I’ve gone back and forth about writing this a lot over the past couple days. In the midst of a flurry of posts on social media from friends about how amazing their experience of Midwest was, it’s hard to be critical of something that they cherish and look forward to every year. I feel like I should feel grateful, inspired, and uplifted, but I don’t. And I can’t escape the feeling of an obligation to talk about my experience as a first time attendee to the Midwest Band Clinic, why I will never attend again, and why I cannot and do not recommend attending for anyone else.
We need to talk about the ableism and transphobia I experienced and encountered at the Midwest Band Clinic.
I decided to go to Midwest on a whim about a week out from the conference. I was talking to a friend about potentially funding a concerto for harp and wind ensemble, and I decided to call a composer friend about ask them about how they had done large ensemble consortia in the past. My composer friend encouraged me to go Midwest with support of a few other composers, and, after I checked flights and registration costs, I decided that it was (for the first time in my life) financially feasible to attend. So I booked a flight, registered for the conference, and began to prepare.
Part of my preparation for Midwest included reaching to a few friends and colleagues that I knew were also going to the event and making absolutely sure that the conference was safe to attend. This is normal for a queer person with a disability, and I felt like I needed a lot of reassurance about the accessibility and the attitudes towards neurodivergent and nonbinary people. I was assured that there would be space for me.
My first day at Midwest was a blur, but I remember becoming overstimulated in the first hour, before setting foot on the exhibit hall floor. I remember asking if there was a designated place I could go that was quiet and got told that if I was feeling overstimulated, I could go back to my hotel.
The Midwest Band Clinic is held annually at McCormick Place, the largest convention space in North America. There’s seriously no space that could be a designated quiet area in the largest convention space in North America and the best they could do was telling an overwhelmed autistic person to go back to their hotel?
I was told repeatedly throughout Midwest that it’s an exercise in overstimulation. That’s just how it is.
There was strange phenomenon with conversations at Midwest, where someone would come up to a person they wanted to talk to and only talk to that one person, making everyone else around them feel invisible. I tried once to insert myself into a conversation at Midwest and got the nastiest glare thrown at me I have ever known. I wandered the rest of the conference observing conversations but often unable to have them myself. The result was invisibility, not inclusion.
While I was at Midwest, I only attended one session: Conducting, Composing, and Performing with Disabilities: An Accessible, Inclusive, and Empathic Vision for Neurodiverse Music. It was the only time during the entire conference that space was made for neurodivergent people and I was excited to engage with the topic in this setting.
What unfolded during the session would be much different. Some highlights included no introductions for its panelists, some light definitions of things like masking and ableism, the mention of a condition coined by a Nazi eugenicist instead of autism, the exclusion of autism from a panel about neurodivergency altogether, two panelists who suggested that the answer to neurodivergency was going to a psychiatrist for medication, an audience who was largely not there for the topic but instead there for one of its panelists, a well-meaning and informational presentation that had to be heavily truncated because the panelist most of the audience had come to see showboated incessantly, expressions of blatant and extraordinarily internalized ableism presented as extremely hilarious jokes, absolutely no time for audience questions, and the ultimate thesis that all neurodivergent people need from neurotypical people is empathy.
Neurodivergent people don’t need empathy. If you are neurotypical or able-bodied (or both), you cannot and never will be able to understand the reality of living with our disabilities and how they shape how we navigate our world. It’s similar to how white people can’t imagine what it’s like to navigate life being Black, or how men cannot understand what it is to be a woman, having never experienced it themselves. Even among neurodivergent people there is such a wide amount of variation that it’s sometimes hard to have empathy for another neurodivergent person. You can’t understand what it’s like to be neurodivergent and it’s insulting for you to try.
What neurodivergent people need is space to be neurodivergent. To be ourselves, to unmask, without judgement or criticism. We need designated spaces to recalibrate and to avoid potential meltdowns or shutdowns. We need neurotypical people to respect us enough to recognize that we need special accommodations that they don’t, and to leaves alone when we say that we need our space.
No amount of empathy for the neurodivergent experience will provide these accommodations, only enough people initiating or demanding change so we feel safe enough to include ourselves in your classrooms, communities, and conferences.
No amount of empathy will build a quiet room at McCormick Place.
There is a very insidious pattern in a lot of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives to only address the inequities of most visible marginalized identities: race and gender. Disabled people (and neurodivergent people) deserve as much visibility and justice of the inequities we face, but we are constantly excluded from discussions and those discussions made inaccessible for us. No amount of empathy gives us back our seats at the table.
After Midwest concluded, I asked the one other nonbinary person I knew who went to the event if they had ever felt misgendered at the conference. They never felt that way, and they asked me the same question.
I was never gendered correctly at Midwest. I was only misgendered there. I was rarely given the space to correct someone on my pronouns (it’s decidedly they/them, not he/him), and spent the entire conference getting ground down by people to whom I would hand my business card, watch them read my pronouns, and still proceed to misgender me.
I have never written at length about my gender and how my journey surrounding it has shaped my life, but I have also never been made more aware of my own reality of living in a transgender body than I was made to at Midwest. Before I attended Midwest, I was sure that I was nonbinary, but not transgender, having never gone through a what I considered a transition to another gender, simply an eradication of my own concept of gender at all. I don’t caucus with or feel represented by men and I don’t caucus with or feel represented by women, and I don’t dress or act like what I perceive to be any specific gender. I felt authentically me, divorced from gender and as if I didn’t need to adhere to anyone else’s rules about what that looks like.
The Midwest Band Clinic makes quite clear in their FAQ that there is no dress code for the event. That is either misleading or untrue, and the unspoken dress code for the event is business casual. If you do not adhere to either business casual for men or business casual for women, you can expect dirty looks, exclusion from conversations, and getting absolutely ignored because you have the stink of queer liberation on you.
The second day was the hardest for me. The first day, I was still excited to be there and I wandered around in my dinosaur onesie, but that was all before the above mentioned session on neurodivergency. The second day, I wore an outfit that I thought was comfortable, and for every person that said something to that effect about it, there were ten, twenty, maybe a hundred who wouldn’t approach me if their life depended on it. By the end, I never wanted to come back to Midwest. I didn’t feel safe or respected or wanted. I spent huge parts of the rest of the conference constantly on the verge of exasperated, exhausted tears.
Trans and nonbinary people navigate life with this attitude towards us typically at a trickle. We can deal with the occasional off-comment or an uneducated person. The Midwest Band Clinic was a tidal wave of transphobia: unstoppable, relentless, unyielding. Like nothing else I’ve ever experienced.
Midwest as institution has no way of supporting the dignity of transgender and nonbinary attendees, but only because they have chosen not to include us. They haven’t even taken the basic step of including pronouns on our name badges. It does not appear that the Midwest Band Clinic has any interest in creating a safe environment for the queer community.
One way that queer people and disabled people share a perspective is that of threat modeling. We have become so accustomed to being so casually mistreated and disrespected that we have to build threat modeling into whether or not we go somewhere or do something. I tried to threat model for Midwest, but was provided with information about an experience of the conference that was not my reality being there, and that made me feel constantly unsafe while attending.
Outside my hotel room, the one safe space I had at Midwest was the …And We Were Heard booth, which I had the opportunity to exhibit at on Monday and Wednesday. They alone made me feel safe and respected and valued. They looked after my needs and checked in with me in ways that buoyed me throughout the conference. I am so lucky to have had their support and to have been safe by them. And they didn’t have to make me feel so seen and heard. They volunteer their time and energy to making people like me visible, and, at least for me, that was life-changing.
I have watched a lot of friends and colleagues go to Midwest every year. One of the things I was told at the conference was that it used to be a lot worse. I’m sorry, but I can’t imagine how that must have been, and I can’t imagine why you would come back since that was the case.
Why do you put up this this? If you care about queer liberation and accessibility for disabled and neurodiverse people, why do you continue to support and attend a conference that is hostile to us? If it’s so important to you to center marginalized voices in your programming and champion the work of marginalized composers, how can you justify not creating a safe space at Midwest for transgender, nonbinary, neurodivergent, or disabled people? Why is it okay with you that queer people and disabled people are not welcome at Midwest, yet attend every year as if nothing is wrong? Doesn’t it bother you that you don’t see more trans people or disabled people at the world’s largest band and orchestra conference?
One could say that, at least until Midwest fundamentally changes how it is run, you can either respect your trans and disabled peers and colleagues or attend the Midwest Band Clinic. After this last week and having endured what I did, I’m very inclined to agree. I get that there’s nostalgia and camaraderie and that a lot of people have made lifelong friendships and unforgettable memories at Midwest. There are lots of people who were lovely to me at Midwest, but most of them already knew me, and that doesn’t make the trauma of going to it go away.
For me, I’m not coming back. The Midwest Band Clinic is not a safe environment for me or for people like me, and people in my communities deserve to know just how bad it is before they spend a few thousand or so dollars to be misgendered and overstimulated. Midwest isn’t ready for trans people, nonbinary people, neurodivergent people, and disabled people, and if that’s okay with you, I think you really ought to think about why that is.
Something has to change. I don’t know what it is, but what happened to me at Midwest should never happen to anyone else ever again.
Something has to change.