On an August night in 1991, Nancy Jean Burkholder was kicked out of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. It wasn’t because she was disrupting the event—it was because she was transgender. The lesbian feminist women’s music festival, which had been an annual event in Oceana County since 1976, claimed that they had a “womyn-born-womyn” policy that excluded trans women from attending. Nancy left the festival grounds, devastated, and returned to her home in New England. When the festival rolled around the following year, Nancy did not attend, but her presence…
