#hidden impacts

I felt an overwhelming sense of loss today because I discovered something new that I was afraid I'd never be able to find. I'm hoping I'm wrong, but I'm out of energy to go more down this rabbit hole, so I'm sharing in case I can come back to it in the future and put in the time to try to dig it up...

I've been entranced with Leslie Feinberg's work the last few months. I have friends (and my own) struggling with gender and sexuality and identity and Stone Butch Blues gave me a lot of vocabulary and insight about it. I discovered Leslie and SBB in 2025. Zie has never been a part of my life while zie was alive, but I know now that Leslie affected my life before I ever heard of hir, and I want hir legacy to continue on. Enough that I'm working on my typeset of it from hir free-to-all pdf to distribute freely to others to help it continue to exist, as zie took "Stone Butch Blues off the capitalist market. "

How could you not fall a little in love with that? I sure did. I read through Minnie Bruce's site a bit (hir partner from the 90s to death in 2014, and Minnie died in 2023), and I can see I'm going to be falling down that rabbit hole as well, but I'm still focused on Leslie presently.

Right now, I know Leslie and Minnie Bruce only through their websites, and there's something so timeless and temporary about that for me... the timeless in the, "I can continue to keep hir words alive" by working on my typeset and creating of more copies of SBB, but then I just a hit a wall and with Leslie dead and Minnie Bruce dead, does it even exist anymore? How fleeting hir work can be if it is no longer commodified and diseminated within our broken exploitative capitalist system...

Back to my issue... above is a snip from this site: https://transgenderwarrior.org/casualty/ which is about Leslie's fighting with Lyme disease but even more, Leslie's fighting with our broken health care system. I've had several friends going through similar struggles in the last few years, and the frustration of watching people I love losing energy to keep fighting their own physical struggles while having to fight with their insurance providers and health care providers to have their concerns taken seriously is INFURIATING.

So I found that site, Casualty of an Undeclared War, and I started downloading the chapters for reading and (possible) binding since I can't find it compiled and for sale.

So the first page is that snip above, giving the intro to the series.

Then there's the table of contents to click on. See how the intro above ends with "Next: Casualty of an undeclared war"? Meaning, I would think, that Part 1 is the next chapter with that title... then Part 2 with Medical combatants, right? But when I click on Part 1, I get the intro again.

This is the bottom of it, saying "Next: Casualty of an undeclared war" again.

And when you click Part 2, it's indeed, Part 2, alluding to there being a Part 1 which does not exist. I started looking for "contact me" but of course, both of the writers/creators have died, and while I'm sure there are trustees, I wasn't find anything simply and was hitting a wall of exhaustion/no energy to keep digging right now, and it was just so sad to think these words might be forever lost... until, while writing this out of frustration, I realized I could back into the Part 1 if Leslie/Minnie Bruce/whoever helped them with their sites was consistent in the page labelling and voila! It popped up when I manually changed the address (which I can't find any link to on the site currently.)

https://transgenderwarrior.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/lyme1.pdf took me to the Part 1 I was afraid was gone forever! It's such a little thing, but the happiness I felt to discover it was still available to me took my breath away for a minute.

It's astonishing to me the people (creators, usually) who have left me with more sense of self and more vocabulary to define my feelings than those who raised me have been able to do so from beyond the grave. My parents are still around, and independently we try to love each other as best we can within our limited ability, but Leslie Feinberg and Andrea Gibson have rocked my world to its foundations in the last year, even though I never even heard of either of them until after their passing.

I'm choosing to take this as a tangible sign of hope right now. Even though those in absolute power right now are trying to destroy us all, the power we have been given from those fighting these same (never ending) fights before us are eternal, and through random discoveries and passion to share the knowledge with others, we can help them outlast the fascists.

Here is a very small and incomplete list of the people I have discovered so far that I have made/will make zines and books about who had a hidden impact on my life before I ever heard of them, even if it's just as an example of bravery and passion for truth and doing what's right that I want to live by. Sharing in case other random folks might stumble on this rambling and trip into an adjacent rabbit hole of their own:

Abel Meeropol

Andrea Gibson

Anne and Carl Braden

Leslie Feinberg

Minnie Bruce Pratt