Leslie Feinberg, Judith Butler, Kate Bornstein, and Riki Wilchins are all Jewish nonbinary people who have paved the way for trans and intersex rights and transfeminist action in the United States over the last several decades and you should know their names and what they've done.
There is a reason why there is a more modern antisemitic caricature of "the college educated coastal elite trying to erode at western masculinity and femininity" and it's literally, in part, because of Jewish led transfeminist action. It is a caricature that exists in dialogue with longer standing antisemitic stereotypes, but we're talking specifically about the modern iteration of it.
It's because of Leslie Feinberg's action, mobilization, and writing in the late 70's through the early 00's as a vocally Jewish transgender feminist. It's because of Judith Butler's essay "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution" and their book Gender Trouble in the 90's. It's because of Bornstein's books Gender Outlaws and Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, the second of which was worked on in collaboration with Jewish trans man S. Bear Bergman. It's because Riki Wilchins has been an active part of trans and intersex feminist action for decades despite you probably not knowing hir name.
Wilchins co-founded Camp Trans with Feinberg. S/he co-founded Transsexual Menace with Denise Norris. Wilchins coined the term "genderqueer" and s/he also helped lead to the foundation of Intersex Awareness Day thanks to hir work with intersex activist Cheryl Chase and the Hermaphrodites With Attitude! protest group. Wilchins has been a backbone of trans and intersex activism since the 90's.
All Jewish nonbinary people from different assigned gender backgrounds working towards trans liberation and solidarity. For decades.
If you ever question why my own politics are aimed so pointedly towards liberation and solidarity, particularly across the lines of sex and gender, it's because it is a legacy that I'm very proud to follow in the footsteps of as a nonbinary Jewish person.
We need desperately to start celebrating the overlap of identity instead of hyper-scrutinizing whether or not someone overlaps fully.
Marsha P. Johnson never called herself a trans woman--she called herself a drag queen, or a transvestite--yet we recognize the impact she had as part of trans history. Of trans women's history. There is so much effort to re-imagine her influence as being the one who "threw the first brick" at Stonewall and less effort to remember her as one of the co-founders of STAR, an org dedicated to the protection of sex working transvestites. (Which took influence from both queer orgs and revolutionary orgs like the Black Panthers). Whether it's a lack of terminology or her transness was not under such a narrow definition (the P. in her name stands for "pay it no mind" because when people asked if she was a man or woman she told them to mind their business, and said "I think of myself as me.")--she is part of trans history because drag history, transvestite history, female impersonator history, gnc history is trans history whether the participants would consider themselves trans women or not. It's transfeminine history.
Stormé DeLarverie, the person whose violent arrest sparked the Stonewall uprising, is described as a drag king, and as such, every publication--including queer coverage of her involvement--lump her in with cis women's history and never also transmasculine, despite the fact that while she didn't identify as anything to those who knew her, she preferred to be assumed to be a Black man. That's transmasculine history. That's lesbian history. These two histories are not mutually exclusive, yet we act like they are.
Leslie Feinberg described hirself as a trans woman--zie was trans and a woman. Queer coverage tries to decide whether that makes Feinberg a cis woman or a trans man. Neither. Leslie has influenced transmasculine history and transfeminine history, and has been part of women's history with hir feminism. Leslie was a pivotal voice in trans movements, and focused much of hir work on the overlap with "female" identity. Leslie has arguably moved the needle more for trans women than trans men due to hir focus on women, but those are not separate categories--victory for trans people of any type is a win for us all. Transmasculine history is not wholly separate from "women's" history.
Emi Koyama is responsible for popularizing the word "transfeminist" and was (and still is) a deeply influential voice in the trans and transfeminist movements. Emi is also intersex, and her identity has been used to discredit her status as a "real" trans woman. Her influence is in intersex history and trans history and women's history. These communities are not non-overlapping--Emi occupies all three!
Kate Bornstein has been one of the most influential trans theorists since the 90s, yet her work has been largely erased as time goes on. Her focus on nonbinary identity and attempts to break us out of a binary seems to be the cause of the strife. A writer, speaker, poet, whose work focuses on the overlap of many trans identities and the empowerment of the individual to find the language that suits them ought to be the single most talked-about style of transfeminism...and it isn't. Her name is fading from people's reading lists.
Riki Anne Wilchins created one of the most influential groups fighting against the exclusion of trans people from pride--and other queer events--alongside Denise Norris: Transexual Menace. She created the term genderqueer. She has written countless influential pieces about trans life and those of us who exist even in the margins of trans identity--and she wrote often about the overlap with nonconforming cis people, whether they later come out or not. She even founded GenderPAC.
Nonbinary people, intersex people, gnc people, genderweird--those who never had the language and those who didn't use it for whatever reason--are part of TRANS history. We do no one any favors to assign labels to people who didn't use them to legitimize their already-legitimate existence in our minds as part of the movement. And we do no favors to narrow our eyes and block the door until the folks who bled, cried, fought, and died for us--the trans community--call themselves what we prefer to hear.
The murder of Brandon Teena galvanized countless trans women. Trans men were some of the first to issue fundraisers for Miss Major when she first fell ill. There are so many trans people who do not see separate niche groups but recognize the collective under this big umbrella of transness--we desperately need for those groups to not be in the minority. Trans is a collective, not a club.
And what does trans men? Anyone who doesn't fit the cis narrative of gender.
Quotes from trans folks about what transgender means to them:
Dana Turner: "...you are a person that feels, in your spirit, your mind, your soul...different than your physical anatomy--your biological anatomy."
Leslie Feinberg: "--whether that be transexual women and men, or masculine women and feminine men, or bearded women who allow their beards to grow, or women weightlifters who can't use the women's bathroom because they've been pumping iron--it can mean everyone who doesn't fit that Ozzie and Harriet paradigm of sex and gender."
Kate Bornstein: "Transgender is just a big ol' umbrella term that includes just about everybody I know.
Martine Rothblatt: "To me, the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the gay and lesbian and transgender movements all really are one and the same. These are all movements to respect people as individuals rather than as a body type that their genes determine for them."
the same webisite also has a free pdf of kate bornstein’s “gender outlaw” which i consider essential reading on trans theory + trans history and is, like i said, free. transreads.org is a fantastic fucking source if you don’t have money for these things or an accessible public library
[“Given any binary, it’s fun to look for some hidden third, and the reason why the third was hidden says a lot about a culture. The choice between two of anything is not a choice at all but rather the opportunity to subscribe to the value system that holds the two presented choices as mutually exclusive alternatives. Once we choose one or the other, we’ve given up our imagination in favor of buying into the system that perpetuates that binary. When, for example, I lived my life saying I was a man or a woman, I was tacitly supporting all the rules of the gender system that defines those two identities. I supported those rules in order to belong, or rather to not be an outsider, a non-belonger.
I began to analyze gender dynamics in terms of group dynamics. One fascinating point stood out as relevant to both gender and group dynamics, providing a link between the two: compliance within a group is set by the naming of good and bad behavior; the former is laudable, the latter is punishable. Either/or is used as a control mechanism, as in, “Either you live up to our high standards here in the club, or your membership will be revoked.”]
kate bornstein, from gender outlaw: men, women, and the rest of us, 1995
Born on March 15th, 1948 in Neptune City, New Jersey, Katherine Vandam Bornstein is a writer, playwright, performance artist and gender theorist.
Kate Bornstein identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them and she/her pronouns and their works include an autobiography called A Queer and Pleasant Danger: A Memoir, My New Gender Workbook: A Step By Step Guide To Achieving World Peace Through Gender Anarchy and Sex Positivity, a theater production called Hidden: A Gender based on the parallels between them and intersex person Herculine Barbin, among other.
“It’s /safe/ having an identity—it’s secure. It’s safe having a gender. But there’s a price for that safety and security within some hard shell. We can’t grow any more. Our identities become so hard and so restrictive that we can no longer stretch and explore—we can’t find new ways of experiencing the world, new ways to delight ourselves, new ways to please others. We’re frozen in that shell. And the only thing for it is to come out of that shell, leave it behind us, and begin the whole process over again.” — Kate Bornstein in “My New Gender Workbook” (2012)
Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us (1994) by Kate Bornstein
Grande Sertão: Veredas (1956) by João Guimarães Rosa
Voting ended onNov 8, 2025
Book summaries and submitted endorsements below:
Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us (1994) by Kate Bornstein
Part coming-of-age story, part mind-altering manifesto on gender and sexuality, coming directly to you from the life experiences of a transgender woman, Gender Outlaw breaks all the rules and leaves the reader forever changed.
Nonfiction, memoir, queer theory
Grande Sertão: Veredas / The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (1956) by João Guimarães Rosa
Endorsement from submitter: "It’s one of the first queer novels in Brazil, being one of the most important works in Portuguese language. It was written as Brazilian Portuguese started to diverge from European Portuguese, with a unique structure with no chapter breaks. The character diadorim is sometimes referred as the first Brazilian queer character, and the romance between the main character and diadorim is central to the plot. Diadorim is sometimes interpreted as someone we would today refer to as transgender (binary or not), being a metaphor for feminine and masculine, good and evil, certainty and doubt in a single character. He’s now a queer icon in Brazil and a symbol of queer Brazilian history."
The original title refers to the veredas - small paths through wetlands usually located at higher altitudes characterized by the presence of grasses and buritizais, groups of the buriti palm-tree (Mauritia flexuosa), that criss-cross the Sertão region in northern Minas Gerais, Southeast Brazil - as a labyrinthine net where an outsider can easily get lost, and where there is no single way to a certain place, since all paths interconnect in such a way that any road can lead anywhere. The English title refers to a later episode in the book involving an attempt to make a deal with the Devil. Most of the book's spirit is however lost in translation, as the Portuguese original is written in a register that is both archaic and colloquial, making it a very difficult book to translate. The combination of its size, linguistic oddness and polemic themes caused a shock when it was published, but now it is considered one of the most important novels of South American literature.
