In August, the Michigan Womyn’s Festival (MWF) relaxed a stringent “womyn-born-womyn only” door policy and admitted two transgendered women. The women had come from Camp Trans, a gathering held annually outside MWF grounds in protest of the controversial policy, which restricts admission to women born with female equipment.

Shortly afterwards, Camp Trans issued a press release stating that the MWF had rescinded the policy, but MWF founder Lisa Vogel promptly clarified that the exisiting admission restrictions were still in effect. The policy, according to Vogel, was designed to preserve a “safe space” where women born as such could exist in solidarity-and so it remains.

If you’re not familiar with terms like “womyn” or “trans,” chances are you’re wondering what the big deal is. The unfortunate truth is that gender politics can be as confusing as gender theory itself.

The schism between biological sex and gender (the roles and attributes we ascribe to sex) spawns many complications, to say the least. The New York Times recently published an article on the trans backlash within lesbian communities, where female-to-male (FTM) transsexuals are at times accused of gender treason.

While transsexuals (those who’ve changed or want to change their biological sex) and transgendered people (those who cross genders, not necessarily through surgical means) fight to gain social and political ground, their ostensible allies have their own-at times conflicting-agendas to defend. Each letter in “LGBTQ” has its own set of opinions about whether a dude is a woman is a woman is a dude.

Gender bending is nothing new; it does and has always belonged to most if not all cultures in some form or another. However, now that those at the sexual margins are reaching new levels of visibility in the Western world, trans activism has become a new frontier.

While “drag queen” is part of the popular lexicon, gender-inclusive pronouns (“ze” and “hir”) haven’t quite caught on beyond PC keeners. The recent film Transamerica helped to raise awareness about sex-reassignment surgeries, but the procedures themselves aren’t always covered by health insurance plans (they were delisted in Ontario by the Harris government in 1998).

Of course, bigotry runs high where matters of sexual diversity are concerned-the murders of Gwen Araujo and Brandon Teena, the transgendered victims of two hate crimes in the United States, tragically prove this point.

In an informal sense, gender roles have long been under fire in popular culture-and we’re not just talking Barbies vs. Tonka Trucks. Take “metrosexuality,” an expression we’re all sick of hearing. It’s a marketing ploy which affords men the right to primp whilst maintaining a façade of masculinity. Many men buy into this because metrosexuality almost seems hyper-masculine-a matter of “reclaiming” female pastimes for specifically “male” purposes, namely attracting (presumably female) bedmates.

In reality, of course, men and women groom themselves for the same reasons-everyone experiences self-doubt, feels good when they look good, and likes to have sex regardless of what they’re packing. If straight men can be tricked into plucking their eyebrows this easily, then surely men and women are not as different as we had assumed.

Does this imply that gender is a blank slate? Many people feel as though they’ve been born the wrong sex. These people, labeled as having Gender Identity Disorder, are certain of their genders-it just so happens that these genders “belong” to the opposite sex.

But even this answer is fairly black and white, and gender can be shades of grey. Some people identify themselves as both man and woman, neither, or something else altogether. Here pronoun use becomes a battleground, and toes are constantly being stepped on.

We have a natural tendency to pigeonhole, and it’s difficult to streamline a reference code for something as potentially complicated and unpredictable as gender identity. While forging a gender-neutral utopia may not be within our current capabilities, promoting social and political legitimacy for transsexuals is. Theorizing, while important, comes second to improving peoples’ lives.