(Trans)Gender in Kabbalah Eshel Retreat 2016 - Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center

Afterword:

Joy Ladin, Torah In Transition - transtorah.org

Painful as it was, I grew up in the world of “male and female God created them,” a world in which gender was, and in many ways still is, essential to humanness. In this country, you can’t get a birth certificate, social security number, driver’s license, or passport without being allocated to the ranks of male or female – which means you can’t get a job, insurance coverage, the right to drive or rent a car or move across borders without taking your place, at least on paper, in the gender binary. In some public places, you can’t pee without identifying yourself as male or female. Thanks to sonograms, many babies are gendered even before they are born, and those who aren’t are labeled “male” or “female” the moment their pelvises see the light of day.

In this sense, as Genesis 1:27 suggests, gender is absolute; we aren’t treated as human until we take our places in the binary.

But as God and Adam discover in Genesis 2, gender is not only an image in which we are created; it is an image in which we create, and recreate, ourselves, through our relationships to one another. Even in the most rigidly gendered social arenas, gender is not absolute. The gender of an octogenarian has little in common with the gender of an adolescent. The gender of the young veiled bride is very different from the gender the same woman will express when she is a forty-something mother of three, and both are different from the gender she expresses when she is in hospital scrubs performing surgery. Gender is something we bring out of ourselves, shaping and reshaping it in response to changing needs for completeness, companionship and a place in the world.

Gender, then, is not a matter of bodies or even souls; as Adam recognizes when he first sees Eve, gender is a way of relating to others that enables us to feel like ourselves. To the extent that gender grows out of relationships, even within the categories of “male” and “female,” our genders are fluid, shifting in nuance and emphasis as we move in and out of contact with people we know and need in different ways. In other words, both accounts in Genesis are true; or rather, truth is what we get when we take both, contradictions and all, together. Gender is both a given of existence and a relationship driven process, an absolute template and a fluid mode of self-expression. And as I’ve discovered, both conceptions of gender have advantages, even for a transsexual.

For years, the binary template of gender enabled me to massage my male identity without publicly transitioning. I shaved my beard, grew out my hair, raised the pitch of my voice and changed my gestural language without a single personal or professional acquaintance, gay or straight, suspecting that I was trans. Those who noticed that I was changing assumed I had a terminal illness. It was easier to imagine that I was dying than to imagine that I wasn’t really a man. Once I began to shift between presenting as a man and presenting as a woman – sometimes as often as five times a day – the gender binary was, well, a Godsend. No matter how odd I looked compared to most men or women, according to the binary, I had to be one or the other, and so everyone went along with my presentation of the moment. Switching from male to female was as simple as changing clothes. But convenient as it has been, the “male and female God created them” model doesn’t allow for the possibility of transition. I might be able to look male or female, but according to the binary template, I could only, absolutely, be one or the other.

Some of us may be created according to the male and female binary; I wasn’t. Like Adam, I’m a homemade creature. God didn’t create me in relation to a category; I had to be individually imagined, assembled, animated. Like Adam, I had to confront the loneliness of that individuality before I could find my place in the world, and like Adam, I have learned that what I needed to find that place was always within me.

As one study of child development points out, all of us learn to act like the gender we “are” by learning to avoid behaviors that are associated with genders we “aren’t.” This means that masculinity contains – indeed, is defined by – the femininity boys and men are taught not to express; all males internalize a femininity that, like Adam’s rib, can be brought out of our male identities and fashioned into new female selves. In this sense, I’m not approximating a femininity that isn’t mine; like my breasts’ ability to grow when exposed to estrogen, femininity has always been there, sleeping within me. Like Adam, I simply – simply! – had to cut myself open to give birth to the woman swaddled and smothered by my masculinity. Our tradition teaches us that we grow through reading Torah. But the Torah itself grows by being read, remains alive, fresh, startling and new, by becoming part of the lives blossoming and dying around it. As our Sages tell us, the Torah is our life, and the length of our days. All our days: gay, straight, male, female, trans, the days we first open our eyes to the world and the days we gaze our last upon it. The Torah’s roots stretch down to the depths of our being; its limbs stretch through us, toward the future. It is not only our right to read the Torah through our gay, lesbian, bi- and trans- lives; it is our obligation. The Torah’s life depends on ours.