I am autistic. The way I experience the world is different than the way most other people do. I haven’t written much about this publicly yet, and I am continuing to learn to be comfortable with being an autistic adult and moving through the world with this part of my identity. Here, though, is something I wrote two weeks ago for the so-called “Autism Awareness Day” and posted to Facebook; I thought I’d edit it slightly and share it more widely here in honor of the much better idea of Autism Acceptance Month.

I’m trying hard, for purposes of self-care, to avoid thinking too much about autism today. But being autistic, it’s not the sort of thing I can turn on and off for an Autism Awareness Day—every day for me is autism awareness day. Now, that said, I have only a few things to say to anyone interested in being my ally this Autism Acceptance Month.

1. Dear neurotypical people: please don’t presume to tell me how I ought to and ought to not live my life.
2. I don’t need to be “cured”; I need to be loved.
3. Autism does not only affect children. Autistic adults are all around you. We are grown-up members of society. We drive cars, we teach your children, we deserve respect. Do not forget us; do not abandon us.
4. Respect the constant struggle and the constant expenditure of spoons some of us have to maintain our standing in neuronormative society. This is not a struggle with or against autism, it’s a struggle with society’s perceptions and preconceptions about autistic people. That is my true struggle.
5. Be my ally when I need it. If I’m sensorily overloaded, respect that and let me go sit in a quiet corner by myself for a while. If I need to be nonverbal, respect that and let me scribble on my Boogie Board instead of speaking for a while. Advocate for me when I’m not around. Don’t make fun of me behind my back. Allyship is an job, not an identity.
6. Just because someone is autistic doesn’t preclude them from any other thing. You can be autistic AND trans, multiple, gay, disabled…
7. Autism and non-neurotypicality are far broader than the dominant discourse would have you believe. Not all of us flap our hands, but some of us do. Not all of us can tell you what day of the week any calendar date is, but some of us can. Not all of us have trouble maintaining eye contact, but some of us do. Not all of us write the alphabet over and over to fill up blank piece of paper, but some of us do. Some of us have diagnoses and some of us don’t. None of this affects the validity of the lived experience of any neurodiverse person.
8. For the love of glob, autism is not caused by vaccines. Vaccinate your fucking kids.
9. Listen to the voices of neurodiverse people instead of neurotypical people who presume to speak for us. If you’re looking to give your money somewhere, one good place to give it to is the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. Don’t speak over us, and don’t make a pretense of being advocates for us without including us. Don’t give your money to Autism Speaks, and don’t light it up blue.

[Content warning for verbal abuse, rape culture, victim blaming, physical harassment, and swear words.]

The first time I ever wore girls’ clothes in public was Purim when I was eleven. I had the idea that it would be funny to dress up as the Energizer bunny. I turned one of my mom’s old gigantic hatboxes into a silver drum, and she borrowed on my behalf a friend’s daughter’s pink hoodie and pants. We made rabbit ears out of something, and a pair of oversized sunglasses completed the costume. It was a pretty great costume, I’m not gonna lie. But I’ll never forget the feeling when I put on those clothes: simultaneously exhilarated to finally have the chance to wear girl’s clothing in public, and angry and frustrated at the realization that people were going to see a boy in a costume, and not a girl. I almost called the whole thing off there and then.

The next year, when I was in sixth grade, one of my male teachers dressed up on Purim in a wig and dress. Not only was this my first experience of cross-dressing on Purim, it was the first time I actually even learned the word “cross-dressing”. I had to ask one of my classmates what it meant. This teacher was a gigantic man who towered over all of the students, and the sight of him in a dress was clearly meant to be funny and amusing. I didn’t want to laugh. All I saw was a parody of a thing I wanted more than anything else. It told me I would be an object to be laughed at, not a person to be respected. I wanted to cry, but I laughed along with my classmates, afraid of what might happen if I didn’t.

In my senior year of high school, six years later, I was starting to come out of my shell, take risks with my presentation, explore names and pronouns and different options among my close friends. And I decided that Purim would be a good time to continue experimenting, to take it one step further. I got a hold of a dress—blue, with flowers—which I stuffed into my bag and took to school, so that I could wear it as a costume. I knew that most people who saw me were again going to see a boy in a costume, but this time I was okay with that, because my friends were going to see me as a girl, finally, in public.

I’m not really sure why I felt the need to duck into the boys’ bathroom so furtively—it’s not like people weren’t going to see me after I came out. I went into a stall, changed as quickly as I possibly could, and came out. Thank goodness, there still wasn’t anybody else in there. I examined myself in the mirror, adjusted one or two things, and exited the bathroom. I went round the corner and went into the sanctuary where we were about to start the morning prayers. A bunch of other people were in there. Some of my friends gave me knowing smiles and even hugs. I got some looks and comments from some other folks. But all in all, I was starting to feel just the tiniest bit safe, even in an unsafe environment, even for just these few hours.

After the prayers and the reading of the Megillah, we went downstairs for lunch. As I came down the stairs, one of my classmates reached at the skirt of my dress and grabbed my bottom. I froze in shock. He passed me on the stairs, and I was too startled to move. I finally reached out with my hand and slapped him. He wheeled round.

“What the fuck?” I said. My voice was quivering.

“What?” he asked, faux-innocently, “you didn’t like that?”

“Why the fuck should I like it?”

“Well,” he condescended to me, “you’re wearing a dress.”

I trembled.

“Why the fuck did you just hit me?” he demanded, suddenly angry. I felt my hands at my side ball into fists.

I don’t remember what I said. I think I was going for something like “You’re not the victim here” but in truth I think it was just a string of curse words.

A few onlookers started to gather closer. One of them addressed me. “Dude,” he said, “chill out. It’s Purim.”

“That doesn’t excuse grabbing my ass,” I said.

“Well,” said someone else, “you’re wearing a dress. You’re kind of asking for it.”

“For real?” I said, incredulously.

“Yeah,” he explained. “You should expect that when you dress up like that.”

I never wore a dress on Purim again.

Purim is traditionally a holiday when up is down, black is white, and the normal rules of everyday life are thrown out the window. People often dress in costume, and cross-dressing is not uncommon. Rabbinical authorities are divided on whether or not the Biblical prohibition on cross-dressing is suspended on Purim, but either way, it doesn’t seem to bother most people.

So you might think that Purim would be a safe time for a nervous, frightened trans* person to experiment with changing their presentation. I know some gender minority folks who do in fact get a lot out of Purim, for exactly this reason, and more power to them. But I don’t. I can’t. It’s transmisogynistic. It’s not true, and it’s not safe.

When I see cis men on Purim dressing up for comedic effect as women, I do not see myself. The comedy hinges on the fact that men “trading down” by dressing up as women are funny, because being a woman is funny, and men being women is even funnier. This kind of humor is rooted in the intersection of transphobia and misogyny. Before coming out, before transition, I could have worn women’s clothes on Purim, and people would have seen a man in a dress. It would have reinforced their idea that I was, in fact, a man, playing at being a woman, because being a woman is something to be played at. It would not have been safe, and it would not have been true. I would be doing it not to be truer to myself, but to be an object of laughter. This is what transmisogyny looks like.

Even now, after changing my name, and my pronouns, and my presentation, some of my cis friends still encourage me to dress up as a woman on Purim. “You must love Purim,” one of them said to me, “because you can really be you on Purim!” I want to ask to this, “What gender do you think I am the rest of the time? What gender do you think I present as in my day-to-day life?” This isn’t the point of Purim. Were I to put on a costume like this, with the understanding that it is supposed to be a costume, it is not a true representation of myself. Truly cross-dressing for me would be putting on a suit and tie, and, well, that just doesn’t interest me much either. Neither of these would be true about me.

In high school, I actually dared to do this, and it was my first experience of sexual harassment and unwanted touching. It makes me physically sick to remember this incident. In what I had thought was going to be a safe environment, I was betrayed by the realization that people perceived as women or even as men dressing up like women are somehow also perceived to be “asking for it”. I was betrayed by the classmates who failed to stand up for me when this happened. I learned a valuable lesson about (trans)misogyny and harassment—that being female, or performing femininity, makes you a target—and I regret that I had to learn it this way. I regret how unsafe it made me feel, and how unsure I was after that of my own personal truth.

If you are a trans* person and you enjoy dressing up however you enjoy it on Purim, please, don’t stop. Express your truth however you’re going to express it. If you’re just starting to experiment, do not let anything I’ve written deter you. Experiment however you’re going to experiment, and do what feels right when it feels right to do it. Just because I didn’t have great Purim experiences doesn’t mean you won’t as well. Yours might be fantastic. Don’t let me stop you from exploring.

If you are a cis person who is cross-dressing on Purim, please, please think about it carefully. Consider the implications, especially to trans* people. Think about it from the perspective of a trans* person who sees you. What message are you sending to them? Are you supporting them? Demonstrating allyship? What if they’re not out yet, and they see you? What might that tell them about being trans*?

Purim is a holiday when the truth is supposed to come out. I hope that we can all do our part to make this truth is one of inclusivity and affirmation.

(My attempt at Trans 101 using only the thousand most common words in English. The creative restrictions made this fun to try.)

Most people think that babies are all either boys or girls. But it turns out that when some baby boys get older they think they would be happier if they were girls, and when some baby girls get older they think they would be happier if they were boys. Sometimes they put on different clothes, or change their names, and some of these people take steps to change their bodies from boy to girl, or from girl to boy. Sometimes people turn out to be not girls, and not boys, but something else. And sometimes the doctors can’t tell whether a baby is a boy or a girl, so the doctors have to guess, but sometimes they guess wrong.

All of this happens a lot of the time, but you don’t often hear about it. And when people talk about it, they often don’t say very nice things about people who need to change themselves so they are happier being a boy or a girl or whatever they want. When other people speak this way about these people, it can hurt very much. Sometimes people get so hurt, they end up hating themselves, and some of them try to kill themselves. All because most people don’t have very nice things to say about people who need to change their bodies.

I am one of these people. When I was a baby, everyone thought I was a boy, and I used to live my life as if I were a boy. But when I got older I learned that I would be much happier if I were a girl, and I would have a much better life if I could live that way. So I started to take these steps to change my body and other things about myself so that I can live as a girl rather than as a boy. Now I talk to other people about what it is like to do this so that I can help them understand a little about what it is like to be a person like me.

It makes me very sad that people don’t always have nice things to say about people like me. Sometimes the things they say hurt. Sometimes they do even worse things. What I want to do with my life is to help make the lives of people like me better, to help them make it easier to change themselves so they will be able to live as happy people, whether they are a boy or a girl or something else. And I also want to help everyone else understand that people like us are normal, that we are human too, and that all we want is to be understood and loved just like everyone else.

(Also check out my friend Tim’s Trans 101 Up Goer Five!)

Riffing on a line from the traditional morning services, very loosely translated in the first and last stanza, I wrote down this short meditation a few days ago.

אמת את היא ראשונה ואת היא אחרונה ומבלעדיך אין לנו מלכה גואלת ומושיעה.

Truth: you are first, and you are last,
And without you, we have nothing to lead us,
Nothing to redeem us, nothing to save us.

Power comes from a deep place I am only starting to discover.
Change begins when I say to myself: I am a truthful person today.
Then I can say: I am a powerful person today.

In the mornings I get to look at my reflection in the mirror,
Every day seeing a person more truthful,
And I get to say: What kind of Emily do I want to be today?

Will I be powerful? Will I bring truth? Will I bring change?
Will I fight for what is just?
Will I lead? Will I redeem? Will I save?

Will I do the work of holiness?
Will I be vulnerable? Will I be wounded? Will I fail?
Will I be genuine? Will I discover my truth?

Truth: you are first, and you are last,
And without you, we have nothing to lead us,
Nothing to redeem us, nothing to save us.

This is the d’var torah (discourse) I gave to my Jewish community at my synagogue this past Shabbat. A d’var torah is based around a theme in the week’s Torah portion in the annual cycle of readings, which last week was the portion Toldot (Genesis 25:19–28:9). We were commemorating Transgender Day of Remembrance, which is today, 20 November. In this d’var torah I explain some of my problems with the commemoration, as well as how, for me, the issues faced by many trans* people today have some ancient parallels in this week’s portion.

[Trigger warning for strong and explicit language, discussion of body image issues, allusions to assault, and death.]

“The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau.” (Gen. 27:22)

So says Isaac to his son Jacob, dressed up in Esau drag, as he, a visually impaired man at the end of his life, tries to determine which of his two sons stands before him requesting his blessing. The rabbis raise an objection to this story. My question is this: was it really possible that Isaac was fooled? Rebecca conspires with Jacob to ensure that the father’s blessing will go to her favored son. She dresses up Jacob in Esau’s clothing, and puts goat skins on her son to simulate Esau’s hairy body, but ultimately the performance must be put on by Jacob himself. He fools him on touch, on behavior, on external appearances, but can the visually impaired Isaac really not tell his sons apart based on their voice? The Midrash—ancient Rabbinic exegesis and commentary—answers the only way it really can, with the goal of preserving the story as written: Esau’s and Isaac’s voices really were so similar that they couldn’t be distinguished in sound only.

I would challenge this question and push it even further. Is it possible that Isaac couldn’t tell that the hair on his son’s body felt like goat hair rather than human hair? Why didn’t he give his son a Turing test, and say, “Tell me something only Esau could know?” If their voices are truly so similar, Isaac and his sons have presumably had to have this kind of conversation before. This can’t be the first time in the family’s history he’s had to ask which one of his sons he’s talking to. So shouldn’t he have known what his son’s hands felt like? Why are their methods for determining who they are so easily subverted?

One major theme of this week’s Torah portion, Toldot, is deception. The tension between appearance and reality figures very prominently in the way the Torah tells the story of the third generation of Abraham’s family. First we get the story of how Jacob convinces his brother—tricks him, really—to sell him his birthright for a mess of pottage. We get a close repeat of two earlier stories about Abraham and Sarah, when Isaac passes his wife Rebecca off as his sister in the land of the Philistines, so they won’t kill him out of jealousy for her beauty. And, of course, there’s the famous story here, about the deception Rebecca and Jacob play on Isaac to ensure the blessing goes to the “right” son.

After he is deprived of the blessing which should be rightfully his, Esau cries out that his brother has deceived him twice: first with the birthright, now with the blessing. The Torah gives Esau a play on words here: the Hebrew root ayin–qof–bet means “heel”, and was the source of Jacob’s name ya’akov, since he came out second grasping his twin brother’s heel, but it also means “to trick” or “to deceive”, as Esau says here: va-ya’k'veini, “he tricked me” or perhaps even “he Jacobed me”. Esau is upset with his father for falling for Jacob’s deception, for not being able to tell which son stood before him, by not being able to tell appearance from reality.

“The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau.”

Like Jacob and Esau, our histories are written all over our bodies. My scars, the scars on my transgender body, my transgender hands, tell the history of my identity. The scars on my transgender voice speak that living history.

“The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau.”

Not every trans person has this particular experience, but I have always suffered from some form of dysmorphia—the feeling that my body wasn’t correct, somehow, even if I was too young to understand exactly how to express it—but it wasn’t until two Wednesdays ago that I was hit with any significant dysphoria regarding my voice. I had volunteered to read the Torah portion at the First Annual Jewish Transgender Gathering in Berkeley, but a few days beforehand a feeling of utter despair hit me. My voice, which I thought I’d made my peace with, was about an octave too low, and there wasn’t really anything I could do about it. Certainly not on that short a time frame; probably not ever.

I asked some of my friends who are trans women, and they directed me to some resources: classes, lessons, videos, with instruction about how to “feminize” your voice. Hormones don’t help, because you can’t shorten the length of the vocal cord again once it’s grown and stretched due to testosterone. All my friends disagreed on what had worked for them: it’s all in the range, said one. No, said another, it’s all in the breathing. A third said it’s all in the words you choose, and the way you deliver them. I let them fight that issue out while I went to go check out some of the websites and programs.

So much of what these programs had to say revolved rhetorically around the idea of “passing”: minimizing situations where you’ll get “read” as trans, or worse, “really a guy”. You can look the part all you want, is the message, but if you haven’t got the voice to go with it, you’re going to get read. “You’ve got the looks, but not the voice,” started one program’s copy, and concluded with the following line: “And now, my clients can finally express themselves as the women they always were!”

What a poisonous statement: to imply that I am not capable of expressing myself as the woman that I am now, simply because fourteen years of exposure to testosterone have left me with a voice slightly below the range of most cis women. But what really stuck in my craw was the notion that if I didn’t “pass” I was somehow “less than”, I wasn’t worth anyone’s time, I would never be taken seriously. I posted this to one of the support groups I had helped found, and what resulted was an explosion.

I was told that trans women who are our “community leaders” but who don’t devote sufficient energy to working on their voices and making themselves more “passable” are not only not doing themselves any favors, they’re actually doing the rest of us a personal disservice. They are setting the cause back by not being as palatable to cisnormative society. I’ve been told that when I go out, looking like I do and expecting people to call me by my correct name and pronouns, I am actually making things harder for other people. “When you do that, you’re making it harder for those of us who put so much effort into their appearance and voice to be taken seriously.” “You’re letting the side down.”

“The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau.”

Deception. Trickery. And what’s worse, we trans people are so very, very practiced at internalizing this transmisogyny and self-hatred. We weaponize it and turn it against ourselves. We are deceivers by means of these tools. We trick society, we trick each other, we trick ourselves.

Julia Serano, a noted trans woman activist, biologist, and author, wrote one of the foundational texts of transfeminism, a book called Whipping Girl. It’s not without its flaws, but it makes several very important contributions to feminism and gender studies in general. She notes that in our society, as a trans women, especially in media coverage, you will be shunted into one of two roles: either the “pathetic transsexual”—the “oh, isn’t that sweet, he really thinks he’s a woman” archetype—or the “deceptive transsexual”—the “just waiting to commit rape or worse because he’s really still a guy with a penis” archetype. Think of the trans women in Transamerica and Ace Ventura as examples of the two sides of this trope in the media, and then think of any other media coverage of trans women and you will see these tropes at work.

But it goes beyond representations of trans people in the media: this is a function of trans lived experience. To transgress the societally sanctioned normative boundaries is to commit an act of deception against society, against the individuals you come into contact with. But either way, your gender is not real, and your identity is a deception. You are not real. You are practicing an unforgivable deceit upon the world if you are thought to possess the voice of Jacob and the hands of Esau.

If you don’t “pass”—and even if you do—it’s your own fault when you get called names. “Tranny.” “Shemale.” “Chicks with dicks.” “That’s really a guy.”

If you don’t “pass”—and even if you do—it’s your own fault when you get hurt. “If you sit next to her, it makes you gay.” “Thank god I didn’t sleep with her, because that would really have made me gay.” “Yeah, bro, can you imagine?”

If you don’t “pass”—and even if you do—it’s your own fault when you get killed. “She had it coming because I didn’t know she had a dick.” “Tranny fag.” “The world’s better off without her.”

If you don’t “pass”—and even if you do—it’s your fault simply for existing. “You should have disclosed.” “You can’t blame them for being men.” “Boys will be boys.” “Not guilty by reason of they didn’t know it was actually a guy.”

As much as I can avoid it, I don’t go in public washrooms, especially when I’m presenting femme or even just wearing a skirt. It’s not safe: if I go in the women’s washroom, I risk getting yelled at and called a rapist, and if I go in the men’s washroom, I risk getting beaten up. The security officer at San Francisco airport took an extra few minutes to feel me up fairly roughly because he read me as male but my driver’s license says female, and my breasts became the subject of a federal investigation. I’ve been called ugly things on the street and in restaurants, had insults thrown at me from strangers passing by in cars. I walk home the long way when it’s dark because it’s better lit than the short way. A few weeks ago a random guy on the subway put his arm around me and started to rub my neck and shoulders.

“With the skins of the kids of goats [did she] cover his arms and his smooth-skinned neck … and Isaac said to Jacob, ‘Come close, please, and let me feel you, my son, so that I may tell whether you are indeed my son Esau or not.’” (Gen. 27:16, 21)

Physical abuse. Sexual abuse. Verbal abuse. “Bitch.” “Whore.” “Faggot.” “Cunt.” “Pussy.” “Slut.” “Tranny.”

“The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau.”

Our society allows this to happen. We do it, and then we give it our approval. The “trans panic defense” can work in court. The killers of Gwen Araujo deadlocked a jury with it. CeCe McDonald is currently serving 41 months for the crime of defending herself against assault. Roseanne Barr and Cathy Brennan recently teamed up to yell at me on Twitter and call me awful things simply because I’m trans, but Brennan has done far worse: outing a transgender teenager to his high school in the name of “safety” and—honest to goodness—”feminism”. “Women should have the right to go to the bathroom without fear of getting raped!” Yes, I completely agree. But I disagree that the only reason that I, a trans woman, could possibly want to go into a bathroom is to rape someone.

And who bears the brunt of this transphobia, this senseless hatred? More than just transgender people, or even transgender women, but disproportionately so, it’s transgender women of color. When we talk about Transgender Day of Remembrance and fail to recognize that the people most at risk in this way are transgender women of color, we allow ourselves to colonize and appropriate their identities to serve our own. When we talk about the senselessness of their deaths, it must be with the promise of addressing the intersectional challenges that they and we face: racism, classism, ableism, sexism, transphobia, transmisogyny. Nothing operates in a vacuum, but it’s still a revelation to many people that oppression can exist along multiple axes. Failure to see that is called privilege, and it can be blinding. And too often, Transgender Day of Remembrance is co-opted by privileged people, well-meaning or not, and subverted to make the deaths of these individuals—in large part, trans women of color—transactional and cheap. Trans guys who make it a “let’s have a celebration!” day—like having a dance party, of all inappropriate things—or cis folks who do all the organizing and can’t be bothered to learn how to pronounce the names of the trans women of color whose deaths they’re supposedly commemorating, or even just white trans women like me who don’t acknowledge these issues and actively work to overcome them—we let our privilege blind us, and we become part of the problem here.

Monica Maldonado, a queer Latina trans woman activist, puts it this way: “It’s a day where trans women of colour have greater value dead than we do alive.”

“The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau.”

Earlier this week, I woke up to find myself on the front page of the Jewish Daily Forward. I have several dozen unread emails sitting in my inbox from friends, media, and the rest of it. Some I’m sure is positive, and some I’m sure isn’t so positive. Like it or not, I am suddenly finding myself in that position of community leadership. And I’ll be honest: it terrifies me. I’m terrified of the external transphobia and the external dangers, and I’m terrified of these same things when they’re internalized by my own “community”. I barely know who I am, and I don’t yet know how to move through the world—not as a woman, not even as a trans woman, not as a person with disabilities, not as a friend or a lover or even simply as myself.

I haven’t yet found my own voice. And yet, in a very real sense, the one I’ve got is still the exact same one I always had. Two Wednesdays ago, all of a sudden I discovered that I feel a touch disconnected from the speaking voice I possess. My “community” tells me I should not like it, and I certainly should not expect to get anywhere in terms of community leadership with it. Add that to the fact that I don’t know what my metaphorical voice is like yet, really—and suddenly both paths to self-expression have now become paths to deceit: deceit of myself, and deceit of the world. I was doubly silenced, both of my voices gone, deceived two times.

“[Esau] said, ‘Is it because his name was called Jacob, that he deceived me these two times? He took my birthright away, and look, he has now taken my blessing away! Have you kept no blessing in reserve for me?’ Isaac answered and said to Esau, ‘Look, I have made him a lord over you, and all his kin I have given him as servants, I have supported him with grain and wine—but for you, where or what can I do, my son?’ Esau said to his father, ‘Don’t you have even one blessing, father? Bless me too, father!’ And Esau raised his voice and cried.” (Gen. 27:36–38)

I began with a problem the Midrash raises: was it really possible that Isaac was fooled by the deception? The Midrash answers, in order to preserve the story as written, that the voices of Jacob and Esau were indeed so similar that they couldn’t be told apart in sound only. But another question immediately presents itself. If that’s true, what could Isaac have meant when he said “the voice is the voice of Jacob”? How did he know? The Midrash answers: the “voice” is metaphorical: it refers to two different ways of speaking, one of which was characteristic of Jacob, and the other characteristic of Esau. It was their metaphorical voices that were distinct, even if their speaking voices were uncertain.

When Moses ascends Sinai to receive revelation from God, the Torah says the following enigmatic verse: “Moses spoke, and God answered him in a voice.” The Talmud says that this means that God spoke back to Moses at the volume of Moses’ own voice—or possibly in Moses’ own voice. What a powerful image: revelation is given in one’s own voice! A voice is more than just a way to identify a person: it’s a beautiful blessing in and of itself. And the divine voice, the voice of that revelation, is really nothing more, and nothing less, than our own voice.

“The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau.”

I am still finding my voice. I am still learning who I am. But at least I can be grateful that I have the freedom to do so, the privilege to allow me to explore these things for myself, at my own pace, and in relative safety in this community, in my family, and in my associations. Transgender Day of Remembrance is not about me: a living, breathing, relatively privileged white trans woman. I urge us all to raise our voices in allyship, to not simply wring our hands and mourn the dead, but to demand change, to work for real results that can make a real difference in this world, to face the hard and inconvenient problems of privilege and intersectionality, to not make the deaths that we are commemorating cheap. This is what we must do, for the sake of these individuals. They were seen to have the voices of Jacob, or the hands of Esau, and for this transgression, they were slaughtered.

So two weeks ago, I rose before a group of my transgender sisters, brothers, and kin, and our cisgender allies, to read from the Torah. The reading was the Akeidah, the story of the Binding of Isaac. I took a deep breath, channeled and challenged my innermost doubts, and let my own voice—for I cannot speak, or sing, or produce any sound in anyone else’s voice—fill the space of the room. The black fire of the sound of a single transgender voice—wavering, new, uncertain—sprang into life on the white fire of a holy gathering of transgender Jews, all responding to each other’s blessings, each uttered in a different, beautiful transgender voice, speaking the living history of its owner’s beautiful transgender body, responding Amen.

I remember Yom Kippur when I was 13. I was in synagogue, proudly wearing the tallit I had been given for my bar mitzvah some months earlier, sitting with my family in the seats we traditionally occupied throughout the High Holidays, four rows back from the bimah and the Ark where the Torah scrolls were kept. It was the Ne’ilah service, the closing moments of the holiday, and the congregation was rising for one final recitation of the Vidui, the collective confession of sins. With the infamous words of Leviticus 18:22, part of the traditional Torah reading for Yom Kippur afternoon, still ringing in my head, I too stood up and began to recite the litany out loud along with everyone else. But one sin, one above all, spoke up and demanded I confess it, repent from it, and pray for divine forgiveness: the sin of being a transgender person.

“For the sin that we have committed against You by identifying with a gender other than that which we were assigned at birth” isn’t part of any confessional liturgy I ever learned—it was more like “For the sins which we have committed against You both in the open and in secret”. But it didn’t matter that I could barely even express what I was thinking. I placed my hand over my heart, struck my breast, and begged God to forgive me for all the indiscretions within me: for desiring more than anything to be someone or something other than what I was, for having failed to fulfill the divine plan for me, whatever it was, for not having been strong enough to resist my yetzer ha-ra, my inclination to do evil. I prayed fervently, cried a little even, wishing that God would take away my transgender nature, and hoping He would make me, well, normal. Somehow.

The recitation of the confessional ended, and shortly the service came to a close with the words the words Adonai Hu Ha-Elohim, “The Lord is God”. The final shofar blast was sounded, and I remembered the verse: Vayomer Adonai solachti ki-d’varecha, “And God said: I have forgiven, as you have asked”, and I knew—or really thought I knew—that, like the people Israel after the High Priest had performed the Yom Kippur sacrifices, I had been cleansed. I went home happy that night: everything would be okay.

As I recall, that lasted two or maybe three weeks.

The next year, feeling even guiltier, I made the same supplication on Yom Kippur. And the year after that. And the year after that. I prayed earnestly for God to forgive me, to take it away, to make me normal, just like everyone else. When I grew older, and was beginning therapy in earnest, one of the questions I was asked was “Why do you believe you are transgender?” When I was younger, I believed it was because God had made an honest mistake. But as I got older and somewhat more theologically sophisticated sophomoric, I believed it was some kind of test, the purpose of which I could only guess at, and I wasn’t sure whether it was benevolently or malevolently intended. However, every time I prayed for God to “take the transgender away”, it only got stronger, and I ended up feeling, over and over again, miserable and worthless, like I’d failed the test.

I now know something I didn’t at the time: that many other people—trans, queer, both—have prayed that very same prayer alongside me. I was never alone; I always had company. I was not the first, and I will not be the last.

And every time I prayed it, it was an earnest, genuine prayer. But I discovered another prayer, a cry from my soul, that is even deeper, even more earnest and genuine. It took me long enough, but I finally heard it calling, from my kol d’mamah dakah, the “still small voice” within me.

The rabbis teach that all the rituals of confession, all the prayers for forgiveness, all the external trappings of Yom Kippur can only serve to atone for sins that are between a human being and God. Yom Kippur, they teach, does not bring atonement for sins one person commits against another, until the person who did wrong seeks forgiveness from the person who was wronged. This is one of the fundamental lessons of repentance and forgiveness in Judaism. The Hebrew word for “repentance” is teshuvah, which means, among other things, “returning”. The time between the start of the year on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is called the Ten Days for teshuvah, for turning and returning inward, for the rediscovery of our selves. Yom Kippur asks us to return to the truth about ourselves; not to hide from it. It asks us to be genuine with ourselves; when we deceive ourselves, we cannot forgive ourselves.

I want to ask my younger self to forgive herself for not being perfect, for wronging herself by denying her inner nature, her truth, for failing to heed the kol d’mamah dakah within her. I want to reassure her that everything will be okay, that God doesn’t hate her, that she will eventually find and build a loving, accepting, and affirming community. I want to seek her pardon for the years of denials, purges, secrets, half-measures, traumas, deceptions, and lies I will inflict on her future self.

But the temporal continuum only works in one direction for us mere mortals, which means this exercise is doomed to failure. I cannot literally commit teshuvah by going back in time; I shall have to content myself with a metaphorical teshuvah. But I trust the kol d’mamah dakah within me, which tells me that this teshuvah must be more genuine than any other I have ever professed to make. I have to be willing to forgive my past self for not knowing that things would change, and both my past and present selves for being so hard on themselves, for demanding such perfection, for not giving themselves permission to fail. And I can try to return the courtesy to my future self: to give her permission to screw up, to fail, to commit wrongdoings and to learn from them. It’s a small comfort, but it helps.

A very wise friend of mine told me that beating myself up, as so many trans people do, for not having transitioned earlier is pointless. Whatever happened in the past, she pointed out, whatever decisions I made, were necessary at that time, because they kept me alive and got me to where I am now. When I introduced this blog (with this very point!) as “my record of surviving“, I was not speaking metaphorically. And I am learning that part of survival—more than simple survival, actually; part of living—is having the ability to forgive myself.

So this is my Yom Kippur prayer this year. May I learn to accept and embrace the person I am, even if I do not know who she is yet. May I have the strength and the courage to forgive myself for the wrongdoings that I have committed against myself in the past, or will commit against myself in the future. May my teshuvah be sincere, and may it bring me closer to knowledge of my own truth. May I learn to recognize and to listen to the kol d’mamah dakah within me, and may I write my own Book of Life in that voice this year. May I love myself, may I remember that I am loved, and may I be at peace. Kein yehi ratzon—may this be so.

The Hineni is one of the central prayers of the services for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It is recited by the person who leads the Musaf prayer, after the public reading of the Torah portion. It is in a tradition of prayers called reshuyot, “requests for permission”, essentially asking God for permission to pray on behalf of the congregation. In medieval times when most people did not possess their own prayer books, praying on behalf of the congregation was an awesome responsibility. But this prayer also is very individualistic: it asks for permission to supplicate, to bare one’s soul, to be one’s most genuine self, and that there be no impediment to this kind of self-expression.

Traditionally, the prayer is phrased in the masculine—an artifact of the time when only men led prayer—but versions in the feminine do exist (gender-neutral Hebrew being notoriously hard to produce). The version that I have created here is phrased for a reader who identifies with feminine pronouns, but I have chosen to phrase references to God and the divine in the masculine and feminine, and in as neutral language as possible in the English version. I have not shied away from some problematic language (“terrible” to describe God as a translation for nora, for example), and I have not changed many of the images from the traditional prayer, preferring instead to find resonances in them for myself and my own life, not that many of the traditional ones really needed much changing to produce such resonances. And of course, the traditional prayer is theistic, which I have also kept—but I have rephrased my supplication as one to my community of humans as well as one directed towards a divine figure.

I plan to take this Hineni with me to Rosh Hashanah services tomorrow and Tuesday, and to pray it. We’ll see if I wish to make any revisions before Yom Kippur.

L’shanah tovah umetukah—my best wishes to you and yours for a good and sweet year of blessing and peace.

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הִנְנִי הָעֲנִיָּה מִמַּעַשׂ, נִרְעֶשֶׁת וְנִפְחֶדֶת מִפַּחַד. בָּאתִי לַעֲמֹד וּלְהִתְחַנֵּן לִפְנֵי עַמִּי וְלִפְנֵי אֱלֹהָי, אַף עַל פִּי שְׁאֵינִי כְדָאִית וַהֲגוּנָה לְכָךְ. לָכֵן אֲבַקֵשׁ מִמְּךָ, אֱלֹהֵי שָׂרָה, אֱלֹהֵי רִבְקָה, אֱלֹהֵי רָחֵל, וְאֱלֹהֵי לֵאָה, אֱלֹהֵי אַבְרָהָם, אֱלֹהֵי יִצְחָק, וְאֱלֹהֵי יַעֲקֹב, יְיָ יְיָ אֵל רַחוּם וְחַנּוּן, אֱלֹהֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל, שַׁדָּי, יָה הַשְּׁכִינָה, הֱיִי נָא מַצְלִיחָה דַּרְכִּי אֲשֶׁר אֲנִי הוֹלֶכֶת, לַעֲמוֹד וּלְבַקֵּשׁ רַחֲמִים עָלַי וְעַל שׁוֹלְחָי.

וְנָא אַל תַּפְשִׁיעֵם בְּחַטֹּאתַי וְאַל תְּחַיְּבֵם בְּעֲוֹנוֹתַי, כִּי חוֹטֵאת וּפוֹשַׁעַת אָנִי. וְנָא אַל תַּפְשִׁיעִי בְּחַטֹּאתַם וְאַל תְּחַיְּבִי בְּעֲוֹנוֹתַם. וְאַל יְכָּלְמוּ בְּפִשְׁעַי, וְאַל אֵבוֹשָׁה בָּהֶם. וְתִגְעַר בְּשָׂטָן לְבַל יַשְׂטִינֵנִי. וִיהִי נָא דִלּוּגֵנוּ עָלַיִךְ אַהֲבָה וְעַל כָּל־פְּשָׁעִים תְּכַסִּי בְּאַהֲבָה. וְכָל־צָרוֹת וְרָעוֹת הֲפָךְ־לָנוּ וּלְכָל־יִשְׂרָאֵל לְשָׂשׂוֹן וּלְשִׂמְחָה לְחַיִּים וּלְשָׁלוֹם. הָאֱמֶת וְהַשָּׁלוֹם אֱהָבוּ, וְלֹא יְהִי שׁוּם מִכְשׁוֹל בִּתְפִלָּתִי.

וִיהִי רָצוֹן מִלְפָנַיךְ, יְיָ, אֱלֹהֵי שָׂרָה רִבְקָה רָחֵל וְלֵאָה, אֱלֹהֵי אַבְרָהָם יִצְחָק וְיַעֲקֹב, הָאֵלָה הַגְּדוֹלָה הַגִּבּוֹרָה וְהַנוֹרָא, אֵל עֶלְיוֹן, מְקוֹר הַחֲיִּים, יָה הַשְּׁכִינָה, אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה, שֶׁתָּבוֹא תְפִילָּתִי לְפָנַיִךְ, וְתִשְׁמְרִי מִכָּל צָרָה וְצוּקָה, וְתִשְׁלְחִי בְּרָכָה וְהָצְלָחָה בְּכָל מַעֲשֵׂה יְדִי, בַּעֲבוּר כָּל־הַצַּדִיקִים וְהַחֲסִידוֹת הַתְּמִימִים וְהַיְשָׁרוֹת, כִּי אַתָּה שׁוֹמֵעַ תְּפִלָּת יִשְׂרָאֵל עַמְּךָ בְּרַחֲמִים. בְּרוּכָה אַתְּ שׁוֹמַעָת תְּפִלָה.

Here I am. Impoverished in merit, I tremble and am afraid with fear. I have come to stand and make supplication before my people and my God, even though I am unworthy and unprepared for this task. Therefore I ask of You, God of Sarah, God of Rebecca, God of Rachel, God of Leah, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, Adonai Adonai, divinely merciful and kind, God of Israel, Shaddai, Yah, Shekhinah divine presence, please grant success along my path which I walk, as I stand and request mercy for myself and for those who send me.

Do not assume them guilty because of my wrongdoings, and do not charge them with my sins, because I sin and do wrong. But do not assume me guilty because of them, and do not charge me with their sins, because they sin and do wrong. May they not be put to shame because of my mistakes, but may I not be embarrassed by theirs. Rebuke the accuser who would impugn me and cause me trouble. Turn all our troubles and evils, and those of all Israel, into joy and gladness, into life and peace. Be a lover of truth and peace, and let there be no stumbling block before my prayer.

So may it be Your will, Adonai, God of Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, divinely great, awe-inspiring, and terrible, Highest One, source of life, Yah, Shekhinah divine presence, Who calls hirself I shall be what I shall be, that my prayer come before You, and that you guard me from all trouble and frustration, and send blessing and success to all my handiwork, on behalf of all people who are righteous, loving, kind, and upright, for You hear the prayer of Your people Israel mercifully. Blessed are You, Who hears prayer.

Last week’s Torah portion, Ki Tetze, includes one of the most infamous Biblical verses for us trans* people:

לא יהיה כלי גבר על אשה ולא ילבש גבר שמלת אשה כי תועבת ה׳ אלקיך כל עשה אלה

A man’s apparel (kli gever) shall not be upon a woman, and a man shall not wear a woman’s garment (simlat ’ishah), for whoever does this is abominable to YHWH your God. (Deut. 22:5)

When I went to synagogue last weekend I brought my tallit, my prayer shawl, along with me, but I wasn’t sure I’d actually wear it. (I hadn’t brought it along the first time I’d gone to synagogue post-transition.) It is, after all, traditionally a kli gever, and I have ceased presenting myself as though I were a man. But in this day and age, women wear the tallit as well, especially in an egalitarian synagogue such as the one I attend. But would putting it on make me feel like I was reverting? Would it throw me back to a time when I was pretending to be a different gender? Would I get hit with Trans Demerits?

The Torah has some very clear-seeming advice about this situation. I first encountered this verse in Ki Tetze as a young child, flipping through the Hertz Chumash to kill time during the boring parts of Shabbat services in synagogue. I was probably six or seven. I remember thinking, “Well, there goes any chance I ever have of being happy.” (Years later I would also feel this way about a verse in the next chapter, which specifically prohibits male castration, and has also been used to oppress trans women and exclude us from the Jewish community. More on that some other time.) I looked this verse up many times; I’m not sure why. And then I remember always hurriedly flipping to some other page or shutting the book, lest I be seen to have too much interest here. Probably unduly paranoid of me, yes, but the fear was very real to me. What if they were to find out?

Much modern scholarship and some more liberal-leaning commentaries try to link the verse to some vaguely specified ancient cultic practices involving cross-dressing for “pagan” ritual purposes. I always found this an unsatisfactory explanation for three reasons. First, nobody ever really gave me a good explanation of what exactly these cultic practices were supposed to be. Second, that updated knowledge, if true, was never used to overturn the law. Cross-dressing on Purim (think Jewish Halloween), even though practiced, is still forbidden, or at least discouraged, by most halachic sources. It’s all well and good to say that this verse refers to something in the ancient world, or that it’s a product of its times, but the fact of the matter is that people still take it seriously, and use it against trans* people.

But the most important problem I saw with this verse, even at that young age, was that the Torah didn’t specify what was clothing “appropriate” to one’s sex. What about women wearing pants? The Torah doesn’t tell you. Are pants for women substantially different from pants for men, in our day and age? What if a woman buys pants from the men’s section because they happen to fit her better? What about Scotsmen wearing kilts? In Scotland, that’s a man’s garment. But what if an Englishman wanted to wear a kilt? Would he be violating this law? And what if I wanted to wear a dress?

So back to my original problem. What about women wearing a tallit?

Reb Irwin Keller interprets this verse as the Torah asking us all to be true to ourselves. Rabbi Elliot Kukla and Reuben Zellman believe that the Torah’s concern is to keep us from harming ourselves or others by misrepresentation. I know whereof they speak. I spent too long misrepresenting myself, causing harm to myself and others, by failing to be true to myself. But the tallit does not have to be an instrument of that misrepresentation. In fact, using it that way is a lie.

While the tallit may at one time have been exclusively a kli gever—a man’s garment—in the communities I associate with, it is not one now. And my own tallit cannot be a kli gever, because I am not a gever.

My tallit is an expression of my femininity. It is a sign—an ’ot—of my gender, my identity, a defiant signifier of the silence I can no longer keep—will no longer keep—about my personal truth.

Traditionally, before putting on the tallit, one recites a Kabbalistic meditation: l’shem yichud kudsha b’rich hu u-sh’khin’teh, “For the sake of the unification of the Holy One, Blessed be He, and His Shekhinah“. What does this mean, to make the divine whole? To make the masculine God one with the Shekhinah, the divine feminine aspect/presence? To blur the lines between genders, between acceptable modes of presentation, between what is a kli gever and what is a simlat ’ishah? To be transgressive, a gender rebel?

I might well add a meditation, when I put on my own tallit: For the sake of helping me become a whole individual. For the sake of unifying the feminine and the masculine. For the sake of self-recognition, self-affirmation, self-healing, and self-unification.

This is what my tallit stands for.

There is beautiful Jewish prayer called Tefilat Ha-Derech in Hebrew, usually “the Traveler’s Prayer” in English. Traditionally recited before going on a long and potentially perilous journey, it asks for divine protection from the dangers on the way. The origin of the prayer is in the page of Talmud studied today in the Daf Yomi cycle (one page per day, over seven and a half years):

רבי יהושע אומר המהלך במקום סכנה מתפלל תפלה קצרה וכו׳ בכל פרשת העבור מאי פרשת העבור אמר רב חסדא אמר מר עוקבא אפי׳ בשעה שאתה מתמלא עליהם עברה כאשה עוברה יהיו כל צרכיהם לפניך איכא דאמרי אמר רב חסדא אמר מר עוקבא אפילו בשעה שהם עוברים על דברי תורה יהיו כל צרכיהם לפניך

[The mishnah says:] Rabbi Joshua says: Someone who travels through a dangerous place should pray a short prayer … [which includes the words] “in every time of crisis [‘ibbur]“. [The gemara asks]: What is “a time of crisis”? Rav Hisda said in the name of Mar Ukba: Even at a time when You are filled with wrath [‘ebrah] against them, just like a pregnant woman [‘uberah], may You be mindful of all their needs. Others report that Rav Hisda said in the name of Mar Ukba: Even at a time when they transgress [‘oberim] the words of Torah, may You be mindful of all their needs. (b. Berachot 29b)

Let’s unpack this a bit. The mishnah (earlier rabbis) relates the tradition that since going on a journey, especially in the ancient world, meant traveling through a maqom sakanah, a place of danger, a traveler should pray for divine protection on the journey. The mishnah gives a specific prayer for this occasion, which asks for divine protection “in every time of crisis”. So the gemara (later rabbis) asks what exactly that means. The answer the gemara gives is that even if God is angry with the person, or even when the person is a sinner, or not the most religiously upstanding person, they are still worthy of divine protection, and God has an obligation to be mindful of their needs.

As they love to do, the rabbis are engaging in a bit of wordplay here. The root of the words “crisis”, “pregnant” (the misogyny is an unfortunate relic of its time), “wrath”, and “transgress” is the three-letter sequence ‘ayin-bet-resh. This root, at its most literal level, means something like “to cross over”. Actually, the word “Hebrew” comes from the same root: literally, “one who crosses over”. This Hebrew root is actually quite similar to the Latin root trans-, and in fact one of my favorite suggestions for a Hebrew word meaning “transgender” is ‘ivri, “one who crosses over”, or perhaps better, “one who transitions” (!).

So in this piece of Talmud, the rabbis are extending the notion of divine protection even to those who are imperfect. They ask God to remain mindful of the needs of those people who might need bit of extra help. When one is in a moment of crisis, one does not need to be a perfect individual in order to ask for help. And, continuing to play on the root ‘ayin-bet-resh, we can extend this notion even to those who cross over. When one is transgender, an ‘ivri, a person who crosses over, one has a right to ask for that help. And the community has the obligation to be mindful of the needs of its transgender members.

A transgender person is constantly traveling though a maqom sakanah, a place filled with perils and pitfalls, and the dangers can sometimes be overwhelming. The traditional Tefilat Ha-Derech asks for divine protection from such dangers as highwaymen and wild beasts—definitely perils on journeys in the ancient world, but perhaps a little less pressing today than they used to be. Tefilat Ha-Derech has been adapted for many different purposes by people today to suit different needs, and different perils associated with journeys, in the modern world. Perhaps a Tefilat Ha-Derech for transgender people ought to ask for protection from oppression, from transphobia, from hatred and bigotry. We might even extend the rabbis’ wordplay: even when we are those who transition, when we are ‘ivrim, a group whose needs have not always been recognized, we have the right to protection.

But it is not enough to ask for these protections from some divine source and hope that they will just magically appear: we can do better than that. We must call upon our allies to take a stand on our behalf. We must build communities that will be mindful of the needs of their members. We must innovate, and create new ways to affirm ourselves and our identities. We must advocate for fairness, tolerance, and justice, not just for ourselves, not just for those who are similar enough to us, but for all human beings.

This is what we must do in every time of crisis, on behalf of all of us who travel through a dangerous place. Ensuring safety on the journey must become everyone’s responsibility.

I’ve not been having the best day in the world today, so I wrote this little reminder for myself down on a napkin at lunch.

I am a beautiful human being
I deserve to be loved
I deserve to be respected
I will not judge myself by the standards others set
I am worthwhile
I am worthy of respect
I respect myself when I am authentic
I love myself