Transgender Book Reviews

Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman
Nonfiction by Leslie Feinberg
Copyright 1996, 218 pages, $17 (with illustrations)
Beacon Press
ISBN 0-8070-7941-3

Capsule: The author of Stone Butch Blues, herself a veteran of transgender harassment, crafts an important account of the transgendered throughout history, in the context of class struggle and patriarchal power.

Full review

Warriors is obviously meant to be a milepost for the transgender community, a rallying point for the improvement of transgendered people's lives. Its author, Leslie Feinberg, supplants her successful earlier semi-autobiographical novel, Stone Butch Blues, by venturing into the history of cross-gender expression and putting it into a political context.

Leslie is a transgendered person who describes herself as a butch lesbian. She (I use "she" loosely) has paid her dues. As a child, people would approach and ask if she was a boy or girl. Later, she ran into great difficulties with employment, finally settling into the lesbian community in Buffalo, New York during a period when police harassment was common. There she became involved with the communist Workers World Party, which shaped her political outlook. She later moved to New York City.

Leslie intertwines her own history with cross-gender history, beginning with the first written admonitions against crossdressing and same-sex love in biblical times. In contrast to this, she says that in the earliest times small societies (including many Native American tribes) were matrilineal and communal and found places for (and even celebrated) she-hes and he-shes. This comes close to her ideal of a classless, non-exploitative society.

She feels that tolerance of gender variations began to rip apart (as one example) when the Christian church, allied with powerful men, saw value in pitting groups of people against each other and in defining male and femaleness narrowly.

One of the last reflections of the old, communal societies (according to the author) was Joan of Arc, whose crossdressing defined her very being. After that, Feinberg points to transgender involvement in many peasant and working-class insurrections, such as when men dressed as women attacked toll collectors in Europe.

For many years, any deviation from the gender norm was considered immoral and illegal unless you were a member of the privileged class.

Arriving in the 20th Century, the author documents the movement to gain transgender rights. Struggle and uprising are seen as necessary, with the Stonewall incident in New York Citya shining example. Feinberg tries to encompass a vast community -- including RuPaul and Dennis Rodman -- as allied with all "rainbow-gendered" people in seeking respect and protection under the law.

The last part of the book contains vignettes of prominent and not-so-prominent gender pioneers. This part of the book is the most inspiring and spiritual of all.

A transgender bill of rights is included.

(Reviewer: Valory Gravois) (Copyright ©1999 by Alchemist/Light Publishing)

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