A Voice from Within: A Challenge for the Conservative Jewish Movement and its Gay/Lesbian Activists

Racing up to me from behind, a woman I have known for years taps me on the shoulder as I walk down the aisle with my mother to our regular seats in shul. It is the year 2000. I am dressed in the finest I can afford on my own—dress shirt, slacks, a tie.

"Excuse me, excuse me sir, you have to put this on"—rushing to make sure that my head is covered as people continue davening the Shabbat morning service. My desire for a kipah rushes through me along with emotions from years of searching and changing and body and sex and longing. Yet, I still do not know how to make sense of the clashes of identities, politics, family, self, empowerment, and self-determination within the halls of Hashem.

My mother simply looks on.

I wish I could simply put on a kipah, along with a tallis, and shroud myself in the peace of mind of a Jewish masculinity such as I have wanted ever since my early years on the bimah—a masculinity that makes sense to me today only within my specific ethnic communities of queer Jewish men, of faygeles and edelkayt. Yet I was raised in a family whose traditional patriarchal model left little room for deviance in synagogue life. I grew up in a Conservative urban shul in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where gender roles and sexuality were rigidly upheld in heterosexist fashion. Where Jewish women were not counted as a part of a minyan, did not wear tallitot or kipot, and where, besides myself, there were—and still are—no visibly queer people.

There have been small changes since my childhood: A few women are now counted in the minyan because they have "proven" themselves by devoting extensive time to synagogue life. Some women wear tallitot and kipot.

Unable to find common ground in my family, I have lived for years in shame and silence about being transgender. Having a wild tomboy of a girl child did not concern my family very much—the "problem" came when the change to a "proper feminine woman" did not transpire. Even though they now know I am not a woman, denial remains. And having chosen not to access (and been unable to afford) the medical options for altering my body, I live in a liminal world of constant invisibility.

Over the years, I have become a person my parents barely recognize, one who has strayed too far from their definition of family structure. The rule used to be that I was not allowed to date boys who were not Jewish. The necessity of dating within Jewish communities was so strong that even when I told my mother I liked women, she asked, in bewilderment, if I could at least date women who were Jewish. My parents could not imagine what it would mean for me not to fulfill the traditional "Jewish motherly role" within a heterosexual nuclear family.

When I first came out at the age of seventeen, I felt no shame. I had strayed from Judaism after living through and surviving cancer. The shame about being queer, or more specifically about not fitting societal roles imposed since my birth, did not come until years later, when I returned to my community and attended the wedding of a family friend. Traumatized that my parents' vision of my future no longer made sense in the world where I am most able to be myself, I wept, understanding the pain my friends had endured during their initial "coming out."

Even more difficult was my straying from the politics of a family whose men voted for Reagan during the 1980s. I had found a home in radical left circles of communists, socialists, anti-imperialists, and revolutionaries. Yet with all my political growth, I had not, as a dyke, been able to bring myself to wrap a tallis around my shoulders. The distance between my family and me was so deep that there were some things I just let be. This was one of them. As I grew...