Last year was a landmark year at Camp Trans!  This was the first time a openly transgendered woman was sold a ticket to attend the festival, the first time an openly transgendered woman was allowed to give a workshop on the land, and both actions were thanks to the organizers of Camp Trans!  We may have taken steps forward, but the competing press releases last summer only prove that our work isn’t over.  There are still people who cloak their transphobia behind feminist politics and economic strength, and there is still a need to educate people concerning the fallacies in those arguments.

Camp Trans ‘07 will be held near Hart, Michigan on August 4-12, 2007. Join our annual gathering of transgender people and their allies as we educate festival-goers and support the building of a trans-inclusive community that is welcoming and safe for all, both on “the land” and off.   We’ll also work to empower the next generation of activists to fight for trans issues in their own communities, advocate for the inclusion of trans issues in progressive, queer, and feminist movements by building coalitions with supportive organizations and of course continue to protest the exclusion of trans women from other women-only spaces.

Each year Camp Trans holds workshops, trainings and caucuses around a variety of trans issues.  These sessions allow campers to share their knowledge, benefit from that of others and also have fun!   You can shape the experience of the many people who will pass thorough camp this year, and in doing so join a variety of others who have chosen to use their expertise to give something back.

We’re looking for proposals from folks of every identity which address diverse topics such as tactics for local organizing and activism, how to be a good ally, hormones and surgery, relationships, employment, identity, and even flirting!   Hour and a half sessions can come in the form of a formal workshop, casual caucus or group activity.

Please include in your proposal your name and pronoun preference (and that of any co-presenters), contact info (email and phone), the name of your session, a brief (under 200 words) description of your session including its goal and how it will be structured, a brief bio for each presenter (under 100 words) and if it is open to all attendees or closed to a specific population.

Email your proposal to [email protected] as an attachment and put “CT workshop proposal” in the subject line.  The deadline for submissions is June 10th, 2007 (submissions received early may be given priority). We look forward to hearing from you!

The year 2006 was momentous for the struggle to have transwomen welcomed on the Land at Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.  Papers were burned, old policies were finally interred, and one courageous transwoman openly took steps onto the land with her head held high.  She was supported on one side by a representative of Camp Trans, the organization that’s spent over a decade working to get transwomen included in this feminist haven, and on the other side by a representative of Yellow Armbands, the grassroots organization that focuses on working for change from the inside out.  A proud woman, a tireless advocate, and a person willing to sacrifice her vacation to make a difference; together they have turned over a new leaf in the histories of MichFest and Camp Trans alike, and this coming year will stand as testament to this new direction.

Camp Trans 2007 will be important for us as an organization, although perhaps not in the way one would originally think.  The best way we can support our allies in the Yellow Armbands at this time is to do away with our “On Land Organizer” position, if only for a year, so that the Yellow Armband organization has an opportunity to prove itself a separate entity from the events and the workshops that Camp Trans will be focusing on in this transitional year.  We’ll still be walking the line, and we’ll offer our support to the Yellow Armbands in whatever way is mutually beneficial, but we shall leave the Yellow Armbands to be the sole promoters of trans inclusion within the festival.  This is in part due to a desire to see the Yellow Armbands continue to blossom into a proud and independent organization internal to MichFest, and in part because Camp Trans has some house cleaning to do, particularly concerning the way we’ve structured our organization in the past.

To put it bluntly, CT has not elected its organizational body for the past two years, and perhaps not legitimately for longer than that.  It’s easy to throw together an online poll or a list-serve email and then mark the trickled responses that make their way back through the wilds of the internet as a form of legitimacy, but this fails to account for the diversity of experiences which make Camp Trans the amazing space that it is.  Not everyone has access to the internet, not everyone has the social capital to know how to find these online elections, and as a result our elections must happen on the ground in the future.  Camp Trans 2007 will include a series of workshops in which we will account for the major organizer positions within the Camp and then hold elections for those positions before camp ends.  This will allow all attendees of CT to know who is in charge in the upcoming year, and should prevent recurrences of situations like two years ago, where our organization was thrown into turmoil when key organizers dropped out without warning.

We know we’ve faced allegations of a lack of transparency as of late, and we want you all to know this is not because we’ve forgotten about you, nor is it because we’re trying to keep secrets from any of you. We’ve been planning on how to make a Camp Trans that will be a self-perpetuating, open entity, and in that hunt for future transparency we’ve been hushed by our fears that speaking of it too soon would jinx our plans. There have been, and will always be, people who profit from the slightest miss-statement from the mouths of CT organizers. In trying to minimize those missteps we’ve appeared to make no steps at all… which is a shame, really, since we’re happy to inform you that we’ve been working, dialoguing and planning to make camp a new and better place for us all.

Jack Radish & Lina Corvus