Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg’s 1993 first novel, is widely considered to be a groundbreaking work about the complexities of gender. Feinberg was the first theorist to advance a Marxist concept of “transgender liberation.” Sold by the hundreds of thousands of copies and also passed from hand-to-hand inside prisons, Stone Butch Blues has been translated into Chinese, Dutch, German, Italian, Slovenian, Turkish, and Hebrew (with hir earnings from that edition going to ASWAT Palestinian Gay Women). The novel was winner of the 1994 American Library Association Stonewall Book Award and a 1994 Lambda Literary Award.

Leslie Feinberg worked up to a few days before hir death in 2014 to ready this 20th anniversary Author’s Edition of Stone Butch Blues, to make it available to all, for free. This action was part of hir entire life work as a communist to “change the world” in the struggle for justice and liberation from oppression.

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Feinberg commented on Stone Butch Blues in hir Author’s Note to the 2003 edition:
“Like my own life, this novel defies easy classification. If you found Stone Butch Blues in a bookstore or library, what category was it in? Lesbian fiction? Gender studies? Like the germinal novel The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe/John Hall, this book is a lesbian novel and a transgender novel—making ‘trans’ genre a verb, as well as an adjective . . .”

“I am typing these words as June 2003 surges with Pride. What year is it now, as you read them? What has been won; what has been lost? I can’t see from here; I can’t predict. But I know this: You are experiencing the impact of what we in the movement take a stand on and fight for today. The present and past are the trajectory of the future. But the arc of history does not bend towards justice automatically—as the great Abolitionist Frederick Douglass observed, without struggle there is no progress . . .”

In hir 2014 Author’s Note to the 20^th anniversary Author’s Edition, Feinberg reflects that language usage had changed in naming the sex and gender spectrum zie/she had so eloquently described in 2003:

“The use of the word ‘transgender’ has changed over the two decades since I wrote Stone Butch Blues. Since that time, the term ‘gender’ has increasingly been used to mean the sexes, rather than gender expressions. This novel argues otherwise.”

“So I can only note that, like planes, trains and automobiles, the same technological vehicles of hormones and surgeries take people on different journeys in their lives—depending on whether their oppression/s is/are based on sex/es, self/gender expressions, sexualities, nationalities, immigration status, health and/or dis/abilities, and/or economic exploitation of their labor.”

Illness and then hir death in 2014 kept hir from a further task for the Author’s Edition:

“I had hoped to write an introduction to place this novel within its social and historical context, the last half of the 20th century. Context is everything in politics, and Stone Butch Blues is a highly political polemic, rooted in its era, and written by a white communist grass-roots organizer.”

[[[Specifications]]]

Format	Paperback
Pages	452
Year Published	1993
Publisher	This edition is print-on-demand and sold at cost

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Stone Butch Blues

Getting Started

Lost in a sea of vibration?

Getting Started

Lost in a sea of vibration?

Lost in a sea  of vibration?

Lost in a sea  of vibration?