Transgender Warriors by Leslie Feinberg comes across as a different form of book than it is.¹ Speaking personally, this title—especially alongside the subtitle Making History from Joan of Arc to Marsha P. Johnson and Beyond—implied a work of bios of famous, progressive trans heroes, something focused on significant individuals and moments of history. While this work could not exist without this personal focus—beginning with the author’s journey and branching outward—it is much more than an examination of trans heroes. Transgender Warriors is a work which seeks to explain the struggle between trans people and the ruling classes, and Feinberg’s journey to recognizing the value of this heritage gives the book an emotional resonance beyond what a clinical analysis of history could create.

As Feinberg navigates hir² transmasc, working-class, and Jewish identities, encounters with the unfolding queer liberation movement prompt the questions which define this work:

As I sat in a gay bar in Buffalo, a friend told me that drag queens had fought back against a police bar raid in New York City. The fight had erupted into a four-night-long uprising in Greenwich Village—the Stonewall Rebellion! … I stared at my beer bottle and wondered: Have we always existed? Have we always been so hated? Have we always fought back? (9)

Implicit in the history these questions take Feinberg through is another, more complicated question: How are queer liberation struggles related to the class struggle?

Throughout Marxism’s history, chauvinistic parties have attempted to sever class from anti-colonial and feminist struggles. They declared that only the class struggle could set oppressed populations free, ergo we must sympathetically nod along and then condescend to those groups who would foolishly seek to proclaim their narrow interests rather than the pure, economic slogans of the proletarians. Scholarship—notably from Domenico Losurdo’s Class Struggle—and the strength of socialism in those Global South countries which placed the anti-colonial and feminist struggles at their core have shown this pure, economic proletariat to be a Western fantasy. Feminism and anti-colonialism are class struggles, just as patriarchy and colonialism are systems of labor extraction. What Transgender Warriors accomplishes which makes it such a vital text is the extension of this truth to queer liberation—the truth that “all historical struggles … are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles between social classes.”³

Feinberg highlights the links between class struggles and transgender identities and expressions⁴ throughout history. Starting with the overthrow of communal, agriculture societies rife with transgender identities and matriarchal deities, Feinberg takes us from the Roman suppression of lower-class Bacchus worship and its enshrinement of transgender expression and same-sex love to the anti-capitalist Rebecca riots of Wales led by crossdressing peasants. Furthermore, rather than separating queer issues from colonialism, Feinberg explores how Western empires systematically targeted Two-Spirited people in their genocide of the Americas’ Indigenous nations, as well as other nonbinary gender expressions in the cultures of Africa, Asia, and Australia. The book provides powerful ammunition against those faux radicals who claim transgender identities to be an example of Western “ideological colonization.”⁵

More than simply showing the ways in which queerness has been targeted by the ruling classes and championed by the oppressed, Feinberg examines the labor relations underlying this oppression. As Engels asserted the patriarchal family to be “founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife,”⁶ the myth of an absolute, binary sex helps obscure how patriarchal labor extraction extends beyond heterosexual relationships and vulgar biological conceptions of gender:

The modern trans movement is not eroding the boundaries of women’s oppression. Throughout history, whenever new lands and new oceans have been discovered, maps have always been re-charted to show their relationship to each other. The modern trans liberation movement is redrawing the boundaries to show the depth and breadth of sex and gender oppression in this society. It is this common enemy that makes the women’s and trans communities sister movements for social justice. (118)

The way Feinberg’s book outlines the intersections of feminism, anti-colonialism, and transgender liberation make it an essential part of this “redrawing [of] boundaries.”

Despite this importance, Transgender Warriors cannot be considered a comprehensive treatment of the questions raised by Feinberg. It covers many topics, and it is approachable in both length and language, another strength of the text. It works beautifully as an introductory text for anyone—trans, Marxist, or both—who’s not familiar with the links between the histories of class struggle and trans liberation. Furthermore, the book rebukes the mythology of modern chauvinists who seek to sever the various manifestations of the class struggle. However, Feinberg sometimes implies a view of history common to anarchists, wherein pre-class societies are elevated as an egalitarian ideal to be returned to. There absolutely is a kernel of truth within hir assertion that “our ancestors lived in societies that enjoyed much more humane social relations than we do” (121). Yet there is a risk in this narrative of forgetting the logical basis of classes, social structures which crystallized because the division of labor provided increased production over preceding forms of society.

Even as we rebuke the notion that binary gender and heterosexuality are the natural state of human society, we need to keep in sight the advances which came alongside the creation of social classes:

Economically, each succeeding stage represented development in the strict sense that there was increased capacity to control the material environment and thereby to create more goods and services for the community … The advance in production increased the range of powers which sections of society had over other sections, and it multiplied the violence which was part of the competition for survival and growth among social groups.⁷

Development must be viewed as this juggling of material advances with social fractures. Queer liberation in the modern day is not just reclaiming social acceptance for queer identities. Feinberg does acknowledge this, expressing hope that advances in production and scientific knowledge will elevate the potential of queer liberation, (122) yet a broader view of the advances of modern queer liberation would have benefited this book.

In addition to modern society’s productive potential and the gender-affirming healthcare this could provide as a right in a socialist society, modern production allows unprecedented communication and cultural exchange between queer communities, from the formation of niche internet cultures to the international Pride movement. Furthermore, the international queer liberation movement rises alongside the struggle for universal human rights, a legal and ethical framework grounded in a modern conception of humanity. As Hegel observed, “through commerce the representations of man’s universality springs forth, and the particularity of nations, of their customs and culture, disappears. What remains is the universal concept that all strangers are men.”⁸ Just as we can maintain that there is a universal concept of human rights which upholds women’s liberation without legitimizing imperialist interventions, so too does queer liberation now exist as a human right to be carefully separated from bourgeois distortions.

While this text would benefit from greater attention to this modern shift in the dynamics of queer liberation, Feinberg’s work remains essential for its dogged focus on the links between social struggles. The transgender warrior Feinberg envisions is never narrowly focused on removing restrictions while ignoring the need for a broader socialist project:

I’m not satisfied with removing the laws that determine what clothes I can wear—not when trans youths are sleeping in abandoned cars, or on sidewalks. A banker can afford to waste food served at elegant diners, while Black and Latina drag queens are forced to turn tricks in order to buy french fries. (127)

The fascism of a declining US empire also sees these compounded class struggles; it targets these Black and Latina drag queens as vulnerable, valuable targets in the bourgeoisie’s campagin for dominance. The ruling class inflicts legal and physical violence, pushes them towards sexual exploitation, and attempts to exclude them from the broader recognition of anti-racist and feminist movements in order to divide and legitimize violence against every subaltern class. What Feinberg envisions—and what our modern context of trans genocide requires—are warriors who expand the dimensions of class struggle, who respond to capitalism’s targeting of them by placing themselves at the tip of the revolutionary spear. This book and the history it unearths remain a critical step to achieving this clarity.

Last modified on 2026-06-27