Stop Questioning My Gender Identity: On Piers Morgan, Janet Mock, and the trans narrative

Twice a week, on average, my Twitter feed erupts in some sort of controversy.  Like many activists, only "one side" of the issue appears in my feed, as I've constructed my twitterverse to be full of people whose thoughts, opinions, and interests are in concert with mine.  I have plenty of avenues to read the thoughts of people I respect that I disagree with, so I don't bother cluttering my twitter feed with homophobic, antichoice, conservative, transphobic, racist, procensorship, or interventionist sorts unless I also happen to be friends with them.  To be exposed to the opinions of people with whom I disagree, I need only read the newspaper, and if I want to be inundated with them, I can watch FOX News.  My twitterverse is therefore a space where I want to hang out: comfortable, welcoming, inviting, interesting, and safer, if not always safe.

The most recent controversy that popped up on my feed is the controversy over Piers Morgan's initial interview with Janet Mock.  The controversy has been extensively chronicled in the media, so I'll avoid rehashing it at length here.  In short, Janet Mock objected to the way Piers Morgan framed her story as being the story of someone who was formerly a boy and man and became a woman the moment she had vaginoplasty in Thailand.  Janet Mock's fan base got defensive and attacked Piers Morgan, calling him transphobic, and telling him he owed all trans* [sic] people everywhere an apology.  Piers Morgan objected to the criticism, accused Janet Mock of orchestrating abuse of him, and cited an article to justify his framing that she had been a man that Janet Mock did not write herself and critiques in the book, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Indentity, Love & So Much More, which she was on the show to promote.  Morgan painted Mock as someone who was out to destroy his reputation, said that she did not object at the time, and repeated that he is a supporter of transgender rights.  Morgan's painting of the controversy fed into mainstream cultural narrative of transgender women: that they are deceptive, as did his overemphasis on Mock's coming out to her romantic partner, insinuating that if she had chosen not to do so, she would be a liar - a man trying to deceive another man into believing that he is a woman.  I do not believe Morgan meant to feed into this myth, but I also don't believe he did enough to avoid its presumptions.  Because of the controversy, Morgan invited Mock back to the show.  In the second interview, he asked her why he was being villified, what he did that could be interpreted as offensive, and why she did not object initially if she had a problem.  She explained (over and over) that she was assigned male at birth, she never identified as a boy or a man, she did not object initially because she was appreciative of the opportunity and scared about how an objection would be taken, and she reiterated that she did not villify Morgan.  She called him an ally and asserted the importance of him getting it right because of his platform as an ally.  She advised that we follow how trans women identify in order to describe them, rather than projecting our own assumptions on how they must identify or feel.  Morgan could not understand what a trans woman of color could possibly find scary about a straight white man.  The interview had several interruptions, but by the end, Mock seems to have communicated that there is a difference between sex and gender, if not that there was a power dynamic that made her fear of speaking out at the time justified.  While Redefining Realness is primarily about intersectionality, and Mock has stated that she cannot live a single identity, Morgan still reduces her appearance to a coming-out narrative and did not let her talk about the book.  Both interviews seem as though the questions were prepared only from the Marie Claire piece about Mock rather than a read of her book.

If Morgan had stopped after the second interview, it would have been an amazing thing for both of them.  Mock had the opportunity to explain what she found problematic, and Morgan had the opportunity to frame himself as an ally, trying to do his best to be supportive, and trying to understand if and how he failed so as not to repeat the mistakes.  However, then there was a panel, in which Ben Ferguson asserted that Mock was a man and boy and Amy Holmes said that the only reason that Mock appeared on Morgan's show is because she is trans (not, for example, that she had written a book as part of her activism).  While Morgan did a good job containing and reiterating what he had learned in closing the panel, there was no reason to have the panel for him to acknowledge he had learned something new.

Other than his insistence that he is a victim in the situation and his defensive stance, Morgan did exactly what allies should do: he asked questions, he listened, and he learned.  Mock, for her part, did exactly what she should do: she spoke up when she felt able that something an ally had done bothered her, and she patiently explained why while reiterating her understand of him as a supportive person.  As far as apologies are concerned, I don't believe anybody ever owes anybody an apology.  An apology is an expression of remorse for wrongdoing.  If Morgan wishes to apologize to Mock for mischaracterizing her story unintentionally, he is free to do so, and if Morgan wishes to apologize to his viewing public for not treating a guest in the most respectful manner possible, he may do so.  As far as all transfolk everywhere? The fault there lies with society, not with Piers Morgan.  We must give our allies the benefit of the doubt when they misstep.

Back to my Twitter feed: I felt alone, even though I'm not alone.  I identify as a man, but I have not always.  I used to identify as a woman, and I used to identify as girl.  I was never a boy.  Sure, I was a tomboy, and that led to many trying to impose the identity butch on me, but tomboy is a fundamentally girly gender expression.  I owned it.  I was the girl who liked sports. I was the girl who could spit farther than most boys.  I was the gamer, the geek, the stagehand, the techie.  I had Shirley Temple curls past my shoulders, wore mostly flannels and birkenstocks, and took pride at being able to get along with the men better than with other women.   was the kid who wanted to be an astronaut because Sally Ride's story inspired me (and also space is cool).  I still answer the curious question, "I didn't know women wear yarmulkes" with a strategic explanation that outside of Orthodoxy many women choose to.  I joke that it took me so long to come out as a man because I wanted to be Julie Silver whe I grew up. I still do, by the way.  I was raised on feminist literature and feminist ideals, and the women and men in my life emphasized the amazing women in the world.  I still took many of the amazing women in my life, particularly many of my early teachers, for granted. I looked forward to joining their ranks.  My eulogy for my grandpa was about his support of me growing into a strong woman.  Then my identity crashed.  As I learned more and more about the way the lens of gender is constructed, I learned that I my conceptions of my gendered self don't match how femininity has been constructed or how feminine masculinity has been constructed, and "woman" became too uncomfortable a term.  So I stopped using it.  For a while, I tried to be outside the constructed gender binary, but I identified with particular kinds of masculine constructions of gender identity, and I ended up feeling that the box "man" is broad enough to include me.  When I identify as a man, people see me for me, and I can interact without the gender dysphoria I used to have. When I identified as a woman, my masculinity was the most important, visible aspect of my identity.  Now, as an effeminate man, neither my effeminacy nor my masculinity stands out.  I sometimes am read as a butch woman, sometimes as a gay man, sometimes as delightfully androgynous (and therefore genderqueer - another problematic assumption), sometimes as a queer man, and very rarely as a straight man.  When I talk about the times in my life when I identified as a girl or a woman, I use feminine pronouns for myself, and when I talk about times since I stopped identifying that way I use masculine pronouns for myself.  This sometimes shocks the people I'm around; I've been known to make jaws drop when I say I used to be a Girl Scout.  Being socialized to be a girl and become a woman is an important aspect of my identity.  I don't compartmentalize me, and I know that it grants me a queer perspective compared to other men.  When trans activists claimed to speak for me that the language Morgan used would be wrong for any trans person, they were wrong, and they made me feel like my narrative wasn't valid.

Allies, haters, the indifferent, and trans activists should not discount my story because there are people who have always identified with a gender that does not match the sex they were assigned.  By being open about having been a girl and a woman, I am being true to myself at those times.  By identifying as a man, I let my gender presentation fade into the background, so I get to interact on a level that takes my gender as a given instead of a question.   And isn't that what Janet Mock wants for herself?

The Menace of HIV/AIDS

I'm sick of correcting people about Mr. Boy dying.  Oh, so he died of cancer?  Well, no, but cancer killed him.  He died of AIDS.  The kind of cancer he had is rarely fatal for those with "normal" immune systems, but the 2-year survival rate for HIV+ folks who get it (because of HIV) is 50%.  But we still don't like to say people died of AIDS.  A long illness, or the secondary cause of death does better, because then we can live in the illusion that AIDS isn't scary anymore.  We can live in the illusion that health care is good enough that as long as HIV+ people have access to it they will be healthy for an indefinite period, and it won't be AIDS that they die of, but something else, and we can protect ourselves from infection.  And we can live in the illusion that there's no longer a stigma about being HIV+.

Maybe it's that I've had a positive partner, or more than "my fair share" of people in my social circle who are positive, that makes me so sensitive to this.  In the US, 1.1 million people are HIV+.  There are more than 315 million people in the US.  1.1 million people represents about one third of one percent of the population.  About 20% of my social circle is positive, and this was also true before I knew Mr. Boy.  In 2010, more than 15,000 Americans died of AIDS.  In 2013, three people in my social circle (including Mr. Boy) died of AIDS.

But the stigma of AIDS is still prevalent in our society.  When I was read as a gay man walking down the street with Mr. Boy, the assumptions of AIDS on people's faces was easily readable.  And in news stories, the assumptions between the lines make me crazy.  There was recently an article in the New York Times shaming gay men for not taking Truvada as a preventative measure.  And the small piece about  Walter Reed blood samples getting mixed up and what Walter Reed is doing to try to find a positive patient is full of stigma.  In the article, the person is assumed to be infecting others through unprotected sex or sharing needles, because the author assumed the risk of having someone who has HIV and does not know it must be elucidated for the reader.  The biggest segment of new infections of the disease is actually the monogamous partners of males who are not monogamous, contracted through heterosexual sex.  Maybe the author knows more about the patient details than I do, but if so, the details should be put to help finding the patient, not toward creating a scare of one HIV+ person who does not know she is.  The CDC estimates almost 1 in 6 positive folks don't know.they are positive, totalling to almost two hundred thousand people.  If that's your story, make it your story, but otherwise, make the story about the inability of military hospitals and their private contractors to maintain accurate patient data.

How the URJ Biennial exacerbated my pet peeves with the Reform Movement

I did not attend the URJ Biennial in San Diego.  My parents did, and I watched videos, though not live broadcasts, as I was busy during the days it occurred.  I was impressed with several of the pieces that are now available on the URJ's YouTube channel including R' Rick Jacobs' keynote, the women clergy (many of whom I learned from at camp and in NFTY) talking about how important NFTY was to their own experience, and R' David Ellenson's d'var torah and blessing of R' Aaron Panken.  I enjoyed learning about the work of the Ruderman Foundation, and fun facts about the progressive nature of the Women of Reform Judaism.  Neshama Carlebach explained how she was made to feel at home in the Reform Movement and is now choosing it for herself.  The cast of musicians was tremendous.  I experienced both naches and horror as current NFTYites cheered (naches because it's NFTY and horror because the cheer has changed in minor ways in the ten and a half years since I was a NFTYite).  I felt proud of the Movement in which I was raised.

Watching the videos from the Biennial also made me aware of the ideological distance between myself and the Reform Movement, even as there are more and more Reform Jews whose personal observance is traditionally radical rather than rebellious.  I felt alienated from the spectacle of pride in a Movement in various ways.

Ideologically, the movement is democratic and capitalist.  The Reform Movement is the movement most focused on inclusion of interfaith families, most talkative on issues of social justice, and claims it is the queer-friendliest (although it does not use that term).  These attributes were trotted out over and over to justify the Reform Movement's market share in America, propped up with unsurprising data from the Pew Research study on American Jewry.  As a socialist raised in the context of multiculturalism who has had the privilege of being a part of genuinely pluralistic Jewish spaces as well as post-denominational Jewish spaces, the competitive nature and liberal democratic values espoused to back it up were a turn-off.  I'm not interested in beating other groups of Jews (or anyone).  And, as my high school English teacher would say, show, don't tell me, that I should want to be a part of your organization.

The Reform Movement has what Rick Jacobs described as respectful differences with Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu.  Support for Israel as a political entity as the democratic and Jewish state was talked of the entire time, ignoring the socialist history of political Zionism, and almost entirely ignoring the injustice of occupation in favor of struggles within "Israeli" society for women's equality and religious (read Jewish religious) freedom (on which R' Rick Jacobs said the Movement and Bibi have respectful differences).  Furthermore, both Bibi and Vice President Joe Biden talked about the importance of keeping Iran from getting nuclear weapons.  Cue Tom Lehrer's "Who's Next?".  My thoughts on Israel, and on the relationship between Israel and American Jewry are quite complex.  Suffice it to say for this that I think the focus of American Jewish engagement with Israel should not be parroting support for injustice by buying into excuses.  The Reform Movement has a vested interest in Israeli politics, having programs and institutions there, and not having its rabbis recognized by the theocratic machine.  Therefore it should be outspoken on every issue that it cares about relating to Israel, and it should not describe any differences regarding subjugation of human beings as "respectful".  It should not stand by when Israel blames the failure of the Peace Process entirely on Palestinians.  As a well-organized body of progressive American Jews, the URJ should exercise its critical perspective on the ways in which Israel does not live up to Reform Jewish values, just as the Religious Action Center does the US government.

Lastly for the major issues, the Campaign for Youth Engagement grates my nerves.  Don't get me wrong; I support the involvement of young Jews in Jewish life.  I benefited tremendously from URJ camping (9 summers at OSRUI and one at Kutz), and my involvement in NFTY led me to feel like a part of the Jewish community rather than a token or an outsider.  The messaging of the Campaign for Youth Engagement is patronizing at best and selfish at worst.  Selfishly, it reads: the reason we should engage youth is that we need somebody to take over for us in 25 years.  The patronizing read is the message: youth are the future of our movement.  As a teenager, being called "the future" was one of the worst things you could say to me.  What I learned from being engaged as a kid and as a teen was that I did not have to wait to express my Judaism.  I was a Jew then, and I could live Jewishly.  My thoughts, insights, learning, and actions as a Jew mattered, even my first summer at camp when I was nine.  As I grew up in the realm of informal Refom Jewish education, I found support for my deepening religious observance in the youth movement and in the professionals who served it.  I found a camp counselor who was extremely traditionally observant.  I found the first person I called my rabbi (who is not ordained as such) in my teacher and mentor Danny Maseng, who implanted within me not only a love for Jewish music but the seeds of the spirituality I am currently building for myself.  I found the first rabbi I would call my rabbi in NFTY in the form of R' Arnold Jacob Wolf, z"l, who knew how to criticize my point of view and point me in the right direction while taking my angry rebellious teenage self absolutely seriously.

A URJ cynic would look at my life and say I am not a success story of Reform Jewish youth engagement. My primary Jewish involvement is not through a Reform congregation, but rather an independent Jewish community called Mishkan run by Rabbi Lizzi Heydemann (ordained at the Ziegler School at American Jewish University, which is affiliated with the Conservative movement) who was also taught by Rabbi Wolf. Since June, for the first time in my life, I do not belong to a URJ congregation.  (Two of the congregations I'm looking at joining happen to be URJ congregations, and one is more traditionally observant than most URJ congregations.)  I married a non-Jew, who, if he survived, would have made the most fabulous rebbetzin [sic].  I am looking toward becoming a rabbi and HUC-JIR is not even on the list of schools I'm considering.  After my first year as a camp counselor, I did not stay involved with OSRUI.  I am far to the left of the Reform Movement politically.  While I consider social justice to be of paramount concern for any Jew, my personal Jewish focus has turned more and more to tikkun middot (which I first learned about at sija in the Bayit at camp).  My theological views include a God that still actively performs miracles.  I can read resurrection of the dead and praying for the coming of the Messiah in metaphorical ways, although I generally prefer to talk of geulah rather than goel whenever possible.  I don't pray for a return of the beit hamikdash, but I do mourn its loss. I believe that we do not have to discard halaja to come up with ethical Judaism.  My political Zionism and my religious Zionism are separate. I don't feel there are any areas of Judaism that are not deserving of questioning.  I feel that there need to be ritual boundaries between what Jews are able to do and what non-Jews are able to do.  This perspective is particularly informed by my growing up with one Jewish and one non-Jewish parent and that non-Jewish parent later converting.  I don't believe that saying we are welcoming makes us so.  And I believe that talking about gender equality as women being equal to men enforces a binary that we should not be enforcing.  So, I'm in no way, the married-to-someone-I-met-in-Tzofim-become-Rosh-Eidah-go-to-HUC-JIR-or-law-school-or-med-school-join-a-Reform-Temple-20s-and-30s-group-future-URJ-board-member success story that the Campaign for Youth Engagement means to create.

However, without Reform Jewish informal education, I would have maxed out the Jewish knowledge of my congregation at an early age.  Without Danny's presence, Judaism would seem entirely intellectual to me.  Without Rabbi Wolf, Judaism would have become a boring set of rules that I didn't even follow.  I would not have developed a daily prayer practice and a reverence for Shabbat.  My parents would not attend synagogue on a weekly basis, and my dad has told me it was my passion for Judaism developed at camp that brought him into the Jewish community as a Jew and not just as related to us.  My partner would not have been enthralled by the rhythms and ethos of Jewish life. We would not have lived in the rhythm of the Jewish week.  And the thought of becoming a rabbi most certainly would not have occurred to me if I had not decided it was the best way to keep coming back to camp every summer for the rest of my life at age nine.  My Judaism might look like my brother's.  My brother had sporadic engagement with Judaism as a youth including a trip to Israel for the Eisendrath International Exchange, had a minor in Jewish studies at San Francisco State mostly because of the rampant anti-Semitism on that campus, and now his Jewish observance is mostly driven by his devout Catholic wife saying "don't you guys do this" and "shouldn't we...".  Judaism for him is at worst something he's stuck with and at best a peripheral connection to the rest of his family.  But then again, he and his wife belong to a Reform synagogue.  There's another possibility for what my Judaism might look like.  I might have gone what R' Benay Lappe calls "Option 2" and thrown out the baby with the bathwater, becoming an atheist who was raised as a Jew or identifying as "spiritual, but not religious".  I might have considered myself too good, too evolved, and too enlightened to practice ancient tribal customs.  My only engagement with Judaism might be seder at my parents' house.  Surely, if somebody had dismissed a teenage me as merely "the future" of Judaism instead of recognized me as a part of its present, I would have been dismissive in return.  Instead, camp and NFTY created places where I could be taken seriously where I was, where I developed the passion which led Judaism to be a central aspect of my life, and where my critiques of current Jewish practice started.  I don't need to feel a part of the Reform Movement, but I do need to feel a part of the Jewish people.  And I didn't feel an emphasis on that from the Biennial.

On Grieving

Mr. Boy died shortly after I posted a short list of his advice for me on November 20th.  Other losses have also touched me since Mr. Boy's death.  A mentor lost a father-in-law, a friend lost a father, Superman Sam whose story helped give me and Mr. Boy strength died, Peter O'Toole's death made news, and, of course, the world lost one of the most incredible humans ever when Nelson Mandela died.  With each loss, I thought I was in a place where my heart could not break more, but it seems as though compassion is unending.

I'd like to write something profound about Mr. Boy, but I think it's too soon for that.  I've been staring at a blank page for days trying to put something together for the service which will be Saturday.  But, as a trusted rabbi shared with me, there are no words.  Human language is not meant to describe grief.  We mourners are not meant to fit people, relationships, and pain into grammatical structures.  We are meant to learn how to hold the joy of love and caring and the pain of loss and absence together.  We are meant to refuse comfort, to be comforted, and to seek comfort from others (not necessarily in that order).  I am meant to reconcile the loss of my partner with the fact that I yet live.  That feeling my grief will be a part of my life in many different ways as I continue to live despite that I feel like my world has stopped.  To live with grief is to expand notions of family and community to include those who are not present.  To live with grief is to live radically - to participate in an ongoing revolution of reimagining life not based on what we planned but based on where we are.

Transgender Day of Remembrance

Even though today has been horrible in terms of my current situtation, I wanted to take the time to remember those who have died because they are Transgender.