From Stone Butch Blues to Drag King Dreams, Feinberg left a lasting imprint on the trans liberation movement.
By Quispe López August 29, 2025
“Remember me as a revolutionary communist” were beloved author, labor organizer, and trans liberation fighter Leslie Feinberg’s final words on November 15, 2014.
Best known for hir seminal 1993 novel Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg forever changed the way we thought about transgender life in the United States. In the semi-autobiographical work, readers follow Jess Goldberg, a working class Jewish butch lesbian, as they navigate the hardships of being gender-nonconforming in a transphobic world, transition, passing, and trying to find queer community through it all. It is a novel so attuned to transmasculine experience that Stone Butch Blues to this day remains a shorthand and point of connection for many trans men, nonbinary people, and trans lesbians broadly.
That’s because Feinberg saw writing as a tool to break down the rigidity of previous understandings of transition. Instead, zie pushed for an expansive view of the term “transgender” — one that left space for the “gender outlaws” of the world who have existed beyond binary Western conceptions of gender since the beginning of time.
To say Feinberg permanently altered the fabric of the trans liberation movement would be an understatement. But to understand hir legacy and work, you need to know who zie was in life. Born September 1, 1949 and raised in Buffalo, New York, Feinberg grew up in a working-class Jewish family and was employed in factories at a young age. It’s through hir labor organizing alongside other butch lesbians and transmasculine people of the time that Feinberg became connected to broader liberation movements like Palestinian solidarity, the anti-racist movement, and transgender rights.
Feinberg’s work underscored the complexity of gender for many trans people, and zie didn’t shy away from trying to get cis people to understand. Following the breakout success of Stone Butch Blues, Feinberg went on to be one of the most visible trans organizers of the 1990s, appearing on popular television programs like The Joan Rivers Show to speak about realities of trans life. Zie went on to write several books on trans life and liberation, such as Drag King Dreams, Transgender Warriors: Making History From Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman, and Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue. As a proud member of the Workers of the World Party, Feinberg emphasized how our struggles for freedom — whether it be gender, race, or class — are all intrinsically linked. Hir legacy insists that in order to free ourselves, we must understand that we are all fighting forms of injustice attached to the same chimera of oppression.
As we celebrate Feinberg’s birthday and Labor Day on September 1, it is a natural time to reflect on hir legacy, work, and contributions to trans people’s collective liberation. Below, we’ve compiled a non-comprehensive list of salient quotes from speeches, books, and articles Feinberg crafted during hir life.
“If you don’t name an oppression, you can’t fight it, you can’t organize around it. We want our own voices to be heard.” — The Joan Rivers Show
A 1993 episode of The Joan Rivers Show about trans people featured Leslie Feinberg alongside famed playwright Kate Bornstein and actor David Harrison. Rivers interviewed each of her guests on their experiences with gender, often asking invasive questions about “the surgery” and what people put down on forms and identity documents. But Feinberg took it as the ultimate opportunity to humanize trans people on national television, cutting through the sensationalizing to share the realities of life outside the Western gender binary. Feinberg even went so far as to point out the existence of gender variant people in cultures all over the world prior to colonization, such as Two-Spirit people — a radical thought for the daytime television audience of the 1990s.
“Understanding the amount of persecution and harassment we have in this society is gonna strengthen the fights from affirmative action to pay equity for all of us,” zie said.
Even when Rivers facetiously dug in with questions about why Feinberg didn’t conform to one gender or another, zie flipped the question and asked why the system existed at all. Rather than spouting off theory, Feinberg made the contradiction tangible by speaking on hir own lived experiences as a nonbinary butch. The whole episode is worth viewing in full.
“But very quickly I discovered that passing didn’t just mean slipping below the surface, it meant being buried alive.” — Stone Butch Blues
Feinberg’s seminal novel wasn’t just a reflection on being a trans in a transphobic society; the semi-biographical work offered a nuanced portrayal of the intersection of butch identity and nonbinary transness. Jess Goldberg, Stone Butch Blues’ protagonist, is forced to pass as a man for safety due to the dangers of being an openly gender non-conforming person in the 1950s and ’60s. But Jess is left feeling entirely isolated . A departure from the “born in the wrong body” narrative of transness, Feinberg instead paints a picture of being forced into a box for safety — and the subsequent loss of community that going stealth can present.
“I was still me on the inside, trapped in there with all my wounds and fears. But I was no longer me on the outside,” Jess reflects in the novel.
“I’m not saying we’ll live to see some sort of paradise. But just fighting for change makes you stronger. Not hoping for anything will kill you for sure.” — Stone Butch Blues
While Stone Butch Blues grapples with heavy themes like the loss of community, transphobia, and social isolation, it ends on a note of hope for our protagonist. In addition to highlighting the harsh realities of being trans, Feinberg always stood steadfast in our need to find strength in each other in the face of it. At the nadir of their isolation after moving to New York City, Jess meets Ruth, a trans woman who reminds them that the only way to survive in the face of transphobia is to rely on each other.
“As I look at them, each one, they are so beautiful and so strong they seem larger than life to me. But they’re not. They are real people. Flawed, like me. No heroic proportions. Just human.” — Drag King Dreams
Another work of fiction, Feinberg’s 2006 political novel Drag King Dreams follows Max Rabinowitz, a trans man who is suddenly catapulted back into social justice spaces by a tragedy after losing his joy for organizing.
The novel often invokes real-life trans figures such as Marsha P. Johnson to shore up its core thesis that all of our struggles for liberation are delicately interconnected. We might all be flawed, and it can be hard to work together at times, but when it counts, we need to put aside our differences and fight. At the culmination of the novel, Max realizes that you don’t need to be perfect to be a good comrade and make a difference.
“Maybe this is what legends are made of — real lives lifted up in retrospect to mythic proportions,” Feinberg writes.
“One banner particularly haunted me: it read ‘Stop the War Against Black America,’ which made me realize it wasn’t just distant wars that needed opposing.” — Transgender Warriors: Making History From Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman
Feinberg always emphasized the interconnected nature of all forms of oppression in hir work. Zie underwood that, rather than fighting in individual silos, it’s imperative to understand the ways that suppressive societal forces work in tandem. In hir 1996 historical reflection on transness, Transgender Warriors: Making History From Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman, Feinberg speaks about an experience they had at a protest for Palestinian liberation that opened their eyes to the symbiotic relationship between white supremacy, colonialism both abroad and domestically, and trans liberation.
“When our lives are suppressed, everyone is denied an understanding of the rich diversity of sex and gender expression and experience that exist in human society.” — Transgender Warriors: Making History From Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman
By outlining the history of gender variance all over the world, Feinberg reminds readers that trans people are nothing new; we have always been here. Often, we were even revered.
“We have not always been forced to pass, to go underground, in order to work and live. We have a right to live openly and proudly,” Feinberg writes.
“No one’s sex reassignment or fluidity of gender threatens your right to self-identify and self-expression. On the contrary, our struggle bolsters your right to your identity. My right to be me is tied with a thousand threads to your right to be you.” — Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue
In this collection of speeches published in 1998, Feinberg reminds us that trans liberation has always been connected to the fight for cisgender gay, lesbian, and bisexual rights. Historically, and even to date, trans people have faced pushback from some cisgender people in the community who believe that the fight for trans rights will invalidate their own struggles. A constant advocate for solidarity between movements, Feinberg always asserted that without trans rights, there would be no gay rights.
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