Leslie Feinberg

A transgender activist and author whose 1993 novel Stone Butch Blues, drawn from lesbian and working-class experience, became a foundational text for a generation of readers with no other literature that reflected their lives. Feinberg's 1996 nonfiction book Transgender Warriors helped establish much of the vocabulary now used to discuss gender identity, work that reshaped public understanding of a subject that had previously gone largely undiscussed.