Product Description

With a New Afterword by the Author

In this fascinating, personal journey hrough history, Leslie Feinberg uncovers persuasive evidence that there have always been people who crossed the cultural boundaries of gender. Transgender Warriors is an eye-opening jaunt through the history of gender expression and a powerful testament to the rebellious spirit.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #99079 in Books
• Published on: 1997-06-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 218 pages

Amazon.com
Leslie Feinberg has been a leader in the transgender rights movement as long as such a movement has existed. This book is both deeply personal and widely researched. Feinberg examines perceptions of the body, the status of clothing, and the structures of societies that welcome or are threatened by gender variance. The portrait gallery that closes the book contains photographs and capsule biographies of contemporary transgendered people.

From Publishers Weekly
Feinberg, a surgically and hormonally transgendered female-to-male and the author of the novel Stone Butch Blues, here effectively pummels several old saws about gender, such as that there were two or three centuries in ancient Greece that constituted the golden age of gayness ("How happy were the gay slaves?" she asks). She also shows the often frantic and neurotic ways Western society clings to rigid notions of gender, while at the same time she describes (though not fully enough) how these notions shift radically from age to age. But her historical perspective can be sketchy. Feinberg, for example, expends little effort in looking into why a notorious band of male Welsh revolutionaries calling themselves Rebecca and Her Daughters dressed as women to destroy tollbooths in the mid-19th century. Though she draws many conclusions from this and other examples of cross-dressing rebellion through the ages, she fails to consider that the readiest disguise for a married man is his wife's clothing. The book does offer an enlightening album of singular people: a female transvestite who is sexually attracted to gay men; a couple consisting of a female cross-dresser and a male-cross-dresser. But Feinberg ultimately leaves too many gaps, both in history and in reasoning, to make her theories about gender expression and gender oppression solid. Author tour. (May) FYI: Filming of Stone Butch Blues, which won both the ALA Award for Gay and Lesbian Literature and the Lambda Literary Award in 1993, is to begin this spring.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Activist Feinberg (Stone Butch Blues, Firebrand, 1993) here presents a sweeping history that many others have glossed over or denied: she traces transgender lives, identities, and expression from communal societies to the present day. Furthermore, she provides theoretical insight while always remaining accessible to the general reader. Feinberg argues that the current devaluation and oppression of trans peoples is inextricably linked to the emergence of hierarchical class-based societal forms and to shifts from matrilineal to patriarchal social organization. Her book really comes alive, however, through her infusion of personal narrative into the historical material?the book ultimately is Feinberg's personal journey to find some representative place in a history that usually has denied or denigrated trans existence. Illustrated throughout, her book is finally a "portrait gallery" of photographs accompanied by statements from and biographies of people representing parts of the transgender spectrum. Appendixes include lists of organizations and publications. A valuable resource for researchers and an important personal and historical account of an underexamined social group, this is recommended for both public and academic libraries.?Karl Bryant, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

The Joan Baez of trans
Love or hate hir, Feinberg, like Joan Baez, raises the flag with the broadest possible coloring. Since when was subtlety required of agitprop? Sure, the Lady Skimmington citation is utopian; on the other hand, Feinberg (unlike almost every feminist) actually gets Engels, so right on. Streamlined, overdetermined? All the better, I say. Hey, Baez's greatest artistic moment was announcing (on the Johnny Carson Show!) her withholding of taxes to protest Vietnam; her LPs were secondary. That's the spirit in which I took this book. In the Top 5 of TG texts.

Transgender Warriors
Although the sections of this book dealing with contemporary issues are reasonably accurate, many historians have pointed out that the history section desperately needed to have been vetted by someone who studies the subject.
Among the numerous errors, the section on Joan of Arc contains more than the usual quota:
1) The author was unaware of a number of basic points concerning the cross-dressing issue. Eyewitness accounts contain quotations from Joan herself stating that she continued wearing a specific type of soldiers' clothing in prison because its securely-fastened pants and tunic offered the only protection she had against attempted rape - the Condemnation transcript itself admits that this clothing was secured with dozens of cords attaching both layers of pants to the tunic. Her motive was necessity, as many of the tribunal members later confirmed. These men also confirmed that she was induced into a "relapse" by a regimen of increased rape attempts followed by the simple expedient of leaving her nothing else to wear but the male outfit. These are basic points which were overlooked by this book, whose version has little in common with history.
2) She was not a pagan. Eyewitness accounts prove this, as do extant letters which Joan dictated to scribes during her military campaigns: these contain phrases such as "King Jesus, King of Heaven and of all the world, my rightful and sovereign Lord". The names "Jesus, Mary" generally serve as the heading. One letter, dated 23 March 1430, orders a group called the Hussites to "return to the Catholic faith" or else she will lead a crusading army against them. Her trial, as we know from English government records and the later statements of the tribunal members, was deliberately rigged by the English in order to convict her for the purposes of revenge, rather than from a sincere belief that she held heretical views.
3) The Marxist and Feminist issues are anachronisms which additionally involve some ironies. Her stated and accomplished goal, after all, was to place her king on his throne, not to overthrow either the aristocracy nor the patriarchy. None of her many recorded statements imply feminist beliefs, nor anything equivalent to Marxism.

There are other books which document genuine cases of transgenderism in history. This is not one of them, and this portion of the book regrettably does a disservice to a field which has far too often been harmed by invalid or poor scholarship.

The best text book I've ever read
This book was refreshingly factual and frank. I was blown away by what I read about the history of the trans person - especially Joan of Arc! I am a big fan of this book because it has provided me with enough valuable backup material for my thesis. I have searched high and low for supporting quotes such as those found in Feinberg's writing. BUY THIS BOOK - it will end up like mine, with notes written all over every page and lots of folded pages, kept next to the bed for reading regularly.