It sucks that I’m so often forced to choose between the two, or that the choice is made for me when people make assumptions based on how I look or sound. It’s something that I deal with almost constantly - any time I meet someone new, speak to someone on the phone, or am forced to choose a gendered title like Ms or Mrs or Mr; any time that I walk into a public restroom and get the double-takes, the questioning, and eventual approval after I reluctantly say “Yes, I’m a woman;” any time someone calls my office asking for me after only reading my name in an email or on a website and I hear those few moments of confusion before they decide, “Oh, this must be a woman named Jack.” However, I’m fairly used to all of that. I expect it from mainstream society, and those low expectations make it a little easier to deal with.

I’m wondering if I’m going to wind up, eventually, as a man with a female name. I have a female name and like it. It’s my chosen name, and it’s not frilly, and I like it. I would also like to grow a beard, and lower my voice. Most likely this will wind up with me going by initials in common job situations etc.

Thanks also for posting this year’s flyer – I hadn’t seen it yet, and I have to say it was surprising to see the Lesbian Avengers’ bomb icons alongside “women, womyn, wimmin” because to me they symbolize such different political frameworks.

But it’s a whole other story when it’s communities that I expect more from, like queer communities. To be pushed into boxes by people who struggle against being shoved into boxes of their own, to be made to feel invisible and disrespected by people who know what it feels like to have to fight to be seen and respected for who one truly is - that’s a special kind of hurt right there.

Thanks also for posting this year’s flyer – I hadn’t seen it yet, and I have to say it was surprising to see the Lesbian Avengers’ bomb icons alongside “women, womyn, wimmin” because to me they symbolize such different political frameworks.

Do you know Bernice Johnson Reagon’s “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century?” She wrote it in response to separatism at women’s music festivals in the early 80s – she does a great job of explaining why separatism at women’s music festivals is harmful, how festivals should really be seen as coalitions and how hard coalition work is:

“I wish there had been another way to graphically make me feel it because I belong to the group of people who are having a very difficult time being here. I feel as if I’m gonna keel over any minute and die. That is often what it feels like if you’re really doing coalition work. Most of the time you feel threatened to the core and if you don’t, you’re not really doing no coalescing.”

If you haven’t seen the piece, it’s included in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, Kitchen Table Press, 1983.

At the meetings to organize the march, did you have a sense of who the activists were who wanted to define the march as women only and what their agenda was? Were they older lesbians who had come out into lesbian feminism in the 70s and 80s, or younger people who have encountered the idea of “women-only” more recently? Is this a transphobic response to the trans men’s protest last year? Or a re-emergence of separatism for some other reason? Or has the NY dyke march always been this way?

I’m new to the area, so last year was my first time at the dyke march here. The Boston Dyke march website is much better:

Boston Dyke March
Join thousands of dykes, lesbians, bisexuals, queers, genderqueers, transwomen, transmen and their allies marching for political and cultural change.

I’m really curious as to why/how NY’s has gone in such a different direction…?