Women Born Transsexual

I am not going to contribute to the creating of a hagiography of Leslie Feinberg.

Leslie wasn’t really a hero to me.  Leslie was an ordinary person who wrote for the Communist Party USA newspaper Worker’s World.

I have always been far too anarchistic and frankly pro-American to embrace the ideals of the CP-USA and its apologists for Stalin and the Soviet Union.

Leslie and I are both Baby Boomers from upstate New York.  Leslie was from Buffalo and I am from the small towns of the Adirondacks.

We shared a working class background along with growing up obviously different from the sort of people we were expected to grow up to be.

The years before Stonewall were a hard time to be an obvious trans-kid.

Leslie turned 18 in 1967 during the height of the Vietnam War and the Year of the Hippies.

The energy was incredible and sides were chosen.

I was down with SDS and the anti-war movement but I was also part of the hippie culture while Leslie was part of the dyke bar scene.

I came out in 1969.

Leslie’s  roman–à–clef, “Stone Butch Blues” is set in the 1970s, an era that was far less bleak for many TS/TG people than milieu painted by Leslie.

Leslie had an agenda.  One that showed in her non-fiction works as well.

Leslie was many different things to different people, a chameleon reflecting what people wanted to see in hir.

To some Leslie was a stone butch dyke, to others a Communist, to yet others a transgender warrior.

People have a tendency to reduce complex people, especially people they admire into paragons representing an ideal of the quality they admire that person for.

It was damned hard to do that with Leslie, just as it is hard to do that with many people who grew up in that era.  Even those whose lives were not impacted with trans-prefixed words, or other labels from the queer glossary.

People who have complex lives challenge us, at times they infuriate us.  Their contradictions make us think rather than simply admire.

I used to come across Worker’s World and the Weekly Worker on occasion.  I would find them in freebee news racks and in piles near the door of various used book stores.

I thought that Leslie was a good writer who made me think even when I disagreed with her, which I often did.

I also think that “Stone Butch Blues” is an incredible book and that if Leslie is remembered for nothing else then she should be remembered for that book.

(According to Minnie Bruce Pratt Leslie preferred female pronouns .)

From The Advocate:  http://www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/books/2014/11/17/transgender-pioneer-leslie-feinberg-stone-butch-blues-has-died

She was a pioneer in trans and lesbian issues, workers rights, and intersectionality long before anyone could define the phrase. Her partner, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and family offered us this obituary.

BY Diane Anderson-Minshall
November 17 2014

Leslie Feinberg, who identified as an anti-racist white, working-class, secular Jewish, transgender, lesbian, female, revolutionary communist, died on November 15. She succumbed to complications from multiple tick-borne co-infections, including Lyme disease, babeisiosis, and protomyxzoa rheumatica, after decades of illness.

She died at home in Syracuse, NY, with her partner and spouse of 22 years, Minnie Bruce Pratt, at her side. Her last words were: “Remember me as a revolutionary communist.”

Feinberg was the first theorist to advance a Marxist concept of “transgender liberation,” and her work impacted popular culture, academic research, and political organizing.

Her historical and theoretical writing has been widely anthologized and taught in the U.S. and international academic circles. Her impact on mass culture was primarily through her 1993 first novel, Stone Butch Blues, widely considered in and outside the U.S. as a groundbreaking work about the complexities of gender. Sold by the hundreds of thousands of copies and also passed from hand-to-hand inside prisons, the novel has been translated into Chinese, Dutch, German, Italian, Slovenian, Turkish, and Hebrew (with her earnings from that edition going to ASWAT Palestinian Gay Women).

In a statement at the end of her life, she said she had “never been in search of a common umbrella identity, or even an umbrella term, that brings together people of oppressed sexes, gender expressions, and sexualities” and added that she believed in the right of self-determination of oppressed individuals, communities, groups, and nations.

She preferred to use the pronouns she/zie and her/hir for herself, but also said: “I care which pronoun is used, but people have been disrespectful to me with the wrong pronoun and respectful with the right one. It matters whether someone is using the pronoun as a bigot, or if they are trying to demonstrate respect.”

Feinberg was born September 1, 1949, in Kansas City, Missouri, and raised in Buffalo, NY, in a working-class Jewish family. At age 14, she began supporting herself by working in the display sign shop of a local department store, and eventually stopped going to her high school classes, though officially she received her diploma. It was during this time that she entered the social life of the Buffalo gay bars. She moved out of a biological family hostile to her sexuality and gender expression, and to the end of her life carried legal documents that made clear they were not her family.

Continue reading at:  http://www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/books/2014/11/17/transgender-pioneer-leslie-feinberg-stone-butch-blues-has-died