Leslie Feinberg: freedom to write novel--not to appropriate my identity, or claim me as "family"

Jan 31, 2011
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freedom to write novel—not to appropriate my identity, or claim me as “family”

Catherine Ryan Hyde—one of three estranged biological relatives—has written a new young adult novel that is “transgender” themed.

Her young adult novel is not my issue. I invite you to read my original message: (http://leslie-feinberg.tumblr.com/, Jan. 14, 2011 entry)

Since the book is about a transman, I leave it up to those fierce individuals whose oppressions she writes about to review her fiction.

But when Hyde began moving audiences as part of her book publicity with accounts of growing up with a “transgender sibling,” she appropriated my actual life identity at a time when she knows I am gravely ill. I reject Hyde’s assertion that she “grew up with a transgender sibling.” I reject her defining me as transgender from birth, or born female with a “male” gender expression.

Hyde grew up with a butch lesbian who wasn’t afraid to be out and proud in the McCarthyite anti-LGBT, anti-communist witchhunts. I came out into community, despite the fact that our love was still against the law. (see: Stone Butch Blues)

Instead of dealing with how she is counter-narrating my life in her book publicity, Catherine Ryan Hyde has tried to shift the issue to her novel itself. She claims that I am attacking her right to write fiction, or her right to write about characters whose oppression she has never experienced. Hyde specifically asserts that I must be erroneously confusing her “transgender” character as being based on my own life.

As both a novelist, fiction and non-fiction writer, and political journalist, I have developed a powerful lifelong ethic in support of other peoples’ rights to express themselves in fiction. As an editor, over many decades I also honed my ethics about my relation of how best to support other peoples’ writing—fictional and non-fictional.

So I offer this vignette to stress how important my ethic of supporting other peoples’ rights to express themselves in fiction is to me.

Years ago, Hyde asked if she could stay with Minnie Bruce and I in our home for two days, despite the fact that I was very ill. When Hyde arrived, she brought an early manuscript of one of her novels that she asked me to read during her visit.

It was an uncomfortable situation in which for me to sort out my role as a reader of the novel. In the manuscript, a young woman’s sister commits suicide, and she journeys to save her lost brother who has become as unsocialized as a non-human animal. I certainly had many observations about her imagination, but it was her fiction—it wasn’t necessary or my place to voice them.

I did report that I was shocked when the “animalistic” brother carried out an act of sudden bloody violence. I said I didn’t think that violence flowed from the character development. Hyde responded furiously in our home, saying angry things about me as a writer and editor. She claimed I had no right to comment on her manuscript. Later, she let drop one line in a message, that her editor had said the same thing to her and she had revised the ending.

Years later, when Hyde again asked to visit, she brought her manuscript of a young adult novel with a transgender character. She asked me to read it and comment on it.

I refused to read the book in any stage. I truthfully explained to her that my decision was, in part, a defense of her right to her own fictional imagination on this subject.

However, when Hyde told me she was writing a young adult novel with a “transgender” theme, I asked her this one question: Could she put forward her young adult novel as her own work of fiction, without bringing in my life and identity—named or unnamed–or claiming me as her family?

If she did, I explained, it would put me in the position of having to enter the battle of ideas, and to explain the bigotry I have experienced from her and her parents. Hyde assured me she would never bring my life—named or unnamed—into the book publicity.

Hyde states that in that last visit with me, I also attacked her freedom to write young adult fiction about the conflict in Rwanda. It is true that I would not agree with her repeated assertions that the “story” of Rwanda was “hers to tell.”

But the issue was not her freedom to write fiction, it was the virulent racism and pro-imperialist arguments she was articulating. As I told Hyde then, her assertions about the character of the Hutu and other African peoples in the course of her arguments were strongly reminiscent of white-supremacist apologists for the antebellum slavocracy.

I explained at that time, and later in response to her follow-up email arguments, that the barricades of class wars, and other civil wars, often run between biological relatives, demanding of each of them: Which side are you on?

Even on Hyde’s blog posts, where she tries to redirect the argument towards her right to pen a “transgender” themed young adult novel, activist individuals challenge Hyde’s assertion that I am her “family.”

I attach all three posts from Hyde’s blog below, and I encourage you to read them all. I appreciate how many individuals have demonstrated the courage to answer a small, organized counter-campaign that tries to mock my oppression and that of my partner, Minnie Bruce Pratt. They minimize a 40-year struggle for legal independence from abusive group dynamics of bigoted scapegoating by biological relatives, redefining it as a “family squabble.”

Therefore, Minnie Bruce and I ask for your help online by explaining to those who do not experience our oppressions—or yours—why the right to define who is, and who is not, our families, and why our right to self-define our own identities, lives and oppressions, are life-and-death matters.

This is a huge issue for the LGBTQTS/+ movement. The more the counter-campaign grows, the more progressive activism and publicity it will generate.

And the larger the counter-campaign, and the more personally and politically abusive the messages are becoming, the struggle that affects millions of oppressed lives will grow and strengthen, spreading farther and wider.

Minnie Bruce Pratt and I express deep gratitude for the many, many hundreds of individuals who read my message and are circulating it into the public record. Thank you for supporting my large, loving, extended chosen family at a time when I’m struggling for health at a time of serious medical setback.

Thank you, each and all!

Solidarity in struggle,

Leslie Feinberg

Jan. 31, 2010

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Catherine Ryan Hyde’s blog posts:

‘In response to a recent issue,’ — http://www.catherineryanhyde.com/blog/2011/1/14/in-response-to-a-recent-issue.html

‘Nowhere to be seen’ — http://www.catherineryanhyde.com/blog/2011/1/17/nowhere-to-be-seen.html

‘Both sides of a specific’ — http://www.catherineryanhyde.com/blog/2011/1/18/both-sides-of-a-specific.html