On some bulletin boards where people are crying these hours Robin Morgan (1941-2026), mourning is accompanied, here and there, by a warning about the shadows of her past. To call them that is to degrade to a biographical incident a political position that Morgan supported throughout her life, denying it the dignity of a conviction. She formulated it publicly in 1973, raising one of the issues that still calls feminism into question., what defines a woman and who is the political subject of the movement that Morgan and others had created.
The story originates from the West Coast Lesbian Conference From Los Angeles. Beth Elliott, a trans woman, lesbian, and activist, was not an outsider seeking acceptance, nor did she aspire to office. He had helped organize the conference, had been invited to perform as a singer-songwriter, and had already held a prominent political office, the vice-presidency of the San Francisco chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis.
His presence was contested from a group of separatist lesbians, the Gutter Dykes. A vote was taken, and the majority of those present voted for Elliott to remain. But the question was now open. A male person who identifies as a woman belongs to the political category of women, and is therefore legitimized to participate in an autonomous space organized by women?
Robin Morgan lets the conflict pass, and the next day intervenes with all his authority. The core of his reasoning is far from a shadow. When he states: «I will not call a male “she”», claims the female sex as a material reality that defines being a woman, not a declared identity, but a body data from which also derives a social history, that of being born female and of having suffered, from the beginning, what society prescribes, limits or denies to people of the female sex. The speech, published that same year in Lesbian Tide with the title “Lesbianism and Feminism: Synonyms or Contradictions?”, then flows, in 1977, into his Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist.
Fifty years before gender criticism and TERF entered the lexicon, Morgan puts a full stop which reaches us intact, a clear political distinction. Trans people experience discrimination and violence because they are trans, not because they are women. They are two distinct structures of oppression, and treating them as interchangeable erases the specificity of both.
Since then, the issue has affected spaces reserved for women, language, law, statistics, sport, anti-violence policies, even the possibility of naming one's biological sex.
Morgan has never publicly recanted the 1973 speech. When questioned about the affair of West Coast Lesbian Conference, fifty years later, she said: "Trans rights are human rights." Then she conceded: "It's complicated.".
Purple Haze
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