Leslie Feinberg

• Name — Leslie Feinberg • Born — 1 September 1949 • Birthplace — Kansas City, Missouri, U.S. • Died — 15 November 2014 • Place of death — Syracuse, New York, U.S. • Occupation — Author, activist • Website — http: transgenderwarrior.org

Feinberg was born in Kansas City, Missouri and raised in Buffalo, New York in a working-class, Jewish family. At fourteen years old, began work at a display sign shop at a local department store. Feinberg eventually dropped out of Bennett High School, though officially received a diploma. Feinberg began frequenting gay bars in Buffalo and primarily worked in low-wage and temporary jobs, including washing dishes, cleaning cargo ships, working as a sign-language interpreter, inputting medical data, and working at a PVC pipe factory and a book bindery.

When Feinberg was in twenties, met members of the Workers World Party at a demonstration for the land rights and self-determination of Palestinians and joined the Buffalo branch of the party. After moving to New York City, Feinberg took part in anti-war, anti-racist, and pro-labor demonstrations on behalf of the party for many years, including the March Against Racism (Boston, 1974), a national tour about HIV/AIDS (1983–84), and a mobilization against KKK members (Atlanta, 1988). Feinberg began writing in the 1970s. As a member of the Workers World Party, was the editor of the political prisoners page of the Workers World newspaper for fifteen years, and by 1995, had become the managing editor. Feinberg's first novel, the 1993 Stone Butch Blues, won the Lambda Literary Award and the 1994 American Library Association Gay & Lesbian Book Award (now called the Stonewall Book Award). While there are parallels to Feinberg's experiences as a working-class dyke, the work is not an autobiography. second novel, Drag King Dreams, was released in 2006. It was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Literature in 2007. nonfiction work included the books Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come in 1992 and Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman in 1996. Both works were finalists for Lambda Literary Awards for Transgender Literature. Also in 1996, Feinberg appeared in Rosa von Praunheim's documentary, Transexual Menace. In 2009, released Rainbow Solidarity in Defense of Cuba—a compilation of 25 journalistic articles. In Transgender Warriors, Feinberg suggests that the term "transgender" was commonly used in two different ways. It served as an umbrella term encompassing anyone who questions or challenges traditional ideas of sex and gender. Additionally, it referred specifically to the distinction between individuals who change the sex assigned to them at birth and those whose gender expression is seen as not aligning with societal expectations for their sex. Feinberg's writings on LGBT history, "Lavender & Red", frequently appeared in the Workers World newspaper. Feinberg was outspoken about her support for Palestinians. In a 2007 speech given to the first public conference of Aswat, an organization for LGBT Palestinian women, in Haifa in 2007, Feinberg said, "I am with Palestinian liberation with every breath in my body; every muscle and every sinew." In a 2006 interview with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore about Drag King Dreams, Feinberg said of her novel's Jewish characters, "for Heshie and Max, this question of the occupation of Palestine goes to the heart of what it means to live an authentic life in a period in which this really historical crime is taking place in their name."

In 2008, Feinberg was diagnosed with Lyme disease. She wrote that the infection first came about in the 1970s, when there was limited knowledge related to such diseases and that felt hesitant to deal with medical professionals for many years due to transgender identity. For this reason, only received treatment later in life. In the 2000s, Feinberg created art and blogged about illnesses with a focus on disability art and class consciousness.

Feinberg described herself as "an anti-racist white, working-class, secular Jewish, transgender, lesbian, female, revolutionary communist." According to Julie Enszer, a friend of Feinberg's, Feinberg sometimes "passed" as a man for safety reasons. Feinberg's spouse, Minnie Bruce Pratt, was a professor at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York. Feinberg and Pratt married in New York and Massachusetts in 2011. In the mid and late 1990s they attended Camp Trans together which was held outside of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival in protest of its trans-exclusionary womyn-born womyn policy. Excerpts from Feinberg's 1994 speech at Camp Trans appear in the Winter 1995 issue of TransSisters: The Journal of Transsexual Feminism. The journal reported that during her introduction to security at the festival, Feinberg presented that "although she was born with female anatomy and still identifies as a woman and as a lesbian that she also identifies as transgendered, that she passes as a man, is frequently mistaken for a man, that her driver's license lists her sex as male, and that sometimes she and her lover pass as a heterosexual couple". Upon her question, Feinberg was denied entry into the festival before the security coordinators quickly reversed the decision. Feinberg died on November 15, 2014, of complications due to multiple tick-borne infections, including "Lyme disease, babeisiosis, and protomyxzoa rheumatica", which had suffered from since the 1970s. Feinberg's last words were reported to be, "Hasten the revolution! Remember me as a revolutionary communist."

Feinberg stated in a 2006 interview that pronouns varied depending on context: Leslie Feinberg, 2006 Feinberg's widow wrote in statement regarding Feinberg's death that Feinberg “preferred to use the pronouns /zie and /hir for herself, but also said: 'I care which pronoun is used, but people have been respectful to me with the wrong pronoun and disrespectful with the right one. It matters whether someone is using the pronoun as a bigot, or if they are trying to demonstrate respect.