Leslie Feinberg > Quotes

“Gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue

“Nature held me close and seemed to find no fault with me.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“Who was I now—woman or man? That question could never be answered as long as those were the only choices; it could never be answered if it had to be asked.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“If I'm not with a butch everyone just assumes I'm straight. It's like I'm passing too, against my will. I'm sick of the world thinking I'm straight. I've worked hard to be discriminated against as a lesbian.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“You're more than just neither, honey. There's other ways to be than either-or. It's not so simple. Otherwise there wouldn't be so many people who don't fit.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“I remembered what it was like to walk a gauntlet of strangers who stare—their eyes angry, confused, intrigued. Woman or man: they are outraged that I confuse them. The punishment will follow. The only recognition I can find in their eyes is that I am “other.” I am different. I will always be different. I will never be able to nestle my skin against the comfort of sameness.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“But very quickly I discovered that passing didn't just mean slipping below the surface, it meant being buried alive. I was still me on the inside, trapped in there with all my wounds and fears. But I was no longer me on the outside.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“I’m not saying we’ll live to see some sort of paradise. But just fighting for change makes you stronger. Not hoping for anything will kill you for sure. Take a chance, Jess. You’re already wondering if the world could change. Try imagining a world worth living in, and then ask yourself if that isn’t worth fighting for. You’ve come too far to give up on hope, Jess.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“I felt as though I was rushing into a burning building to discover the ideas I needed for my own life.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“I hurried out to the pond to catch polywogs in a jar. I leaned on my elbow and looked up close at the little frogs that climbed up on the sun-baked rocks.

"Caw, caw!" A huge black crow circled above me in the air and landed on a rock nearby. We looked at each other in silence.

"Crow, are you a boy or a girl?"

"Caw, caw!"

I laughed and rolled over on my back. The sky was crayon blue. I pretended I was lying on the white cotton clouds. The earth was damp against my back. The sun was hot, the breeze was cool. I felt happy. Nature held me close and seemed to find no fault with me.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“Surrendering is unimaginably more dangerous than struggling for survival.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“Everybody's scared, but if you don't let your fears stop you, that's bravery.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“More exists among human beings than can be answered by the simplistic question I'm hit with every day of my life: "Are you a man or a woman?”
― Leslie Feinberg

“I began to feel the pleasure of the weightless state between here and there.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“Never underestimate the power of fiction to tell the truth.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“The loneliness became more and more unbearable. I ached to be touched. I feared I was disappearing and I'd cease to exist if someone didn't touch me.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“I know the difference between what I can't do and what I refuse to do.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“The sky was black and strewn with stars. I felt alone on the planet. I was so scared I could hardly breathe. I didn't know where I was headed. I didn't know what to do with my life. I strained to look into my future, trying to picture the road ahead of me, searching for a glimpse of who I would become.
All I could see was the night sky and the stars above me.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“I've been going to the library, looking up our history. There's a ton of it in anthropology books, a ton of it, Ruth. We haven't always been hated. Why didn't we grow up knowing that?”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“This is what courage is. It’s not just living through the nightmare, it’s doing something with it afterward. It’s being brave enough to talk about it to other people. It’s trying to organize to change things.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“We have not always been forced to pass, to go underground, in order to work and live. We have a right to live openly and proudly...when our lives are suppressed, everyone is denied an understanding of the rich diversity of sex and gender expression and experience that exist in human society.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Warriors : Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman

“I’m sorry it’s had to be this hard. But if I hadn’t walked this path, who would I be? At the moment I felt at the center of my life, the dream still braided like sweetgrass in my memory. I remembered Duffy’s challenge. Imagine a world worth living in, a world worth fighting for. I closed my eyes and allowed my hopes to soar. I heard the beatings of wings nearby. I opened my eyes. A young man on a nearby rooftop released his pigeons, like dreams, into the dawn.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“When I was really small I thought I’d do anything to change whatever was wrong with me. Now I didn’t want to change, I just wanted people to stop being mad at me all the time.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“When my alarm jangled in the morning, I awoke feeling small and terrified. I couldn't find myself in my own life—there was no memory of me that I could grasp. There was no place outside of me where I belonged. So every morning I willed myself back into existence.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“Strength, like height, is measured by who you're standing next to.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“Sometimes I feel like I’m choking to death on what
I’m feeling. I need to talk and I don’t even know how.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“Like racism and all forms of prejudice, bigotry against transgendered people is a deadly carcinogen. We are pitted against each other in order to keep us from seeing each other as allies. Genuine bonds of solidarity can be forged between people who respect each other's differences and are willing to fight their enemy together. We are the class that does the work of the world, and can revolutionize it. We can win true liberation.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come

“The shades of gender in her voice were intricate, like mine.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others... two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“I actually chafe at describing myself as masculine. For one thing, masculinity itself is such an expansive territory, encompassing boundaries of nationality, race, and class. Most importantly, individuals blaze their own trails across this landscape. And it’s hard for me to label the intricate matrix of my gender as simply masculine.

To me, branding individual self-expression as simply feminine or masculine is like asking poets: Do you write in English or Spanish? The question leaves out the possibilities that the poetry is woven in Cantonese or Ladino, Swahili or Arabic. The question deals only with the system of language that the poet has been taught. It ignores the words each writer hauls up, hand over hand, from a common well. The music words make when finding themselves next to each other for the first time. The silences echoing in the space between ideas. The powerful winds of passion and belief that move the poet to write.”
― Leslie Feinberg