Leslie Feinberg - Blog Posts

Leslie feinberg was a real person who existed and i’m posting about hir again because i deleted the last post i made on hir.

The first photo is Leslie Feinberg from some time in the 70’s, the second is her with her wife Minnie Bruce Pratt.

Feinberg identified both as a lesbian, and as transgender. he was a queer and workers rights activist and a Palestinian liberation activist. He fought for the freedom of Mumia Abu-Jamal, who received the death penalty after an unfair trial regarding the shooting of a police officer. He believed that all communities, met with oppression, from the government, and on the social level, should come together for the sake of all of us being liberated.

Ze went by multiple sets of pronouns based on context, going by he/him, to honour his transgender identity, referring to zemself with ze/hir pronouns personally, and going by she/her to signify gender incongruence with her masculine appearance in certain spaces.

Ze wrote two novels about the queer experience, drag king dreams in 2006, and stone butch blues in 1993, which is considered a seminal text in the history of trans and lesbian writing.

Feinberg passed away in twenty-fourteen, hir last words were “Remember me as a revolutionary communist.”

Don’t forget about transmasc lesbians, they’ve been around for longer than you’d think. Their history shouldn’t be erased.

Here are the links to two interviews with Feinberg, hir website, a link to a website ze made to give free access to the 20th anniversary edition of stone butch blues, and a talk ze gave on Mumia Abu-Jamal:

(I might also make a follow up post on Andrea Dworkin, since a lot of her ideas regarding Androgyny get ignored. she as a lone activist was kind of like, a swansong to the power of being really fucking mad about misogyny, which is inspiring, but i think she gets pigeon holed a lot as just a feminist, and is left out of discussions on queerness, which was also relevant to her life and work. That’s not to say feminism doesn’t matter, but that it wasn’t all she wrote about.)

I read Stone Butch Blues when it was first published. I was 18, just barely out, and a sophomore at a liberal arts women's college 45 minutes from my parents' house. That would've been... 1993? Yup. 1993.

The book fundamentally changed my understanding of... pretty much everything.

My great-grandparents were all working class. On my dad's side (his parents were cousins), they were farmers. On my mom's maternal side, they were European immigrants and union bricklayers. On her paternal side, Jewish immigrants. Her dad and his sister were raised by their mom, who was not, I believe, religious, and didn't raise them in the faith. She was a shopkeeper.

My grandparents' generation were college-educated (possibly except for my dad's mom). My dad's father was a math teacher and my mom's father, educated at Caltech, was a civil engineer. My mom's mother ran my grandfather's business, including a real estate office for a while.

Both my parents graduated from Stanford and taught English (my dad, who had a Ph.D., eventually went into corporate management to make more money).

So... I grew up surrounded by both the privileged world of aspirational academia and the, much more resonant for me, family stories about immigrant lives, trade unions, and beautiful craftsmanship.

I can do the academic thing, and do it well, but I have always preferred making things to studying them. I have always felt a bit out-of-sync with my family’s "evolution" towards increasingly academic pursuits. I like using my brain, but I like to keep my hands dirty while I do it.

Leslie Feinberg's writing became, for me, the first place where my own queerness and my identification with my family’s immigrant and working-class roots, made sense to me as parts of a single whole.

The summer after my junior year, I went through a directory I'd gotten my hands on of lesbians working in the arts, and sent out letters to those who seemed interesting, compatible, and far enough away from my childhood in California to let me try my hand at becoming something more than my parents' daughter. I asked for an apprenticeship.

As such things do, the end result wound up being... very different from what I'd imagined. I got a gig in New Hampshire helping a musician and her trans partner, who made their living busking on hammered dulcimer. I was meant to go live in a tent on their land, help with the straw bale house they were building, help babysit their 3 year old daughter, and join the busking on my harp. As it turns out, I have absolutely NO musical improvisation ability and had no clue what to do when there wasn't sheet music. The harp spent the summer in its case. Also turns out that my social anxiety made not having my own, completely private, space to retreat to unbearable. I wound up renting a tiny apartment in a nearby college town. And then... well, it turned out that the weather wasn't great for house building, and my girlfriend, spending the summer outside DC with her parents, was miserable, and so she came to join me, and...

Well. Before my girlfriend arrived, I did a lot of hiking and lake swimming, went to Boston Pride and cheered on my busking "bosses," joined them and their friends for a summer solstice ritual at which I was introduced to the concept of herbed butter and the back-breaking problems of invasive blackberry, and rode in their decomposing old subaru wagon (it's fascinating to warch the road go by through clusters of tiny, rusted out, salt-holes in the footwell) all the way to New York, specifically to hear Leslie Feinberg speak.

I was the most awestruck, hero-worshipping baby dyke imaginable, the youngest person in the room by at least a decade, and I still remember the sensation of blushing for *three hours.* Because. I was. In. The. Same. Room. As. Leslie. Feinberg.

That summer broke me wide open. It was the first time I ever felt like I, as an individual being, might hold power, make something that changed things, in the world.

That feeling, of urgent, hopeful agency, swells and recedes in my life, but I never experience it without thinking of Stone Butch Blues and of Leslie Feinberg. And yes, I still blush. Every damn time.

Happy (early) Nov 15th! Remember that Stone Butch Blues is free now and always to read here

Leslie was a communist, a butch lesbian, a nonbinary and transgender activist, and the person who made me who I am today. Consider checking out Stone Butch Blues if you haven’t already 😘 Do it for Leslie, and for hir surviving partner, Minnie Bruce Pratt 💕