More on Adrienne Rich and being a good ally

Yes, I've already written quite a few things about merging one's life as an ally while being a fan of things that are problematic. If I sound like a broken record it's because I think enough hasn't been said, and it seems like the only options are to purge from the canon anyone who isn't, or hasn't been, 100% ideologically perfect, or just ignore it all together, which implies complacency. This, from someone who commented on Feministe under the handle number9, really resonated with me:

"But I struggle with thinking about what to do with those feminist “icons.” I have no use for Mary Daly, but I can’t argue with the fact that she was formative for many feminists. So do we acknowledge the horrors of second wave’s transphobia, keep what’s useful, and move on to building a better movement? Or do we just strike Mary Daly and others like her from our “required reading” lists and just leave a footnote, “text removed due to incompatibility with feminism?” I’m sort of in the latter camp as far as feminist theory goes, but I mainly know Rich as a poet and without having read anything transphobic from her, I do mourn her passing. But I wouldn’t presume to tell a transgendered person what to think about Rich at her passing."

I've never read Mary Daly, nor do I have any real desire to now, but as I was reading Rich's 1982 essay, "Split at the Root, " yesterday I thought, "No, I don't want to banish her forever," and it's not that many people, trans or cis,  are suggesting that either. Maybe had I found more concrete evidence that she had been actively transphobic, instead of being referenced by a noted transphobe,  I'd think differently; and as a cis person, I have the privilege to make that choice. But I still have a lot of the same questions: what do we do with this information -- I mean collectively? It's not like there's formal hierarchal system in place that says, "this stays; that goes."

I  think we're just really afraid to have these kinds of discussion -- like anything less than outright condemnation makes one a bad ally.