Beth Elliott

Beth Elliott (born 1950) is an American trans lesbian folk-singer, activist, and writer.^[1] Elliot had served as vice-president of the San Francisco chapter of the lesbian group Daughters of Bilitis, and edited the chapter's newsletter, Sisters, but was expelled from the group in 1973 on the grounds that she "was not really a woman".^[2][3]

She performed at the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference at a time when the issue of transsexual women within the lesbian community and the women's movement was emerging as a controversial topic with some anti-transexual feminist activists. Although Elliott had been invited by conference organizers to perform, some attendees objected, and the issue was raised from the podium the following day, when Robin Morgan gave a controversial keynote address in which she referred to Elliott as a “transsexual male” and used male pronouns throughout, charging her as “an opportunist, an infiltrator, and a destroyer-with the mentality of a rapist."^[4] Beth Elliott responded in the pages of the Lesbian Tide, in which she lamented the increasing tone of Inquisitional self-righteousness at the conference, in which “everyone seemed to feel she had the right true gospel of liberation and everyone else was a Threat To The Movement.”^[5] Elliott explained her transsexuality through the form of a dream, in which she was on trial before Pope Robin for daring to call herself a woman and a lesbian. Her testimony drew upon contemporary medical science concerning the role of hormones in shaping gender identity, which Elliott was careful to distinguish from biological sex and feminist theory critiquing sex role conditioning, among other strategies to complicate Morgan’s essentialist standpoint. But Elliott knew she fought a losing battle: “YOUR BIOLOGY IS YOUR DESTINY,” Morgan thundered within the dream. In response to this declaration, Elliott questions what Morgan (and by extension, other anti-transsexual feminists) means by “biology”: “What? I don’t get that. Look. The doctors are saying I am a woman with a defective body, for all practical purposes…That’s my biology."^[6][7][8]

References

1. Susan Stryker. Transgender History. Seal Press. 190 pp 2008: 102-5,108-9.
2. ">> social sciences >> Transgender Activism". glbtq. Retrieved 2015-06-17.
3. Joanne J. MEYEROWITZ; Joanne J Meyerowitz (30 June 2009). How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Harvard University Press. pp. 289–. ISBN 978-0-674-04096-0.
4. Robin Morgan, “Keynote Address” Lesbian Tide. May/Jun73, Vol. 2 Issue 10/11, p30-34 (quote p 32); for additional coverage see Pichulina Hampi, Advocate, May 9, 1973, issue 11, p. 4
5. Beth Elliott, “Of Infidels and Inquisitions,” Lesbian Tide, May/Jun73, Vol. 2 Issue 10/11, p15-26. 2p.(quotes on pg. 26).
6. Beth Elliott, “Of Infidels and Inquisitions,” Lesbian Tide, May/Jun73, Vol. 2 Issue 10/11, p15-26. 2p.(quotes on pg. 26).
7. Goldberg, Michelle (4 August 2014). "What Is a Woman? The dispute between radical feminism and transgenderism". New Yorker Magazine. Retrieved 5 August 2014.