoints that were isolated, but reflected a unique idea or position. I included these ideas and positions within themes whenever related or in entirely separate sections when not. Experience conducting trans, transsexual, and intersex education in SACs and transition houses varied greatly between educators and activists. Some educators and activists, for example, had just started to engage in educational processes, while others had many years of experience to draw on. Consequently, some educators and activists were referred to and quoted more often than others. 68 Reflecting on the Design Language My use of language shifted throughout the study. For the questionnaire, for example, I used \"transgendered (TG) women\" (see appendix A), whereas in the interviews I tended to use the terms trans or trans women, and/or several terms together such as trans, transsexual, and intersex women, and sometimes trans, transsexual, and intersex people. I used \"transgendered\" for the questionnaire, because I wanted to use a word that was widely familiar, but which would also include the largest range of trans identities possible, and \"transgender\" was both commonly understood and used as an umbrella term—despite the arguments made by some T/TS/IS educators/activists not to (Namaste, 2000; Survivor Project, 2001). I used transgendered \"women\" rather than \"people,\" believing that women's organizations working toward T/TS/IS access to services were working toward access for T/TS/IS women and not men. I also assumed that if a SAC or transition house was not addressing transgendered women's access to its organization, then it was not probable that it would be addressing the access of either transgendered men or people who identify outside of the gender binary. Further, I planned to take up specific questions regarding T/TS/IS men and people who identify outside of the binary in the interview. Finally, given that the language is relatively new, and definitions and meaning are both shifting and used differently from community to community, I included my own definition of \"transgendered woman\" in the questionnaire as: \"a person who self-identifies as a woman regardless of her life experiences, appearance and/or her biological sex\" (see Appendix B). For the interviews, I initially thought that I would use the term \"trans women\", which the Vancouver-based trans activist group Trans/Action defined as \"women who self-identify as women and who are differently-gendered or differently-sexed\" (see Appendix D). I was uncomfortable with this definition, though, because it positioned 69 trans women as \"other\" to the non-trans gender \"norms\" by using the word \"differently\" as in \"differently-gendered\" and \"differently-sexed.\"2o in the end, I decided not to define \"trans women\" in the interviews at all, and instead use whatever words and definitions that the participants used, asking them for clarification when their meaning and usage was not clear to me, for example, if an educator/activist used the term \"trans women,\" but it was unclear in their usage who this term included. Most educators and activists used the terms \"trans\" or \"transgendered women\" as an umbrella term encompassing ail trans people who identified as women, regardless of their interest in SRS. One activist, however, used both \"transgendered\" and \"transsexual\" and sometimes just \"transsexual\" to make clear that transgendered women and transsexual women's interests are not necessarily one and the same, that transsexual women often do not self-identify as trans, and further, that it was transsexual women, in fact, who first organized to gain access to women's organizations and services. A second activist used \"trans\" instead of \"transgendered,\" explaining that many transsexual people do not self-identify as part of the umbrella term \"transgender\" and that \"trans\" was preferable. This participant also included \"intersex people\" in order to highlight the specific issues and concerns of intersex people. Following both participants' lead to expand the various identities represented by language rather than collapse them into single words, I decided to use \"trans, transsexual, and intersex\" rather than simply \"trans\" or \"transgendered.\" And, in order to represent the trans men—acknowledged or not—currently working and volunteering in women's organizations, as well as seeking women-only services, I attempted, whenever possible, to use trans, transsexual, and intersex people in subsequent interviews and in subsequent work. Using trans, transsexual, and intersex people also represents individuals who identify outside of the gender binary. 20 Trans/Action also stopped using \"differently-gendered\" and \"differently-sexed\" for the same reasons that I did and replaced it with gender and sex variant. 70 Questionnaires and Interviews as a Form of Education Both the questionnaires and interviews were forms of education in and of themselves, not only to me, but to some of the questionnaire respondents and interview participants as well. Six questionnaire respondents, for example, commented that the issue of T/TS/IS access and inclusion—previously unaddressed in their organization—had been raised at staff meetings by way of the questionnaire. An additional four respondents indicated that they had just started to address the issue, and requested any resources that might assist them through the process. In the interviews some educators and activists were introduced—by way of the questions— to terms or issues that were new or only vaguely familiar to them; the term \"intersex,\" for example, was new or vaguely familiar to some of the participants, as were some of the issues specific to intersex people. Issues regarding T/TS/IS men's access to women's organizations were also new to some of the educators and activists. Follow-up Interviews Few SACs or transition houses, in British Columbia and Ontario, 21-and quite possibly other provinces and territories in Canada, if these two provinces are any indication—are involved in any formal educational processes regarding T/TS/IS access to their organizations and services. Consequently, the organizations that are currently involved in these processes are doing the work without the benefit of knowledge gained by previous experience and so are navigating processes while simultaneously developing them! The interviews themselves reflected this quality of unchartered territories and work in progress: terms and definitions, knowledge, experience and approaches varied greatly from person to person; few things could be assumed or taken for granted. Interview questions necessarily focused on establishing both context and an overview of each participant's work. Necessary as they were, 21 See \"Comparing BC to Ontario\" in Chapter Three. 71 however, the asking of them—given time limitations (even though participants generously volunteered two to four hours of time for the interviews, it was still not enough!)—severely restricted the direction of the interviews. It also restricted the possibility of raising, and further exploring, ideas and issues raised in other interviews. Second interviews or a focus group after the completed interviews would have been useful as a forum for this type of continued dialogue. Unfortunately, however, due to geographical distance between participants and limited financial resources, these options were not possible. I had considered limiting the number of interviews to five or six in an effort to free-up resources for second interviews by telephone, but I decided that eleven interviews would provide both a richer understanding and overview of the range of T/TS/IS work currently happening in women's organizations and would also build a stronger foundation for any future research on the same issue. 72 Chapter Three: Building a Foundation for Access and Inclusion: BC Questionnaire and \"Trans\" 101 Education A lot of middle class transsexual and transgender activists in the United States have worked to gain access to women's cultural spaces. But for a lot of transsexual women who come from a poor or working class background, and who are prostitutes such as myself (and I'm including here the transsexual activists who work with us), our political priority has been more to fight to gain access to vital and essential services. The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival is not an essential service in my life despite the fact that a lot of people argue that it is. Needing to go and run around dancing in the woods with a bunch of other women is nothing compared to the importance of being able to find a shelter for a transsexual woman to stay at when it's 20 below zero and there's a snowstorm and this woman will be stuck to sleep on a bench outside. I really can't compare the two. (Mirha-Soleil, educator/activist interviewed for this thesis). This chapter provides an overview and discussion of the results obtained from the questionnaire distributed to sexual assault centres and transition houses in British Columbia and compares these results with those of the Ross and Phillippa questionnaire conducted in 1994 (M. Ross, 1995) and the Cope and Darke questionnaire conducted in 1999. The focus then shifts to the interviews I conducted with the educators and activists, providing an overview of the educational strategies employed in educating for trans, transsexual, and intersex access to sexual assault centres, transition houses, and centres for domestic violence and/or sexual violence. The chapter concludes with an exploration of some of the themes, struggles and questions raised by what many of the educators and activists refer to as \"Trans\" 101. The Questionnaire An Overview of The Results A total of 104 questionnaires were distributed: 13 to sexual assault centres, 83 to transition houses (including second stage houses and safe houses), and 8 to organizations that offer both sexual assault centre and transition house services. Sixty-73 two of the 104 questionnaires were returned for a return rate of 60%. Of the 62 questionnaires returned 10 were from sexual assault centres, 50 from transition houses, and 2 from sexual assault centre/transition houses, indicating that 76.9% of all sexual assault centres, 60.2% of all transition houses and 25% of all sexual assault centre/transition houses responded. Twenty-seven (43.5%) of the respondents identified as rural, 23 (37%) as urban, 6 (9.6%) as both, 5 (8%) as other, and 1 (1.6%) did not indicate. Forty-five (72.5%) respondents indicated that their organizations were accessible to transgendered women, 14 (22.5%) indicated that they were not accessible, and 3 (4.8%) did not indicate their position either way (see Table 1). Table 1: Overview of Questionnaire Results Number of Questionnaires Distributed Number of Questionnaires Returned Number of Organizations Accessible Number of Organizations Inaccessible Organizations Identifying as Rural