Oh, I love you in your fuck-me pumps, & your nimble dress that trails.

We, the undersigned, want to speak out in love and support of the trans women in our community.

That's right: trans WOMEN, male to female. While debate rages about whether trans-masculine people belong in women's spaces, we must not forget that there are many communities that claim to be by and for women but shun and exclude one group of women: trans women.

* We've witnessed women being misunderstood and treated like outsiders -- just for being trans. We've seen women being ostracized for having relationships or sleeping with trans women. That's bullshit! If a community wants to call itself pro-woman, that needs to include ALL women, regardless of class, race, size, ability, how we express our gender, who we love, or what gender we were assigned at birth.

* Trans women have been a part of queer, lesbian, and dyke communities since the beginning. Trans women have been marching alongside other women since day one, and still are today! It's ridiculous that, all too often, trans women are silenced and forced to suppress part of their experiences and who they are, in order to fit in.

* Our community should be smart enough to see through the few narrow stereotypes our society offers about trans women. Trans women are just as diverse, complicated, and individual as non-trans women. There are butch trans women; there are femme trans women. There are trans women of all kinds and experiences. Generalizing about trans women is just as asinine as perpetuating stereotypes about any other group of women.

* Society encourages women to compete with and hate each other. To resist this, we must work to support all women. We have to examine and deal with our own misogyny and transphobia, and stop projecting our biases onto other women -- including trans women, who are not only devalued and objectified as women, but often excluded by other women.

* Women's bodies and genitals come in all shapes, sizes, and configurations. That's awesome! We are all more than the sum of our body parts. We believe in self-determination over our own bodies and how we use them, and we know that making any kind of assumption about someone based solely on the shape of their body is deeply foolish.

Trans women are our friends, our lovers, our co-workers, our neighbors, and ourselves. Trans women are not strangers to our communities. We sign this petition in support of the women of all kinds of experiences and bodies: women we value, appreciate, and love.

Signed,
1. Ariel Federow, New York, NY
2. Naomi Clark, New York, NY
3. Jess Snodgrass, Pittsburgh, PA
.... Gina de Vries, San Francisco, CA




if you want to sign the petition now, send your name and address to dykeplustrans@gmail.com
view the list of signatures and the website here: http://www.halfrobot.com/dykeplustrans.html

Nikki Lee Atwell, author of "Nolite Te Bastardes Corborundorum," "It All Started Somewhere" and numerous other zines, died this October 8th. She fell asleep at the wheel of her car at approximately 1:30pm on October 7th, and was thrown out of the vehicle and suffered severe heard injuries. She never regained consciousness, and doctors proclaimed her dead at 5:00pm on October 8th. She was four days away from her twentieth birthday.

I met Nikki through zines when I was 14. I originally wrote to her because I saw a review of her zine "Nolite Te Bastardes Corborundorum," and appreciated the reference to Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale," one of my favorite books. Nikki and I exchanged letters and mixed tapes, zines and comics -- she taped me songs she composed on her acoustic guitar and Bikini Kill bootlegs and I taped her out-of-print Allen Ginsberg songs and readings. She lived in rural Arkansas and I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area -- we compared notes about the differences between our homes, told anecdotes to each other about our lives. I liked her zines, her voice, and her sense of humor. However, we were never particularly close, and as many penpals/zinesters tend to, we lost touch after awhile.

I got a notice about Nikki's death in the mail today, along with an announcement from her parents that they are starting a memorial fund in Nikki's honor to help provide music, art, and dance education to kids in rural Arkansas. If anyone wants more information on the fund, please write to:
Freda Phillips (Nikki's mom)
415 Riverview North
Mountain View, Arkansas 72560
or email: Nikki@mvtel.net

If you want to donate money directly, send checks written to:
The Nikki Atwell Fund
Bank of Mountain View
PO Box 1228
Mountain View, Arkansas 72560

I am still in major shock that someone I knew from the zine community is gone.