It’s a mess!
Being both religious and queer can put you at an awkward intersection of identity, seemingly neither fully accepted by either community. But the conflict between faith and being queer is not an irreconcilable one, and countless people live this reality every day.
In this article series I am hi-lighting the voices of queer people of faith, to talk about their experiences of identifying as both, and debunking commonly held narratives.
The first article in the series can be found here.
In this article, I spoke to Leo Adams, a Jewish student at the University of Leeds, Equality and Diversity Officer for the LGBT society, and LUU’s Trans Liberation Co-ordinator.
Answers have been edited for brevity.
So Leo, tell us a bit about yourself, your religious background?
I identify as a non-binary trans masculine person. I was assigned female at birth [AFAB], so that was the first big shocker. I’m not ethnically or culturally Jewish, I converted four years ago. My father was an atheist and my mother a non-practising Anglican, so I was raised in the Church of England faith. I became more involved with religion when I was thirteen because we moved and lived literally opposite a church. So religion has always been a part of my life. I started going to prayer groups and services, and then about six months after I began to realise I was a trans person.
But before that moment, at the time you knew you weren’t het(erosexual) and the church was ok with that?
Kind of, yeah. I didn’t talk about it loads. This was before gay marriage so it was a hot issue. Because there was an image, I think, they wanted to project that they were liberal or whatever, they were ok with me being there and being bi(sexual) as long as I didn’t merge it with religious practice. There were other people who were exploring that side of their sexuality.
And then I came out as trans to my friends about six months after joining the church, and then the church a year later. And when I did become more open, I was outed the church staff by a member of the congregation, so I had to deal with that immediately. They were like “this is too much now”. I had somebody insinuate that I was possessed. Nobody had said that they wanted me to leave, but it was in every action and word they said to me from that point on. A level of attraction to me had gone, because there was a fundamental disconnect between who I was and who they were. That prompted my decision to leave that church, and also at the time played into a bigger questioning of Christianity that I had going on anyway. And so I thought this was a good time for me to step back and reassess. As I started to look at the religion from a theological viewpoint, I had personal theological disagreements with the Christian concept of sin, of the afterlife, and that’s when I started considering there may be more to it. I felt there was no recourse for me in that religion, because that severed the cord between me and Christianity.
I came out as trans at the beginning sixth form, and basically was told very calmly that I have a choice either to retract that (i.e. go back into the closet) or be asked to leave.
Your college said that?
Yeah, and here’s the gag, it was a religious school.
You identify as a non-binary trans masculine person — what does that mean?
I used to identify as a trans man, and then I identified more as non-binary. Trans masculine basically means you identify as trans, but not completely one binary gender, not completely on one side. There are some ways in which I identity with maleness and masculinity, just not enough that I feel comfortable to identify as a man. The space in which I feel I fit is somewhere between the neutral and the male gender spectrum, but I don’t feel fully aligned with maleness and manhood, so I don’t feel comfortable saying that I’m a man.
When did you convert to Judaism?
So I started converting in March 2015. I guess I landed on Judaism because I’d done a lot of reading and the principles behind Judaism. The way they approach certain aspects of theology and how its divergent from Christianity, was more in line with more of how I perceived the world, and how I want to live my life. The denomination I’m officially a part of is liberal Judaism, which is the most progressive sect of Judaism in the UK. One of their rabbis is trans. So I knew in theory they [liberal Judaism] was fine with it, but what I’ve found is that while in theory an organisation can be pro something, it isn’t always a reality. So I ended up going “stealth”, which is colloquialism for presenting yourself as the gender you identify as without telling anyone you’re trans. So I presented as a cis-gendered man.
About six months in I had the conversation with my rabbi, and she was like “I thought so”, and she was just immediately incredibly supportive. She recommended me websites to look at. And then I found out she’s gay/bi, and the congregation is aware of that and they treat her like any other rabbi. That was very positive to me. I haven’t come out officially to the congregation as trans, but it’s never presented as an issue to me. It has literally never come up in the four years I’ve been with that congregation.
Rabbinic literature is vast, so how did you navigate and come to point where you comfortable with both identities?
It’s a mess.
I’m going to quote you on that: “It’s a mess”.
It is a mess. Put that as a big quote in the middle of the article.
The Torah is the OG, basic rules 101 and the first five books of the Old Testament, so I had read that. But I did read loads of articles on Jew FAQ.
Jew FAQ! That rhymes.
I know right, it’s incredible. Being raised Jewish doesn’t necessarily mean you have all the law memorised off the top of your head, to go through the Torah, to go through the Talmud, and go through all the Rabbinic law. There’s so much honey. It’s important to remember when converting it’s not just turning up to religious ceremonies, you have to do your own learning alongside it. So, from then until now I’ve read more, learned more, understood more, which is something that is supervised so they can point you in the right direction.
It is a religion of questioning, nothing is taken for granted in Judaism. With a lot of questions comes a lot of ways to interpret things. Judaism is a religion of questioning and developing knowledge.
What does the Torah say about trans identities?
What I found, and I was really surprised, is that there’s a lot of precedent in the Torah for people who are gender non-conforming. There’s six different noted Hebrew words, I think, that occur in the Torah that express very different concepts of gender. There’s male and female, and then there’s the point between at which you can have equal characteristics of both, or neither characteristics of either, and then the point where you’re towards female but in the middle, towards female but still in the middle. Important figures in the Torah, pivotal figures were expressed as having neither, and having these characteristics that we would understand now as some with a gender non-conforming identity. But back then it wasn’t, because that was an accepted part of the gender canon. If you identified with one of those you were still conforming to the idea of gender that they had, because they had a much broader understanding of gender.
And actually the Conservative Jewish Society of America, which is a step below Orthodox but above Reform in terms of orthodoxy, so pretty orthodox, released a blessing welcoming members of the trans community in our community, and welcome people who are non-binary, because we’ve gone back and read it and there is actually much more evidence to suggest that trans and non-binary have always been part of our community. And there’s nothing to criminalise that action, to be trans or non-binary. So that was a really big step.
A lot of people would say Jewish and queer identities are not compatible. That’s a narrative that’s still dominant. What would you say to that?
Absolutely. Whilst the Conservative Jewish Society of America may have released that blessed, and officially said that trans people are welcome in our congregations, I can’t say but I think I have an idea probably that a lot of the specific congregations that come under that denomination are individually resistant to the idea of trans people. It’s a very different thing to say we accept trans people, to actually have to practice that in your daily life. Unfortunately it is a dominant narrative.
If feel that the way I practice religion is completely inseparable from my identity. Judaism is a very personal religion I feel. There’s a constant interactions between me and my Jewish identity. It’s not like something that I get out of its box and dust off on Shabbat. And it’s the same with my transness, and I think that’s something that people don’t understand. You can hold more than one identity that close to your heart, you don’t ultimately have to pick one. It really does come down to the “pick one’ thing. It’s like strands of DNA, they twist around one another. And from a queer perspective, people are like “keep it in the bedroom”. There’s an expectation that you should keep things impersonal from yourself
That leads us nicely to the next question: how have other LGBTQ people reacted to when you tell them you’re Jewish?
In some spaces I have to prioritise my Jewishness or my queerness depending where I am.
I’ve never experienced overt anti-Semitism in LGBTQ spaces like I experience everyday, there’s not the same level of ignorance. LGBT people do understand that you shouldn’t hate someone for something that’s a part of them. What I perceive is the hostility. There’s a certain normativity of atheism or anti-theism. There’s an assumption I shouldn’t talk about it [religion]. There’s this attitude I feel, that the reason you’re religious is because you don’t have agency to not be religious. Because why would you be queer and religious, why would you do that? I just don’t get good vibes about it.
There is an assumption if I’m in an LGBT space, that I’ve chosen queerness that day, and that I shouldn’t be talking about my faith, and that’s so ridiculous to me. I feel like queer people should have a better understanding of it. Preaching tolerance extends to subjects which you might not feel tolerant about. Tolerance doesn’t mean tolerating sub-sections of an identity immediately adjacent to yours, it means tolerating anything someone might be marginalised for. I don’t blame queer people for having a hard time with religious, because there’s a lot of fundamentalist Christians doing shitty things, like the Westboro Baptist Church or whatever.
They’re [Westboro Baptist Church] are so bad even conservative Christians are like woah!
Literally. It’s a mess. Definition of a mess.
You understand why many queer people have a hard time with religion though?
Yeah. People have a bad experience with religion, and what they don’t seem to understand is that if you’re a queer person now, who’s in your religion now, you’re probably also having a hard time with religion. Being queer and religious means there are times before that, and times after that members of your community still want to marginalise you, and you have to make those two things coexist. I think there’s an assumption of your queer and religious you community’s absolutely ok with it, and so everything must be easy for you and you don’t know what it’s like. No, not true. There’s still loads of popular Jewish thought that’s like you can’t be queer, trans and Jewish, and I suspect the same for Christianity and Islam.
I’m gay all the time; I’m trans all the time; I’m Jewish all the time. I can be all three things.
You shouldn’t have to compromise your identity. But it’s not as simple as going, “listen up honey, I’m gay and fabulous and you’re just going to have to deal with it”. No. Some people will just say, just be yourself. No. Not to be the bitch at the picnic but, if you have a reasonable belief that you won’t be able to access something which is an incredibly personal thing, then don’t be yourself. If that’s something you can cope with, you need to think about you and your safety first. And the really sad fact is, in order to access queerness and a religious identity, you have to be willing to compromise on one or both of those things. It’s sad, but it is unfortunately how things are still. And it’s really hard to talk about a religion, a religious experience that is seemingly behind the times because there’s a sort of “well of course it is [behind], because that’s how all religion is. And it’s really difficult to have a candid conversation about it. It’s a conversation that gets shut down, and that’s really upsetting.
There’s no central authority in Judaism, as there is in say Catholicism with the Pope, but as you know the dominant narrative is as it is. But would you say the conversation in Jewish circles about being accommodating queer people is changing, or is it very much in these circles it’s fine and in these circles it isn’t. in other words, are the conversations about being queer and Jewish now becoming mainstream?
So there’s been some stuff that’s really advanced everything. There was an ultra-orthodox rabbi who came out as a trans woman and left. She wasn’t allowed to continue practicing. But that really kick started a discussion, or at the very least is people didn’t want to talk about it, it became something within the orthodox community that they couldn’t just not address.
She was raised in a Hassidic community which is the most orthodox community on the planet. Her name is Abby Stein, the first transgender woman who was raised in a Hassidic community. She was a rabbi, certified in 2011, came out, then left the denomination.
And this kick started the conversation?
I think so yeah, because it’s something people have said “that’s not something that happens in our community”. Then Abby Stein happened, they were like “oh no, it does”. I think it’s going to take a long time. It has started to be discussed and I hope there is change. The conservative Jewish society of America — I’ve literally said that acronym in a different order every time I’ve said it — the society of Jewish Americans, the fact they they’ve opened that up means there is recourse. Because in conservative Judaism, there’s still an emphasis on Halakhic lifestyle, like living a traditional Jewish lifestyle for the modern word is like their tag line if you will. So these rabbis having these discussions are conservative rabbis. Some conservative rabbis don’t even believe in women rabbis, for example, and they’ve still eventually passed this motion affirming trans people, so I think that is a huge step.
What would you say to someone struggling to reconcile their sexual and/or gender identities with their faith.
It does help that, religious texts support you, because they do. Even further than that, like, you don’t need a religious text to tell you that your [sexual and gender] identify is a valid and important part of who you are, because it is. And, when you are in a Jewish space as a queer person, whether you’re out or not because that’s your choice, you’re bringing an important perspective, and important part of you that is adding the rich tapestry of Judaism that is present in the community you’re in, whatever community you’re that is. You don’t have to be open about your queerness in a Jewish space, or your Jewishness in a queer space to be contributing or and positively effecting the culture you’re engaging in. And, I think you’ll only continue to do that more, if you make the decision to come out about either. Every queer person is queer and also something else, or Jewish and also something else. Its just we put more weight on different identities, but you can be both because you are both. And the fact that other people will not have caught up with that, like can be your burden to bear but it doesn’t have to be.
And as you’ve said, there are already Jewish spaces out there where you’ll be accepted for who you are, and that might not be in the most orthodox of spaces, but they do exist.
Yeah, exactly. There is a space where you’ll feel accepted, and its painful to not feel accepted within like, the community you’re around. I know how exhausting and tiring it is.
If someone wanted to know more about queer Jewish theology, what would you recommend?
“Balancing on the Mechitza: Transgender in Jewish Community”, by Noach Dzmura.
I can’t spell the last word
Leo spells out “Mechitza” letter by letter.
And the website www.transtorah.org. They’ve got loads of blessings, like when putting on a binder, taking hormones.
That brings to an end everything I wanted to ask. It’s been refreshing and invigorating! Thank you for speaking to me Leo.
Thank you
