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.

Leslie Feinberg was born on September 1, 1949, in Kansas City, Missouri. Feinberg was raised in Buffalo, New York, where the family lived in housing connected to Bell Aircraft projects. Feinberg came from a working-class Jewish family; hir father, Irving Feinberg, was employed at Bell Aircraft in the years after World War II.

Leslie Feinberg was born on September 1, 1949, in Kansas City, Missouri, and raised in a working-class Jewish family in Buffalo, New York, during the 1950s and 1960s. From an early age, Feinberg exhibited masculine gender presentation, later self-describing as "a very masculine woman" in hir 1980 autobiographical pamphlet Journal of a Transsexual. This nonconformity manifested in childhood and adolescence amid a blue-collar environment, where Feinberg faced social penalties for deviating from expected feminine norms, including harassment simply for appearing as a masculine female in public.