Transgender Warrior Interview With Leslie Feinberg

Introduction: The Lesbian Gay Bisexual Programs Office of the University of Michigan will open its Silver Anniversary Distinguished Lecturer Series with a presentation by transgender author and activist, Leslie Feinberg, on Saturday, Nov. 2, at the William Monroe Trotter House in Ann Arbor. Feinberg's lecture, "Transgender Warriors, " will offer a sweeping look at the history and oppression of transgender people and discusses what "trans liberation" means for the women's, people of color, and lesbian gaybisexual struggles.

Leslie Feinberg came of age as a young butch lesbian in the factories and gay bars of Buffalo, NY in the 1960s. A journalist and typesetter by trade, the discrimination that she endured because of her cross dressing and androgynous features, along with her subsequent writings about it, have made her one of the best known activists in the United States' nascent transgender movement.

Feinberg's lavishly illustrated new book, Transgender Warriors (Beacon Press, 1996), chronicles the important roles played by transgender people as spiritual and political leaders throughout history. From Joon of Are to the Two-Spirit traditions in American cultures, to RuPaul. Her previous work, Stone Butch Blues (Firebrand Books, 1994), received that year's American Library Association Award for Gay & Lesbian Literature and a LAMBDA Literary Award. The following text is from a May 22, 1996 interview with Feinberg by Lynden Kelly, originally broadcast on Radio Q, of public affairs program on U-M 's student-run radio station, WCBN-88.3 FM. Radio Q can be heard weekly on Wednesdays at 6:30pm. It shares "The Gay Radio Hour" with Closets are for Clothes, starting at 6 pm.

KELLY: Stone Butch Blues was one of my favorite books of all time. It really blew me away in a lot of ways - one of which was that it was the best description of pre-Stonewall lesbian and gay life in America I have ever read. It was the first time that I felt like I got a visceral sense of what it was like to be there - to be in the bars, to be expecting to be raided at any time by the cops, and then when that happened the way the cops were so brutal and mean and bullying. I think it's really important to keep that memory alive in our culture. And when I read Transgender Warriors it was pretty clear that that was part of your life. Why did you choose fiction to tell that story?

FEINBERG: There are two reasons. First of all, I had tried writing a short story at the request of an anthologer for The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader. It was an experiment because I usually write non-fiction - I have a journalism background in the progressive movement - and I had always thought of fiction asa rather imprecise tool for such a topic that people can react so subjectively to (the transgender).

And when I had heard the discussions reopening about butchfemme in the lesbian community but I still heard a certain kind of shorthand about abilities or lack of abilities being attached to people's gender expression like, 'Tm butch because I know how to use power tools" or "She's femme because she doesn't think mathematically," I felt it was important to intervene with my voice and say from my point of view people have the right to express their gender without that meaning that they are going to be necessarily good at something or not good at something else. And I wrote the short story about the oppression of people based on how they expressed their gender. And I could never have anticipated what a wave of support I got. I ended up writing two short stories for that anthology and the response was so strong that I used them to write the novel.

Also, in approaching writing a work at that time like a novel, I had to figure out what genre to use. I actually felt that I would feel freer to explore more emotional truths about this oppression through fiction than tnrough autobiography and it would grant me greater freedom to illustrate things for people than just necessarily taking moments from my own life. So, it's completely fiction but like all fiction it doesn't mean it's not resonating with truth.

KELLY: For me, being more a fiction reader than a non-fiction reader, and as a bookseller who sees a lot of people come into the store looking for fiction, you really do reach a different group of people with fiction who won't pick up non-fiction.

FEINBERG: I want my writing to be accessible. I want to write the kind of gender theory that someone can read on a beach and not feel intimidated by. I want to write for the people who think they don't read history and theory and politics - because of course they do - they're living it all the time.

KELLY: I think fiction also reaches out and grabs you by the heart more than non-fiction and that's what Stone Butch Blues did. For me, a window was opened into the world of transgender which I had no idea existed before and I felt like I really got a true picture of what it was like for this one person to live the daily struggle of that kind of oppression.

FEINBERG: There is a certain universality when you're reading about someone's oppression and of course you can't imagine it if you have never lived through it or seen it represented respectfully in culture. It Iets someone look out the eyes of the person - like you said - and then from the inside you think "Oh, I know how this feels!" No matter what it is that you experience every day - being a woman, a person of color, disabled - whatever it is, you think "Oh, I know this."

KELLY: I think gay and lesbian people really do identify with "the outsider" and the outsider not being able to find a place in the world where they fit.

FEINBERG: Yes, and most of the world is made up of people who are outsiders in this system.

KELLY: It's shocking that we don't see that and identify with each other more, which kind of bridges the gap into Transgender Warriors and what you talk about there. But one question before we get into that: What is it like for you, as a writer, to put this work down in the privacy of your own workspace, to create this thing that is obviously really important to you, and then send it out into the world not knowing what is going to happen to it?

FEINBERG: I've been writing articles for 20 years every week for Workers World newspaper. And it's a similar experience every week, as a journalist, to write an article and not know who is going to be reading it, or the response. So, I think I was a little more prepared for it on one level. My writing for me is part of my activism. I do it - I try to do the best job I can - and it's not perfect and when you're done revising and it's out there then you have a chance to work on something else. But what I couldn't have anticipated really was how Stone Butch Blues would kind of catch a wave of interest and an opening for transgender issues or for gender issues in general.

KELLY: Could you help us with some terminology? What is transgender, transsexual, transvestite, and how are those terms being used today?

FEINBERG: They're used in a couple of ways. For example, the word transgender gets used commonly by many "trans" organizations as being an umbrella term that incorporates transsexual men and women who have reassigned the sex they were labeled at birth, people who are cross dressers, sometimes referred to as transvestite (but that's being used less now because it's been so defined by the psychological industry as being as sort of a fetish as opposed to just another way to express yourself. It also means those who are literally transgendered or across the boundary of the gender expression we were assigned at birth - meaning that we are masculine women or feminine men. It can mean intersexual people, referred to in the past as hermaphrodites; bearded women who allow their beards to grow and whose lives are changed by the experience; women weight lifters who have been pumping iron so much that they have problems using a bathroom. Really, it's used in this umbrella way to include everyone who is confronting the social boundaries of sex and gender. And it's also used in a more specific way: sometimes you hear transsexualtransgender. And when it's used in that way it means transsexual, people who are going through a sex reassignment, and those of us whose gender expression appears to be at odds with our birth sex either because of the way we dress or move or express ourselves.

KELLY: And how about the term "she" which I think is pronounced "she"?

FEINBERG: Or "see," like "see with your eyes." The gender-neutral pronoun she is really one of the gains of the women's movement because as we all know up until the women's movement educational materials and corporate training manuals all said "the writer, he; the manager, he" and the women's movement meant that people had to add the "s" to make it inclusive of women and men. But once the slash was in there it became a gender-neutral pronoun too. I asked Beacon Press, which put out Transcender Warriors, to use she and also to use "hir" as gender-neutral pronouns for me in bookjacketcopy so that people would begin to realize how much baggage or how many assumptions are already in play once you say I'd like you to meet this person, she or he.

KELLY: And how do you pronounce "hir"?

FEINBERG: Like "here," right "here and now."

KELLY: And that comes from the combination of "him" and "her"?

FEINBERG: Right, exactly. And these are terms that in some ways are being experimented with primarily in the beginning in cyberspace. People also used "ze" for "she and he" but I felt that she had become so recognizable in society that it was worth introducing along with the possessive pronoun hir to say: Look, if you were able through a gender neutral pronoun to say I'd like you to meet this person what a different introduction that is without assumption and how you then have to explore that person to find out who they are.

KELLY: I really liked in Transgender Warriors the way that you described how the continuum of male to female expression is more CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE

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like a circle than a line with two polar opposites. Could you tell us more about that?

FEINBERG: Yes, because I'm considered masculine - I really think my gender expression is far more complex than that - but because people look at me and say "She's trying to be like a man," the assumption is that men are masculine and women are feminine so the woman who tends towards masculinity is looking like a man and a man who is feminine is trying to look like a woman. And I think that really enforces the idea that there are only two ways to be. I pointed out in Transgender Warriors that when I ride the subway in Manhattan - even in such a repressive society that regulates what people can wear and how they can express themselves by law and through violence against people who transgress it - I still see women who range from masculine to androgynous to feminine, and men who range from feminine to androgynous to masculine. And if we think of a circle and defend people's right to move on it or to incorpórate ambiguity and contradiction then we really get a wider concept of what kind of gender freedom we are fighting for.

KELLY: I understand what you're saying that your physical reality of sex and gender expression are independent characteristics, and even your sexual orientation is a third independent characteristic, and each of those varíes along a continuum and probably for each person also varíes over time. Is it your sense that in a "perfect world" people wouldn't feel compelled to re-sculpt their bodies physically to conform with an internal sense - that if society accepted all ranges on the continuum, would people still feel an internal discontinuity?

FEINBERG: I don't profess to have any advance knowledge of the future ... However, one of the things I looked at in Transgender Warriors is that we have been kind of given an assumption culturally through the media that transsexualism is a high-tech phenomenon. And it's true that the development of an aesthetic - which led to great advances in surgery - and the commercial synthesis of hormones made it possible for people to have greater freedom in choosing to live in the sex in which they are most identified, not the sex they were labeled by some doctor who glanced at their genitals at birth. However when I went and looked back in history I found that sex change was a very ancient and once-sacred path, and that surgical and possibly even hormonal knowledge was very much part of ancient communal cultures and that people chose sex change and went into very esteemed areas of communal life like being priestesses, spiritual leaders, as well as other roles. And so I think that when we look at those societies in which people were allowed to walk many paths and the compulsion to fit the narrow Ozzie-and-Harriet norms that we have today didn't exist, that people still did shape their bodies, surgically and I believe, probably also hormonally through knowledge of herbs and plants. And so I think that there is no reason to think that transsexuals will not always exert their right to explore their life in the body and the identity that they've chosen and that they feel deep inside but that hasn't been respected in this society. Hopefully what will change is the respect for people's transsexual paths.

KELLY: In Transgender Warriors you talk a lot about these other cultures, especially communal cultures in different places in the world in different times when transgender people were respected and revered. Can you give us a couple of examples of that?

FEINBERG: Chapter Three of Transgender Warriors doesn't even have to go back 25,000 years to the Paleolithic period to find the acceptance of trans expressions in communal cultures. Chapter Three deals with native nations on the North American continent and how the many different nations had varying and diverse responses to - and paths available to - people that are far different than what we think of as what is natural for men and women. For example, gay American-Indians documented 135 of what they call alternative gender roles in that many nations on this continent. And they've even reclaimed the language that existed for those people so that it's not just man and woman but other language that existed in those societies for other sex-gender paths. The very brilliant Menominee Two-Spirit person poet, Christos, served as a kind-of editor for Chapter Three of Transgender Warriors. "Two-Spirit" may incorporate the kind of "LGBT" that we use now for this whole coalition of all these communities. Many Two-Spirit people from native nations talk to me in the book about how their own legacies from their own nations treated people who were Two-Spirit. I think it's an amazing contrast to 200 years later what colonial U.S. history says is the way it has always been, when in fact just a couple-hundred years ago it wasn't. And the Two-Spirit tradition continues today for native nations and is part of the resistance to cultural genocide as well as physical genocide.

KELLY: It's really inspiring to read those accounts, too ...

FEINBERG: It is, isn't it? It shows that the kind of history I read in school had no heart. And it didn't have me in it either!

KELLY: It really was a big click for me too when I read about how Christianity came in and squashed the existing cultures. It has never really made sense to me what was the big problem that the culture had towards people who were in that gray area. It just didn't really seem like something that people should get so uptight about but when I read about the Christians coming in and trying to especially squash the pagan rights that made it make sense for me. It made me understand the motivation behind that kind of powerful squashing.

FEINBERG: And for me I wanted to look at also: Where did those religions arise from? Why did Christianity, for example, which had begun as a religion of the urban poor who wanted to resist tyranny - why did this suddenly become tyranny, or the flag of tyranny? And one thing that was interesting for me in the research for Transgender Warriors was to see how differently - when a group of people have to work together in order to survive - what a different relationship those individuals have to each other in terms of respecting the contributions of each member of the group. And how when societies began to divide into "I own it and you work for me" how much of a threat anything that represented the old free association of working together was to that new elite. I began to see how that was reflected in the religious beliefs that were imposed on people, the new laws that were imposed that said from now on you can't have same-sex love, women are not going to enjoy the status they did before, and I found that amongst the laboring classes that were being enslaved, there was a great reverence for transexpression, particularly as religious leaders. But that these religions and this reverence harkened back to an old system that threatened the new economie system. And so I thought this is like when I used to work in the factory and the strike was coming and suddenly they would come in and try to split us all up and make us fight each other. They were just doing that on a larger scale . . .

KELLY: Just divide and conquer. It's an old technique, and it works . . .

FEINBERG: Well, it works up to the point that one becomes conscious of it. And the moment you become conscious of the way you've been manipulated or pitted against other people it becomes like a bone that won't break twice in the same place.

KELLY: Which is why we as gay and lesbian people need to align ourselves with the transgender liberation movement, and the women's movement, and the African-American movement. FEINBERG: Well put, yes!

KELLY: Can you tell us about the people who you dedicated the book to - Brandon Teená and Marsha P. Johnson?

FEINBERG: I dedicated the book to Brandon Teena, a young white male who was arrested by the pólice who later exposed to the town that he was born female and he was kidnapped and gang-raped and beaten by two men after this discovery and later stabbed to death along with two other people by these same two men. No one has yet carried out a community investigation into the role of the police in instigating this violence against Brandon Teena. But his death has served as a rallying cry not just for the trans communities but I think also for the lesbiangay bi communities and the women's movement to put a stop to this violence. Marsha P. Johnson, who I also dedicated the book to, was an African-American drag queen who was a combatant at the Stonewall Rebellion against pólice brutality and bigotry. She was found floating in the Hudson River a little more than four years ago. The police conducted an investigation that consisted of two phone calis and ruled her death a suicide. But when a people's postering campaign began in Manhattan and the Village we discovered reports that a group of young bashers had been surrounding her on the same piers near where she was found. So, I think that both of these people's lives are an indication that orí the one hand we don't even know how many people were killed or died under similar circumstances in the past and whose lives and deaths were rendered invisible. But Brandon Teena's and Marsha P. Johnson's deaths are a demand now for us that this cease; that we're going to put our energy into stopping this kind of violence . . . and the cover-up.

KELLY: That kind of tells us something about some of the current legal issues. Are there other things, legal issues or in general, you can tell us about that are important to the trans movement?

FEINBERG : In the broadest sense, trans people have no federal protection and almost no state or local protection against discrimination on any level. So every case that is being fought out, every transsexual man or woman who is fighting for their right to transition on a job, is breaking new ground. For those of us who are gender ambiguous or transgendered or drag kings or queens or cross dressers coming up against doors that have a necessary toilet and sink inside but have a door with stick figures that have skirts or straight legs on them - that we're never going to fit into - is an issue. We can be arrested or harassed based on which we use. Not being able to check off the "m" or "f" on a passport or driver's license is another issue. If I check off female I don't feel free to travel without being in danger, but if I check off male I'm a felon. These are documents that have photos on them, why do we still have to have an "m" or an "f on them? From job discrimination to accessibility to health care that's affordable and sympathetic, the right to housing, and even the right to just walk down the street or be served in a restaurant, we're plowing up fresh ground here.

KELLY: On a quick personal note, I wanted to thank you for signing the Feminist Bookstore Pledge which pledges that feminist writers will support feminist and independent bookstores in a time when the corporate bookstores are taking over the market. The unfortunate side-effect of this is going to be that writers with progressive and groundbreaking ideas are not going to be put into print.

FEINBERG: That's right. And one of the reasons I went with Beacon Press was I went to New Words Bookstore in Boston and asked the women who run it there: "What's Beacon's commitment like to independent bookstores?" And they said, "Great!" So it was one of my considerations when publishing. ■

LYNDEN KELLY is co-owner of Common Language Bookstore.