I remember the threat you feel being in the bar where butches are seen as masculine and worthy of fighting by cops and each other alike. I remember the risks you take just going to the bathroom or being in the men’s section of a store.
Through the lens of Leslie Feinberg’s award winning novel, I am reminded of your particularly hard and different struggle from any other identity in the rainbow spectrum. I am so grateful you exist.Īs I recently devoured Stone Butch Blues for the very first time, I am reminded of my sexual, romantic and non-sexual/non-romantic love affair with butches, masculine women and trans men. Here goes…ĭear Leslie Feinberg, Claude Brown and all the Toronto-based 2-spirit, genderqueer, trans men, gender non-conforming, butches and friends that I know: I thought I would write an open letter to Leslie and all the Butch, Trans, gender non-conforming amazing folks that I know. Instead of a retrospective of Feinberg’s work and life which you can find here, here, and here. I read Stone Butch Blues for the first time. I always had a massive sense of respect for Feinberg’s work but never picked up hir non-fictions Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Denis Rodman or Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink and Blue and when I had her first novel, Stone Butch Blues in my hand, I put it down twice because of the rape scenes at the near beginning of the book.īut as Leslie Feinberg left this existence for the next, out of fear of losing this amazing activist, I wanted some of hir work to live on in me. Leslie Feinberg, the prolific writer and activist passed away on November 15, 2014. While I felt camaraderie, while my experiences of heterosexism mirrored those of Jess Goldberg and her band of seldom merry butches back in 1967, I don’t know what it’s like being a gender bender.
But the truth is, I didn’t and still don’t know the experience of the butches in that very true fiction. As a brown femme I had my own Brown Femme Blues. I came up with the birthing of gender-neutral washrooms, trans men in my community and regular drag king performances at local gay bars (that were gay all week long, not just on Saturday nights). Credit: Tikkun Daily.Īs a young femme birthed into queer community in the 2000s, I thought I didn’t need Leslie Feinberg.
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