Between The Letters: Transversing The Edges of Gender and Judaism
Last semester a transman named Ash Wickell visited my college campus and read the speech I am now posting. To those of us who were interested, he gave a copy of the speech and encouraged us to share it with others. It's a wonderful, poignant piece, well worth the read.
Between The Letters: Traversing The Edges of Gender and Judaism
My name is Asher. I go by Ash. I'm a complicated kind of Jew. But Jews, for
centuries upon centuries... upon centuries... have turned to the Torah, the first
five books of both Hebrew and Christian Bibles, for guidance on the kind of Jews
they should be. We've also written books upon books, for centuries... and
centuries... about which guidance they should look for, and why the guidance
they think they found is actually a different kind, and the idiots from a century
ago, who completely misconstrued what the Torah was actually saying--in
academic circles, this is given the very civilized title of a "Jewish concentric
textual tradition." Rabbis call it talmud and midrash. What it actually is, is a
millenia-long shouting match, back and forth across the centuries about what G-d
ACTUALLY meant to say to Moses, and how much attention we should pay, and
to which parts of it.
This sounds like a convoluted path to understanding one's identity, I know. But
I'm a Jew, and who am I to scoff at such a long tradition? So, like millions before
me, I begin with Torah--with the five books of Moses.
A Sefer Torah--a Torah scroll, used in a synagogue--is always written by hand.
The Jewish scribes who write them are governed by strict regulations, which they
follow to the letter--one letter at a time. Each letter in a scroll must be copied as it
appears in an existing, kosher Torah scroll--"kosher," in this context, of course,
means not "edible," but acceptable, suitable for use. And this is true even when--
from a secular standpoint--there appears to be an error in the original.
Inconsistencies in the spelling of some words, and the way they are written, are
retained, not adjusted into conformity with the rest of the text. This means,
among other things, that every kosher Torah--every Torah scroll which is fit for
use--contains a number of letters which are intentionally written upside-down.
No letter, of course, may be omitted or replaced. Each one of the scroll's 304,805
letters must be copied clearly and exactly. The space between letters must also
be preserved--no two letters may touch or overlap. If any of these conditions is
not met--if even one letter is out of place, or incorrect; if a well-meaning (and illtrained)
scribe decides to flip the inverted letters right-side-up--the entire scroll is
non-kosher, unsuitable for use.
Letters have occupied a place of increasing importance in my life--well, two
letters in particular. My bio introduced me using the name "Ash," and the
masculine pronoun "he." That is the introduction I asked for; those are the forms
of address I prefer. I did, in fact, write the introduction myself. But there are these
letters, and to my way of thinking--though there are those who disagree--you
cannot really know me without knowing about them.
This is my driver's license. This, along with my passport, is the marker, in this
time and place, of my adulthood. Employability. Freedom to travel between states
and nations. Right to vote. They are the most basic proof of my civic and social
existence. These, along with a handful of other documents that I don't travel with,
are the ways in which we designate complete personhood. They are the proof of
my humanity.
I could deliver an entire paper on the ways in which that's problematic, but for
now, I'm going to tell you what it means for me, and I'll let you draw your own
conclusions.
What is important to note is that on each of these documents--each of these
proofs of my existence and humanity--next to the word "sex," there is a small,
black "F," although most of you can't see it from where you're sitting.
The Fs are a problem for me, because what they mean in the real world is that I
am a person only when and if I am recognizably female.
Even if I were a woman, even when I was generally understood to be a woman,
that didn't work well for me. "Woman," in our society, means all kinds of things.
Women are approachable, and for "approachable," read "vulnerable." Women
are emotional, which is to say, volatile, moody, and unreliable. Women's
emotions don't count; women's opinions don't count, because of course, they're
rooted in emotion. Women are incompetent. Women are fertile; women's bodies
and sex serve a procreative purpose; women's bodies are not their own. I've
lived 21 years trying to be a woman, and 24 years being, at least occasionally,
mistaken for one--I know. I get it.
But for me, for any person whose documentation does not match up to hir
expression, it is also problematic in other ways. I am not only a woman who
doesn't know her place--I am also a man, whose manhood doesn't measure up.
I'm a dyke; I'm a butch; I'm trying to be a man; I need a real man to show me
what I really am. I'm a fag; I'm a pussy; I'm a threat to the masculinity and
probably also the marriage of any red-blooded heterosexual American man. I
catch it coming and going, and even in gay spaces, I am neither recognizable,
nor necessarily welcome.
So, these upside-down letters, in the Torah--this is something that really
fascinates me. What is a letter, when you invert it like that? It becomes
unpronounceable, unreadable, unnameable. It's not even a letter, in the way that
we understand letters. Letters have to be comprehensible, have to signify
something known--that's why they exist. An unreadable letter doesn't make any
sense.
And yet, it must be a letter, or else it wouldn't be there. A Torah is copied by
copying letters, one by one. It must be a letter; its presence demands it.
There's a tradition that there is one letter in the Torah for every soul that was
present when G-d gave the law to Moses. One soul less, one unfortunate,
misplaced in the Exodus, abandoned in the desert--a single person who was too
troublesome or slow or demanding or insignificant--and the Torah would have
been incomplete.
Except you can't really have an incomplete Torah. One letter less, and the entire
thing becomes non-kosher, unusable, purposeless. Dead. If the Torah is not
whole, then there is, functionally, no Torah. If the people is not whole, then there
is no people. Every letter, every soul, depends on all of the others--readable,
nameable, or not.
I know. Already, gender is this slippery, unstable thing. If I asked everyone in the
room, "Tell me, what do you think a real woman is? What is a real man?" Fifty
years ago, we might have reached some consensus, however flawed. Maybe.
But here, now? Short of resorting to descriptions of genes, or hormones, or
anatomy, no one would give me the same answer. And even then, most of us
know, don't we, that there are exceptions? Human exceptions. People who are
XO, instead of XX or XY; people with more than two sex chromosomes; people
who are XY, but androgen-insensitive, who grow up to be women and not men.
Beautiful women, as it happens--fashion models, at a much higher rate than the
general population. Men who develop breasts during adolescence; girls, who
reach puberty, and then their testicles descend, and they grow up to be guys.
And yet, gender is as close to most of us as our own names. Gender is supposed
to be absolute, unchangeable. It's how we grew up. It's what our parents did, who
they were, or weren't, to one another and to us. It's how we know about our own
safety--which stranger can you ask for help, if your car breaks down? Who is a
threat to you? Who are you a threat to? It's who we fall in love with, who we
marry, how we dress, how we make love.
And into the middle of all of that walks someone like me. And if I say to you,
"Listen, I'm not anatomically exceptional. My genes are, as far as I can tell, pretty
much par for the course. My adolescence was standard, more traumatic than
most, I think, but biologically about what medical professionals expect. All the
parts, all the plumbing--it's all female. But I'm not a girl, and I'm not a woman, and
I'm running as fast and as far as I can from anything that gives my body away as
being what it is." Where on earth does that leave you and your gender? What
does that do to your safety, your family, your love-life?
The perfection of the Torah, likewise, is an awkward kind of perfection. On the
one hand, it's assumed, in the way the text is copied and preserved. It's
supposed to be... absolute. Unchangeable. On the other hand--there are these
letters, larger and smaller than the rest, inverted, even broken. And here we all
are, in an imperfect, broken world. How can that Torah, in that world, possibly be
perfect? But if it isn't, why even bother? Why follow, or even pay attention to, a
Law that is as broken as the world it exists in? If it isn't perfect, why does it
matter?
Jewish mystics have taken a stab at explaining this. Maybe the Torah, as it
stands, is as it should be. Maybe, instead of being incorrect, the Torah is just
missing something--like a letter. Maybe one of the letters that should exist in the
Hebrew alphabet and the Torah isn't there. But! We've already established that
we're in deep trouble, if we have a Torah that's short a single letter. If we have a
letter that's missing from the alphabet, all right, a letter that should be present all
through the Torah--we might as well just give up. So: maybe the letter isn't really
missing. Maybe the letter is present, but invisible. In fact: maybe what appears to
be missing from the Torah is actually there, in the spaces between the letters that
we know how to read.
There is a phenomenon--a role, really, which transgender activist Bear Bergman
refers to as the "pathetic transsexual." It's not one I'm fond of, because, frankly, it
gets old to be an object of pity. Also, I'm rather pleased and proud of the things
I've accomplished because of being transgender and in spite of widespread,
virulent transphobia. But I'm going to take a moment and slip into role, because
transpeople do exist within a set of realities that people who are not transgender,
who have no transgender people--or now out transgender people--in their
immediate circle of friends, have no reason to know about.
I can't pee. Not in public. This seems comparatively minor, I know--nobody likes
public restrooms--but try it sometime. Just... don't pee, for a day, or a week, or a
month, or... the rest of your life. Public restrooms are not safe for transpeople. I
never use women's restrooms, anymore, anatomy be damned, because I've
been challenged, or threatened, or followed (and then challenged or threatened)
a few too many times. It runs something like this: "WHAT were you doing in the
women's restroom?" "... peeing." "WHY were you in there?" "... ... peeing." And
then she beckons over her seven-foot-tall husband, or the nearest security
guard, and I can either pull out my ID and prove my humanity by way of
femaleness, again--unless it turns out that I'm not feminine enough, in which
case I'm in a whole different kind of trouble--or try to get around them, and lose
myself in the crowd. If there is a crowd.
I use men's restrooms, which are safer for me, except when they're not, but
mostly they are. Because men--straight men--aren't allowed to check each other
out in the same way that women can, and isn't it funny and terrifying, the way I
rely on other people's homophobia to keep me safe? So the odds are better that
I'll make it past, under the radar. Not, you know, enough better, though, and men
are slower to ask questions but faster to throw punches, so as a general rule, I
do what I can to avoid the issue altogether.
This means I can't drink--certainly not caffeine or alcohol--unless I'm within
reachable distance of a safe bathroom, which is my apartment, or the tea-shop
where I know the owner, when I'm at home; and my hotel, here in town. I have to
be careful at meals, when I'm out--I imagine most of you ate lunch sometime in
the last few hours? So did I. And I weighed every bite against my need NOT to
use a public restroom.
I can't be pulled over. Not ever. Police aren't safe for me, anymore. They all begin
by being very friendly--more than when I read as a female, and why wouldn't they
be, a nice white boy like me? "Good evening, sir; how are you, tonight, sir; looks
like you forgot to turn your lights on, sir; just going to write you a warning tonight,
sir," and then they ask for my license, and it's down the rabbit-hole, again. I've
been lucky, so far. A few hundred dollars in tickets, for violations no one I know
had ever heard of, before; a few two-hour waits on the shoulder of the road, while
they called in my name to everyone they could think of, looking for a reason not
to let me go. But it could be worse. It is worse.
A transwoman, Duanna Johnson, was shot this week in Tennessee. She was a
sex worker--a lot of transpeople are, because most places, there's nothing that
says we can't be fired just for being trans--so she was arrested, back in June, on
a prostitution charge. And while she was in the station, waiting to be booked,
one Memphis police officer held her down, and another beat her, with a pair of
handcuffs in his hands. This was taped on a security camera; you can go watch
it on YouTube or any of the major news sites, if you're so inclined. They were
fired over it. And Duanna Johnson did, I think, what anybody would do, and sued
the hell out of the police department for assault.
Five months later, she's shot, execution style, in the middle of the street.
Nobody, as they say, saw nothing. Investigators do not have any suspects at
this time.
So I for sure can't be arrested. If I go to a public protest; if I show up at a party
where I don't know the ages of everyone present, and one twenty-year-old has a
beer in his hand in another room--I can't just go spend the night in jail, call a
friend to bail me out. I'd be risking my life.
And then there's my body. Not the one they'd be arresting, I mean; just the one I
have to live in. It's not exactly comfortable. In fact, it's kind of like a lifetime of
being in the seventh grade. You wake up; you pull on a pair of pants; you go look
in the mirror--and your body's betrayed you, again. That's the closest I can come
to a decent description, for people who haven't been there. It's that middle-school
feeling; you're growing new parts, all at different speeds, and they're awkward,
and off-balance, and none of them fit together, and they certainly don't match up
to your clothes, or the way you'd like to look, or the person you think you are.
Except it doesn't end. Every morning, you wake up, and it's never better, and it
never levels off--it's just wrong. Continuously, pervasively, wrong.
There are, I'm periodically reminded, solutions for that--oh, yes. If all goes as
planned, in fact, I'll start self-administering regular doses of testosterone
sometime in January of 2009. This is a comparatively low-stakes transition; it
runs around $200 a month, minus the additional doctor-visits and blood tests it
makes necessary. It will probably only raise my cost of living by $3000 or so, a
year.
There's chest surgery, which I've thought about--that starts at about $5000,
minus travel expenses, because this is not the kind of surgery that's offered at
just any municipal hospital--but it means losing sensation... here. It means I'll
never feel my partner against my skin, when I hold him; I might eventually, after
months or years of healing, feel the pressure, if he lays his head on my chest, but
never his hand, or his hair, or the warmth or coolness of his skin. Is it worth it?
And there's genital surgery, and I'll skip the gorier details, but what I'd be risking
is urinary function, bowel function, sexual function, and orgasmic capacity--and
what I'd be getting would be a realistic-looking, sexually functional penis that tops
out at around two inches long--or an unrealistic-looking but full-size penis, with
no erectile function of its own, with orgasmic capacity an open question. In either
case, if I want testicles, or to be able to pee through my penis, it costs extra.
Do I even have to say how totally unwilling my health insurance company is to
have anything to do with any of this?
Suicide attempts among transgender youth are estimated at around 50%,
although I have to wonder if that's not related to who's asking the question. Every
transgender person I know has attempted suicide at least once. Also: depending
on which study you read, my lifetime odds of being murdered fall somewhere
between one in 12 and one in 8.
And it's worth noting this: I'm lucky. I can pass as male, most of the time, when
my safety depends on it. I'm white. I'm educated. I'm a student and adjunct
faculty member at a university, with a policy that bans discrimination on sexual
orientation and gender identity. I've got about as much cultural capital as it's
possible to have. And people like me make up the majority, in the sample groups
for all of those studies. The rest of us are suffering more.
We make up somewhere between one quarter of one percent, and two percent of
the population--but then no one really knows how many of us die, before we can
be counted.
That's the end of that. Not because that's all there is to say, but because it's
endless, frankly; and because there are other things that I think it's important to
touch on, before we're done here.
Being transgender--being someone who crosses boundaries that are supposed
to be inviolable--it doesn't make me broken. Dented, a little, sometimes, but I'm in
one piece, so far. It does, often, make me invisible. Because, of course, there
are these two boxes, and one of them says "M," and one of them says "F," and
everyone, always, is supposed to be able to check one or the other, and if they
can't, well, where does that leave them? Where does that leave... you? But of
course, here, too--invisibility is not the same thing as insignificance.
When you look at a Torah scroll, the letters are the first thing you see--they're the
only thing most people see. They're beautiful--clearly written, evenly spaced,
none of them smudged--they are as perfect as human hands can make them.
And they depend utterly on the uninscribed space that surrounds them. You can
pour out as much ink as you like; if there is no space between the letters--no
breathing room, no place for possibility--you'll never arrive at a Torah, or anything
else worth having.
It's relatively easy to convince people who are not transgender, who are not part
of the queer community, that we need them. Transpeople, especially--we're not a
big voting bloc. We're nobody's target consumer, really. We survive, often,
because of our allies. And I want you as allies. I want you to have some idea,
when you leave, that your friendship, your support, can be lifesaving to people
like me.
But it's not as simple or as one-sided as us needing you. You need us, too.
Because this enormous mess that you call "gender"? This staggering set of
assumptions and insecurities and possibilities that is so essential, and flawed,
and deeply human--we're the answer to it. We don't read that way. We don't
always look the way women, or men, even lesbians, or gay men, are supposed
to look. We don't fit into gender, the way it's built right now. We are doing "man"
and "woman" very differently from how they have traditionally been done--and
some of us are doing both--and some of us are doing neither.
And so when things come unglued to do with gender, when gendered institutions
like work and family and places of worship are destabilized, it must be easy to
look at us and see the problem. It's the gays. It's the men marrying other men
and not women; it's the women marrying other women and not men. It's the men
wanting to be women, and the women wanting to be men, and, my G-d, if they all
knew their place! ...maybe we would, too?
It's easy. But it's wrong. We aren't your problem; we're the solution. We're what's
missing. Our absence, our invisibility, is hurting you as it's hurting us. For two
reasons: first of all, if we aren't allowed to exist, then anyone who looks even a
little bit like us is questionable. No transpeople means no drag queens or crossdressers,
for sure--no gay people. Those aren't appropriately gendered
relationships; no way.
All married men have to earn more than their wives, for sure, and--you know,
really, women should be at home, keeping house and raising children. Men: no
emotions, no therapy, certainly no hair past your ears. You may, however, swear--
so long as there's not a lady present--and drink, but it can't be fruit-flavored; and
kill animals on the weekends. Ladies, sorry; you'll be home with the kids, but you
are allowed to cry about it! And you can tell your analyst (who will probably write
it off as feminine hysteria).
Of course, if we're going to insist on normative gender across the board, we'd
better ask ourselves what that means for women who are infertile, or who've had
mastectomies, or lost their hair during chemo--and for men who are impotent, or
who've had testicular cancer, who aren't reproductively capable. Hormone-based
treatments for sex-linked cancers are off the table, too.
I was at the grocery store, after I had cut my hair, but before I began selfconsciously
presenting as male in public spaces. And a man called me "sir," and
when he heard how high my voice was, he started apologizing for having
mistaken me for a man.
He seemed genuinely distressed, and so I tried, in a fumbling sort of way, to
explain that he was mistaken about his mistake being a mistake, and in the
middle of it, he started crying--this complete stranger, in the middle of the grocery
store. And he said, "My wife is very sick. She's had cancer, and she had a
mastectomy, and chemo, and she's lost all her hair. People keep mistaking her
for a man. And it's been incredibly hard for her; she can't even use the women's
room, because people think she's a man."
Oh.
Kate Bornstein, another trans activist, says that if you're gay, then you're
transgender. That's all there is to it. Because by being gay, you have already
broken the rules about the gender to which people of your gender may be
attracted to--that's why it's so threatening. Homophobia is transphobia, one step
removed.
I'd like to go her one better. If you're in the room right now, you're transgressing
gender, one way or another. Gentlemen, you're relating to the women and others
present as co-professionals--as fellow students and professors. I can't, I
suppose, make assumptions about what's going on in your heads, but if nothing
else, you are staying silent long enough for me to speak. You aren't supposed to
do that.
And any woman who's here--as a student or educator, or any way at all, frankly--
you're breaking the rules, too.
Of course, if you don't fit into either category as traditionally defined, you're
breaking the rules just by breathing. Congratulations. Come find me later; we'll do
coffee.
But there's more to it than that. It's not just about the ways you have to limit
yourselves, in order to exclude us. It's about what you lose when we aren't there,
when we aren't visible, when it isn't safe for us to speak. When it comes to
gender--we've walked on ahead of you. The rest of the world is just getting
around to arguing over whether we can exist, or should exist, and how we should
exist--we're over here, existing.
There is space between those letters--F and M. Space within them, too--space
that can be passed through, on your way somewhere more definite, and also
space that can be lived in. And we're here. And we're living in it. And it's okay.
Really.
Living there--in that space--doesn't change who you are. Or what you are. It does
make you stick out a bit. It makes you more visible. It makes it harder to hide.
But as a Jew, I am called to be visible. To be a faithful Jew is to replace injustice
with justice, omission with honesty, brokenness with wholeness. To be a faithful
Jew is, for me, to be a faithful queer. I am not openly gay, or transgender,
despite my Jewishness, but because of it. I'm not standing here, looking this
way, telling you the deep dark truth about my gendered body by accident--nor am
I convinced, as little as I sometimes like it, that I am an accident. Although I was
born into an ill-fitting body, and one which I am changing to make it more livable,
I am not convinced that I was born in the wrong body. I was born exactly the way
I was meant to be--the space between the letters is where I belong.
.
Between The Letters: Traversing The Edges of Gender and Judaism
My name is Asher. I go by Ash. I'm a complicated kind of Jew. But Jews, for
centuries upon centuries... upon centuries... have turned to the Torah, the first
five books of both Hebrew and Christian Bibles, for guidance on the kind of Jews
they should be. We've also written books upon books, for centuries... and
centuries... about which guidance they should look for, and why the guidance
they think they found is actually a different kind, and the idiots from a century
ago, who completely misconstrued what the Torah was actually saying--in
academic circles, this is given the very civilized title of a "Jewish concentric
textual tradition." Rabbis call it talmud and midrash. What it actually is, is a
millenia-long shouting match, back and forth across the centuries about what G-d
ACTUALLY meant to say to Moses, and how much attention we should pay, and
to which parts of it.
This sounds like a convoluted path to understanding one's identity, I know. But
I'm a Jew, and who am I to scoff at such a long tradition? So, like millions before
me, I begin with Torah--with the five books of Moses.
A Sefer Torah--a Torah scroll, used in a synagogue--is always written by hand.
The Jewish scribes who write them are governed by strict regulations, which they
follow to the letter--one letter at a time. Each letter in a scroll must be copied as it
appears in an existing, kosher Torah scroll--"kosher," in this context, of course,
means not "edible," but acceptable, suitable for use. And this is true even when--
from a secular standpoint--there appears to be an error in the original.
Inconsistencies in the spelling of some words, and the way they are written, are
retained, not adjusted into conformity with the rest of the text. This means,
among other things, that every kosher Torah--every Torah scroll which is fit for
use--contains a number of letters which are intentionally written upside-down.
No letter, of course, may be omitted or replaced. Each one of the scroll's 304,805
letters must be copied clearly and exactly. The space between letters must also
be preserved--no two letters may touch or overlap. If any of these conditions is
not met--if even one letter is out of place, or incorrect; if a well-meaning (and illtrained)
scribe decides to flip the inverted letters right-side-up--the entire scroll is
non-kosher, unsuitable for use.
Letters have occupied a place of increasing importance in my life--well, two
letters in particular. My bio introduced me using the name "Ash," and the
masculine pronoun "he." That is the introduction I asked for; those are the forms
of address I prefer. I did, in fact, write the introduction myself. But there are these
letters, and to my way of thinking--though there are those who disagree--you
cannot really know me without knowing about them.
This is my driver's license. This, along with my passport, is the marker, in this
time and place, of my adulthood. Employability. Freedom to travel between states
and nations. Right to vote. They are the most basic proof of my civic and social
existence. These, along with a handful of other documents that I don't travel with,
are the ways in which we designate complete personhood. They are the proof of
my humanity.
I could deliver an entire paper on the ways in which that's problematic, but for
now, I'm going to tell you what it means for me, and I'll let you draw your own
conclusions.
What is important to note is that on each of these documents--each of these
proofs of my existence and humanity--next to the word "sex," there is a small,
black "F," although most of you can't see it from where you're sitting.
The Fs are a problem for me, because what they mean in the real world is that I
am a person only when and if I am recognizably female.
Even if I were a woman, even when I was generally understood to be a woman,
that didn't work well for me. "Woman," in our society, means all kinds of things.
Women are approachable, and for "approachable," read "vulnerable." Women
are emotional, which is to say, volatile, moody, and unreliable. Women's
emotions don't count; women's opinions don't count, because of course, they're
rooted in emotion. Women are incompetent. Women are fertile; women's bodies
and sex serve a procreative purpose; women's bodies are not their own. I've
lived 21 years trying to be a woman, and 24 years being, at least occasionally,
mistaken for one--I know. I get it.
But for me, for any person whose documentation does not match up to hir
expression, it is also problematic in other ways. I am not only a woman who
doesn't know her place--I am also a man, whose manhood doesn't measure up.
I'm a dyke; I'm a butch; I'm trying to be a man; I need a real man to show me
what I really am. I'm a fag; I'm a pussy; I'm a threat to the masculinity and
probably also the marriage of any red-blooded heterosexual American man. I
catch it coming and going, and even in gay spaces, I am neither recognizable,
nor necessarily welcome.
So, these upside-down letters, in the Torah--this is something that really
fascinates me. What is a letter, when you invert it like that? It becomes
unpronounceable, unreadable, unnameable. It's not even a letter, in the way that
we understand letters. Letters have to be comprehensible, have to signify
something known--that's why they exist. An unreadable letter doesn't make any
sense.
And yet, it must be a letter, or else it wouldn't be there. A Torah is copied by
copying letters, one by one. It must be a letter; its presence demands it.
There's a tradition that there is one letter in the Torah for every soul that was
present when G-d gave the law to Moses. One soul less, one unfortunate,
misplaced in the Exodus, abandoned in the desert--a single person who was too
troublesome or slow or demanding or insignificant--and the Torah would have
been incomplete.
Except you can't really have an incomplete Torah. One letter less, and the entire
thing becomes non-kosher, unusable, purposeless. Dead. If the Torah is not
whole, then there is, functionally, no Torah. If the people is not whole, then there
is no people. Every letter, every soul, depends on all of the others--readable,
nameable, or not.
I know. Already, gender is this slippery, unstable thing. If I asked everyone in the
room, "Tell me, what do you think a real woman is? What is a real man?" Fifty
years ago, we might have reached some consensus, however flawed. Maybe.
But here, now? Short of resorting to descriptions of genes, or hormones, or
anatomy, no one would give me the same answer. And even then, most of us
know, don't we, that there are exceptions? Human exceptions. People who are
XO, instead of XX or XY; people with more than two sex chromosomes; people
who are XY, but androgen-insensitive, who grow up to be women and not men.
Beautiful women, as it happens--fashion models, at a much higher rate than the
general population. Men who develop breasts during adolescence; girls, who
reach puberty, and then their testicles descend, and they grow up to be guys.
And yet, gender is as close to most of us as our own names. Gender is supposed
to be absolute, unchangeable. It's how we grew up. It's what our parents did, who
they were, or weren't, to one another and to us. It's how we know about our own
safety--which stranger can you ask for help, if your car breaks down? Who is a
threat to you? Who are you a threat to? It's who we fall in love with, who we
marry, how we dress, how we make love.
And into the middle of all of that walks someone like me. And if I say to you,
"Listen, I'm not anatomically exceptional. My genes are, as far as I can tell, pretty
much par for the course. My adolescence was standard, more traumatic than
most, I think, but biologically about what medical professionals expect. All the
parts, all the plumbing--it's all female. But I'm not a girl, and I'm not a woman, and
I'm running as fast and as far as I can from anything that gives my body away as
being what it is." Where on earth does that leave you and your gender? What
does that do to your safety, your family, your love-life?
The perfection of the Torah, likewise, is an awkward kind of perfection. On the
one hand, it's assumed, in the way the text is copied and preserved. It's
supposed to be... absolute. Unchangeable. On the other hand--there are these
letters, larger and smaller than the rest, inverted, even broken. And here we all
are, in an imperfect, broken world. How can that Torah, in that world, possibly be
perfect? But if it isn't, why even bother? Why follow, or even pay attention to, a
Law that is as broken as the world it exists in? If it isn't perfect, why does it
matter?
Jewish mystics have taken a stab at explaining this. Maybe the Torah, as it
stands, is as it should be. Maybe, instead of being incorrect, the Torah is just
missing something--like a letter. Maybe one of the letters that should exist in the
Hebrew alphabet and the Torah isn't there. But! We've already established that
we're in deep trouble, if we have a Torah that's short a single letter. If we have a
letter that's missing from the alphabet, all right, a letter that should be present all
through the Torah--we might as well just give up. So: maybe the letter isn't really
missing. Maybe the letter is present, but invisible. In fact: maybe what appears to
be missing from the Torah is actually there, in the spaces between the letters that
we know how to read.
There is a phenomenon--a role, really, which transgender activist Bear Bergman
refers to as the "pathetic transsexual." It's not one I'm fond of, because, frankly, it
gets old to be an object of pity. Also, I'm rather pleased and proud of the things
I've accomplished because of being transgender and in spite of widespread,
virulent transphobia. But I'm going to take a moment and slip into role, because
transpeople do exist within a set of realities that people who are not transgender,
who have no transgender people--or now out transgender people--in their
immediate circle of friends, have no reason to know about.
I can't pee. Not in public. This seems comparatively minor, I know--nobody likes
public restrooms--but try it sometime. Just... don't pee, for a day, or a week, or a
month, or... the rest of your life. Public restrooms are not safe for transpeople. I
never use women's restrooms, anymore, anatomy be damned, because I've
been challenged, or threatened, or followed (and then challenged or threatened)
a few too many times. It runs something like this: "WHAT were you doing in the
women's restroom?" "... peeing." "WHY were you in there?" "... ... peeing." And
then she beckons over her seven-foot-tall husband, or the nearest security
guard, and I can either pull out my ID and prove my humanity by way of
femaleness, again--unless it turns out that I'm not feminine enough, in which
case I'm in a whole different kind of trouble--or try to get around them, and lose
myself in the crowd. If there is a crowd.
I use men's restrooms, which are safer for me, except when they're not, but
mostly they are. Because men--straight men--aren't allowed to check each other
out in the same way that women can, and isn't it funny and terrifying, the way I
rely on other people's homophobia to keep me safe? So the odds are better that
I'll make it past, under the radar. Not, you know, enough better, though, and men
are slower to ask questions but faster to throw punches, so as a general rule, I
do what I can to avoid the issue altogether.
This means I can't drink--certainly not caffeine or alcohol--unless I'm within
reachable distance of a safe bathroom, which is my apartment, or the tea-shop
where I know the owner, when I'm at home; and my hotel, here in town. I have to
be careful at meals, when I'm out--I imagine most of you ate lunch sometime in
the last few hours? So did I. And I weighed every bite against my need NOT to
use a public restroom.
I can't be pulled over. Not ever. Police aren't safe for me, anymore. They all begin
by being very friendly--more than when I read as a female, and why wouldn't they
be, a nice white boy like me? "Good evening, sir; how are you, tonight, sir; looks
like you forgot to turn your lights on, sir; just going to write you a warning tonight,
sir," and then they ask for my license, and it's down the rabbit-hole, again. I've
been lucky, so far. A few hundred dollars in tickets, for violations no one I know
had ever heard of, before; a few two-hour waits on the shoulder of the road, while
they called in my name to everyone they could think of, looking for a reason not
to let me go. But it could be worse. It is worse.
A transwoman, Duanna Johnson, was shot this week in Tennessee. She was a
sex worker--a lot of transpeople are, because most places, there's nothing that
says we can't be fired just for being trans--so she was arrested, back in June, on
a prostitution charge. And while she was in the station, waiting to be booked,
one Memphis police officer held her down, and another beat her, with a pair of
handcuffs in his hands. This was taped on a security camera; you can go watch
it on YouTube or any of the major news sites, if you're so inclined. They were
fired over it. And Duanna Johnson did, I think, what anybody would do, and sued
the hell out of the police department for assault.
Five months later, she's shot, execution style, in the middle of the street.
Nobody, as they say, saw nothing. Investigators do not have any suspects at
this time.
So I for sure can't be arrested. If I go to a public protest; if I show up at a party
where I don't know the ages of everyone present, and one twenty-year-old has a
beer in his hand in another room--I can't just go spend the night in jail, call a
friend to bail me out. I'd be risking my life.
And then there's my body. Not the one they'd be arresting, I mean; just the one I
have to live in. It's not exactly comfortable. In fact, it's kind of like a lifetime of
being in the seventh grade. You wake up; you pull on a pair of pants; you go look
in the mirror--and your body's betrayed you, again. That's the closest I can come
to a decent description, for people who haven't been there. It's that middle-school
feeling; you're growing new parts, all at different speeds, and they're awkward,
and off-balance, and none of them fit together, and they certainly don't match up
to your clothes, or the way you'd like to look, or the person you think you are.
Except it doesn't end. Every morning, you wake up, and it's never better, and it
never levels off--it's just wrong. Continuously, pervasively, wrong.
There are, I'm periodically reminded, solutions for that--oh, yes. If all goes as
planned, in fact, I'll start self-administering regular doses of testosterone
sometime in January of 2009. This is a comparatively low-stakes transition; it
runs around $200 a month, minus the additional doctor-visits and blood tests it
makes necessary. It will probably only raise my cost of living by $3000 or so, a
year.
There's chest surgery, which I've thought about--that starts at about $5000,
minus travel expenses, because this is not the kind of surgery that's offered at
just any municipal hospital--but it means losing sensation... here. It means I'll
never feel my partner against my skin, when I hold him; I might eventually, after
months or years of healing, feel the pressure, if he lays his head on my chest, but
never his hand, or his hair, or the warmth or coolness of his skin. Is it worth it?
And there's genital surgery, and I'll skip the gorier details, but what I'd be risking
is urinary function, bowel function, sexual function, and orgasmic capacity--and
what I'd be getting would be a realistic-looking, sexually functional penis that tops
out at around two inches long--or an unrealistic-looking but full-size penis, with
no erectile function of its own, with orgasmic capacity an open question. In either
case, if I want testicles, or to be able to pee through my penis, it costs extra.
Do I even have to say how totally unwilling my health insurance company is to
have anything to do with any of this?
Suicide attempts among transgender youth are estimated at around 50%,
although I have to wonder if that's not related to who's asking the question. Every
transgender person I know has attempted suicide at least once. Also: depending
on which study you read, my lifetime odds of being murdered fall somewhere
between one in 12 and one in 8.
And it's worth noting this: I'm lucky. I can pass as male, most of the time, when
my safety depends on it. I'm white. I'm educated. I'm a student and adjunct
faculty member at a university, with a policy that bans discrimination on sexual
orientation and gender identity. I've got about as much cultural capital as it's
possible to have. And people like me make up the majority, in the sample groups
for all of those studies. The rest of us are suffering more.
We make up somewhere between one quarter of one percent, and two percent of
the population--but then no one really knows how many of us die, before we can
be counted.
That's the end of that. Not because that's all there is to say, but because it's
endless, frankly; and because there are other things that I think it's important to
touch on, before we're done here.
Being transgender--being someone who crosses boundaries that are supposed
to be inviolable--it doesn't make me broken. Dented, a little, sometimes, but I'm in
one piece, so far. It does, often, make me invisible. Because, of course, there
are these two boxes, and one of them says "M," and one of them says "F," and
everyone, always, is supposed to be able to check one or the other, and if they
can't, well, where does that leave them? Where does that leave... you? But of
course, here, too--invisibility is not the same thing as insignificance.
When you look at a Torah scroll, the letters are the first thing you see--they're the
only thing most people see. They're beautiful--clearly written, evenly spaced,
none of them smudged--they are as perfect as human hands can make them.
And they depend utterly on the uninscribed space that surrounds them. You can
pour out as much ink as you like; if there is no space between the letters--no
breathing room, no place for possibility--you'll never arrive at a Torah, or anything
else worth having.
It's relatively easy to convince people who are not transgender, who are not part
of the queer community, that we need them. Transpeople, especially--we're not a
big voting bloc. We're nobody's target consumer, really. We survive, often,
because of our allies. And I want you as allies. I want you to have some idea,
when you leave, that your friendship, your support, can be lifesaving to people
like me.
But it's not as simple or as one-sided as us needing you. You need us, too.
Because this enormous mess that you call "gender"? This staggering set of
assumptions and insecurities and possibilities that is so essential, and flawed,
and deeply human--we're the answer to it. We don't read that way. We don't
always look the way women, or men, even lesbians, or gay men, are supposed
to look. We don't fit into gender, the way it's built right now. We are doing "man"
and "woman" very differently from how they have traditionally been done--and
some of us are doing both--and some of us are doing neither.
And so when things come unglued to do with gender, when gendered institutions
like work and family and places of worship are destabilized, it must be easy to
look at us and see the problem. It's the gays. It's the men marrying other men
and not women; it's the women marrying other women and not men. It's the men
wanting to be women, and the women wanting to be men, and, my G-d, if they all
knew their place! ...maybe we would, too?
It's easy. But it's wrong. We aren't your problem; we're the solution. We're what's
missing. Our absence, our invisibility, is hurting you as it's hurting us. For two
reasons: first of all, if we aren't allowed to exist, then anyone who looks even a
little bit like us is questionable. No transpeople means no drag queens or crossdressers,
for sure--no gay people. Those aren't appropriately gendered
relationships; no way.
All married men have to earn more than their wives, for sure, and--you know,
really, women should be at home, keeping house and raising children. Men: no
emotions, no therapy, certainly no hair past your ears. You may, however, swear--
so long as there's not a lady present--and drink, but it can't be fruit-flavored; and
kill animals on the weekends. Ladies, sorry; you'll be home with the kids, but you
are allowed to cry about it! And you can tell your analyst (who will probably write
it off as feminine hysteria).
Of course, if we're going to insist on normative gender across the board, we'd
better ask ourselves what that means for women who are infertile, or who've had
mastectomies, or lost their hair during chemo--and for men who are impotent, or
who've had testicular cancer, who aren't reproductively capable. Hormone-based
treatments for sex-linked cancers are off the table, too.
I was at the grocery store, after I had cut my hair, but before I began selfconsciously
presenting as male in public spaces. And a man called me "sir," and
when he heard how high my voice was, he started apologizing for having
mistaken me for a man.
He seemed genuinely distressed, and so I tried, in a fumbling sort of way, to
explain that he was mistaken about his mistake being a mistake, and in the
middle of it, he started crying--this complete stranger, in the middle of the grocery
store. And he said, "My wife is very sick. She's had cancer, and she had a
mastectomy, and chemo, and she's lost all her hair. People keep mistaking her
for a man. And it's been incredibly hard for her; she can't even use the women's
room, because people think she's a man."
Oh.
Kate Bornstein, another trans activist, says that if you're gay, then you're
transgender. That's all there is to it. Because by being gay, you have already
broken the rules about the gender to which people of your gender may be
attracted to--that's why it's so threatening. Homophobia is transphobia, one step
removed.
I'd like to go her one better. If you're in the room right now, you're transgressing
gender, one way or another. Gentlemen, you're relating to the women and others
present as co-professionals--as fellow students and professors. I can't, I
suppose, make assumptions about what's going on in your heads, but if nothing
else, you are staying silent long enough for me to speak. You aren't supposed to
do that.
And any woman who's here--as a student or educator, or any way at all, frankly--
you're breaking the rules, too.
Of course, if you don't fit into either category as traditionally defined, you're
breaking the rules just by breathing. Congratulations. Come find me later; we'll do
coffee.
But there's more to it than that. It's not just about the ways you have to limit
yourselves, in order to exclude us. It's about what you lose when we aren't there,
when we aren't visible, when it isn't safe for us to speak. When it comes to
gender--we've walked on ahead of you. The rest of the world is just getting
around to arguing over whether we can exist, or should exist, and how we should
exist--we're over here, existing.
There is space between those letters--F and M. Space within them, too--space
that can be passed through, on your way somewhere more definite, and also
space that can be lived in. And we're here. And we're living in it. And it's okay.
Really.
Living there--in that space--doesn't change who you are. Or what you are. It does
make you stick out a bit. It makes you more visible. It makes it harder to hide.
But as a Jew, I am called to be visible. To be a faithful Jew is to replace injustice
with justice, omission with honesty, brokenness with wholeness. To be a faithful
Jew is, for me, to be a faithful queer. I am not openly gay, or transgender,
despite my Jewishness, but because of it. I'm not standing here, looking this
way, telling you the deep dark truth about my gendered body by accident--nor am
I convinced, as little as I sometimes like it, that I am an accident. Although I was
born into an ill-fitting body, and one which I am changing to make it more livable,
I am not convinced that I was born in the wrong body. I was born exactly the way
I was meant to be--the space between the letters is where I belong.
.