Leslie Feinberg – a communist pioneer for transgender rights
By Minnie Bruce Pratt on November 18, 2014
Speaking in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Town Hall, New York, 1999.
WW photo: Deirdre Griswold
WW photo: Deirdre Griswold
She died at home in Syracuse, N.Y., with her partner and spouse of 22 years, Minnie Bruce Pratt, at her side. Her last words were: “Hasten the revolution! Remember me as a revolutionary communist.”
Feinberg was the first theorist to advance a Marxist concept of “transgender liberation,” and her work impacted popular culture, academic research and political organizing.
Her historical and theoretical writing has been widely anthologized and taught in the U.S. and international academic circles. Her impact on mass culture was primarily through her 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 and also passed from hand-to-hand inside prisons, the novel has been translated into Chinese, Dutch, German, Italian, Slovenian, Turkish and Hebrew. Her earnings from the Hebrew edition go to ASWAT, Palestinian Gay Women.
Painting a wall for CeCe McDonald.
She preferred to use the pronouns she/zie and her/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.”
Low-wage worker, anti-racist organizer
Feinberg was born Sept. 1, 1949, in Kansas City, Mo., and raised in Buffalo, N.Y., in a working-class Jewish family. At age 14 she began supporting herself by working in the display sign shop of a local department store, and eventually stopped going to high school classes, though officially she received her diploma. It was during this time that she entered the social life of the Buffalo gay bars. She moved out of a biological family hostile to her sexuality and gender expression, and to the end of her life carried legal documents that made clear they were not her family.
With Minnie Bruce Pratt at Stop War on Iran protest.
WW photo: Mike Eilenfeldt
WW photo: Mike Eilenfeldt
In her early twenties, Feinberg met Workers World Party at a demonstration for Palestinian land rights and self-determination. She soon joined WWP’s founding Buffalo branch.
After moving to New York City, she participated in numerous mass organizing campaigns by the party over the years, including many anti-war, pro-labor rallies. 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 10 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 embarked on a national tour about AIDS as a denied epidemic.
Feinberg was one of the organizers of the 1988 mobilization in Atlanta that routed the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan as they tried to march down Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue on MLK Day. When anti-abortion groups descended on Buffalo in 1992 and again in 1998-1999, following the murder there of Dr. Barnard 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 WW journalist since 1974, Feinberg was the editor of the Political Prisoners page of the newspaper for 15 years, becoming a managing editor in 1995. She was a member of the National Committee of the Party.
From 2004 to 2008, Feinberg’s writing on the links between socialism and LGBT history, “Lavender & Red,” ran as a 120-part series in Workers World. Her most recent book, “Rainbow Solidarity in Defense of Cuba,” was an edited selection of that series. (workers.org/lavender-red)
Feinberg authored two other nonfiction 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 of the National Writers Union, United Auto Workers Local 1981 and of Pride at Work, an AFL-CIO constituency group. She received an honorary doctorate from the Starr King School for the Ministry for her transgender and social justice work, and was the recipient of numerous other awards, including the Lambda Literary Award and the American Library Association Gay and Lesbian Book Award.
‘Bigotry, prejudice, lack of science’
During a period when diseases would not allow her to read, write or talk, Feinberg continued to communicate through art. Picking up a camera for the first time, she posted thousands of pictures on Flickr, including “The Screened-In Series,” a disability-art, class-conscious documentary of her Hawley-Green neighborhood photographed entirely from behind the windows of her apartment. (tinyurl.com/k5bpg58)
Diagnosed with Lyme and multiple tick-borne co-infections in 2008, Feinberg was infected first in the early 1970s when little was known about the diseases. She had received treatment for these only within the last six years. She said, “My experience in ILADS care offers great hope to desperately ill people who are in earlier stages of tick-borne diseases.”
She attributed her catastrophic health crisis to “bigotry, prejudice and lack of science” — active prejudice toward her transgender identity that made access to health care exceedingly difficult and lack of science from limits placed by mainstream medical authorities on information, treatment and research about Lyme and its co-infections. She blogged online about these issues in “Casualty of an Undeclared War.” (transgenderwarrior.org)
At the time of her death, Feinberg was preparing a 20th-anniversary edition of “Stone Butch Blues.” She worked up to within a few days of her death to prepare the edition for free access, reading and download from on-line. In addition to the text of the novel, the on-line edition will contain a slideshow, “This Is What Solidarity Looks Like,” documenting the breadth of the organizing campaign to free CeCe McDonald, a young Minneapolis (trans)woman organizer and activist sent to prison for defending herself against a white neo-Nazi attacker. The new edition is dedicated to McDonald. A devoted group of friends are continuing to work to post Feinberg’s final writing and art online at lesliefeinberg.net.
Feinberg’s spouse, Minnie Bruce Pratt, an activist and poet, is the author of “Crime Against Nature” about loss of custody of her sons as a lesbian mother. Feinberg and Pratt met in 1992 when Feinberg presented a slideshow on her transgender research in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the local Workers World branch. After a long-distance courtship, they made their home for many years in Jersey City, N.J., where, to protect their relationship, the couple domestic-partnered in 2004 and civil-unioned in 2006. They also married in civil ceremony in Massachusetts and in New York state in 2011.
Feinberg stressed that state authorities had no right to assign who were or were not her loved ones, but rather that she would define her chosen family, citing Marx who said that the exchange value of love is — love.
Feinberg is survived by Pratt and an extended family of choice, as well as many friends, activists and comrades around the world in struggle against oppression and for liberation.
Articles copyright 1995-2014 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
I thought that was something worth highlighting.
Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
Shocking news out of England where the Iraq Inquiry appears to have come to some conclusions (finally). The Inquiry kicked off with Chair John Chilcot declaring:
This is an Inquiry by a committee of Privy Counsellors. It will consider the period from the summer of 2001 to the end of July 2009, embracing the run-up to the conflict in Iraq, the military action and its aftermath. We will therefore be considering the UK's involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made and actions taken, to establish, as accurately as possible, what happened and to identify the lessons that can be learned. Those lessons will help ensure that, if we face similar situations in future, the government of the day is best equipped to respond to those situations in the most effective manner in the best interests of the country.
The Inquiry held public hearings starting in November 2009 and concluding in February 2011.
That was nearly four years ago and still people wait for the Inquiry to issue its findings.
Well . . .
It turns out only some people wait.
Some people already know the findings.
RT reports:
Letters containing in-depth conclusions of a public inquiry into Britain’s 2003 Iraq War have been dispatched to the probe’s primary participants. Critics charge that the brutal eight-year war divided Britain and blackened Tony Blair’s legacy.
Under UK law, any individual that faces criticism in a public inquiry must be issued with an official letter warning them of allegations in its findings. They are subsequently then permitted to rebut and counter unsavory or unsatisfactory findings.
The Daily Mail adds:
In May [UK Prime Minister] David Cameron said he expected the report to be published ‘before the end of the year’.
He added: ‘The public wants to see the answers of the inquiry and I think we shouldn’t have to wait too much longer.’
But
just four weeks of the Parliamentary term remain – making it unlikely
that it will be published before MPs recess for Christmas.
The big fear politically about the report has been Labour's fear that anchor around the neck Tony Blair will sink them all, that the report -- even if it's a whitewash -- has to hold the War Criminal accountable for his actions and words.
If the report doesn't come out by the end of the year, however, Labour could score points by painting Cameron (of the Conservative Party) as an obstructionist refusing to allow the British people to know the truth.
Space has already been created between the current Labour leadership and disgraced War Criminal Tony Blair. Demanding the release of the report and painting the Conservative Party as a barrier to the report's release could actually help Labour improve their numbers in Parliament.
As for the discarded Tony Blair?
Dominic Grover (IBT) notes:
Blair continues to be a deeply divisive figure in
Britain, due to his decision to back George W Bush campaign to topple
Saddam and the controversial "sexed up" dossier, which critics claim
mis-sold the need for war to the British people.
France's foreign minister recently said Blair was "not best placed" to issue advice on the Middle East, in light of his track record.
There have even been alleged threats to his life, with terror suspect Erol Incedal accused of plotting an attack on him.
To cap it all, Mayor of London Boris Johnson has chosen to compare the three-time New Labour leader to tyrant Adolf Hitler in a new book.Despite that, War Criminal Tony feels the world needs to listen to him on Iraq. The criminal doesn't want to confess, please understand, he just laughably believes he has expertise and wisdom to share.
He has nothing to share.
Blair fancies himself a Christian yet he's never taken accountability for how the Iraq War has destroyed the Christian communities in Iraq.
-
Baghdad Patriarch: "I will not resign myself to an
#Iraq and a Middle East without Christians" http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Baghdad-Patriarch-hopes-to-see-Francis-in-Iraq-to-restore-Christians'-hope-32732.html …0 replies 25 retweets 9 favorites
CitizenGO
He may not want it but it may beyond his control.
Some people have a hard time giving up control -- even those who consider themselves servants of a God or god. John Bingham (Telegraph of London) presents the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby explaining that, "I think there is an answer that says we need to do more where there is really no choice but we also need to be deeply committed to enabling solutions to be found enabling communities that have been there for 2,000 years to remain there."
If Welby's so worried that Christians may vanish, he can always pack a suitcase and go live there.
The notion that Christian refugees should not be granted asylum outside the region?
I'm sorry, would you also go back in time and argue that Jews in Germany and surrounding areas not be granted asylum to safety because Jews might vanish from the region?
Because it sounds sort of like you would.
Too much time by 'caring' people has already been wasted with faux concerns about how refugees are vanishing from the region when the reality is that refugees want to leave and find safety. I don't know how this is confusing and I don't believe that this or that religious leader is honestly puzzled.
I think people are actively looking to look the other way just as they did during the Holocaust.
The Yazidis swooped in on the wave of outrage the targeting of Christians had created. I am not accusing the Yazidis of anything. I am saying that outrage was building and certain members of Congress were calling out the treatment of the Chaldeans which the US press was ignoring and then the religious minority (Yazidis) were trapped on Mount Sinjar and the press glommed on it.
It was an important story. (The fact that Yazidis remain trapped on Mount Sinjar is an important story -- even if the US press can't find it.) But somewhere along the way, the press -- the US press -- completely missed what was happening to Iraq's Christian community in the last months.
Margaret Griffis (Antiwar.com) reports, "At least 91 people were killed today, mostly militants, and another 24 people were wounded." In addition, Iraqi Spring MC reports the bombing of Falluja's residential neighborhood by the Iraqi military continues -- despite Prime Minister Haider al-Baidi promising September 13th that these War Crimes would end. Today, 3 civilians were injured in these bombings.
Moving over to food, Justin Worland (Time magazine) reports, "Iraq’s agriculture minister on Tuesday accused the extremist group Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) of pilfering more than 1.1 million tons of grain from the country’s northern region and delivering it to militant-controlled cities in Syria." That news comes as US House Rep Rick Crawford's office issues the following:
Washington, Nov 18 | Mitchell Nail
In a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, U.S. Congressman
Rick Crawford (AR-1) and U.S. Senator John Boozman (R-AR) today urged
protecting American rice producers against unfair business practices in
Iraq.
In early November, the Iraqi Grain Board (IGB) paid $1.4 million more to buy rice from Brazil and Uruguay rather than accept the competitive, lower bid by U.S. rice.
“Given the considerable investment of resources by the American taxpayer in Iraq, it is critical that the United States be on ‘equal footing’ with its foreign competitors when it comes to the ability to win bids issued by the IGB. Simply deciding to pick winners and losers in bids for Iraqi rice tenders based on arbitrary reasons is not only unfair, it deprives rice farmers in Arkansas — a leader in rice production — and across America of a vital trading partnership with Iraq,” the members wrote.
A tender to buy 30,000 metric tons of rice closed on Sunday, November 16th. Winning bids are expected to be announced later this week.
To read the letter in its entirety, click here.
In early November, the Iraqi Grain Board (IGB) paid $1.4 million more to buy rice from Brazil and Uruguay rather than accept the competitive, lower bid by U.S. rice.
“Given the considerable investment of resources by the American taxpayer in Iraq, it is critical that the United States be on ‘equal footing’ with its foreign competitors when it comes to the ability to win bids issued by the IGB. Simply deciding to pick winners and losers in bids for Iraqi rice tenders based on arbitrary reasons is not only unfair, it deprives rice farmers in Arkansas — a leader in rice production — and across America of a vital trading partnership with Iraq,” the members wrote.
A tender to buy 30,000 metric tons of rice closed on Sunday, November 16th. Winning bids are expected to be announced later this week.
To read the letter in its entirety, click here.
We'll close with this from Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America:
WHAT: Coming off Veterans Day 2014 and a week when politicians and lawmakers touted their support for the veterans community, IAVA urges members of Congress to now step up and take action to pass the Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention Bill of 2014. The bill, dropped Monday, was introduced by Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Richard Burr (R-N.C.), Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Ala.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).
IAVA Legislative Director Alex Nicholson and Susan Selke, mother of Clay Hunt, a Marine veteran who died by suicide, will be available for press ahead of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee (SVAC) hearing on Mental Health and Suicide Among Veterans at 10 a.m. outside the hearing room in the Russell Senate Office Building SR-418.
Susan Selke will then testify before SVAC at 10:30 a.m.
WHO: Alex Nicholson, IAVA Legislative Director and Susan Selke, mother of Clay Hunt, Marine veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and died by suicide in 2011
WHEN: Wednesday, November 19, 2014 at 10 a.m.
WHERE: Outside Hearing Room- Russell Senate Office Building SR-418
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