Remembering Leslie Feinberg
Edited excerpts from an article first posted at workers.org/2024/11/81973/
Leslie Feinberg, who identified as an anti-racist white, working-class, secular Jewish, transgender, lesbian, female, revolutionary communist, died on Nov. 15, 2014, at the age of 65.
As a leader of Workers World Party, 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 U.S. and international academic circles. Her impact on mass culture was primarily through her 1993 novel, “Stone Butch Blues,” widely considered inside and outside the U.S. as a groundbreaking work about the complexities of gender.
Sold by the hundreds of thousands and also passed from hand-to-hand inside prisons, the novel has been translated into Chinese, Dutch, German, Hebrew, Italian, Slovenian and Turkish. Her earnings from the Hebrew edition are donated to ASWAT, the feminist queer movement for sexual and gender freedoms in Palestine. Some of her other writings include:
Workers World publications
Transgender Liberation: A movement whose time has come
Leslie Feinberg’s 1992 “Transgender Liberation: A movement whose time has come.” The first paragraph says: “This pamphlet is an attempt to trace the historic rise of an oppression …”
Rainbow Solidarity in Defense of Cuba
“Rainbow Solidarity in Defense of Cuba” is a “compilation of 25 articles about same-sex love and sex/gender variance in Cuba’s pre- and post-revolutionary history.”
Leslie Feinberg’s series on LGBTQ history, “Lavender & Red,” appeared in Workers World newspaper from 2004-2008.
