The Jewish Daily Forward, NY, USA


Transgender Jews Now Out of Closet, Seeking Communal Recognition

By Rebecca Spence

Wed. Dec 31, 2008


Los Angeles — When Elliot Kukla, a Reform rabbi, came out as
transgender six months before his ordination in 2006, he never
imagined how openly the Jewish community would be addressing
transgender issues just three years later. This month, he is poised to
address a West Coast regional conference of Reform rabbis on the
subject, and even the elderly Jews that he works with in the Bay Area
are largely accepting of his identity.

"I'm so amazed at the old ladies who will turn to their friends and
say, 'Did you meet the nice, young transgender rabbi?'" Kukla said.
"Some of that is San Francisco, but that conversation would never have
happened a few years ago."

For nearly a decade, Kukla, 34, has been publishing articles and
giving talks in the Jewish community on the topic of transgender
people. But over the past year, education and advocacy initiatives
dealing with transgender rights in the Jewish community have increased
to a level never before seen. The conversation in liberal Jewish
circles surrounding gay and lesbian rights is shifting, with the
spotlight now being trained on the often overlooked — and, activists
say, far more stigmatized — matter of transgender rights.

"Transgender issues are really the next set of issues that the Jewish
community feels it needs to address," said Gregg Drinkwater, executive
director of the Denver-based group Jewish Mosaic, which promotes the
full inclusion of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender individuals
in the Jewish community. "It's the next wave within the liberal Jewish
community, certainly within the Reform and Reconstructionist
movements, and in parts of the Conservative world."

The term "transgender" refers to a wide spectrum of people who fall
outside society's gender norms. It includes those often labeled as
transsexuals, cross-dressers or drag queens. There are no hard data on
the number of transgender people in America.

A common misconception, transgender activists say, is that all
transgender people either want or have had sexual reassignment
surgery, or take hormones. In fact, activists say, many transgender
people — especially those who transition from female to male — do not
opt for the medical route, and may choose other ways of altering their
gender identity, like changing their name and appearance.

In the Conservative movement, plastic surgeon-turned-rabbi Leonard
Sharzer, who once performed sexual reassignment surgeries, has taken a
similar view. Sharzer, senior fellow in bioethics at the Louis
Finkelstein Institute for Religious and Social Studies at the Jewish
Theological Seminary in New York, has written a rabbinic opinion, or
teshuvah, expanding on an earlier teshuvah on transsexuals that in
2003 was passed by the movement's top lawmaking body. Authored by
Mayer Rabinowitz, an associate professor of Talmud at JTS, the opinion
argued that Jewish law, or Halacha, should consider people who undergo
sexual reassignment surgery in terms of their new gender.

"Those who claim that we can not change God's creation are closing
their eyes to conversion, and to transplants as well as many other
medical procedures which in fact do change God's creation,"
Rabinowitz's teshuvah states. "Halakhah has always been macroscopic
and not microscopic. Therefore, external organs determine the sexual
status of a person."

Sharzer's opinion, which has yet to be submitted to the law committee,
proposes that an individual claiming a transgender identity be
considered the gender that person claims for himself or herself,
regardless of whether or not he or she has undergone surgery.

Sharzer said that his teshuvah relied on Rabinowitz's reasoning. But
Rabinowitz's teshuvah addresses only those who have undergone full
sexual reassignment surgery. Asked how his interpretation of Jewish
law justifies the inclusion of those who have not surgically altered
their bodies, Sharzer framed his argument in medical and psychological
terms. He pointed to a scholarly text by sexologist Leah Cahan
Schaefer that, Sharzer said, found that those transgender individuals
who do not have surgery feel as strongly about their gender identity
as those who do.

According to Avi Shafran, director of public affairs at
ultra-traditionalist Orthodox advocacy group Agudath Israel of
America, Orthodox Judaism does not recognize the concept of
transgender Jews."Halachically, and that's all that should matter to
an Orthodox Jew, if the physiology is clearly male or female, then
they are considered that," Shafran said. As for those who have had
surgery: "Certainly the surgery is not permitted. If post facto there
was a change, to the best of my knowledge it doesn't make a difference
either."

Jewish transgender activists, however, point to the fact that Jewish
texts themselves recognize a multiplicity of genders. "Today in the
Western world, we are very insistent about our binary gender system,"
said Reuben Zellman, a rabbinic intern at the San Francisco Reform
synagogue Congregation Sha'ar Zahav. "Our sages talked about gender
diversity in a much different way than we talk about it in
contemporary America. They were, in some senses, much more open about
what the range of human experience could really be."

Zellman, 30, said that rabbinic literature — including the Mishnah and
the Babylonian Talmud — considers many different possible sexual
categories for people. Those categories, he said, include the
androgynos and the tumtum, two distinct and accepted categories of
people who are not decidedly male or female. As an example, Zellman
pointed to a passage from the Babylonian Talmud in which the rabbis
are discussing Sarah's infertility. One of the possible reasons that
the rabbis consider for Sarah's infertility, Zellman said, is that
Abraham and Sarah were tumtumim, or people of indeterminate sexual
identity. "What they say is that maybe she didn't have a uterus,"
Zellman said. "In essence, maybe Sarah is not a woman in the way that
we understand it."

Zellman was the first openly transgender person to apply to the Reform
movement's rabbinical school, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of
Religion. He began HUC in 2003, and is on track to be ordained in
2010.

Under the auspices of Jewish Mosaic, Zellman and Kukla, who serves as
a rabbi at the Bay Area Jewish Healing Center, designed a guide for
exploring gender issues, and specifically transgender and intersex
issues, in the context of Jewish sacred texts. Known as TransTexts,
the guide takes passages from Jewish texts that in some way address
gender. It includes rabbinic commentary to show the myriad ways that
the text can be interpreted.

Kukla is also one of a collective of activists who a month ago
launched Transtorah.org, a Web site designed to serve as a resource
for the Jewish community on transgender issues. And in another example
of Jewish transgender activism, Keshet, a Boston-based Jewish group
that advocates for the rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual and
transgender people, is in the midst of organizing an interfaith
coalition to support a transgender rights bill up for consideration by
the Massachusetts state legislature.

It may be that transgender issues are now hitting the Jewish community
in a pronounced way because they are rising to the fore in broader
American society, said Denise Eger, rabbi of Congregation Kol Ami,
West Hollywood's gay and lesbian Reform synagogue.

Indeed, both inside and outside the Jewish community, media attention
in recent months has been focused on transgender people. Within the
Jewish community, Joy Ladin, a transgender male-to-female literature
professor at Yeshiva University, caused a stir last fall. Formerly a
man known as Jay Ladin, she returned to work as a woman. Elsewhere,
Thomas Beatie — known as the "pregnant man" — made headlines when he
became the first known transgender man to give birth.

Eger, who is also chair of the Pacific Association of Reform Rabbis,
invited Kukla to address the upcoming PARR conference, which begins on
January 4 in Palm Springs, Calif. Eger said that while the Jewish
community is just now beginning to address transgender people, "It's
something that's always been there, but now perhaps we're able to shed
a light on the journey and the spirituality of it."


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