Camp Trans Report

Considering that Camp Trans was in early August, this post is really late. Anyway, this past Camp was my third. Camp was really stressful for me this year, because I was pretty involved in getting things to happen, both before and during Camp. But it was still an amazing, wonderful, intense, and healing space for me.

A lot was accomplished at Camp this year. Walking the line of Festies, the vast majority of Michfest attendees are now either pro-inclusion or really don't care. There were only a few anti-inclusion people that I talked to, and they weren't angry or anything - they just politely said they didn't want to talk about it, so we didn't. That was the Monday, which is the start of that big event across the road from us (MWMF, of courses).

The next day was the solidarity vigil, held across the gates from Fest; several of us performed various pieces, and then we broke up into groups, several Camp attendees with several Festies, to talk about Camp Trans myths and ways that Fest can become a more inclusive, welcoming space.

The exciting news that we found out later in the week was that a Festie had donated enough money on Monday, earmarked for the purpose of sending two trans women onto the land. Between that, another earmarked donation, and several trans women purchasing their own wristbands, quite a few trans women went on the land this year, enough to run a workshop on Sunday, the last day of Fest, on the land.

All of them reported getting incredibly positive receptions, so the culture of MWMF has changed a lot.

At Camp itself, it was an amazing year for Camp. Every year we get more people, with lots of new faces. We had a great line up of performers (including yours truly, playing and singing folk punk on guitar and doing spoken word), with three nights of performers, with dance parties afterwards (yes, we have amazing dance parties out in the woods); also, we had one night of karaoke followed by a dance party on Wednesday, the first night we had organized parties going.

We had a great variety of workshops; personally, I did a Disability 101 workshop with a big focus on intersectionality and how to advocate for trans people with disabilities, which was well attended and super productive, with a lot of great input from both the Race and Class Inclusion Committee (RCI) and other Campers - it was one of several workshops that had been done from the list of workshops that we (the RCI) had assembled as ones we'd like to see. Other workshops that were held included several by the RCI, which focuses on increasing attendance at Camp by POC and people from poor or working class backgrounds (many campers may not have money now, but come from middle class backgrounds, which is an entirely different situation) and also on making Camp in general a more accessible place. There were trans men, trans women, genderqueer, and people of color caucuses, among others; workshops on engaging in anti-racist struggle, parenting options for trans people, transphobia in queer, genderqueer, and trans spaces, and rope bondage and trans bodies, among others.

There was in general a huge focus on making Camp more accessible (ability, monetarily (it's free, but we're trying to gather a stock of extra camping supplies, as those get expensive), in terms of culture, and in terms of language), and I think that we have a lot of good information and ideas on how to expand that even further next year. I was personally really happy that this felt like the first year that there were discussions of ablism in the space, and I feel like that happened really organically with some nudging by myself and others.

I met a ton of great people (including Drakyn), got to help out a lot (I can be a bit of a workaholic if you throw me into something I care about), which was really healing from the ablism in my day to day life; for me, it was over a week and a half of letting my guard down gender-wise (there is nowhere in the outside world like that). Camp continues to be an amazing space for trans people, genderqueer people, and our allies; it continues to do amazing work to help change the culture at Michfest and help make the festival better and more inclusive; unlike most queer/trans spaces, transmisogyny is called out and focused on being eliminated and there is a big presence of trans women, not just trans men and masculine genderqueers, and it continues to be a space that is becoming more and more inclusive and welcoming of all trans communities, because while we're not perfect, we're dedicated to getting better.