Leslie Feinberg, 9/1/1949 – 11/15/2014
BY Claire Potter ON November 17, 2014
OutHistory is saddened to report that transgender pioneer, writer and activist Leslie Feinberg, died Saturday after a long illness: ze was 65 years old. Read the full obituary here. We send our deepest condolences to Feinberg’s partner, Minnie Bruce Pratt: they were comrades for 22 years, and had been married since 2011. As Diane Anderson-Minshall of The Advocate notes, however, “Feinberg stressed that state authorities had no right to assign who were or were not her loved ones but rather that she would define her chosen family, citing Marx who said that the exchange value of love is — love.”
Feinberg’s most famous book is Stone Butch Blues, originally published in 1993 and reissued in 2010, a fictionalized memoir of growing to maturity in between genders. It was, perhaps, the first book to directly address and analyze the forms of violence directed at transgender people. Later work paved the way for transgender history as an academic field of study in the 1990s. Feinberg’s activism and intellectual work became an early touchstone for younger generations coming out as trans, and the book continues to be taught in LGBT studies and trans studies courses.
As importantly, Stone Butch Blues chronicles Feinberg’s transphobic encounters within second wave radical feminism, hir path to finding a home in the labor movement, and hir emergence as an organic intellectual deeply committed to racial, class, gender, indigenous, disability and global justice. Although ze had been chronically ill for many years, something that ze documented in words and in photographs, Feinberg was instrumental to the campaign to free CeCe McDonald between 2012 and 2014. Ze appeared in numerous demonstrations, sending messages of solidarity when hir health prevented hir from being present.
In 2013, I posted on my Facebook page about Feinberg’s activism on behalf of McDonald and characterized hir as a “socialist”: less than a day later, confined to to home, Feinberg zinged back: “I am not a socialist — I am a Communist!”
Comments