Sandy Stone is a touchstone woman in transgender history. She has a whole section dedicated to her place in transgender and feminist history in the book Transgender History and the book is worth reading if just for that segment.
In a nutshell, Stone was the first recording engineer at Olivia Records, a lesbian collective founded in 1973 to record and market women’s music. Janice Raymond, a trans exclusionary radical lesbian feminist, attacked the collective for including Stone because Stone was out as a transsexual. Raymond created the controversy, and then blamed Stone for it. “It is significant that transsexually constructed lesbian-feminists have inserted themselves into the positions of importance and/or performance in the feminist community,” Raymond wrote in her book The Transsexual Empire: the Making of the She-M***. “The controversy in the summer of 1977 surrounding Sandy Stone, the transsexual sound engineer for Olivia Records, an ‘all women’ recording company, illustrates this well … Having produced such divisiveness, one would think that if Stone’s commitment to and identification with women were genuinely woman-centered, he would have removed himself from Olivia and assumed some responsibility for the divisiveness.”
And in actuality, Stone did remove herself. Many trans exclusionary radical lesbian feminists of the 1970s, including Raymond and Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival co-founder Lisa Vogel, would’ve rather destroyed the Olivia Records collective – when there were no other recording companies making music for and by women – rather than acknowledge a trans woman was a woman … acknowledge Sandy Stone was a woman.
I sat down recently with Sandy Stone at UC Santa Cruz, where she’s a professor, and interviewed her about her life since Olivia. This is part one of a short series, excerpted from that interview.
Autumn Sandeen: So what’s it like being a professor?
Sandy Stone: I’m crazy about being a professor. Being a professor answers a whole lot of personal problems.
The reason I tend to self-identify as an artist is because one of the definitions of an artist is a person who only does something once. The nice thing about being a professor is only having to do something once, and then you can change it for the next term. I get unhappy where I get trapped into doing any one thing.
The other thing is is that I spent decades – most of my life – trying to find my community. The problem with all the communities I found, including Olivia Records, the collective is the one thing I couldn’t do at the collective was talk to them about things that interested me. Because, one of the principles of the collective is that we were intellectually downwardly mobile. We were not only financially downwardly mobile, but we were conducting an experiment of being intellectually downwardly mobile.
Now here I was using big words, and that got me into trouble! (laughs) In other words, I was a geek when I was a kid, and I didn’t know any other geeks. And, for a while I’d come and go with geekism. I never really found any other geeks when I was young who were not just geekly, but were also fairly emotionally mature. I don’t know how else to put that!
And, there were no shortage of people who were really good at one thing. People who were tremendous at building radio transmitters, fantastic at working with computers, but didn’t know anything about renaissance art. I tend to be more of a generalist.
So when I got to university, not that the average professor is broader or more interesting than anyone else, you can find people who do have broader interests there.
When I was with the collective, a friend of mine from Santa Cruz asked me, “Why are you hanging out with a lesbian separatist collective?”
I said, “Do you know the story about the guy who lost his car keys? A passer-by says ‘Where’d you lose ‘em?’ It’s at night, and he’s under a street light and he says, ‘Oh, back there,’ and he points there back in the dark. So the passer-by says ‘Why aren’t you looking down there?’ And he says ‘The light’s better here.’”
That was why I was at the Olivia collective. It’s been true ever since, except eventually I found my keys.
In part two, Sandy Stone finishes the surprisingly long answer to that first question.
A brief history of Sandy Stone’s life is on Wikipedia.
An Open Letter Regarding the End of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival by Sara St. Martin Lynne
VOICES FROM THE LAND APRIL 27, 2015 A COMMUNITY RESPONDS TO THE END OF THE FESTIVAL, COMMUNITY LETTERS AND STATEMENTS
An Open Letter to the Advocate (and other LGBT mainstream press) Regarding the End of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival,
“Patriarchal Poetry makes no mistake…
Patriarchal poetry is the same as Patriotic poetry is the same as patriarchal poetry is the same as Patriotic poetry is the same as patriarchal poetry is the same.
Patriarchal poetry is the same.”
– Gertrude Stein from “Patriarchal poetry their origin their history their origin”
Your media has been blazing this week. You have claimed a victory at the closing of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. You say it’s been a battle, a fight, a war. It’s a war that you invented and so the story you are telling now is one that you have been crafting all along. I think you can guess that I am not here to ring the bell and dance in the street with you.
I would like to hear you tell the truth about what you call this victory. I would like to hear you say:
“We waged a full scale media attack on the only place on the planet where gender non conforming females thrive, a place where a 75 year old bearded woman can proudly walk bare breasted on a path next to a mother who watches her four-year old daughter run away from her, completely unafraid, as the child goes completely feral with wild abandon. We are proud to report that we have done our best at making sure that any moments of true freedom they experienced together on that Land will be unavailable to each of them, and every other girlchild and woman from now on.“
Or this:
“We waged war against the true oppressor, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, but we here at the Advocate, want to assure you that we will not write a single word challenging the problematic reality of trans women who actively proclaim their love and support for the conservative republicanism that is (as we speak) passing anti-trans bathroom bills, anti-LGBT “religious freedom” bills, and anti-female reproductive rights bills, because lesbians.”
Or this:
“Lisa Vogel, founder and producer of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival announced that she will retire in 2015 after the 40th Festival. This announcement comes after 20 years of “articles”, op-ed pieces and blog posts that targeted her relentlessly by calling her stupid, a bigot, un-evolved, ugly and irrelevant, a liar and compared her to the most vile enemies of human and civil rights in modern history; all while belittling her leadership, and making many references to the “metaphorical” rope with which she could hang herself. But rest easy folks, although she will retire, we will not abandon our efforts to destroy the legacy of the woman who created a space that gave dignity and voice to thousands upon thousands of women and girls. Be assured, we will continue to produce volumes of lies, insults and innuendos until her reputation has been thoroughly destroyed. Oh, because lesbians”
For someone who should be a reviled footnote to feminist history, you sure gave Lisa Vogel a disproportionate amount of your time and attention. Funny, I never once read anything where she made mention of you, hatefully or otherwise.
At least be honest about who you are serving.
Let the truth of what you think you have accomplished ring out in the articles and op-ed pieces where you speak so liberally of justice. You write about love, compassion and tolerance as you sit behind a cannon that never ceases fire. You distort our image and paint us as primitives who are persistently resistant to civilization and progress. You’ve said that the forfeit of our Lesbian homeland, culture and language is for our own good and the advancement of society as a whole. You use tired racist stereotypes to erase the unrelenting support of women of color. This story you are telling is old. It’s been told before. You are the smiling face of every colonizing endeavor that has ever claimed itself benign. You are every other witch hunt ever conducted. There is nothing original in your content or tactic.
In the effort to erase women who love one another and ourselves, patriarchal journalism makes no mistake.
In the war against women and girls, patriotic journalism makes no mistake.
Their origin and their history.
Patriarchal journalism is the same as Patriotic journalism is the same as Patriarchal journalism
Patriarchal journalism is the same.
Patriarchal journalism makes no mistake.
But make no mistake about this:
The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival has been the most influential incubator for female liberation for 40 years. The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival has been a refuge and place where we have gathered strength and resources. The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival is a place where we have had homecoming processions, wolf packs; where we put down the shame of our girlhood and licked our wounds together. We were nourished, fortified, lifted up and made whole. We built brand new mirrors. We recalibrated the lenses through which we see one another. We remembered ourselves. We celebrated ourselves. We took back our language. We took back our rites. We reclaimed our bellies, blood, brains, breasts, bones, muscles, and cunts. We are no longer strangers to our power or our purpose. We focused our intellect and let loose our wildest laughter. We know what it means to truly flourish.
Those are things that will not be undone. We gave those things to one another and ourselves. What we built has been for us and about us. It has never been about you. It’s not about you now. This is not your victory. If victory belongs to anyone here, it belongs to that Sacred Land. If victory belongs to anyone here, it belongs to Lisa Vogel for devoting 40 years of her life in service and commitment to one of the most reviled populations on the planet, female lesbians. It belongs to Lisa Vogel for doing her job courageously, tirelessly and gracefully in spite of having her name and image appropriated for the straw man you created, in spite of being a stand-in for your disdain for lesbians. Victory belongs to the womyn and girls who came together and brought our racism, classism, ableism, agism and internalized misogyny to the table so that every female could experience wholeness in our stunning, complicated, flawed, compassionate and intentional community. Victory belongs to 40 years of Matriarchal manifestation. This true story of Michfest is rich and long; as are our memories. In both, you will always be relegated to the sidelines, a footnote.
When I said that we are a nation of shape shifters, I was not speaking in metaphor. Many of us have long lost the internal and external shapes we are supposed to hold in order to be seen, accepted or embraced by you. We are now teenage girls who know how to throw blades, axes and shoot arrows. We are now crones who know our worth. We are now women who have learned to build structures, run meetings, and bang drums. We are now 10-year old girls who say, “We should have this everywhere”. Trust me. That girl knows what she is talking about when she says “this” and she will go on, somewhere in her beautiful lifetime, to build her “this” right in front of you. We will all take new form right in front of you. You forget, because you underestimate our power, commitment and reach. We are community organizers. We are engineers. We know how to cook for thousands. We are teachers. We are tradeswomen. We are Priestesses. We are messengers. We are Mothers. We are world class musicians. We are professors. We are unrepentant separatist Sapphists. We are wild dykes who have divorced ourselves from any desire to accommodate your feelings. We are healers. We are women who have changed the default pronoun for everything in our world back to the female. Matriarchal language makes no mistake and we are all fluent in her from our tongues to our toes.
Yes, we will miss the face of the Land the way some of us miss the face of a sister, mother, grandmother or other sweet beloved. It will be so bittersweet to dream of Her when we do. I also know that we will glimpse her when we catch sight of our own reflections. We will see her when we study our faces in the mirror. We will recognize her scent on the skin of our lovers. We will hear her voice in the voices of our friends. Her story is alive in our bodies. We are made up of the water that flows through her, her soil that held us while we slept, the meteor showers and the sun that rises above Her. Walking her terrain in the dark of a new moon has made us less afraid and more capable of navigating the darkness in ourselves. We are women who do not cower when we face the darkness in you. That Land has taken root inside thousands upon thousands of women and girls. And She will grow. And we will grow. There is a wilderness in each and every one of us what will never be tamed, re-named or erased. Our cells have shifted. Our DNA has been altered. And we will be inherited.
Best Regards,
Sara St. Martin Lynne
April, 27 2015
reposted from http://fishwithoutabicycle.com/
I would be so much more open to hearing trans women if they didn’t constantly publish articles about how they are so much better being women than bio women are. The ‘downwardly mobile feminists’ of the 70’s who had no intellectual weight apparently didn’t do jack shit except for creating theory and praxis responsible for starting the battered women’s movement and the rape crisis and self-defense movement, bringing incest and child abuse to the forefront, starting the field of Women’s Studies, challenging and changing religion to include women as something other than servants,continuing and winning the first round for the rights for abortion and birth control, challenging and changing the psychiatric industry which labeled women who were traumatized as ‘crazy’, pushing open the doors of the work world so women could be included in jobs previously held by men, fighting for civil rights and developing race critical theory- not all lesbian feminists were white, starting women’s newspapers all over the country, opening women’s centers all over the country, pushing for lesbian rights, developing theory and art and politics and women’s music, developing a new lexicon and concepts to explain the hidden reality of women and lesbians, in short they changed the cultural and gender landscape of many countries…
It’s a shame that Sandy sees fit to trash Olivia, and by extension the feminist lesbian movement of that time, although ironically it seems that Sandy is justifying the concerns that women had about her. How groundbreaking it would have been for Sandy to talk about how much she learned from the pioneers of that time. Instead, we’re dished up yet another article of a trans activist narcissistically mansplaining to us with great tedium and self-aggrandizement how much better a woman she is than bio women.
Sandy Stone was not the first sound engineer at Olivia, nor the engineer on their most successful and far-reaching albums. That honour belongs to Joan Lowe. At least look at the album covers before repeating self-serving revisionism.
As one of the founders of Olivia Records and one of the women who welcomed Sandy into Olivia, I need to correct a few errors of fact and some misconceptions. First, as Maggie posted, Sandy was not Olivia’s first engineer. That was Joan Lowe. Second, Lisa Vogel was most assuredly NOT among those who would rather destroy Olivia than see it succeed with Sandy. We always considered Lisa a friend and ally.
I would not agree that the Olivia collective was downwardly mobile either intellectually or economically, and it is sad that Sandy sees us like that now. Sandy did like to use “big words” which often seem more intended to show off and create distance than to contribute to a conversation. To equate our lack of interest in what interested Sandy as “intellectual downward mobility” seems a bit self-absorbed to me. And we were most definitely not financially downwardly mobile–in fact, we were explicitly not. But we were also not interested in building personal fortunes. We pooled our money and operated collectively in an attempt to equalize class differences and put our resources into building Olivia and a lesbian feminist institution that was based on love of justice, not love of money.
As a Lesbian feminist and transsexual who was active in a Lesbian theater collective around 1974, I’d like briefly to comment on what I also see as the misconception of “downward intellectual mobility” in such Second Wave groups.
Each small group or collective, of course, was unique, including Olivia. But I can say, as Ginny Berson has pointed out, that many of us were concerned about addressing racism, classism, and academic privilege. That’s not being “downwardly intellectual mobile,” but trying to meet as sisters and hear each other’s needs.
As wonderful as feminist process is, I wouldn’t expect that any one group or collective would meet all the needs or “geeky” interests of any woman: there is a time and place for everything.
Having said that, I’ll observe that for the last 40 years and a bit more, there’s been tension within the Lesbian community around the issue of birth assignments. With small groups or collectives, it’s always been my understanding that each group sets its own policy and boundaries, as also happens with specific events at conferences of various kinds.
The attacks on the Olivia collective, starting around 1976, for including Sandy Stone, were invasions into Lesbian space of what can only be called the politics of personal destruction. She was attacked as a “transsexual man,” an act of sex/gender politics for which this thread can and should be an opportunity for truth and reconciliation.
As for Michfest, Lisa Vogel has announced her absence of plans at this point for continuing Fest beyond Michfest 40 (August 4-9) as the natural closing of a cycle, rather than as a political defeat or victory for anyone.
Even while feeling sadness and also celebrating Lisa’s achievement in keeping Fest going through four decades, we might consider to address these unhealed wounds in our Lesbian and feminist communities centered around birth assignment.
A calm and dispassionate herstory of how this conflict took shape, and often took unfortunate turns because of misjudgments on various “sides,” or actions by people with little if any interest in feminism or Lesbian solidarity, is something that might help both in healing wounds and in planning future events.
Thanks to Autumn for the interview and to everyone who responded. Brief interviews are invariably digests, and compression may change their meaning and tone. I do not think this article, as published, properly represents my position on several topics.