Top 50 Leslie Feinberg Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I live proudly in a body of my own design. I defend my right to be complex.”

— Leslie Feinberg

2. “My right to be me is tied with a thousand threads to your right to be you.”

— Leslie Feinberg

3. “Gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught.”

— Leslie Feinberg

4. “I reserve my right to be complex.”

— Leslie Feinberg

5. “If I’m not with a butch everyone just assumes I’m straight. It’s like I’m passing too, against my will. I’m sick of the world thinking I’m straight. I’ve worked hard to be discriminated against as a lesbian.”

— Leslie Feinberg

6. “Like racism and all forms of prejudice, bigotry against transgendered people is a deadly carcinogen. We are pitted against each other in order to keep us from seeing each other as allies. Genuine bonds of solidarity can be forged between people who respect each other’s differences and are willing to fight their enemy together. We are the class that does the work of the world, and can revolutionize it. We can win true liberation.”

— Leslie Feinberg

7. “I’m not saying we’ll live to see some sort of paradise. But just fighting for change makes you stronger. Not hoping for anything will kill you for sure. Take a chance, Jess. You’re already wondering if the world could change. Try imagining a world worth living in, and then ask yourself if that isn’t worth fighting for. You’ve come too far to give up on hope, Jess.”

— Leslie Feinberg

8. “People of all sexes have the right to explore femininity, masculinity-and the infinite variations between-without criticism or ridicule.”

— Leslie Feinberg

9. “It’s a beauty one isn’t born with, but must fight to construct at great sacrifice.”

— Leslie Feinberg

10. “I began to feel the pleasure of the weightless state between here and there.”

— Leslie Feinberg

11. “Never underestimate the power of fiction to tell the truth.”

— Leslie Feinberg

12. “Nature held me close and seemed to find no fault with me.”

— Leslie Feinberg

13. “The loneliness became more and more unbearable. I ached to be touched. I feared I was disappearing and I’d cease to exist if someone didn’t touch me.”

— Leslie Feinberg

14. “Who was I now – woman or man? That question could never be answered as long as those were the only choices; it could never be answered if it had to be asked.”

— Leslie Feinberg

15. “I’ve been going to the library, looking up our history. There’s a ton of it in anthropology books, a ton of it, Ruth. We haven’t always been hated. Why didn’t we grow up knowing that?”

— Leslie Feinberg

16. “This is what courage is. It’s not just living through the nightmare, it’s doing something with it afterward. It’s being brave enough to talk about it to other people. It’s trying to organize to change things.”

— Leslie Feinberg

17. “Are you with women who only bleed monthly on their cycles?”

— Leslie Feinberg

18. “I remembered what it was like to walk a gauntlet of strangers who stare – their eyes angry, confused, intrigued. Woman or man: they are outraged that I confuse them. The punishment will follow. The only recognition I can find in their eyes is that I am “other.” I am different. I will always be different. I will never be able to nestle my skin against the comfort of sameness.”

— Leslie Feinberg

19. “The shades of gender in her voice were intricate, like mine.”

— Leslie Feinberg

20. “I wanted to thank you. If it wasn’t for you, I’d never have known I had a right to be me.”

— Leslie Feinberg

21. “I remembered Duffy’s challenge. Imagine a world worth living in, a world worth fighting for. I closed my eyes and allowed my hopes to soar.”

— Leslie Feinberg

22. “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others... two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

— Leslie Feinberg

23. “But very quickly I discovered that passing didn’t just mean slipping below the surface, it meant being buried alive. I was still me on the inside, trapped in there with all my wounds and fears. But I was no longer me on the outside.”

— Leslie Feinberg

24. “Remember me as a revolutionary communist.”

— Leslie Feinberg

25. “From that moment on I was her butch and she was my femme.”

— Leslie Feinberg

26. “Since I had no words to bring the woman I loved so much, I gave her all my tenderness.”

— Leslie Feinberg

27. “I’m sorry it’s had to be this hard. But if I hadn’t walked this path, who would I be? At the moment I felt at the center of my life, the dream still braided like sweetgrass in my memory. I remembered Duffy’s challenge. Imagine a world worth living in, a world worth fighting for. I closed my eyes and allowed my hopes to soar. I heard the beatings of wings nearby. I opened my eyes. A young man on a nearby rooftop released his pigeons, like dreams, into the dawn.”

— Leslie Feinberg

28. “I remembered earlier in the summer I’d found her working in her garden, sweaty and flushed with heat. I laid her down in the grass nearby and pressed her body into the dirt with my hips and kissed her mouth until she made small sounds of desire I recognised.”

— Leslie Feinberg

29. “When my alarm jangled in the morning, I awoke feeling small and terrified. I couldn’t find myself in my own life – there was no memory of me that I could grasp. There was no place outside of me where I belonged. So every morning I willed myself back into existence.”

— Leslie Feinberg

30. “Every day I saw others like me in this city – enough of us to populate our own town. But we only acknowledged each other with a furtive glance, fearful of calling attention to ourselves. Being alone in public was painful enough; two could find themselves smack in the center of an unbearable sideshow. We didn’t seem to have any of our own places to gather in community, to immerse ourselves in our own ways and our own languages.”

— Leslie Feinberg

31. “Every day the men around me came to exercise their bodies; I came to exorcise my demons.”

— Leslie Feinberg

32. “I want to understand about change – I don’t just want to be at the mercy of it. I feel like I’m waking up inside. I want to know about history. I have all this new information about people like me down through the ages, but I don’t know anything about the ages.”

— Leslie Feinberg

33. “I think girls and boys should be able to be any way they want to be without getting picked on.”

— Leslie Feinberg

34. “When I was really small I thought I’d do anything to change whatever was wrong with me. Now I didn’t want to change, I just wanted people to stop being mad at me all the time.”

— Leslie Feinberg

35. “All the girls and women looked pretty much the same, so did all the boys and men. I couldn’t find myself among the girls. I had never seen any adult woman who looked like I thought I would when I grew up. There were no women on television like the small woman reflected in this mirror, none on the streets. I knew. I was always searching.”

— Leslie Feinberg

36. “I wondered how it would feel to be touched and not be afraid.”

— Leslie Feinberg

37. “I went to the window and looked out over the mounds of snow, wishing I could do everything in my life once as practice and then go back and do it again.”

— Leslie Feinberg

38. “Maybe that was the lesson I tried to teach myself with each repetition – that power is something qualitatively more than strength. And that the world was wrong about me. I had a right to live.”

— Leslie Feinberg

39. “History, in the hands of those who have the most to gain from change, is a formidable weapon. That’s why colonizers and imperialists always burned and destroyed the historical accounts of those they conquered. They revise history to parrot one message over and over again, “the way things are now is the way they’ve always been”. The meaning is clear and demoralizing: Don’t even think about fighting for change.”

— Leslie Feinberg

40. “I’m not saying we’ll live to see some sort of paradise. But just fighting for change makes you stronger. Not hoping for anything will kill you for sure.”

— Leslie Feinberg

41. “Strong to my enemies, tender to those I loved and respected. That’s what I wanted to be. Soon I would have to put these abilities to the test. But for the moment, I was happy.”

— Leslie Feinberg

42. “The people who make a difference in history are those who fight for freedom – not because they’re guaranteed to succeed – but because it’s the right thing to do. And that’s the kind of fighters that history demands today. Not those who worship the accomplished fact. Not those who can only believe in what is visible today. But instead, people of conscience who dedicate their lives to what needs to be won, and what can be won.”

— Leslie Feinberg

43. “Too many of us as trans people have experienced something similar to the ‘Miss or Mrs.’ query – except it feels much more demeaning. It’s the address I call ‘Mamsir.’ You know what I mean: ‘Here’s your change, ma’am, I mean sir, I mean ma’am, I mean sir.’ It’s debasing and embarrasses both people and anyone else who is listening. I despise the class subordination that resides in those once-mandatory forms of address, as well.”

— Leslie Feinberg

44. “Struggle informs theory, and theory in turn counsels action. That’s why those at the summits of power do everything that can to ridicule and condemn and censor these ideas.”

— Leslie Feinberg

45. “I could see the sadness in Jan’s smile. “You’ve been through a lot. There’s some age you can’t count by years. You know how they cut a slice from a tree and count the rings? You got a lot of rings inside that trunk of yours. You know what? I think it’s time I stopped calling you kid. You stopped being a kid a long time ago.”

— Leslie Feinberg

46. “And I discovered Norton’s anthology of poetry in the patients’ library – it changed my life. I read the poems over and over again before I began to grasp their meanings. It wasn’t just that the words were musical notes my eyes could sing. It was the discovery that women and men, long dead, had left me messages about their feelings, emotions I could compare to my own. I had finally found others who were as lonely as I was. In an odd way, that knowledge comforted me.”

— Leslie Feinberg

47. “History teaches us that when an economic crisis hits, the process of scapegoating becomes more intense and more violent. African-American, Latino, Asian, and Arab peoples, lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals, feminists, trans people – and others who have been in the forefront of progress – will increasingly find themselves in the crosshairs. And the gains we made will all be under siege, as well.”

— Leslie Feinberg

48. “But no one can deny that rigid gender education begins early on in life – from pink and blue color-coding of infant outfits to genderlabeling toys and games. And those who overstep these arbitrary borders are punished. Severely. When the steel handcuffs tighten, it is human bones that crack.”

— Leslie Feinberg

49. “I wondered if she would have left me if there had been more inside of me to love, or if I just could have needed less.”

— Leslie Feinberg

50. “Where do my tears go? Why is it that I can’t cry now when I need to? Yet I knew that later my tears would be unexpectedly triggered by the scent of lilacs, or the low hum of a cello.”

— Leslie Feinberg