How Leslie Feinberg Became the Parent I Needed During My Transition

“I needed preparation, not protection. I needed to see myself as a part of history.”

“Gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught.” —Leslie Feinberg, 1949-2014

I first heard of Leslie Feinberg’s semi-autobiographical novel Stone Butch Blues as an undergrad, after coming out as a lesbian, an announcement I would later retract. Stripping away the rationalizations that had enabled me to remain closeted to myself regarding my fluid sexuality forced me to look at my gender, and the fluidity I found there, too, confused and terrified me. In order to read the story of Jess Goldberg, the narrator of Stone Butch Blues, I had to overcome my fear of a kind of death— the death of my desire to be normal—at which point I would start becoming myself. Weird is something I’ve always been called, for varying reasons, and I’ve often interpreted it to mean unwanted.

When I finally flipped through a copy of Stone Butch Blues in the Rainbow Lounge above the university cafeteria where all the drunk kids came late at night for pizza, foreboding spread through me like cold water. I didn’t want to walk any further into Feinberg’s words.

Although I’ve never been particularly butch, nor “stone” (a term used in lesbian communities to refer to a top who prefers not to be genitally touched), and though the majority of my sexual partners have been men, the candor with which Feinberg wrote about Jess’s romantic and sexual life provided me one model of a non-binary person negotiating their relationship to their body. The descriptions of Jess’s intimacy with her partners—the frankness with which prostheses and the effects of past trauma are addressed, the disregard for the cis male gaze—let me know that another kind of love was possible.

I’m privileged to live in a city with an excellent and well-funded LGBT health provider, Howard Brown. Unlike many trans people, I don’t dread doctor’s appointments. When I told an acquaintance of mine, a Jewish woman, how upset I was at Trump’s transgender military ban tweet, I felt ashamed; I’ve never experienced familial or economic pressure to join the armed forces, and white masc privilege mostly inoculates me against the worst of structural transphobia. As memes about Trump’s tweet popped up in my Facebook newsfeed, I wondered how many of the cis people posting truly understood that hormone therapy and surgery are, for the trans people who do require them, not cosmetic or elective but necessary to survive. While gender-confirming surgeries can indeed be prohibitively expensive for trans individuals, they constitute a negligible percentage of the US military’s budget. I couldn’t shake the anger and sadness.

“You haven’t had any preparation,” my friend explained. By this she meant that I’d had no parent who could prepare me. Her mother had taught her what it meant to be a Jew in the world, taught her to understand that “never again” meant vigilance. My mother, a straight cis woman, could not possibly warn me of what might be ahead in an America intent on returning to the queerphobic cultural mores of her childhood. Instead, I had the knowledge that the boys who called me an “it” and a “faggot” and prank-called me pretending to be a popular girl soliciting sex were the same boys who made anti-Semitic jokes and carved Swastikas into their desks—that these boys’ parents were not impoverished salt-of-the-earth rural Americans but brain surgeons and corporate lawyers, former NFL quarterbacks and devisers of complicated financial instruments.

“I just think of you as a person,” or conversely, “Do you think there will ever be a time where you can just be a person?” are comments I hear regularly from cis people above a certain age—they are really asking that I not “inconvenience” others by requesting he/him pronouns—despite the patience with accidental misgendering I happily afford anyone who has an open heart and is willing to try. As if personhood were incompatible with being trans.

While I’ve since realized that HRT is not a panacea, last summer I felt that if I didn’t begin testosterone I was going to kill myself. Only selfish, attention-seeking people kill themselves, we’re told, and so I’d mostly kept the severity of my suicidal ideation plausibly deniable, even to myself, much like my transness. Denial and rationalization are profound forces. I didn’t need to medically transition, I told myself for nine months after coming out. I was afraid of the cost financially, professionally, socially, romantically. Many cis people seem to feel that to medically transition is to mutilate yourself. Even though I suspected that hormone therapy could enable me to lead a genuinely fulfilling life, my mother’s friends urged me to read de-transitioning narratives and my own friends insisted on the necessity of Absolute Certainty, so I backpedaled.

Feinberg, unlike me, did not identify as a man but as a butch lesbian who existed in a gender liminal state. I grew up in the Chicago suburbs and went on to pursue graduate study, which mostly consisted of going on bad OK Cupid dates, eating scones in bookstore cafes and feeling sorry for myself while eating said scones. Feinberg began working in factories as a teenager and accessed testosterone for hir safety as an outwardly masculine woman. Growing a beard didn’t allow Feinberg to escape the blows of nightsticks when police raided gay bars and other community gatherings, but it did allow hir to avoid everyday homophobic violence and to maintain steadier employment despite hir labor activism. Ze also accessed top surgery to alleviate physical dysphoria. The description of Jess Goldberg’s top surgery procedure in Stone Butch Blues, of the cynical, exploitative treatment she receives from medical providers, is chilling.

“Look, I don’t understand any of this. But I can tell you this hospital is for sick people,” a nurse tells Jess post-procedure, to explain why the doctor who took her money neither granted her a consultation nor showed up to perform the mastectomy himself; why she isn’t being offered a room to recuperate in but rather sent home immediately without anything for the pain. “You people make some arrangement with Costanza on the side, that’s your business. But this bed and our time is for sick people.” Another nurse, more compassionate, apologetically sneaks Jess four Darvon in a paper towel. Because Jess is unable to provide a doctor’s note, she also loses her job at a factory.

While trans visibility has certainly increased since the early seventies, we are no longer a protected class under employment discrimination and hate crimes legislation. Trump’s administration prioritizes religious conscience above public health and seeks to legally enable doctors like those who turned away Robert Eads, a trans man who died of ovarian cancer in 1999 in Georgia because no one would treat him. Regardless of whether cis people can empathize with trans people—whether we “make sense” or remain inscrutable, inducing discomfort—no one’s personal beliefs should impede us from enjoying basic human rights.

Feinberg’s foundational, identity-affirming text is out of print. Outside certain circles, Feinberg’s remarkable life and work as an author and radical organizer are hardly remembered. Feinberg came of age as a working-class, Jewish queer in mid-century upstate New York. At a time when it was enshrined in law that American citizens wear at least three items of clothing corresponding to their “biological” sex, a time long before the term non-binary or the singular they entered the nomenclature, Feinberg bravely articulated and fought for a sense of self, a way of being human, neither male nor female but somewhere in between or outside the two. That this book isn’t more widely available, given how many it has parented and empowered, trans people and cis queer women alike, is unacceptable. I am grateful to Leslie Feinberg for the way ze lived hir life, for transmitting all ze learned to this generation, for fighting so relentlessly on behalf of trans people’s undeniable humanity.

I know that when my mother discouraged me from coming out, first as queer then later as trans, she was trying to protect me from other people’s judgment. But I needed preparation, not protection. I needed to see myself as a part of history, to understand how that history influenced the present and the potential future. As Feinberg documented in hir book Transgender Warriors, people have existed across the gender spectrum throughout recorded human history, not only in Native American and South East Asian cultures but in Western Europe as well. In one particularly poignant passage from Stone Butch Blues, Jess dreams that she is in a house filled with the spirits of other trans and gender non-conforming people, both ancestors and those to come, surrounded by lineage, engulfed in a profound feeling of wholeness. Like a rite of passage, reading Stone Butch Blues ushered me into the bolder and more expansive life that was waiting.