Leslie Feinberg

Leslie Feinberg, who identified as an anti-racist white, working-class, secular Jewish, transgender, lesbian, female, revolutionary communist, died on November 15, 2014. She/zie succumbed to complications from multiple tick-borne co-infections, including Lyme disease, babeisiosis, and protomyxzoa rheumatica, after decades of illness. Zie/she died at home in Syracuse, NY, with hir partner and spouse of 22 years, Minnie Bruce Pratt, at hir side. Hir historical and theoretical writings have been widely anthologized and taught in U.S. and international academic circles. Hir impact on mass culture was primarily through hir 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). Leslie Feinberg was born September 1, 1949, in Kansas City, Missouri, and raised in Buffalo, New York in a working-class Jewish family. At age 14, she/zie began supporting hirself by working in the display sign shop of a local department store, and eventually stopped going to high school classes, though officially zie/she received hir diploma. It was during this time that she/zie entered the social life of the Buffalo gay bars. Zie/she moved out of a biological family hostile to hir sexuality and gender expression, and to the end of hir life carried legal documents that made clear they were not hir family. Discrimination against hir as a transgender person made it impossible for hir to get steady work. Zie/she earned hir living for most of hir life through a series of low-wage temp jobs, including working in a PVC pipe factory and a book bindery, cleaning out ship cargo holds and washing dishes, serving as an ASL interpreter, and doing medical data inputting. In hir early twenties Leslie Feinberg met Workers World Party at a demonstration for Palestinian land rights and self-determination. She/zie soon joined WWP through its founding Buffalo branch. After moving to New York City, zie/she participated in numerous mass organizing campaigns by the Party over the years, including many anti-war, pro-labor rallies. Zie/she was a key organizer in the December 1974 March Against Racism in Boston, a campaign against white supremacist attacks on African-American adults and schoolchildren in the city. Feinberg led a group of ten lesbian-identified people, including several from South Boston, on an all-night “paste up” of South Boston, covering every visible racist epithet. In 1983-1984 she/zie embarked on a national tour about AIDS as a denied epidemic. Feinberg was one of the organizers of the 1988 mobilization in Atlanta that drove back the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan as they tried to march down Martin Luther King, Jr. Ave. on MLK Day. When anti-abortion groups descended on Buffalo in 1992 and again in 1998-1999 with the murder there of Dr. Barnett Slepian, Feinberg returned to work with Buffalo United for Choice and its Rainbow Peacekeepers, which organized community self-defense for local LGBTQ+ bars and clubs as well as the women’s clinic. A Workers World journalist since 1974, Feinberg was the editor of the Political Prisoners page of Workers World newspaper for 15 years, and became a managing editor in 1995. She/zie was a member of the National Committee of the Party . From 2004-2008 Feinberg’s writing on the links between socialism and LGBT history, “Lavender & Red,” ran as a 120-part series in Workers World newspaper . Hir last book, Rainbow Solidarity in Defense of Cuba, was an edited selection of that series. Feinberg authored two other non-fiction books, Transgender Warriors: Making History and Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue, as well as a second novel, Drag King Dreams. Feinberg was a member