When Caitlyn Jenner posed on the cover of the July issue of Vanity Fair in a bustier, the transgender movement had its cover girl. Jenner’s glamorous portrait, shot by famed photographer Annie Leibovitz, created an instant iconic image of transgender identity in the 21st century.
The 1976 Olympic decathlon champion and reality TV personality is the biggest celebrity to come out as transgender, and her story has made transgender identity more relatable for many Americans. Jenner’s transition has had global impact — the city of Tel Aviv invited her to be a guest of honor at its Gay Pride Week celebration.
For transgender Jews, Jenner’s coming out is a significant moment in mainstream culture, but it’s only a step in the long journey toward greater acceptance within the Jewish community that many of them have been traveling for years.
“In the last 10 years or so, a growing number of visible transgender leaders in the Jewish world have emerged,” said Jhos Singer, who transitioned in 2004 at the age of 44 and identifies as male.
The co-spiritual leader of Berkeley congregation Chochmat HaLev (with his wife, Julie Batz) and maggid for the JCC of San Francisco, Singer said he hasn’t experienced condemnation as a transgender man in the Jewish community, but said that others have struggled with negative reaction to their transitions. “We all have different stories about how we were met,” he said.
One of the most high-profile Jewish transition stories was Joy Ladin, a tenured professor at Stern College for Women at Yeshiva University, who came out as a transgender woman in 2007 and was featured prominently in Jewish publications, including on the cover of Lilith magazine, after her book of poetry, “Transmigration,” was published in 2009 under her new name. Yeshiva University put Ladin on paid research leave after her transition, arguing that students at the Orthodox university wouldn’t accept her, but allowed her to return to teaching after a year.
“When Joy Ladin came out, there was an important transgender female voice in the Jewish world, and that voice is so beautiful and so profound,” said Rabbi Dev Noily, associate rabbi at Kehilla Community Synagogue in Piedmont. Noily, who identifies as genderqueer, said acceptance for transgender Jews has evolved over time, even within the LGBT community.
Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, where Noily was an active member before she went to rabbinical school, started in the 1970s serving primarily gay men, Noily said. Over time, Noily added, it has gone through internal changes to become more accepting of lesbians and bisexuals, and finally, transgender people.
“Through each of those processes, it was painful and difficult for the people involved who were on the path to greater inclusion,” Noily said.
Along with other transgender Jewish leaders — including Ladin, Rabbi Elliot Kukla of the Bay Area Jewish Healing Center and Rabbi Reuben Zellman of Congregation Beth El in Berkeley — Singer runs TransTorah, a website that helps the transgender community access Jewish resources that are relevant to their experience, such as blessings for a gender transition and gender-neutral naming ceremonies.
“Those of us involved in TransTorah are trying really hard to return to the radical tradition that is the Talmud,” Singer said. The rabbis of the Talmud, Singer noted, recognized multiple expressions of gender, not just the binary of man and woman.
“We have a tradition that talks a lot about multiple gender possibilities,” Noily said. “This whole binary gender thing is a relatively recent phenomenon. In truth there’s much more gender diversity, and Jewish tradition retains the record of that.”
Some critics, including some feminists, have criticized Caitlyn Jenner for reinforcing gender stereotypes in her hyper-feminine photo shoot for Vanity Fair. Ladin worries that the splashy photo spread plays into stereotypes that transgender women are simply men playing dress-up.
“It kind of looked like Caitlyn was expressing a very outdated, 1950s wedding cake version of femininity,” Ladin told J. “For people who want to see expressions of trans identity as revolutionary, that was disappointing. And for anybody who would like to see feminist resistance to conventional ideas of what women are and should look like, it’s also disappointing … But is it good for people who have never seen a trans person before, to see a trans person, and see a trans person who’s [conventionally] beautiful? I do think that’s good. I think it’s good if it represents a beginning, but not if it represents an end.”
Singer has a different take on Jenner’s photo shoot, noting that going through a gender transition with hormone treatments thrusts an individual into a second adolescence.
“How old is she hormonally, how old is she psychologically, how old is she emotionally when she’s going through something this big?” Singer asked. “I’m not super surprised she came out in a bustier and all super mega femme because this is her moment to do that. She’s in a 65-year-old formerly male body. If she’s ever going to get to play this game, now’s her moment. Not everyone gets to have her moment on the cover of Vanity Fair with one of the world’s greatest celebrity photographers to do the photo shoot. I don’t think it destroys the cause of feminism any more than Cher.”
For more of Drew Himmesltein’s interview with Joy Ladin, visit www.jweekly.com/article/full/75028.