stone butch blues is highly transmisogynistic. come on now.
Oh my sweet, summer child, how you have come to the right person to be schooled in the ways of critically reading literature.
Likely, you are referring to the character Ruth in SBB (if you are not, well, I'll never know because you're an anon who seemingly would like to try to shame me rather than engaging in discussion about important books). So, assuming that you are referring to Ruth, I can further surmise you are specifically thinking of this quote: "Her face startled me. It was badly bruised on one side like a rainbow -- yellow, red, blue. Her hair was outrageously crimson. I could tell that womanhood had not come easily to her. It wasn't just her large Adam's apple or her broad, big-boned hands. It was the way she dropped her eyes and rushed away when I spoke to her."
Now, is there transmisogyny in this quote? Totally! Jess is basically saying "this woman is clocky as hell." BUT does that mean that SBB itself is transmisogynistic? Not necessarily. Why?
Well, sweet anon, let me tell you.
Our beloved protagonist, Jess, is a notably flawed character. She holds numerous beliefs about herself and others that are full of bullshit brainworms. And the majority of the book is about her undoing those brainworms and figuring out how to be a decent person in a world that is trying to kill her and her loved ones.
At the point in the novel when we're introduced to Ruth, Jess is at the precipice of a perspective shift on her life that will change the way that she views herself and others. We see this in how she comes around from alienating Frankie for loving another butch to reaching out, apologizing, and actually being able to see and experience - for herself, in her own body - the magic of the possibility of butches as lovers. She learns.
We also see how she understands that, in protecting herself when Duffy outed her at work, she cut off a dear and important comrade who could have supported her in numerous ways throughout her working and social life.
And we see this perspective shift with how Ruth is discussed as well. After the quote above, there is one more quote about how Jess has never held someone bigger than herself before - something that you could read as another piece of transmisogyny. But then, after this moment - it stops. There is just deepening relationship between Jess and Ruth that explores the ways that they experience the world and build a life together. And this happens while Jess is undoing and unraveling her other beliefs, as she is reconnecting with Frankie and Duffy. And reading this, we read that Jess learns. That Jess undoes her brainworms. That she opens herself to understanding other experiences of butchness, of womanhood, of transness, than her own.
Are Jess's thoughts and perspectives of Ruth originally full of transmisogyny - yes. But that's the character, Jess. That's not Leslie Feinberg, that's not the book as a piece of literature, that's a character in a book who we're watching change. Feinberg captures the experience of a 1950's butch figuring her way through life by showing us all of it - the good, the bad, the bigoted, the growing, the changing, the love. All of it. That's what good literature does. It makes you think and, sometimes, it makes you uncomfortable.
AND outside of the novel itself, we can look at Leslie Feinberg's broader body of work and hir relationships in community with others and see that ze was actively fighting transmisogyny and in close relationship with trans women in hir communities. Surely ze had to unlearn transmisogynistic ways of thinking, surely ze wasn't perfect, but claiming that hir most famous work is chalk full of transmisogyny is quite wild given what we know about hir and hir active work with trans communities.
So, to put a finer point on it, I will quote my ever-wise wife: "...writing a transmisogynistic character often involves writing transmisogynistic things for them to say."
So, sweet anon, "highly transmisogyinstic" is a huge reach. And it's a boring take.
Thinking critically about media is hot, consider trying it!
