Involvement With The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival
In 1999, Mr. Lady records (along with one of its artists, The Butchies), were involved in issues surrounding the debate as to whether transsexual women should be entitled to attend the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, which had a formal stance against allowing transsexual and transgender women to attend the festival. In response to a request from transgender activists to boycott the festival, Mr. Lady released a statement which defended the festival, believing that they did not consider an event for "womyn born womyn" and the transgender community to be mutually exclusive, but backed the right of the festival to exclude those not born as women.
Kaia Wilson confirmed this in a June 1999 statement: "e strongly believe that transgender/transsexual people are an important part of the queer community and that they face an enormous amount of opposition. We know that the MWMF started as a separatist event for womyn born womyn and we personally still feel the continued need for that kind of space and event. We don't think that our support of the trans communities and womyn born womyn communities are in direct contradiction to each other."
Formally backing the festival's trans-exclusion policy led to protests and boycotts aimed towards Mr. Lady acts, Wilson and The Butchies in particular. Groups such as Camp Trans, and many participants in the queercore community disagreed with Mr. Lady's stance and felt that the group and label exploited transgendered images. The label went defunct in June 2004.
Read more about this topic: Mr. Lady Records
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