The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival: The historic RadFem vs TERF vs Trans fight

West Coast Lesbian Conference NOTE: In 2008 the non-transgender Feminist/Radical Feminist community popularized the term Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist (TERF) as a way to identify a group, primarily focused on targeting transgender people in the name of Radical Feminism – as being non-representative of Radical Feminism itself. It is out of respect for these feminists that I’ve used their terminology to differentiate between Radical Feminists icons like Monique Wittig and Andrea Dworkin and TERFs like Sheila Jeffreys and Janice Raymond. Many in the feminist and trans communities have come to view the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MWMF) as a microcosm of the larger Radical Feminist vs TERF vs Trans battle that’s been raging since the 1970s. TERFs began to colonize the RadFem identity as early as 1973 at Radical Feminism’s biggest event: the West Coast Lesbian Conference. The conference was specifically trans-inclusive, but TERFs disrupted the event, demanding that trans

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