I'm not the most up on trans issues, so I didn't know that TERFs had started as early as the '70s. Here's an
interview with Sandy Stone, a trans woman who was a recording engineer.
That would have been the Janice Raymond incident. That came in the context of my work with Olivia Records. When I was first approached by representatives of Olivia Records, which I think was in 1974, I immediately told them that I was trans and in fact, they had already heard that I was trans from Leslie Ann Jones, who was an assistant recording engineer in San Francisco. So, we were already in clear communication about the fact that I was trans and they were very open to working with me. They mostly wanted to know if our politics agreed and whether or not I could work with a lesbian separatist collective. They badly needed engineering skills.
The collective was very clear that they considered me to be a woman. We spent a long time – about a year, maybe more – in which we got to know each other and by the time that I actually joined the collective, we felt that we knew all that we needed to know about how we were going to get along together. And so, I joined the collective and went to live with them in Wilshire District of LA, where we had three houses: two next to each other and one across the street. There were 13 members of the collective after a while. I think that when I joined there were 11.
That’s the background. I wanted to give you that background because what happened with Raymond was so betraying, so bizarre and so completely unexpected.
…
All of a sudden came this thing from left field. We were being broadsided by hate mail. The hate mail initially took a form that was so recognizable that Ginny Berson diagrammed it out. We’d get a letter and the letter would attack one of our albums because of the way that it was engineered and mixed. There were very clear ideas of what constituted a “male” mix and a “female” mix, which nobody had ever heard of before. What it came down to was that “male” mixes had drums, which was linked back to “throbbing male energy.”
I am always suspicious of anyone who talks about "energy" of any kind that's not measurable in joules.
This pattern escalated. We were organizing what was for us, a major tour. We wanted to tour the country and provide women’s music for women in major cities along our route. It was the first time anything like that had been attempted. We were very intent on it and it was extremely energy-absorbing. It took all our energy to get it going. We had an entire network of lesbian separatist producers, people who could organize local logistical support, people who could advertise tickets and handle the selling and we wanted it to be completely done by women.
Anyway, we had organized this tour and we had gotten a letter telling us that when we got to Seattle that there was a separatist paramilitary group called the Gorgons. The Gorgons was a group of women who wore camo gear, shaved their heads and carried live weapons. We were told that when we got to town, they were going to kill me.