Leslie Feinberg: Transgender Warrior
Day 21 of the Pride 30 Project for Pride Month, 2018.
Coming of age as a gender-nonconforming person in Buffalo, New York during the 1950s was not easy for Leslie Feinberg. Feinberg, who used the gender-inclusive pronouns “ze” and “hir,” was harassed simply for walking down the street as a butch lesbian and a masculine female. Ze was born on September 1st of 1949 in Kansas City, Missouri to a working-class Jewish family who was not accepting of hir sexuality or gender nonconformity. As a result, ze dropped out of school at the age of fourteen, working various low-wage jobs to support hirself.
It was at this time that Feinberg entered Buffalo’s gay social scene which, like many other mid-twentieth-century American cities, consisted primarily of bar culture. Buffalo’s lesbian bars, which were surprisingly plentiful in number, were both a space of community and a source of terror for Feinberg. Despite Buffalo’s racial segregation along east and west sides of the city, gay and drag bars hosted a mixed crowd of working-class whites, African Americans, Latinos, and Haudenosaunee.
The harassment and physical and sexual violence gay and gender nonconforming Buffalonians faced at the hands of the police was little different from the actions that precipitated the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, or the much-mythologized Stonewall Inn Riots of 1969. “When I heard about Stonewall,” Feinberg said, “I was mad I missed it because I was ready to fight.” In addition to queerphobic harassment and violence, ze had difficulty finding steady employment due to hir gender expression and was forced to take a series of low-wage temp jobs.
These early experiences shaped Feinberg’s first, and most celebrated, book, the novel Stone Butch Blues, published in 1993 by Firebrand Books. Firebrand, founded in Ithaca New York by Nancy Bereano, published literary fiction, poetry, and non-fiction with lesbian and feminism themes between 1984 and 2000. The press was established as part of the rise in small press feminist and gay publishing in the wake of the Gay Rights and second-wave Women’s Movements and helped to launch the careers of luminaries such as Dorothy Allison, Alison Bechdel, Beth Brant, Jewelle Gomez, Audre Lorde, and Lesléa Newman. In 1996, Bereano received the Publisher’s Service Award from Lambda Literary for her contributions to lesbian and small press publishing.
Stone Butch Blues recounts the story of Jess Goldberg, a so-called “he-she” from a working-class background who, like Feinberg hirself, comes of age in Buffalo. Despite similarities to Feinberg’s own biography, ze insisted the novel was a work of fiction and not autobiographical, writing in the first, as opposed to the third, person to avoid the complexities posed by Jess’ pronouns. In the 20th anniversary edition of the novel, Feinberg explains that Stone Butch Blues “is a work of fiction, written by an author who has lived the non-fiction.”
Jess, who initially identifies as a butch lesbian, faces hostility from straight society and within her own community. After uncomfortably straddling the gender binary for most of her life, she transitions to live full time as a man, Jesse, and takes testosterone. Jesse becomes involved in union organizing, and the novel connects gay and trans rights to anti-capitalist struggle. Jesse, however, is accused by some lesbian feminists of masculinizing himself only to escape the oppression of living as a woman. Jess/Jesse feels that though “passing” as a man allows her to be seen as a person and not a “freak,” it also erases her queerness, her history. Edna, one of Jess’ femme lovers, tells her:
“Believe me… you’re not alone in feeling that you’re not a man or a woman… You’re more than just neither, honey. There’s other ways to be than either-or. It’s not so simple. Otherwise there wouldn’t be so many people who don’t fit.”
It is only after Jess moves to New York City and becomes involved in activism that ze realizes ze can live outside the gender binary with legitimacy. Stone Butch Blues, which won multiple literary awards, is regarded as one of the most accurate and complex fictional portrayals of a transgender person.
Feinberg also wrote several works of non-fiction that brought knowledge of transgender people, issues, and language to mainstream awareness. Ze, along with fellow writer-activists Kate Bornstein, Holly Boswell, and Riki Wilchins, is credited with popularizing the term “transgender” during the 1990s. The activist Virginia Prince first used “transgender” in the 1970s to describe persons like herself who identified and lived as women full time, but did not desire to surgically transition. In Transgender Warriors, Feinberg’s historical study of gender nonconforming identities across cultures and time, ze expansively defines “transgender” as: “All people who cross the cultural boundaries of gender.”
Feinberg is also credited with forwarding the first Marxist understanding of transgender liberation, defining transgender people as a distinctly oppressed class. That ze conceptualized transgender identity so broadly was necessary at the time and helped to build a coalition of gender variant people following transphobic attacks such as the murder of trans man Brandon Teena in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1994. The term also brought awareness to the fact that while mid-twentieth-century feminist and gay activists had been successful in securing rights for women and sexual minorities, they were not committed to dismantling binary notions of gender, sexuality, and identity, which resulted in the marginalization of trans and gender nonconforming people within gay and feminist movements.
“Transgender” also described the experiences of those who did not fit neatly into the gender binary. Holly Boswell, like Feinberg, was one of the earliest proponents of the term “transgender” and is credited with creating the transgender symbol in 1993. In her 1991 essay “The Transgender Alternative,” published in Chrysalis Quarterly, an early transgender publication, Boswell defined transgender as “identifying oneself across gender lines,” presenting the term as an alternative to binary gender identification. Kate Bornstein similarly defined “transgender” as being “transgressively gendered,” or, any transgression against the morays and codes that make up gender in a particular culture. Feinberg later clarified that ze did not intend to create a common identity to unite all gender nonconforming people and stressed the right of all people to self identify.
Feinberg was also a leader of the Workers World Party (WWP), an independent Marxist-Leninist political party, and served as the managing editor of its newsletter. Beginning in 2004, ze wrote a WWP column entitled “Lavender & Red” that ran for a total of 120 installments and connected the American Gay Rights Movement to socialism and other global liberation struggles. Feinberg was always attentive to the ways the struggle for gay and trans rights did not operate in isolation, but intersected with other social movements.
As part of hir work with the WWP, Feinberg co-founded Rainbow Flags for Mumia, a coalition of LGBTQ organizers who, on April 19th of 1999, marched in support of a new trial for Mumia Abu-Jamal, a death row inmate who, in 1981, was sentenced to death for allegedly shooting Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Jamal, who has maintained his innocence, was a former member of the Black Panther Party and reporter who was known for his commentary on various social issues. In 2011, his sentence was commuted to life in prison with no chance of parole.
Feinberg and hir partner, lesbian poet Minnie Bruce Pratt, also participated in Camp Trans, an annual demonstration held to protest the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival’s exclusionary “womyn-born-womyn” policy. The policy, which stated that only those who were born “biologically female” could attend the festival, was implemented beginning in 1991 when Nancy Burkholder, a transgender woman, was ejected from the festival after refusing to disclose whether she was transgender. Feinberg began organizing the demonstration in 1999 with fellow trans activist Riki Wilchins. “Camp Trans: For-Humyn-Born Humyns,” proclaimed a sign held by Feinberg at one of the annual protests to poke fun at Mich Fest.
Beginning in the 1990s, Feinberg struggled with multiple health issues. Ze was diagnosed with Lyme disease, which was compounded by discrimination ze faced from medical professionals. Ze almost died from endocarditis, an infection of the heart valves, due to being refused treatment by intolerant doctors. Despite hir debilitating health issues, Feinberg remained a transgender warrior. One of hir last acts of resistance was working for the release of CeCe McDonald, a transgender woman of color from Minneapolis, Minnesota who stabbed and killed Dean Schmitz, a white man, in self defense after he attacked McDonald and her friends at a bar in 2012. Schmitz’s crew hurled homophobic, racist, and transphobic slurs at McDonald and her friends, and a woman smashed a glass in her face when McDonald said they would not tolerate the hateful language used against them. McDonald was the only person arrested following the altercation.
While protesting on the ground in Minneapolis, Feinberg was able to meet with McDonald in prison after she accepted a manslaughter plea to ensure a reduced sentence of 41 months. Feinberg, who was working on the 20th anniversary edition of Stone Butch Blues, had the idea to dedicate the rereleased edition to McDonald to raise awareness of her story, to which McDonald readily said yes. Though hir health was tenuous due to late-stage Lyme disease, Feinberg was arrested outside the Hennepin County Public Safety Facility where McDonald was being held after spray painting “FREE CECE NOW!” on the wall of the building. Ze put hir life on the line to being attention to McDonald’s unjust imprisonment.
“CeCe McDonald survived a fascist hate crime,” Feinberg said. “Now she’s sentenced as she struggles to survive an ongoing state hate crime…As a white, working-class, Jewish, transgender lesbian revolutionary, I will not be silent as this injustice continues!”
Ze was released after three nights in jail without bond. Felony charges of property damage were dropped, though Feinberg was recharged with a “gross misdemeanor.” The focus, for Feinberg, was never about hir arrest and always about fighting against injustice.
Feinberg, a warrior till the end, worked on Stone Butch Blues’ 20th anniversary edition, dedicated to McDonald, up until a few days before hir death on November 15th of 2014. Hir last words were:
“Hasten the revolution! Remember me as a revolutionary communist.”
