Stone Butch Blues
Book (Fiction)
1993
United States of America
Authored by the butch/trans pioneer Leslie Feinberg, this novel follows the journey of stone butch Jess Goldberg. Jess experiences abuse and discrimination due to her masculinity, begins using testosterone as an adult, has top surgery, and ultimately falls in love with a trans woman named Ruth.
Read.
Notes from Leslie:
Dear Reader:
I want to let you know that Stone Butch Blues is an anti-oppression/s novel. As a result, it contains scenes of rape and other violence. None of this violence is gratuitous or salacious.
-Book preface.
Like my own life, this novel defies easy classification. If you found Stone Butch Blues in a bookstore or library, what category was it in? Lesbian fiction? Gender studies? Like the germinal novel The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe/John Hall, this book is a lesbian novel and a transgender novel—making ‘trans’ genre a verb, as well as an adjective... People who have lived very different lives have generously related to me the similarities they recognized in these pages with their own struggles—the taste of bile; the inferno of rage—transsexual men and women, heterosexual cross-dressers and bearded females, intersexual and androgynous people, bi-gender and tri-gender individuals, and many other exquisitely defined and expressed identities.
-Offical website.
Note from Jack:
Depending on your own experiences, this book might be very, very hard for you to read. Proceed with caution and, if needed, seek the opinions and reviews of butches and survivors. There is a lot of violence, discrimination, shame, and non-consensual sex in this book, along with some dubiously-consensual sex as well.
Entry last updated:
23 Mar 2026