Leslie Feinberg

Leslie Feinberg (September 1, 1949 – November 15, 2014) was an American author, journalist, and revolutionary socialist organizer who identified as transgender and advanced theories linking gender variance to class struggle and historical patterns of nonconformity. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, to a working-class Jewish family and raised in Buffalo, New York, Feinberg experienced early familial rejection tied to nonconforming appearance and sexuality, which informed lifelong activism against oppression.

Feinberg joined the Workers World Party in the early 1970s following participation in a demonstration for Palestinian rights, becoming a managing editor and contributor to its newspaper, where ze edited the political prisoners page for 15 years and covered labor, anti-war, and LGBTQ issues. The 1993 novel Stone Butch Blues, narrated from the viewpoint of a butch lesbian enduring mid-20th-century industrial-era hardships, depicted experiences of gender policing, workplace discrimination, and interpersonal relationships without resolution through medical intervention, gaining acclaim as an early exploration of such themes in literature.

Feinberg's nonfiction, including Transgender Warriors (1996), argued for transgender phenomena as transhistorical responses to social conditions rather than isolated pathologies, emphasizing solidarity across butch, femme, and cross-gender expressions in pursuit of communist revolution over individualized identity reforms. Ze died from complications of tick-borne infections after years of illness, requesting remembrance as a revolutionary communist rather than solely through gender categories.