Transgender Activist Leslie Feinberg Dies at 65
Image by Ulrike Anhamm/Wikimedia Commons
Transgender activist Leslie Feinberg died November 15 at age 65, at her home in Syracuse, New York. According to the website Advocate.com, Feinberg died of “complications from multiple tick-borne co-infections, including Lyme disease, babeisiosis, and protomyxzoa rheumatica.”
Feinberg was known for her 1993 novel “Stone Butch Blues,” which won the Lambda Literary Award and is considered a seminal work addressing queer and transgender issues. She also wrote works of non-fiction, including “Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue” and “Transgender Warriors: Making History.” She was a member of the Workers World Party and an editor of Workers World newspaper.
Feinberg was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and raised in Buffalo, New York, where she started supporting herself at age 14. Her longtime partner was Minnie Bruce Pratt, a professor at Syracuse University, whom she married in 2011.
According to Advocate.com, Feinberg identified as “an anti-racist white, working-class, secular Jewish, transgender, lesbian, female, revolutionary communist.” Her last words were, “Remember me as a revolutionary communist.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
