“Remember me as a revolutionary communist.” RIP, Leslie Feinberg.

Calling Leslie Feinberg, who died this past weekend, a trans writer and activist does a disservice to the incredible breadth of radical intersectional work ze did as an “anti-racist white, working-class, secular Jewish, transgender, lesbian, female, revolutionary communist” — from writing the influential novel Stone Butch Blues to editing the communist Workers World newspaper, from mobilizing against the KKK in Atlanta to defending Buffalo, NY from anti-choicers. 

Read more about hir legacy in this obituary penned by her partner, Minnie Bruce Pratt, for The Advocate:

Leslie Feinberg, who identified as an anti-racist white, working-class, secular Jewish, transgender, lesbian, female, revolutionary communist, died on November 15. She succumbed to complications from multiple tick-borne co-infections, including Lyme disease, babeisiosis, and protomyxzoa rheumatica, after decades of illness.

She died at home in Syracuse, NY, with her partner and spouse of 22 years, Minnie Bruce Pratt, at her side. Her last words were: “Remember me as a revolutionary communist.”

Feinberg was the first theorist to advance a Marxist concept of “transgender liberation,” and her work impacted popular culture, academic research, and political organizing.

Her historical and theoretical writing has been widely anthologized and taught in the U.S. and international academic circles. Her impact on mass culture was primarily through her 1993 first novel, Stone Butch Blues, widely considered in and outside the U.S. as a groundbreaking work about the complexities of gender. Sold by the hundreds of thousands of copies and also passed from hand-to-hand inside prisons, the novel has been translated into Chinese, Dutch, German, Italian, Slovenian, Turkish, and Hebrew (with her earnings from that edition going to ASWAT Palestinian Gay Women).

Most recently, Feinberg was working on putting together a 20th anniversary edition of Stone Butch Blues. The online edition will be dedicated to CeCe McDonald and contain a slideshow called “This Is What Solidarity Looks Like” documenting the Free Cece campaign. You may recall that Feinberg was arrested a couple years ago while protesting outside the facility where McDonald was being held, urging others to “come out against racist, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ and sexist wars at home and abroad.” Hir friends are working to ensure that Feinberg’s final work is available at Lesliefeinberg.net.

Read more about hir life here.