"This groundbreaking book - far ahead of its time when first published in 1996 and still galvanizing today - interweaves history, memoir, and gender studies to show that transgender people, far from being a modern phenomenon, have always existed and have exerted their influence throughout history.
Leslie Feinberg - hirself a lifelong transgender revolutionary - reveals the origin of the check-one-box-only gender system and shows how zie found empowerment in the lives of transgender warriors around the world, from the Two Spirits of the Americas to the many genders of India, from the trans shamans of East Asia to the gender-bending Queen Nzinga of Angola, from Joan of Arc to Marsha P. Johnson and beyond."
According to Wikipedia, "the beginnings of the research that would become Transgender Warriors first appeared in Feinberg's pamphlet "Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come", which was published by the Workers World Party in 1992. This pamphlet was one of the first works to use transgender in an expansive sense, and the pamphlet gave the word a new "political charge".
The Marxist lens which Feinberg uses in "Transgender Liberation" is also present in Transgender Warriors. Feinberg uses her personal history to frame her discussion of world history and help people relate the information to present day struggles. The book itself is organized into five sections correlating roughly with when Feinberg learned the information she presents and chunking similar information thematically."
Leslie Feinberg (1949-2014) was an American butch lesbian, transgender activist, communist, and author. She wrote "Stone Butch Blues" in 1993. Her writing, notably "Stone Butch Blues" and her pioneering non-fiction book "Transgender Warriors" (1996), laid the groundwork for much of the terminology and awareness around gender studies and was instrumental in bringing these issues to a more mainstream audience.
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