Digital Transgender Archive

Finding a Place in Feminism

In the last few decades of the 20th century, trans people faced misunderstanding, marginalization, and exclusion within parts of the feminist community. In the early 1990s, TransSisters: The Journal of Transsexual Feminism worked to create a forum to deal with “the specific intersection of transsexual and feminist issues,” enrich the feminist movement and transsexual rights movement, and foster dialogue and “a process of reconciliation” between communities.

Access to women-only spaces was a source of conflict between transsexual and feminist communities in the 1990s. For example, an issue covered throughout the publication was the exclusion of transsexual women from the annual Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. The festival, which had its last gathering in 2015, faced annual protests because of its “womyn born womyn only” policy in the early 1990s. These periodicals provide interesting and important coverage about intersectionality and inclusion.