Leslie Feinberg
The author of “Stone Butch Blues” gave the word “transgender” its political meaning – and fought for workers, butches and trans people.
Leslie Feinberg grew up in a working-class Jewish family in Buffalo, New York. As a masculine young lesbian she left home and found community in the butch-femme bar culture of the 1960s, where police raids and violence were part of everyday life. She worked in factories and other low-paid jobs and became a communist activist.
In 1992 she published the pamphlet “Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come”, which helped establish “transgender” as an umbrella term for a political movement. Her novel “Stone Butch Blues” (1993), about a working-class butch lesbian who is often taken for a man, became a classic of queer literature. “Transgender Warriors” (1996) traced the history of gender-nonconforming people across cultures.
Feinberg described herself as a butch lesbian and as transgender, and used both “she” and the gender-neutral “ze/hir”, saying that the context and the respect behind the pronoun mattered most. Her partner was the poet Minnie Bruce Pratt, whom she married in 2011.
After years of illness from Lyme disease, Feinberg died in Syracuse in 2014, aged 65. Her last words were reportedly: “Remember me as a revolutionary communist.”