An Open Letter to Julie R. Enszer: Who Does Inclusion Exclude?
I am writing about a response to a letter in Sinister Wisdom #112, Spring 2019. In response to Hawk Madrone’s thoughtful letter about the loss of lesbian space in SW, you said, “Nothing in SW [in the] past eight years of publishing….erases lesbians or lesbian space.”
I take serious offense to your assertion and want to share my reasons why. I will be sending this letter to Lesbian Connection and SW both in the hopes it will be published and open the discussion further. I will also be publishing it online.
First, I would like to explain my language choices. In order for this to be palatable to the widest range of lesbian readers, I am going to avoid using pronouns in reference to trans women and use neutral language (for example, using the gender-inclusive term of “male people” instead of “men” for people who were born male.) These concessions of language are my peace offering to my lesbian sisters who will fiercely disagree with this letter.
For some personal background, I am a lesbian woman who was groomed into queer ideology and subsequently sexually abused by a much older trans woman, when I was a lesbian teenager. I spent several years lost in a “queer” identity in a few different physically, sexually & emotionally abusive relationships with trans women. I was able to escape from my longest abusive relationship with my life and was able to find my way back to my lesbian reality with the help of many wonderful women.
Part of my experience of coming home as a lesbian has been exploring lesbian herstory, including a hunger for the many viewpoints presented in lesbian periodicals. My girlfriend and I buy up (and borrow!) all the copies of SW, Lesbian Ethics, and Common Lives/Lesbian Lives we can. One such issue we managed to get our hands on was Sinister Wisdom #95 from Winter 2015.
I was aware that after Sinister Wisdom changed editors in 2014, the publication expanded to allow submissions from male people who claim a lesbian identity. I was prepared for that. What I wasn’t prepared for was finding an article submission by a trans woman named Michelle Lynne Kosilek.
The article is titled Mutagenic Diaspora. In it, an incarcerated trans woman uses the term disapora, which I have only ever heard used by people separated from their indigenous lands, to describe the feeling of gender dysphoria. Kosilek refers to having a “little girls’ heart”, says “natal females have mostly been freed from the patriarchal slavery where a woman’s value was inextricably linked to her willingness to be subservient and bear children”, celebrates a ruling in favor of receiving vaginoplasty, and talks about the plight of trans women who identify as lesbians in prison.
Kosilek finishes the article with: “As women, as lesbians, as feminists, we are stronger and more deserving than that.” The sentence is part of an argument about gaining free access to state-funded women’s attire, makeup, uterine transplants, vaginoplasties, and housing in a women’s prison. But my letter is not to argue the merits of sex-segregated spaces or state-funded transition.
Let me tell you why Michelle Kosilek is in prison. In May 1990, Kosilek’s wife Cheryl McCaul came home and found Kosilek wearing her clothes. She was upset. According to Kosilek, she threw a cup of tea. We’ll never know if that even happened. What we do know is that Kosilek first strangled Cheryl with a rope, then with piano wire, nearly decapitating her from the force used. Kosilek drove her body to a local mall and dumped her there. Her body was found with her top pulled up and her pants pulled down. Kosilek claims to have no memory of the murder and that it was in “self-defense” due to the trauma of Cheryl’s negative reaction to finding her husband wearing her clothes and allegedly being doused with a hot cup of tea.
This is what the court record states: “With regard to deliberate premeditation, the evidence would permit a rational jury to infer that the defendant waited until the victim’s son was at work, that he approached his wife from behind with a wire, and strangled her by tightening the wire around her neck. With regard to extreme atrocity or cruelty, the prosecution’s expert testified that: there were multiple wounds on the victim’s body; she was strangled by a wire and then a rope; she was conscious for at least fifteen seconds after strangulation began and remained alive for three to five minutes; and there were indications of a conscious struggle.”
A male person killing a female partner — we, as lesbians with feminist consciousness, know the this is part of a pattern — male violence. We know this happens often. One estimate I’ve heard is 3 women a day. I see these stories every day — locally, nationally, globally. Those of us who have experienced male violence as little girls and/or grown women know it goes on and on and on.
I should not have had to read the manifesto of a male person who carried out a lethal, brutal act of male violence in the pages of a lesbian feminist publication. I did not seek out this experience. I was not scouring issues for something to upset me as a survivor of male violence perpetrated by trans women. I simply started reading an issue I had felt I was lucky to obtain and was severely disturbed by the casual inclusion of a “lesbian & feminist” manifesto from a male person who held piano wire taut around a woman’s neck and watched her as she struggled & died.
I read this article in February 2018. I have hardly picked up an issue of Sinister Wisdom since. I have kept my silence about this article but find myself willing to do so no longer. The idea that we can have lesbian space, especially lesbian separatist space, that includes male people is not a neutral idea. This is not a win-win situation. Where there are male people, there is male violence. This is not to say that lesbians cannot abuse and harm each other greatly. That reality is not up for debate. But this is not that, and it never will be.
To say the inclusion of this male murderer does not erase lesbians or negate the intention of lesbian space is ludicrous. It is insulting to all lesbians. It is especially insulting to lesbians who have faced male violence or sexual & emotional misconduct from male people who identify as lesbians while trying to navigate lesbians spaces which are more and more “inclusive” of trans women identifying as lesbians and more and more hostile towards lesbians who do not include male people in their sexuality or wish to gather or organize with them.
To try to fence-sit on this issue is in some ways admirable and certainly understandable. I know many lesbians trapped in this balancing act. But for some of us, the fence ran out and we found we had our backs against a wall. There is no “inclusion” of transwomen without the heavy cost of excluding lesbians like me. My story is not unique. Upon coming out, many lesbians of my generation have been targeted by trans women for this type of abuse. Please do not “include” male people in lesbian culture, when that makes it untenable for some of us to participate anymore. I hope you will reconsider your decision to “include” this perpetrator in SW, and understand you made that decision at the expense of lesbian survivors.
I am no longer willing to stay silent on this issue, so I am choosing to speak out.
Thank you for your time.
Kitty Robinson
