Was Leslie Feinberg a detrans butch?

Many people today know of Leslie Feinberg as a trans activist and author of Stone Butch Blues, but most don't know that Feinberg also has a detrans story

Although detransition was barely studied in North America for the last 20 years, some of the earliest writing from the field of transgender medicine did present some cases of detransition.

But this older research mostly focused on adults who were assigned male at birth (AMAB) and who transitioned to trans women before changing course. This earlier research is important, but it does not always reflect the experiences of modern day detransition/regret, especially not the difficult social/political dynamics that now surround these experiences.

Even so, pioneering trans activists long recognized that fluidity and non-linearity could occur in gender transitions, including among trans masculine people. A good example of this is American transgender activist Leslie Feinberg, who is often credited with popularizing the term “transgender.”

Feinberg is well-known for raising awareness about gender nonconformity and transgender rights, and for advocating for social justice for the working class and LGBTQ+ people. Many queer/trans people today also know of Leslie Feinberg as the author of groundbreaking Stone Butch Blues.

But most people are unaware that Feinberg also has a detrans story. In fact, Feinberg is much less known for writing about their detransition as a masculine, gender nonconforming person who paved the way for a new way of thinking about trans outside of binary transsexuality.

In the 1970s-1980s, when Feinberg began medically transitioning to live as male, “trans” was thought to come only in two types: transvestites, that is, heterosexual cross-dressers who dressed up part-time, primarily relating to sexuality and pleasure; and transsexuals, referred to those who transitioned medically from male-to-female or female-to-male to their affirmed gender identity/role. Experiences outside of these two manifestations were not conceived of as “trans” until roughly the 1990s, and in large part due to some of Feinberg’s writing and advocacy.

In 1980, Feinberg published an autobiography titled Journal of a Transsexual. In it, Feinberg wrote about life as a gender nonconforming, assigned female at birth (AFAB) masculine person who initiated a medical transition and later engaged in a detransition. Feinberg wrote:

I am a very masculine woman. Perhaps that is the easiest way to introduce myself. I lived convincingly as a man for four years on a sex-change program before leaving that program. I am a woman. I am the way I am. It is a fine way to be…

When I first entered a sex-change program a decade ago, in order to avoid embarrassment my parents disposed of all pictures of me, a little girl or young woman growing up with the tenseness of puberty etched on my face. When I later took back control of my body after four years of being on the program, my parents discarded all pictures of me living as a man. I have one photo left.

As a pioneer of the transgender movement between the 1980s-2000s, and as the author foundational work with Transgender Warriors, Feinberg’s early autobiographical writing conveys thinking on sex/gender from a different era.

At that time, sex was conflated with gender and gender was thought of as strictly binary. Transgender medicine standards of care reflected these ideas and required that transitions be female-to-male or male-to-female. For those who left the “sex-change program” and reidentified with their assigned sex/gender, as Feinberg did, gender clinicians classified this as a type of “regret.”

However, Feinberg’s writing, activism, and legacy did not espouse feelings of decisional regret about their gender transition. Rather, Feinberg directed their advocacy to raise awareness about the challenges faced by transgender/gender nonconforming people and sexual minorities, and they continued affirming a transgender identity after rejecting their former transsexual one.

What’s most interesting to us as researchers who are studying detransition is that this excerpt from Feinberg’s autobiography, though brief, communicates emerging themes from new, contemporary research on detransition. These include, for example, the struggle to articulate detransition experiences that can lack clear concepts and language (“Perhaps that is the easiest way to introduce myself…”), embodied feelings (“the tenseness of puberty…”, “took back control of my body”), and the interpersonal and familial implications of gender transition and detransition (“I have one photo left”).

But there was something else that Feinberg included in their autobiography that caught our attention. Feinberg wrote:

Many people would be surprised to learn that an equal number of women as well as men are entering sex-change programs. Some people stay in their new lives, others leave the programs after a time and try to go back to living as their original gender.

This passage is “surprising,” as Feinberg puts it, because it challenges the knowledge and thinking we have about that era: that the majority of people transitioning were AMAB trans women and that detransition/regret was a very rare occurrence—the origins of the 1% relic! Much of this came from gender clinicians who assessed, treated, and followed up patients who initiated medical gender transitions, but Feinberg’s authobiographical writing, from a community perspective, suggests a different story.

This discrepancy between the clinical literature (what clinicians see) and real life (what patients experience and see in their own communities) is also evident in the emerging field of detransition research. From the few studies conducted in recent years, we know that many detransitioners never inform their providers of their detransition, for a variety of reasons, including fear of judgement, mistrust, or anger.

This means that clinical research, which informs much of our current concepts and ways of thinking about trans issues, may not be capturing the reality of many patients who, like Feinberg, diverge from traditional transition pathways. Community-led detrans initiatives, such as Elie Vandenbussche’s 2022 study or the DARE study, may be much better suited to achieving this goal.

But perhaps what’s most provocative about Feinberg’s autobiographical account is that it forces us to rethink discourses that portray detransition as a new phenomenon. Feinberg, and probably many others who went through the same process at the time, didn’t always have the language to describe what they were experiencing. They also didn’t have social media to connect with others with similar thoughts and feelings.

What Feinberg describes in their 1980 autobiography undoubtedly resonates with many of the stories of detransitioners we hear today.

What is new about detransition is not its occurrence, but the medical, social, and cultural conditions that have led to it being one of the most politicized topics in medicine today.

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