lev/crypt

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first image is of marsha p johnson a black woman in a beautiful blue dress holding a box adorned with a crown and jewels and wearing a stash that reads "stonewall"

second image is part 2 of an interview between leslie feinberg and lynden kelly a writer for a magazine called agenda

"6—agenda—november 1996

FROM PREVIOUS PAGE

like a circle than a line with two polar opposites. Could you tell us more about that?

FEINBERG: Yes, because I'm considered masculine - I really think my gender expression is far more complex than that - but because people look at me and say "She's trying to be like a man," the assumption is that men are masculine and women are feminine so the woman who tends towards masculinity is looking like a man and a man who is feminine is trying to look like a woman. And I think that really enforces the idea that there are only two ways to be. I pointed out in Transgender Warriors that when I ride the subway in Manhattan - even in such a repressive society that regulates what people can wear and how they can express themselves by law and through violence against people who transgress it - I still see women who range from masculine to androgynous to feminine, and men who range from feminine to androgynous to masculine. And if we think of a circle and defend people's right to move on it or to incorpórate ambiguity and contradiction then we really get a wider concept of what kind of gender freedom we are fighting for.

KELLY: I understand what you're saying that your physical reality of sex and gender expression are independent characteristics, and even your sexual orientation is a third independent characteristic, and each of those varíes along a continuum and probably for each person also varíes over time. Is it your sense that in a "perfect world" people wouldn't feel compelled to re-sculpt their bodies physically to conform with an internal sense - that if society accepted all ranges on the continuum, would people still feel an internal discontinuity?

FEINBERG: I don't profess to have any advance knowledge of the future ... However, one of the things I looked at in Transgender Warriors is that we have been kind of given an assumption culturally through the media that transsexualism is a high-tech phenomenon. And it's true that the development of an aesthetic - which led to great advances in surgery - and the commercial synthesis of hormones made it possible for people to have greater freedom in choosing to live in the sex in which they are most identified, not the sex they were labeled by some doctor who glanced at their genitals at birth. However when I went and looked back in history I found that sex change was a very ancient and once-sacred path, and that surgical and possibly even hormonal knowledge was very much part of ancient communal cultures and that people chose sex change and went into very esteemed areas of communal life like being priestesses, spiritual leaders, as well as other roles. And so I think that when we look at those societies in which people were allowed to walk many paths and the compulsion to fit the narrow Ozzie-and-Harriet norms that we have today didn't exist, that people still did shape their bodies, surgically and I believe, probably also hormonally through knowledge of herbs and plants. And so I think that there is no reason to think that transsexuals will not always exert their right to explore their life in the body and the identity that they've chosen and that they feel deep inside but that hasn't been respected in this society. Hopefully what will change is the respect for people's transsexual paths.

KELLY: In Transgender Warriors you talk a lot about these other cultures, especially communal cultures in different places in the world in different times when transgender people were respected and revered. Can you give us a couple of examples of that?

FEINBERG: Chapter Three of Transgender Warriors doesn't even have to go back 25,000 years to the Paleolithic period to find the acceptance of trans expressions in communal cultures. Chapter Three deals with native nations on the North American continent and how the many different nations had varying and diverse responses to - and paths available to - people that are far different than what we think of as what is natural for men and women. For example, gay American-Indians documented 135 of what they call alternative gender roles in that many nations on this continent. And they've even reclaimed the language that existed for those people so that it's not just man and woman but other language that existed in those societies for other sex-gender paths. The very brilliant Menominee Two-Spirit person poet, Christos, served as a kind-of editor for Chapter Three of Transgender Warriors. "Two-Spirit" may incorporate the kind of "LGBT" that we use now for this whole coalition of all these communities. Many Two-Spirit people from native nations talk to me in the book about how their own legacies from their own nations treated people who were Two-Spirit. I think it's an amazing contrast to 200 years later what colonial U.S. history says is the way it has always been, when in fact just a couple-hundred years ago it wasn't. And the Two-Spirit tradition continues today for native nations and is part of the resistance to cultural genocide as well as physical genocide.

KELLY: It's really inspiring to read those accounts, too ...

FEINBERG: It is, isn't it? It shows that the kind of history I read in school had no heart. And it didn't have me in it either!

KELLY: It really was a big click for me too when I read about how Christianity came in and squashed the existing cultures. It has never really made sense to me what was the big problem that the culture had towards people who were in that gray area. It just didn't really seem like something that people should get so uptight about but when I read about the Christians coming in and trying to especially squash the pagan rights that made it make sense for me. It made me understand the motivation behind that kind of powerful squashing.

FEINBERG: And for me I wanted to look at also: Where did those religions arise from? Why did Christianity, for example, which had begun as a religion of the urban poor who wanted to resist tyranny - why did this suddenly become tyranny, or the flag of tyranny? And one thing that was interesting for me in the research for Transgender Warriors was to see how differently - when a group of people have to work together in order to survive - what a different relationship those individuals have to each other in terms of respecting the contributions of each member of the group. And how when societies began to divide into "I own it and you work for me" how much of a threat anything that represented the old free association of working together was to that new elite. I began to see how that was reflected in the religious beliefs that were imposed on people, the new laws that were imposed that said from now on you can't have same-sex love, women are not going to enjoy the status they did before, and I found that amongst the laboring classes that were being enslaved, there was a great reverence for transexpression, particularly as religious leaders. But that these religions and this reverence harkened back to an old system that threatened the new economie system. And so I thought this is like when I used to work in the factory and the strike was coming and suddenly they would come in and try to split us all up and make us fight each other. They were just doing that on a larger scale . . .

KELLY: Just divide and conquer. It's an old technique, and it works . . .

FEINBERG: Well, it works up to the point that one becomes conscious of it. And the moment you become conscious of the way you've been manipulated or pitted against other people it becomes like a bone that won't break twice in the same place.

KELLY: Which is why we as gay and lesbian people need to align ourselves with the transgender liberation movement, and the women's movement, and the African-American movement. FEINBERG: Well put, yes!

KELLY: Can you tell us about the people who you dedicated the book to - Brandon Teená and Marsha P. Johnson?

FEINBERG: I dedicated the book to Brandon Teena, a young white male who was arrested by the pólice who later exposed to the town that he was born female and he was kidnapped and gang-raped and beaten by two men after this discovery and later stabbed to death along with two other people by these same two men. No one has yet carried out a community investigation into the role of the police in instigating this violence against Brandon Teena. But his death has served as a rallying cry not just for the trans communities but I think also for the lesbiangay bi communities and the women's movement to put a stop to this violence. Marsha P. Johnson, who I also dedicated the book to, was an African-American drag queen who was a combatant at the Stonewall Rebellion against pólice brutality and bigotry. She was found floating in the Hudson River a little more than four years ago. The police conducted an investigation that consisted of two phone calis and ruled her death a suicide. But when a people's postering campaign began in Manhattan and the Village we discovered reports that a group of young bashers had been surrounding her on the same piers near where she was found. So, I think that both of these people's lives are an indication that orí the one hand we don't even know how many people were killed or died under similar circumstances in the past and whose lives and deaths were rendered invisible. But Brandon Teena's and Marsha P. Johnson's deaths are a demand now for us that this cease; that we're going to put our energy into stopping this kind of violence . . . and the cover-up.

KELLY: That kind of tells us something about some of the current legal issues. Are there other things, legal issues or in general, you can tell us about that are important to the trans movement?

FEINBERG : In the broadest sense, trans people have no federal protection and almost no state or local protection against discrimination on any level. So every case that is being fought out, every transsexual man or woman who is fighting for their right to transition on a job, is breaking new ground. For those of us who are gender ambiguous or transgendered or drag kings or queens or cross dressers coming up against doors that have a necessary toilet and sink inside but have a door with stick figures that have skirts or straight legs on them - that we're never going to fit into - is an issue. We can be arrested or harassed based on which we use. Not being able to check off the "m" or "f" on a passport or driver's license is another issue. If I check off female I don't feel free to travel without being in danger, but if I check off male I'm a felon. These are documents that have photos on them, why do we still have to have an "m" or an "f on them? From job discrimination to accessibility to health care that's affordable and sympathetic, the right to housing, and even the right to just walk down the street or be served in a restaurant, we're plowing up fresh ground here.

KELLY: On a quick personal note, I wanted to thank you for signing the Feminist Bookstore Pledge which pledges that feminist writers will support feminist and independent bookstores in a time when the corporate bookstores are taking over the market. The unfortunate side-effect of this is going to be that writers with progressive and groundbreaking ideas are not going to be put into print.

FEINBERG: That's right. And one of the reasons I went with Beacon Press was I went to New Words Bookstore in Boston and asked the women who run it there: "What's Beacon's commitment like to independent bookstores?" And they said, "Great!" So it was one of my considerations when publishing

LYNDEN KELLY is a co-owner of Common Language Bookstore.*

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