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We hope you enjoy this episode of the Revealer podcast: Gender Diversity in Islam and Judaism.

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The scene is haunting: Families packing up their belongings and leaving their homes because they fear for their children’s wellbeing and safety. In Austin, Texas, one of the items lovingly packed was a poster emblazoned with “Trans Girls are Girls.” It belongs to Jessie, a 10-year-old, who along with her family, fled to Oregon after a spate of anti-trans legislation was enacted in the Lonestar State.

Jessie is not alone. In Alabama, a 48-year-old mother fled with her 15-year-old son after the state criminalized gender affirming healthcare. And news reports are steadily documenting the ongoing travels of trans youth who must now seek medical treatment out of state. These trans refugees and migrants have been displaced by the force of a multi-year moral panic that has demonized trans adults as sexual predators and trans youth as endangered victims of “gender theory,” or, as dangerous influences on other “innocent” children.

The fearmongering around trans people now has legislative teeth in a growing number of states. At the urging of conservative politicians, legislatures have passed hundreds of bills including bans on trans youth from playing on sports teams, the censorship of LGBTQ topics in classrooms and libraries, the gendered policing of bathroom use, and the creation of religious exemptions for anti-discrimination statutes. Some laws even empower state agencies to investigate and charge parents and physicians who provide gender-affirming care to minors. Other legislation intends to punish parents for traveling out of state with their children to seek supportive medical treatment.

Today’s state sponsored stigmatization—which seeks to disappear trans people—has all the hallmarks of a moral panic. Sociologists and historians have shown that moral panics are political tools that have allowed members of dominant groups to demonize minorities. In most cases, these same minorities have limited access to political and cultural resources that might stymie the harmful story being told about them. As a result, these engineered fears have justified draconian laws, surveillance, and the institutionalization of minorities. Less acknowledged is that these orchestrated outbursts of fear and loathing also create refugees who engage in temporary or permanent migrations. The current panic over trans people means that their healthcare and visibility is ever more precarious and dangerous in certain regions of the United States. And it is forcing some trans people and their families to flee from home permanently. Others face the hardship of traveling repeatedly in order to seek essential medical care.

(Photo by Jay Janner for the Associated Press)

Because of the uneven restrictions and laws surrounding gender and sexuality at the state level, there is a long and diverse history of forced migrations and temporary travel. These ongoing displacements directly link trans folks to broader histories of sexual refugees and medical migrants. At a moment when the far right and trans-exclusionary feminists both would deny the existence, dignity, and rights of trans folk, such histories offer an urgent reminder that trans people shared and continue to share in persistent forms of oppression and resistance. In this sense, trans struggles for healthcare and equality must be seen as part of – rather than apart from – other historical struggles for civil rights in the face of moral panics.

We should think about trans folks as overlapping in the experiences of a number of groups, but especially queers and abortion seekers. Members of each of these groups, at one time or another, were forced to leave home to seek dignity, legal recognition, safety and/or medical treatment in other parts of the country. The places where they sojourned sometimes embraced them. More often they tolerated them. And frequently, these destinations became sites from which to challenge the restrictive moral regimes elsewhere.

Sexual Refugees

“By the tens of thousands, we fled small towns where to be ourselves would endanger our jobs and any hope of a decent life; we have fled from blackmailing cops, from families who disowned or ‘tolerated’ us; we have been drummed out of the armed services, thrown out of schools, fired from jobs, beaten by punks and policemen.” – Carl Wittman, “Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto”

Queers have long left their homes for cities like San Francisco and New York where urban anonymity and thriving communities have provided shelter and support. Urban queer enclaves, already burgeoning by WWII, became safe havens in the wake of a series of midcentury moral panics—what historian David K. Johnson calls the “lavender scare” and George Chauncey names a “sex crime panic”—about homosexuality. These 1950s and 1960s paranoid paroxysms that saw police and politicians fearmonger about queers haunting public parks, public bathrooms, suburbs, the military, and government agencies, have been well documented but their consequences and afterlife are worth considering.

Media reporting about an upsurge of sex crimes – most of which involved adult men assaulting young girls – led to violent anti-gay crackdowns and the flight of gays and lesbians from their communities. In numerous cities, police forces and politicians, striving to show they were tough on sex crimes, unfairly stigmatized “all homosexuals as potential child molesters or murderers,” writes George Chauncey. Police regularly raided the places where gays and lesbians congregated. In the wake of such raids, local newspapers would frequently print the names and home addresses of those arrested, leading to a cascade of consequences including interpersonal violence and job loss.

(Image source: CBS News)

In one notorious backlash in Boise, Idaho in 1955, news of a single sodomy arrest led to the displacement of that city’s gay community. Boise’s local press both instigated and accelerated this moral panic. An op-ed in the city’s leading newspaper warned that “a number of boys have been victimized by these perverts” and demanded that all homosexuals “be removed from this community.” The city’s prosecutor promised to “eliminate” all homosexuality from Boise. One gay school teacher read about these threats in the morning paper as he ate his breakfast. Fearing the worst, he “jumped up from his seat, pulled out his suitcases, packed as fast as he could, got into his car, and drove straight to San Francisco never bothering to call up the school to let it be known that he would be absent. The cold eggs, coffee, and toast remained on his table for two days before someone from his school came by to see what had happened.”

Remarking on the anti-gay panic, the same teacher remembered: “First they say, ‘Save the kids.’ Then they say, ‘Crush the homosexuals.’ Enemies of society—that’s what we were called. I remember very well. So I asked myself, where will this stop? I’ve never had any kind of relations except with consenting adults. But is Boise going to be calm enough to draw the difference? Will they look for the difference? No, I knew they’d go after anybody who wears a ring on their pinky. I wasn’t going to take the chance and get swallowed up in a blind, raging witch hunt. I got the hell out.” The teacher was one of many gay refugees leaving Boise for safer locales.

Federal policy codified the midcentury anti-gay panic. Numerous government agencies, believing that queers were security risks, attempted to ferret out gays and lesbians. As various government agencies investigated and interrogated suspected queers, there was a “subdued hysteria” among Washington DC’s gay and lesbian government workers, records David K. Johnson. One lesbian woman who worked for the Department of Commerce in the 1950s recalled: “You lived not knowing what would happen next… You would be socializing with somebody, and then they disappeared, they had gotten kicked out and left town.” The woman who shared these recollections was fired from her job for being a lesbian. Like many of her colleagues, also ended up fleeing DC for San Francisco in the summer of 1958. There she joined other sexual refugees, who in the wake of being outed and fired, continued to battle “long-term unemployment or underemployment, resulting in severe financial or health problems.”

But the flight from their hometowns was not the end of the story for these queer refugees. Rather, their plight spurred a wave of activism and institution building. Groups like the Mattachine Society, a path-setting gay rights organization, was devoted to helping “the most desperate individuals,” many of whom were minors, in their migration westward. As historian Martin Meeker has shown, the Mattachine Society pioneered civil rights activism for gays and lesbians even as it offered advice for refugees, helping them find jobs, places to live, and integrating them into the queer community. One letter to the Mattachine from a man in Owensboro, Kentucky encapsulated both the plight of queers and the activism of the Mattachine: “I would like to ask if you could guide me as just where can I go to live a peaceful, happy life…? Would San Francisco be the place[?]”

While many queers arrived to new cities alone having fled their families and towns of origin, they often found organizations—imperfect though they were—in place to help them sojourn. “San Francisco is a refugee camp for homosexuals,” declared gay liberationist Carl Wittman in 1970. “We have fled here from every part of the nation, and like refugees elsewhere, we came not because it is so great here, but because it was so bad there.” And while San Francisco—a gay ghetto in Wittman’s words—was one of the places that offered greater protection and tolerance, the work of gay rights groups radiated outward far beyond that city’s limits.

Moral panics thrive when its targets can be easily silenced and stigmatized. The queer legal and cultural activism in San Francisco, and in other urban centers, slowly produced transformations over the next seven decades that made the demonization of same-sex sexuality more difficult to sustain. Increasingly, queers, the families that loved them, and the organizations that supported them, worked on neutralizing the cultural and legal minefields sewn by the moral panics of decades’ past. This work produced tangible, albeit imperfect results by transforming the meaning of same-sex sexuality and making greater swaths of the United States habitable, if not hospitable, to queers.

Compulsory Pregnancy and Medical Migration

“When we found ourselves unable to get help in the United States we were forced to go overseas. [A doctor] called it self-imposed exile…. It sounds kind of cruel but we really had no choice at that point. I knew that I was right in terminating the pregnancy.” – Sherri Chessen, “The Lesser of Two Evils” (1966)

Overlapping neatly with the state persecution of queers, from the 1940s until Roe, abortion seekers traveled out of state or abroad for services because police, prosecutors, and hospitals engaged in a “newly aggressive level” of suppression of skilled abortion providers. A sensationalistic press regularly glorified the ongoing police raids on abortion clinics. Headlines screamed that these medical practitioners—some of whom were in fact well respected and conscientious physicians—were dangerous members of a “criminal underworld.” And the women who sought out abortion, conservative doctors argued, were abandoning their motherly responsibilities and feminine destinies.

Many newspaper articles did more than approvingly describe the raids. They also publicly named and shamed the providers and abortion seekers who sought their help. Against this backdrop, hospitals dramatically tightened their abortion restrictions, making it difficult for sympathetic physicians to help their patients.

Patients, of course, paid a heavy price. Those caught up in anti-abortion dragnets were subjected to invasive gynecological exams, interrogations, and public humiliation. Other abortion seekers lost access to local medical assistance, as police pressure shuttered clinics and drove providers out of business. Medical scarcity became the norm. Some who might have chosen to terminate pregnancies were compelled to carry them to term. Mainland American women with the means to do so were forced to travel offshore. Growing numbers of medical migrants headed for Cuba, Japan, Puerto Rico and Mexico in the 1950s and 1960s. Newspapers termed these destinations “abortion meccas” and “abortion capitals.” After England legalized abortion in 1968, it too became an “abortion capital.” New York City in 1970 also assumed this title as abortion seekers—denied medical services at home—traveled there by the thousands, desperate to control their bodies and reproductive futures.

The travel experiences of abortion seekers ran the gamut from harrowing to comforting. Such travel was consistently costly. And for some, this journey was their first trip outside of the United States. “My mother nearly emptied their savings account to buy roundtrip plane tickets to Havana, and get the money to pay the abortionist,” wrote Miriam Levine Helbok about her sister’s medical migration in the mid-1950s. “Neither my mother nor my sister had ever been on a plane,” she explained. But the kind of care abortion seekers encountered upon arrival varied significantly. Some received compassionate and competent care. Others, like Helbok’s sister, experienced painful or poor medical treatment. Too many women faced sexual assault or exploitation from providers. And some returned home suffering from infections or complications, some of which proved fatal.

Early on, women found their way to abortion providers through word of mouth. A friend, a relative, or a physician might have a connection. Such referrals were often dicey and involved clandestine behavior. Fearing identification and arrest, abortion providers would have clients wait on street corners where they would be picked up in cars, blindfolded, and driven around before arriving at the site where the abortion would be performed. Sometimes the blindfold would be removed. Other times it would not. For abortion seekers, these experiences were harrowing. And stories of “knitting needles or coat hangers as instruments, of the administration of dangerous drugs, of blindfold pick-ups, of free sex as part of the fee, of blackmail and intimidation” circulated widely as the terrible cost of controlling reproduction. Despite these dangers, women were willing to risk their lives to control their fertility and their future. “I feel that even that I’ve heard a few bad things,” wrote one woman who braved the abortion underground, “and this is the only answer.”

By the late 1960s, a network of activists helped thousands of abortion seekers navigate travel, directing them to pre-vetted abortion providers around the globe. Groups like Association to Repeal Abortion Laws and the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion were at the forefront of efforts to ensure that forced medical migrants’ journeys were as uneventful as possible. These and other networks offered extensive guidance on how to cross borders safely to reach trusted physicians for safe and comparatively affordable care. At the same time, reproductive rights groups worked to ensure that abortion opponents would not have the final word on the meaning of abortion. Through concerted advocacy and strategic use of the press, abortion rights groups shifted the public meaning of abortion from “deviant to decent.”

Such efforts did more than save abortion seekers’ lives. They helped destigmatize abortion and raised the expectations of abortion seekers for better and more accessible healthcare. As American abortion seekers encountered each other while traveling on planes and buses, in clinic waiting rooms, and in recovery rooms, they quickly realized they were not alone. They, and the doctors who helped them, also wondered together why they could not easily and affordably have abortions at home. And on the eve of Roe v. Wade, there was a widespread consensus among feminists, religious leaders, medical professionals, the press, politicians, lawyers, and an ever-wider public, that abortion ought to be legal, local, and available on demand.

The Past is Not a Foreign Country

Today, as growing numbers of states restrict abortion healthcare, trans healthcare, and seek to roll back gay and lesbian civil rights, the past is far from a foreign country. Rather, we are traversing familiar terrain as conservatives look to these oppressive legacies, not with horror, but with longing. The backlash against queers, trans folks, and abortion seekers is all part of the long rise of anti-democratic movements in the United States.

But the differences between past and present are also marked: far from solitary, the medical migrations of trans youth and abortion seekers are often guided by supportive parents, empowering organizations, and affirmative physicians. Gay and lesbian institutions have deep political infrastructures and a bedrock of legal precedents to draw from. So too do abortion seekers and those who support them, who look to half-a-century of constitutionally protected abortion rights as a touchstone for their expectations.

There are many who would maintain that trans quests for dignity and treatment are somehow outliers, deviant, or out of step with American traditions. But even the most cursory glance at the parallel journeys of trans folk with abortion seekers, queers, and many others, offers an urgent reminder that they are not alone. History shows us that a moral panic is most dangerous and efficacious when its proponents can silence and isolate the groups they are targeting. By placing trans youth and those who love them within larger American civil rights histories, we work to blunt the force of conservatives’ manufactured fears. Instead, we insist that our trans kin are in good company in the ongoing American quest for medical dignity, social equality, and civil rights.

Gillian Frank is a historian of religion and sexuality who co-hosts the podcast Sexing History. His book, Making Choice Sacred: Liberal Religion and the Struggle for Abortion Before Roe, is forthcoming with University of North Carolina Press.

The post For We Were Strangers: Trans Refugees and Moral Panics appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image by Elizabeth Brockway for the Daily Beast)

“This is my beloved child in whom I am well pleased,” read the banner that hung from the chapel’s ceiling at the seminary where I was teaching. A transgender student stepped up and took his place at the podium underneath it. To him, this was a familiar place—he had read and prayed there many times. But this turned out to be a special moment, something different. As he stood, an electric wave of recognition ran through the congregation as they saw the importance of this moment: the powerful image of a transgender person above whose head read the Holy Spirit’s blessing of Jesus: “This is my beloved child.”

For more than thirty years, I have been a queer and trans activist, advocate, minister, and theologian; in that time, I’ve affirmed that to be known and loved by God is the birthright of every person—indeed of all creation. The declaration that a transgender person is God’s “beloved child’ is a radical theological statement only against the backdrop of a conservative religious bias against those outside of the gender binary. That is, it should be a normative idea: God’s love is for all people. And yet it becomes a statement of liberation, even defiance, in this era. I have witnessed the profound power that comes when we truly know ourselves to be treasured, holy, and beloved people. This knowledge can be a tremendous source of healing and even protection against the destructive forces of transphobia and homophobia. Understanding the truth that we are God’s beloved children reveals the falsehood of religious rejection. We need that knowledge of our sacredness, especially as transgender rights come under attack.

Over the past few years, the United States has seen an alarming number of state and local bills that intend to restrict transgender people from accessing public accommodations, legal and healthcare services, and more. Many, but not all, of these bills focus on restricting the lives of non-binary and transgender youth. Not only is the sheer number of anti-LGBTQ bills rising—from 41 in 2018 to 238 in the first quarter of 2022—but the percentage of these bills that focus directly on gender identity has also steadily increased. Many have been defeated, died in committee, or been vetoed, but some have become law.

In the proposed and passed state legislation, transgender and non-binary people are set to lose access to public restrooms and locker rooms, be excluded from organized sports, and have our contributions and histories erased from classroom conversations. Some policies prevent transgender patients, their families, and their doctors from following necessary and best-practice medical care. Instead, these healthcare decisions will be made by politicians without any training or knowledge of the subject. Other bills make it more challenging to change names and gender markers on legal documents, which exposes transgender people to discrimination in all arenas, especially housing, employment, education, and travel. When a group is singled out for exclusion from public spaces and services, or deliberately exposed to discrimination through state actions, it poses a serious danger to society by sending a message to the broader public and to members of that group that it is acceptable to treat them as less than others and not on equal footing as human beings.

Research shows that when people are demonized or excluded based on demographic categories, it becomes significantly easier to increase stigmatization, marginalization, and violence. Consider, for example, the work of Professor Erwin Staub, whose research focuses on genocide. He points out that horrific events of violence often begin with small acts of dehumanization. It is at those early stages that bystanders’ objections are most effective in ending the discrimination. When people ignore the mistreatment of others, society as a whole finds it easier to engage in or condone violent behavior against that group. It is, therefore, imperative to object to attempts to enshrine prejudice and exclusion into law. To be clear: I am not suggesting that we are on the verge of genocide—although transgender people, especially trans people of color, face devastating rates of discrimination and violence; but rather, we are at a point when it is ethically and urgently necessary to protect the wellbeing of non-binary and transgender people.

(Photo by Nicole Craine for the New York Times)

Anti-transgender bills are already doing harm to our society and to those most impacted by them. When Texas officials labelled gender-affirming care as child abuse and called for the public to report parents who supported such care, it had significant adverse effects on youth and families in the state. These were compounded by additional actions by the Texas legislature banning transgender youth from participating in sports teams congruent with their gender identity. The Trevor Project, which provides suicide prevention services for LGBTQ youth, reported a 150% increase in calls from Texas during this period. Similarly, as I write this, Florida is considering a ban on all gender affirming care for minors after enacting a new law barring teachers from speaking about gender identity and sexual orientation. Each additional bill compounds the pressure on young people. Given that these bans on medical care are the polar opposite of the guidance from groups such as the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, it defies credibility when politicians argue that these laws are needed to protect adolescents’ health.

Attempts to legislate transgender and non-binary people away from public view—either because we make some people uncomfortable or because it is an effective wedge issue in our deeply partisan times—leads to the constriction of lives and souls. When non-binary and transgender people must restrict our movements so as not to enter forbidden spaces, or live with the knowledge that we are not allowed to participate in organized sports or have our existence mentioned in classrooms, our world becomes smaller and more fraught with danger. These limitations stifle the spirit and even lead to death for those who internalize the stigma and hatred.

As people of faith, we recognize that the freedom to express our truest and deepest selves is vital to our emotional and spiritual wellbeing. For those of us from religious, spiritual, and philosophical traditions that affirm the worth, dignity, and sacredness of all people, the escalating assaults on transgender and non-binary people’s rights should be deeply alarming. Our values call us to stand against state-sanctioned stigmatization. Transgender and non-binary people deserve the right to use public facilities, to participate in social activities and athletics, and to receive competent, compassionate healthcare simply because we are human beings and are worthy of all these things.

For those of us who are Christian, we must take note that our conservative co-religionists are driving much of this bias and resulting legislation. They claim to represent the views of an entire faith and yet they do not. In a recent study by the Pew Research Center, only white evangelicals felt that there was too much acceptance of transgender people in American society. By contrast, the majority of religiously unaffiliated Americans felt society had not gone far enough in accepting transgender people. However, this is not simply a religious vs. unreligious divide. A strong plurality of Roman Catholics, Black Protestants, and white mainline Protestants reported in the same survey, in roughly equal numbers, that society’s acceptance of trans people had been “about right” or “had not gone far enough.” This is a valuable piece of truth about the sizeable number of Christians who support transgender equality. And while the Pew analysis was limited to Christians, other research shows similar findings across religious groups. People of faith who support transgender individuals must now step up and act. We must speak out against destructive anti-trans legislation and actions that fly in the face of our values.

(Image source: Shutterstock)

While conservatives claim their anti-transgender sentiments are based on Biblical principles, the fact of the matter is that there are positive examples of gender differences in our sacred text. Take, for example, what the Bible says about eunuchs. Eunuchs are a fairly close parallel to non-binary and transgender people, as much as any ancient category can fit modern understandings. Jesus stated that there are different kinds of eunuchs, some created by God, some by human hands (Matthew 19: 11-12). One story in the Christian Bible tells us of an Ethiopian eunuch who is traveling along a wilderness road after attending a religious festival in Jerusalem. One of Jesus’ followers, Philip, appears to him and shares the Gospel with him. The eunuch asks to be baptized and Philip immediately does so. The center of this sacred story is the religious inclusion and affirmation of a Black man who lived outside of the bounds of normative gender; this should be the basis for Christian responses to transgender and non-binary people.

The prejudices of conservative Christianity fail to tell the whole story of how people of faith, including Christians, have responded to non-binary and transgender people. Several years ago, I met a chaplain who works at one of the European hospitals that has served the medical needs of transgender people since the late 1950s. The medical staff at the time—then exclusively Christian—followed a line of reasoning that began with the understanding that gender dysphoria causes suffering. As medical providers, they had the means to alleviate suffering. As those who follow Jesus, himself a healer, they knew they had a responsibility to lessen this pain. Offering appropriate medical care, therefore, became an ethical and spiritual obligation.

What if we took this same approach to those who would deny treatment to transgender youth? Rather than being the cause of increased suffering, people of faith can advocate for the most effective medical care and promote actions to ensure the wellbeing of non-binary and transgender children and adolescents.

Today, we recognize that gender differences themselves do not cause suffering; rather, trans and non-binary people suffer when we are rejected by our families and denied sufficient healthcare and equality under the law. In research that I have conducted with colleagues, we found a clear link between family support and increased wellbeing (shown in indices like decreased risk of suicide attempts, lower rates of homelessness and substance use to cope with discrimination, etc.).

I have seen this at work not only on spreadsheets of data, but also in the lives of real families. At a conference on pastoral care for transgender youth, one mother told me how, when her child expressed a different gender identity, she had diligently followed the advice of her evangelical pastor to discourage every act of gender transgression. She truly wanted what was best for her child. But after months and months of this, as she was ready to dole out yet another punishment, she looked into the eyes of her 10-year-old and saw nothing but defeat, resignation, and, she said, frankly, death. It was as if her child were no longer living. And in that moment, she had a life-changing revelation: as a mother, her job was to protect and nurture her child and that was what she was going to do, no matter what the pastor had said. She described a long and difficult road of rebuilding trust as a family, a path that was necessary, in her words, for her child to survive. Her faith was most fully expressed by caring for and loving her child exactly as that child is, rather than by her evangelical church’s teachings. That made all the difference, she said, between depression and flourishing for her child, who is now an engaging, active teenager getting ready for college. The family sought out a new church where their whole family was affirmed.

One of the most inspiring changes I have seen over the past thirty years is the emergence of supportive families. It gives me such hope for future generations when I see parents and grandparents who believe their children when they share their identities and fiercely protect the rights of those kids to go to school, play sports, encounter the world—to just be children. Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, I could not have imagined trusting any adult with the truth I knew about myself. How wonderful that, in some families today, kids are believed, affirmed, and valued as they are, gender differences and all—and that increases my resolve to ensure that every child has that experience and that right.

This truth telling, this affirmation, is a sacred story. At the end of the day, this is about souls finding the necessary freedom to express ourselves. It is a quest for joy, thriving, and self-knowledge. It is the right to understand ourselves as beloved children of God at the deepest and holiest level of our beings. We don’t need a banner over our heads to proclaim it, although that is lovely when it occurs. These words of affirmation are already written within our hearts.

Justin Sabia-Tanis is the director of the Social Transformation program and an assistant professor at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. A universalist Christian, he has served as an LGBTQ activist, educator, and pastor since the 1980s; he is ordained in the United Church of Christ.

The post Beloved Transgender Children and Holy Resistance appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Shutterstock)

When I google “gender” and “Talmud,” I find countless articles that enumerate the eight (or seven or six, depending on how the list-maker is counting) genders discussed in the Talmud, a Jewish body of literature that dates from approximately the first six centuries of the common era. The rabbis’ writings in the Talmud about these multiple genders have created a swell of popular interest in Jewish legal sources. Discussions of the multiple kinds of gender possibilities in rabbinic literature are in a mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic (with the occasional loan word thrown in from other languages). These sources are difficult to understand and require training to be able to read them; even just being able to read Hebrew fluently will not be enough to parse rabbinic arguments. And traditionally, these texts have only been taught to men. It is a recent development that there are venues for women to learn the skills needed to access these sources. Typically, the study of the Talmud takes place in conservative environments and is segregated by sex; it is only very recently that there are schools and classes that specifically welcome trans, queer, and nonbinary students.

Since publishing my book, Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature, I have been invited to be a guest on podcasts, teach at synagogues and rabbinical schools, and have been interviewed about my work. Given that I wrote a dense academic book about one of the more technical areas of law in rabbinic literature, why has there been so much interest? What is it about eunuchs and androgynes in Jewish legal texts that is attracting so much attention?

In order to answer that question, I want to first introduce the figures of eunuchs and androgynes to give you a sense of the many different kinds of bodies that the Talmudic rabbis discuss. I use the English words “eunuchs” and “androgynes” as short hand for a variety of different terms that the rabbis employ to describe bodily gender diversity. The rabbis did not invent all of these terms. For example, their word for eunuch (saris) is found in the Hebrew Bible, which pre-dates rabbinic literature. But the rabbis had a more expansive understanding of what a saris/eunuch could be. For the rabbis, a eunuch could refer to a man who undergoes changes to his genitalia, including castration. But a man could also be born as a eunuch. Being a “born eunuch” meant being born with bodily differences that would preclude the ability to reproduce as an adult. Today, we might label that person intersex. Saris/eunuch, therefore, functioned as an umbrella term; it could refer both to people who were born without reproductive capability, and those who become unable to reproduce.

In addition to the male eunuch, the rabbis also had a category of female eunuchs, called the aylonit: a woman born with bodily differences that prohibit her from bearing children. She is the counterpart to the born male eunuch.

The rabbis also describe different types of bodies that I group under the English term “androgynes.” One kind of androgyne was someone with two sets of genitalia; we have early texts that describe them as able to menstruate and produce seminal emissions. Another kind of androgyne was called a tumtum, which refers to a person who has an indeterminate gender. Descriptions of the tumtum differ, but some texts describe them as having a flap of skin that obscures their genitalia.

All of these different figures appear prolifically in rabbinic literature. In Jewish legal sources, gender is frequently a determining factor when ascertaining legal obligations. For example, there are many laws that specifically govern the ritual behavior of men, such as how many times a day they must pray. Within the system of Jewish law, the rabbis debate how to handle the status of eunuchs and androgynes. Are eunuchs obligated to participate in marriages that are contracted specifically for procreation? Likewise, what are the requirements and prohibitions for circumcision when an androgyne baby is being circumcised?

Rabbinic sources do not always cast eunuchs and androgynes in a positive light. Some strains of rabbinic debates place more restrictions on eunuchs and androgynes than they do on men and women.

Still, the rabbis never question that a variety of different kinds of nonbinary bodies exist in the world. And for some rabbis, being born into a particular body is akin to saying that a person’s body was created by God. We see statements that assert that the born eunuch was created by the “hand of heaven.”

In my book, I argue that the inclusion of eunuchs and androgynes in Jewish traditions has two opposite effects: androgynes create nonbinary space in Jewish law, and they also create more opportunities for the rabbis to regulate gender and sexuality. For example, the rabbis debate androgyne’s sex lives. Is an androgyne “man” enough that when a man has sex with an androgyne it violates the biblical prohibition against men having sex with men? The rabbis are not able to offer a definitive answer. Since the rabbis cannot fully decide the gender of androgynes, these figures haunt the text, creating defacto nonbinary space in the legal tradition. Paradoxically, the fact that the rabbis are unsure about the androgyne’s gender does not save the androgyne from being subjected to sexual prohibitions. And it means that the rabbis spend a considerable amount of time contemplating the anatomy of androgynes and androgyne sex. So, at one and the same time, androgynes both create nonbinary space in the tradition, but also enable the rabbis to extend their policing of sexuality and enact more surveillance of gendered bodies.

(Image source: Flickr)

While the texts about eunuchs and androgynes are inherently interesting to me, what I find most inspiring is the way the rabbis organize sex and gender differently. Categories of androgynes and eunuchs do not correspond to the division we draw today between intersex and trans people in the United States. While it is possible that some of these figures, like the born eunuch, would be understood as intersex today, the rabbis grouped together those who were born with bodily differences and those who acquire bodily differences under the same heading. For them, the defining feature of a eunuch was that they could not bear children, whether they were born infertile or became infertile, and whether they were men or women.

These historical differences are significant precisely because of the way binary gender is considered natural and normal today. In the United States we regulate, operate upon, and police trans and intersex people when their sex or gender does not meet binary expectations. Rabbinic literature provides an example of a cultural framework where nonbinary bodies are a part of creation. If our current systems of sex and gender are historically and culturally contingent, then there is potential for a more expansive understanding to emerge in the future.

As a scholar who studies these categories, and believes that they have not received enough attention in mainstream Jewish communities or in the academy, I am pleased by the growing popular interest in androgynes and eunuchs. While I do not think these texts present celebratory, or even (sometimes) positive, depictions of eunuchs and androgynes, I do think they provide an important resource for re-envisioning Judaism.

***

To return to the question with which I began, I believe that there are at least two answers as to why eunuchs and androgynes in rabbinic literature are suddenly seeing mainstream popularity, despite the fact that they are found in technical and often uninspiring sources. On the one hand, the popularity of eunuchs and androgynes directly correlates to the strength of these new movements in the study of the Talmud. The reason that mainstream Jewish and non-Jewish audiences are suddenly discovering these sources is because of the painstaking work of activists who are bringing those traditions to the fore.

On the other hand, the very popularity of eunuchs and androgynes in rabbinic literature also indexes a much darker political moment – specifically the rise in anti-trans legislation. Lourdes Ashley Hunter, national director of the Trans Women of Color Collective, has said: “Every breath a Black trans woman takes is an act of revolution.” She is calling out the way the current political climate violently targets Black trans women, and BIPOC trans people more generally, often to devastating effect. In this environment, survival is an act of resistance.

Recent legislation has primarily targeted transgender youth: there have been bans on trans teens in sports, bans on trans-affirming medical care for adolescents, and attempts to regulate public facilities like restrooms. Some of these legislative efforts have been directly linked to Christian evangelical or Christian nationalist organizations, which make the claim that religious freedom necessitates the freedom to discriminate against trans people. At the same time, there has been a rise of accusations that transgender people are “groomers,” implying that trans and queer adults are actively recruiting vulnerable youth.

“Groomer” rhetoric presents transness as a kind of disease spread by calculating trans adults. This accusation has been connected to recent legislation. The governor of Florida’s press secretary, Christina Pushaw, characterized Florida’s “Parental Rights in Education” law as an “Anti-Grooming” law. The left dubbed this the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, arguing that it prevents educators from addressing sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom. This not only harms trans and queer youth, but it also can be interpreted to ban discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity even when it pertains to a student’s family. Pushaw argues that supporters of queer and trans education in schools are themselves “groomers,” or supporters of groomers, suggesting that even teaching students about the existence of queer and trans people damages minors. These concerted anti-trans efforts have led historian Jules Gill-Peterson to describe such legislation as an attempt to build a “cisgender state.”

Taken together, the legislation to erase trans youth and the stigmatization of intergenerational contact in trans communities cuts trans youth off from their histories. By situating trans youth as a “recent” phenomenon that must be explained, we are denying youth their intergenerational inheritance. This is nothing less than a concerted effort to suppress the kinds of knowledge building and the passing down of survival skills that has traditionally taken place in trans, queer, and intersex communities. Targeting youth is an attempt to erase a trans future.

It is in this context, then, that we must understand popular interest in centuries-old texts about androgynes and eunuchs. In a climate where legislators are claiming “religion” requires them to discriminate against trans people, trans and intersex Jews are turning to historical sources to present a different narrative. Trans Jewish theologians are reinterpreting the Hebrew Bible. Trans artists have depicted Jewish legal traditions about androgynes. And trans and intersex rabbis have turned to eunuchs and androgynes to argue that nonbinary gender has a history within the Jewish tradition. In answer to the claim that religion hates trans people, the existence of eunuchs and androgynes in canonical religious texts is powerful. That religion has an awareness of nonbinary existence threatens the current conservative narrative.

I should be clear that I do not believe the Talmud’s eunuchs and androgynes are literally trans and intersex, which are modern categories to explain gender and sex differences. I also do not think trans people should be called upon to justify their existence by turning to history. Still, history and traditions remain a powerful tool in countering anti-trans narratives in this current political climate.

Historically, the Talmud has been denied to marginalized Jews and only studied by men. The recent activism of BIPOC Jews, trans and queer Jews, and feminist Jews, has dramatically widened who has access to rabbinic literature. The creation of alternative venues to study the Talmud is a corrective to the way the tradition has been interpreted by and for straight, cisgender men. BIPOC, trans, intersex, feminist, and queer rabbis, activists, and artists have been reinterpreting and reinventing the tradition by reading from the perspectives of those who were deliberately excluded from it.

These sources, even as they are problematic at times, are the inheritance, the yerushah, of intersex, trans, and queer Jews. They will be the ones to use these sources to transform contemporary Judaism and change the negative relationship between religion and trans people in the future.

Max Strassfeld is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Arizona. They are the author of Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature, published with the University of California Press.

The post Turning to the Talmud to Find Gender Diversity that Speaks to Today appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image by Michael Horse for the BAAITS Two-Spirit Powwow in 2012)

Conservative lawmakers have proposed more anti-LGBTQ legislation this year than ever before, and nearly a third of these laws specifically target transgender youth. Politicians say these laws will protect religious freedom and “traditional” family values. But transgender and non-binary people have a long history on this continent. Some Indigenous peoples refer to such individuals as Two-Spirit. As Candi Brings Plenty (Oglala Lakota Sioux) explains, “Two-Spirit people have always had a role to be a part of our ‘tiospayes,’ to be a part of our families, our extended families, our encampments.”

“Two-Spirit” is a contemporary term for Indigenous peoples who live outside the gender binary or who are not heterosexual or cisgender. People we now call Two-Spirit have existed for centuries and are part of long-held, and developing, Indigenous traditions of gender and sexual diversity.

Indigenous traditions of gender variance have much to teach the non-Indigenous world. For one, they disrupt the alleged universality of the gender binary. Indigenous concepts of gender also invite us to rethink assumptions about the supposed conflict between religion and trans and queer identities since Two-Spirit people are an active part of Indigenous life. And they challenge non-Indigenous people to expand our understanding of Indigenous peoples as important contributors to conversations about gender, religion, and “traditional” families in today’s world.

To understand Indigenous concepts of gender variance, we have to look to the past and the present. In some ways, the present is even more important given that Indigenous peoples are often thought of as existing only in the past. Because of this, Chippewa literary scholar Gerald Vizenor describes contemporary Native experience as “survivance,” a combination of the words “survival” and “resistance.” He labels it as “an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name.”

I have engaged with Indigenous political movements related to gender and sexuality as a scholar and participant. As a non-Native queer Latinx scholar, I study how colonization has shaped Indigenous genders, sexualities, and religions. I have also participated as an organizer for the annual Two-Spirit Powwow in San Francisco hosted by the Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits. Following the work of non-Native scholar Scott Lauria Morgensen, I offer the following as part of a larger conversation with (and not for) Indigenous LGBTQ and Two-Spirit people, activists, and scholars.

Traditions of Gender and Sexual Diversity

For some Indigenous cultures, Two-Spirit people emerged at the time of creation. In an episode of the Netflix series “Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness,” Two-Spirit and non-binary cultural leader Geo Neptune (Passamaquoddy) recounts a creation story of the Wabanaki people. The story tells of the hero Gluskabe who shot an arrow at the brown ash tree, cutting both the tree and the tree spirit in half. This spirit now had two parts and agreed to be transformed into people. After Gluskabe breathed into the tree, the first Wabanaki woman and man emerged. “And after that,” Neptune explained, “there was just a little bit of each essence left over, so Gluskabe recombined them and sent the first Two-Spirit out of the tree. So, in our tradition we haven’t been separated from ourselves.” This is hardly the only such story within Native communities. Contemporary Two-Spirit and Indigenous LGBTQ people turn to these stories to remember that gender variance has always been a part of Indigenous traditions.

Indigenous traditions of gender variation illuminate pre-colonial understandings of gender before Christianity swept through the continent. Transgender Mohawk performance artist Aiyyana Maracle  (1950-2016) speaks to this in her essay “A Journey in Gender.” She writes, “Though I may fit the definition of the European concept of transsexuality, as far as I am concerned, my being and transformation are based in the historical continuum of North America’s Indigenous people.” According to Maracle, this “continuum” draws from “a perception of gender that has existed, and continues to exist, quite apart from the prevailing Euro-North American norm epitomized by an inflexible, Christian, pseudoscientific declaration of one’s being as male or female.”

(Image source: Native Justice)

Concepts of gender vary across Indigenous communities, which are as diverse as the lands they inhabit. Native nations had (and have) distinct names for what we might call “trans” or “queer” people today. The Diné (Navajo) term is nádleehé, meaning “one who transforms.” Among the Lakota, the term is winkte, sometimes translated as “to be as a woman.” There are multiple terms in the Cree language, such as iskwêhkân, “one who acts/lives as a woman” and napêhkân, “one who acts/lives as a man.” In most cases, these identities were linked to social roles rather than biological sex. Historically, the people holding these identities took on esteemed positions as ceremonial leaders, warriors, storytellers, and healers.

Two-Spirit activist L. Frank Manriquez (Tongva, Rarámuri, Acjachemen) says that in Native California, “We permeated the sacred and the profane parts of life…Historically, we Two-Spirit have always been those who can do what others cannot do but need to be done.” Manriquez continues by saying that, “To some, Two-Spirit is strictly a spiritual thing. Two-Spirit[s] are the only ones who can bury the dead.”

Despite (or because of) the importance of Two-Spirit people, European colonizers directly targeted them. In California, as in other places, colonizers took Native lands and imposed their ideas about gender binaries and patriarchy. Two-Spirit literary scholar Deborah Miranda (Ohlone/Costanoan Esselen Nation) writes of the ways that “third gender people” experienced shaming, physical punishment, and erasure in the Spanish California Mission. The United States and Canadian governments also took a role in this through Indian boarding schools. In these schools, church leaders and government officials tried to assimilate Native children through a strict gender binary model. “Boys” were taught to engage in manual labor, while “girls” were taught to be domestics.

(Image of We’wha)

The most famous historical figure of Indigenous gender diversity is We’wha (c. 1849-1896), an Ihamana (third gender) person from the Zuni Pueblo in what is now New Mexico. Like other Ihamana, We’wha took on the cultural and ceremonial roles of both women and men in Zuni society. We’wha was known to be a particularly skilled weaver, potter, and spiritual leader. As an esteemed cultural ambassador, We’wha consulted with anthropologists and was even brought to Washington, D.C. in 1885 where they met with President Grover Cleveland. We’wha is remembered today as an important Two-Spirit figure who advocated for Zuni people while the U.S. was trying to assimilate Native peoples and take even more of their lands.

White academics were fascinated by the gender and sexual diversity in Native nations, although they regularly misunderstood what they were observing. In the 20^th century they used the term “berdache” to describe those they perceived as homosexual, cross-dressers, and transgender, and especially those we might call male-assigned-at-birth in domestic and sexual relationships with men. For these academics, “berdache” had a negative connotation; the word’s origins in Arabic and French suggested such meanings as “kept boy” and “male prostitute.”

Since “berdache” was an external term applied to Native Americans, Indigenous people sought to find their own label that better reflected their histories and traditions. They adopted the term “Two-Spirit” in 1990 at the International Gathering of American Indian and First Nations Gays and Lesbians in Winnipeg. “Two-Spirit” is a translation of the Anishinaabemowin word Niizho Manidook. This term came to elder and academic Myra Laramee (Fisher River Cree Nation) in a dream before being adopted at the 1990 gathering. Laramee recounts that the dream included seven orbs of light, which transformed into male and female faces. “And the first time the grandpa came, the mooshum face came, he said, ‘You are as of us. You are one of us and you have been here like us since the beginning of time and you have come to know… how we travel the earth and the sky world, and the spirit world,’” Laramee recalls. This voice said, “‘You will begin to know many different kinds of things about the Two-Spirit Nation. It’s a nation of many means and many gifts and many ways. But the easiest and best way, is to see that your gift is to see the world always in two sights, with two feelings of the heart.’” While often defined as a person with a masculine and feminine spirit, some Two-Spirit people emphasize that the term instead refers to what Laramee describes as a person with “two sights.”

“Two-Spirit” is a specifically Indigenous concept of gender and sexuality; non-Native people should not apply the label to themselves. Trans social media influencer and scholar Charlie Scott (Diné) argues, “it would be inappropriate to use this phrase, this concept, this being as an explanation for other communities, especially because they have their own meaning, their own cultural context, their own understanding of themselves within their own communities.”

Continuity, Expansion, Transformation

Two-Spirit people are active in transforming Native communities, some of which became entrenched in the gender binary and homophobia following colonization. As such, Two-Spirit people identify in a variety of ways. Some use nation-specific terms like nádleehé. Others may refer to themselves with mainstream designations like “LGBTQ” in addition to Two-Spirit. Because of this, there is not always a direct correlation between “transgender” and “Two-Spirit” identities. In an open letter declining the Lambda Literary award in “Trans Poetry,” poet Joshua Whitehead (Oji-Cree) writes of his objection to being labeled “trans,” saying, “My gender, sexuality, and my identities supersede Western categorizations of LGBTQ+ because Two-Spirit is a home-calling, it is a home-coming. I note that it may be easy from an outside vantage point to read Two-Spirit as a conflation of feminine and masculine spirits and to easily, although wrongfully, categorize it as trans.” Like Whitehead, many Two-Spirit people embrace the term “Two-Spirit” because it allows for a more robust, culturally-grounded identity that cannot fully be captured by mainstream understandings of “LGBTQ.”

In a similar way, Two-Spirit identities are often about “coming in” to a cultural identity rather than “coming out.” Literary scholar Qwo-li Driskill (Cherokee) argues that unlike many non-Native queer movements that frame queerness as oppositional to mainstream society, Two-Spirit people situate their identities in the worldviews of Indigenous peoples. To be Two-Spirit is to embrace Indigenous practices and one’s place within the culture. As education scholar Alex Wilson (Opaskwayak Cree Nation) put it, “As a self-identifier, two-spirit acknowledges and affirms our identity as Indigenous peoples, our connection to the land, and values in our traditional culture that recognize and accept gender and sexual diversity.”

Despite the rich history of gender and sexual diversity in Indigenous communities, homophobia and transphobia persists in some areas, largely as a result of Christianity and colonization. Diné trans community leader Yuè Begay grew up on the Navajo Nation reservation. She explained, “I think it would be kind of naïve to say that because I grew up in rural settings, it was all glitz and glamours, [that] I had medicine people roll out the red carpet for me because I was Two-Spirit. That didn’t happen. On the reservation, you pretty much do experience, in some cases, extreme effects of colonization because it’s by your own people, because it cuts so deep because it’s from your own elders.” This can include transphobic shaming or exclusion, which are direct results of colonization. This is important to note so as to not idealize Indigenous communities. Some Two-Spirit and trans people feel accepted in their home communities. Others work to transform settler-imposed ideas of gender and sexuality as part of decolonization.

Two-Spirit people have worked to expand their cultural traditions in many ways. One example is how they have re-conceived some traditional ceremonies. Alex Wilson writes that, according to some Native oral teachings, the drum is feminine and is the heartbeat of the Earth, but that only men should drum. Wilson continues, “This latter assertion (which takes power from and regulates the bodies of women and two-spirit and trans people, and simultaneously privileges men) is typically presented to our children at a very early age and entrenched as a ‘traditional teaching’ by those in our community who enforce gender specific protocols at ceremonies and celebrations.”

In the San Francisco Bay Area, Two-Spirit people received their own drum in 2010. Drum keeper Phoenix Lara (Yaqui) said, “it was unheard of to have Two-Spirits have their own drum, especially here in the west coast. So, this is like really having broken ground by having our own drum. And so, part of that has been to have been teaching songs…learning. We have been reclaiming our traditions. We hold drum circles every month.” In these drum circles, participants sit around a large drum and beat the drum with a drumstick while offering traditional songs and prayers. They also burn sacred plants like sage or cedar. Though Two-Spirits have been excluded from participation in some Indigenous spaces, Lara mentioned that this drum allows Two-Spirits, their families, and allies “to be part of the circle and to reclaim your traditions and [to] also have an opportunity to create new traditions as well.”

The drum Lara describes is affiliated with the community organization Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits. “Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits (BAAITS) exists to restore and recover the role of Two-Spirit people within the American Indian/First Nations community by creating a forum for the spiritual, cultural and artistic expression of Two-Spirit people,” according to their website. BAAITS made history in 2012 by hosting the world’s first public Two-Spirit Powwow in San Francisco. A powwow is an Indigenous gathering where songs and dances are shared with community. Though not explicitly a religious ceremony, powwows often include important religious elements such as prayers and drums. Many powwows feature gendered dances, such as the jiggle dress dance for women. At the BAAITS powwow, however, all the dances are de-gendered to allow people of any gender to dance when they see fit.

(Image: BAAITS Powwow. Source: crazycow.com)

The BAAITS Powwow offers an important space to celebrate Two-Spirit people, a respite from the transphobia and homophobia some feel both inside and outside of Native spaces. BAAITS board member J. Miko Thomas (Chickasaw), a.k.a. drag persona Landa Lakes, remembers the experience of exclusion while attending the large Red Earth powwow in Oklahoma in the 1980s. Thomas said, “So it felt really empowering to me the very first time that we…Sorry. [Holds back tears.] We as the organizers really stress very, very much that it has to be welcoming, that everybody in our community is welcome.” Thomas added, “I think that if anything, if we could change the lives of those young Two-Spirits who are afraid now, and who are so scared of being shunned or unloved by their own parents, then I think it’s important to have spaces like this so that people can see that we are a part of the Native community. And we’re just like everybody else.”

Two-Spirit powwows are now held across the United States and Canada.

Survivance and Solidarity

“Indigenous and trans women have been at the forefront of Indigenous and queer issues since we have had to fight to exist. Since colonization, we have survived through the genocide of both of these worlds — and we will survive this. Through community and kinship, we will create new possibilities for love,” writes trans and Two-Spirit poet Arielle Twist (Cree).

Two-Spirit and Indigenous trans people continue to experience the colonial ramifications of transphobic violence, land dispossession, and the ongoing crises of missing and murdered Indigenous women. But their lives are not just violence; they also embody “survivance.” They continue a long history of gender variance and fluidity embedded in Indigenous stories, ceremonies, and languages.

Two-Spirit survivance calls each of us to engage in ongoing and self-reflective work of community building to dismantle both transphobia and settler colonialism. This can take different forms. Kai Pyle (Métis/Sault St. Marie Nishaabe), a trans and Two-Spirit scholar, notes that for Indigenous peoples, this can include relationship-building within Indigenous nations with their trans and Two-Spirit community members, creating new traditions for trans people, and ensuring connections between trans Indigenous peoples and their homelands. For Non-Native peoples, Scott Lauria Morgensen writes, this work can include challenging the colonial roots of gender binaries, heterosexism, and patriarchy. Most importantly, he urges non-Native peoples to enter into relationships of solidarity with Native struggles towards decolonization.

Considering Two-Spirit survivance invites us understand the complex intersections of religion, colonialism, and gender. It also opens new possibilities for decolonial futures. As Kai Pyle writes, “It is only by facing head-on the realities of trans Indigenous people’s lives and by working on building decolonial loving relationships that we will begin to find a way to create a world that embraces all of us.”

Abel R. Gomez is Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous spiritual traditions in the Religion Department at Texas Christian University, located on the homelands of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes. His research focuses on sacred sites, ceremony, and (de)colonization in the context of contemporary Indigenous religions.

The post Two-Spirit Indigenous Peoples Building on Legacies of Gender Variance appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Nicole Rowbottom on Flickr)

On May 16, 2020, I sat alone at a desk in my tiny Brooklyn apartment waiting to join an online gathering for trans and queer Sikhs. For a fleeting moment, I saw my face appear big on the laptop screen in front of me, displaying a Zoom video preview, and then, nothing. Suddenly, my face was tiny in a sea of colorful rectangles, and the room filled with the sound of voices and digital pings cutting through an ambient electronic music playlist. I was in attendance at the first-ever Queer Sikh Virtual Meet-Up. More rectangles appeared and smiling faces revealed themselves from behind screen names flanked by pronouns of all sorts. Before I knew it, I was sharing space with over 100 people. Gurleen Kaur, who organized this and a series of virtual meet-ups, reports that 120 queer and trans Sikhs attended the first event, with more than 350 joining the email list she created. Having expected only 40 people to respond to her initial invitation, Kaur found herself speaking before a group that spanned every corner of the globe and represented a plethora of queer identities and experiences.

As Kaur clicked through her slideshow at the start of the event, I sat back in my chair in absolute awe. My cheeks hurt from smiling as I watched the chat box flare with conversation.

“Hi from Singapore!”

“It’s midnight here in India.”

“Add me on Instagram everyone!”

Electric excitement traveled from my smile to my fingertips as I typed an introduction of my own into the chat box and hit send. After beginning the long process of coming out as transgender and nonbinary in 2019, followed by the sudden, painful isolation spurred by the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, I knew I had found my sangat, my spiritual community, and I was finally stepping into it.

I was one of dozens of queer Sikhs at the meet-up finally leaning into the fullness of our humanity and our Sikh identity in the face of relentless harassment, assault, and spiritual negligence from within and outside of the Sikh community. The Queer Sikh Virtual Meet-Up wasn’t simply a social event; it was a unique invitation into authentic love and spiritual safety. Socially conservative Sikh communities have not been especially welcoming to trans and queer Sikhs, but the growth of virtual spaces like this during the pandemic suggests that marginalized Sikhs are evolving the definition of “sangat” to affirm our inclusion in the broader Sikh community.

“Virtual-First” Gives Room for Queer Sikh Connection

“In March, at the start of the pandemic, I felt like I really needed community. I reached out to other folks I knew who are queer and Sikh, and we assembled a team [to plan the gathering],” Gurleen Kaur, head organizer of the Queer Sikh Network, told me. “Maybe it’s how I cope with trauma. I have to make meaning from it and organize. That’s how I heal.”

Kaur, who describes herself as an “occasionally masc-leaning Sikh woman,” was not the first to identify an ongoing need among queer and trans Sikhs for safe and nurturing sangat. For the past several years, the volunteer-led group Sarbat in the United Kingdom has facilitated queer and trans sangat online and in-person. The interest in such offerings has grown substantially, especially since the start of the pandemic. In response, Sarbat launched their “Gup-Shup (Chit-Chat)” series in 2020, featuring queer and trans speakers from across the world, including India, the United States, and New Zealand. By the end of 2020, Sarbat began listing their virtual event details in multiple time zones and organized events outside of the U.K. to account for their growing international audience.

Kaur named Sarbat and Fateh.info, another queer-affirming Sikh platform that later became the Queer Sikh Network, as early thought-partners for her own queer Sikh community project. The appetite for queer sangat was obvious given the international response to Sarbat’s programming, and Kaur wanted to experiment with what is possible for queer sangats online. Soon after the first round of Queer Sikh Virtual Meet-Ups, Kaur turned her attention from organizing social gatherings to building the Queer Sikh Network, a social media project aimed at uncovering Sikh sources and stories that uplift queer and trans people.

In July 2021, I attended one of the first meetings for the Queer Sikh Network, where we discussed the most pressing issues facing trans and queer Sikhs. As a seminarian, I was thrilled to join a virtual gathering of like-minded Sikhs who were hungry to dig deep into our tradition for answers. We all knew that the liberative spirit of the Sikh tradition included us, but we needed hard evidence.

During that meeting, we discussed the most painful parts of our experiences as queer and trans Sikhs: how the Akal Takht, the highest governing authority in our community, barred same-sex marriage; how separate seating for men and women in American gurdwaras, Sikh houses of worship, set a dangerous precedent for nonbinary Sikhs; and how established Sikh codes of conduct, like the Rehat Maryada, alienated transgender Sikhs in need of support as they transition.

The people discussing these issues were queer and trans Sikhs I had followed on Twitter and Instagram for some time with hopes of building a queer Sikh social network of my own. Among these familiar voices was that of prabhdeep singh kehal, Ph.D., a nonbinary Sikh writer and sociologist.

Trans Sikh Visibility on Twitter

I first became acquainted with kehal’s advocacy after scrolling past a since-deleted Tweet in 2019, in which they celebrated their trans identity through fashion. kehal was the first trans Sikh I ever encountered, well before I publicly came out as trans and nonbinary. We had a series of brief interactions on Twitter between 2019 and 2021 before connecting through the first Queer Sikh Network meeting. Without actively seeking to do so, kehal became the first Sikh to affirm for me that the Sikh tradition and trans identities are not at odds, that being a visible trans Sikh is possible, and that we were not the only trans Sikhs working to build a community.

kehal, who has had a Twitter account since 2009, learned early on that social media could be a powerful community-building tool, not only for queer Sikhs, but for everyone. Not long after creating their account, kehal found themself engaging on Twitter as an ethical obligation in response to rising tensions around anti-Blackness and LGBTQ+ rights: “The [scholarly] work that I focus on is anti-Black racism in the U.S. and colonialism. I can’t actually say that my work addresses those things if, in practice, I don’t do something as basic as share a tweet. There aren’t a whole lot of us Sikhs saying anything [about this] there are more of us online.”

(prabhdeep singh kehal. Source: pskehal.com)

Through kehal’s Twitter activity – retweeting friends and colleagues whose views resonated with kehal’s – I came to know of dozens of queer and trans Sikhs. Across North America and the world, queer and trans Sikhs were sharing their experiences of marginalization through stories, art, and scholarship. Some recorded music and published poetry about the rejection they faced as trans people, while others celebrated cultural dances through drag performance. It quickly became apparent that the compassionate community of queer Sikh solidarity I sought had already been coalescing.

As a huge online sangat of queer Sikh artists, scholars, and activists began to form before my eyes, I noticed the most visible and vocal of these Sikhs identify as transgender and speak powerfully about the transphobic hate they experience in Sikh spaces both online and offline. In January 2021, two nonbinary Sikhs, Manu Kaur and manmit, co-authored a series of articles titled, “When Will Caste-Oppressed and Queer and Trans Folks Find Liberation in Sikh Spaces?” for Kaur Life magazine, an online publication catered primarily to Sikh women. The series outlined the pain that queer, trans, and caste-oppressed Sikhs face in the community, like forcible removal from worship spaces, physical violence at the hands of family members and community leaders, caste-based and homophobic harassment, and relentless verbal abuse on social media.

Despite Twitter serving as fertile ground to nurture queer and trans sangats, I spoke with trans Sikhs who described the anti-trans harassment they encounter on social media, most frequently from other Sikhs. sahiba, a trans nonbinary Sikh, spoke to me about a time they were doxxed for their public remarks about the Sikh tradition, saying, “On a panel with the Jakara Movement [a community organization serving California’s Sikh populations] for Pride Month last year, I had said, ‘Fuck the Rehat Maryada [the Sikh code of conduct].’ Someone took that seven-second clip and posted it to Twitter. I was doxxed…and my address was out there,” sahiba told me. I recalled the incident immediately. After speaking honestly about their experiences of alienation in what was meant to be a safe space, sahiba was blackmailed and harassed by transphobes and homophobes on Twitter. Shortly after, a stranger publicly tweeted sahiba’s address, endangering them and their family.

sahiba expressed an ongoing hesitation to re-engage Sikh Twitter for fear that the harassment would escalate. “I took a break [from social media] at that time. I was living two separate lives, and I was scared that someone would come up to my family and ask, ‘What is your child doing?’ I was really scared that, if it came to my family, I would die.”

The Greatest Threat to Trans Sangat is Other Sikhs

The life-threatening hate speech that sahiba and others encounter from transphobic Sikhs does not exist exclusively in the vacuum of social media. According to Dr. Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh, chair of the department of Religion at Colby College and author of The Birth of the Khalsa: A Feminist Re-Memory of Sikh Identity, the violence we experience online simply serves as an extension of the centuries-old patriarchal norms that permeate Sikh communities.

In our conversation, Dr. Singh told me that the Sri Guru Granth Sahib, which Sikhs consider our primary sacred text and living Eternal Guru, is not a clear, prescriptive text. As a result, we Sikhs are left to interpret the poetic verses therein ourselves. “But who has been doing the hermeneutics?” Dr. Singh asked me pointedly at the start of our discussion. “The males. The patriarchs.”

The Sikh Gurus “tried to create a window of opportunity through which women [and others] could achieve liberty, equality and sorority,” says Singh in her book, Sikhism: An Introduction. “[But] The Gurus’ words have never been understood,” Singh told me. The ten Sikh Gurus established a community and tradition grounded in revolution against oppressive norms. But queer, trans, and female-identified Sikhs continue to suffer from ancient patriarchal standards in Sikh spaces, largely peddled by cisgender men who feel their long-standing power is threatened by the growing popularity and visibility of feminism, queerness, and transness.

“[The Sikh tradition] is all love, and that love can be for anybody,” said Singh. “But the way the Gurus’ words are distorted, that love becomes fear.”

It’s the spirit of openness and the recognition of our innate humanity that Singh says will pave the way for the inclusion of queer and trans Sikhs. While the Sri Guru Granth Sahib and other sources in the Sikh tradition don’t speak explicitly to trans identities, “the Gurus provide us with space to change [and] the notion of temporality,” Singh said. “We have to put our own sensibilities into [contextual] understanding,” respecting the strong foundation of inclusion and collective liberation within our tradition to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse global Sikh community.

The Sikh Tradition is Queer

Despite a constant barrage of transphobic hate in the very spaces that trans Sikhs seek to build sangat, many trans Sikhs agree with Singh’s assessment of the inclusive nature of the tradition. When I asked trans Sikhs if and how they see transness affirmed in the Sikh tradition, all responded with evidence directly from Sikh spiritual sources. Together, we started piecing together the beginnings of a trans Sikh liberation theology.

sahiba asserted, “Throughout Gurbani [Sikh sacred texts], Guru Sahib [the Divine] is not married to a specific gender. Guru Sahib is always shifting. The project of Sikhi, as far as I can tell, is focused on the abolition of gender. We don’t need these boxes…they’re holding us back.”

manpreet singh, a trans masculine spoken word poet, illustrator, and author of Singh is Queer, cited the janamsakhi (story) of Guru Nanak meeting a genderfluid Sufi Sheikh as a significant source of trans affirmation. In the account, Guru Nanak finds Sheikh Saraf, a male-bodied person, dressed as a bride and asks why the sheikh is wearing traditionally feminine clothing. Sheikh Saraf responds saying they are waiting to find their beloved. Rather than reprimanding Sheikh Saraf for challenging gender norms, Guru Nanak joins the Sheikh in song and discussion on spirituality and love for the Divine.

Armaan Singh, a comedian, rapper, and self-described “Trans-Singh,” also cited Guru Nanak as his inspiration for trans affirmation — and human affirmation — during our interview. He showcases this view in his latest single, “Queer Sikhs,” in which Armaan raps, “Transphobia has no place, if you give love a taste. Guru Nanak said it, in fact: We’re anti-hate, anti-caste.”

Theological evidence such as this inspires artists like Armaan to continue posting trans-affirming Sikh content on their social media channels despite backlash. Armaan says, “[The response to my art has been] hit or miss. If you go to TikTok, it’s all negative and trolls. I think I have a more conscious audience on Instagram because I’ve built it over the last five or six years. There are more people [on Instagram] who know what I’m saying.”

It’s the sense of being seen, heard, and understood that brings trans Sikhs back to social media day after day. For manpreet, sharing excerpts of his poems on Instagram and networking with queer and trans Sikhs in the comments on his posts is a life-affirming activity, especially in light of the alienation they experienced in predominantly white queer digital spaces. manpreet reports that, “If I had exposed myself to Brown and Black trans people first instead of white trans people [on Tumblr], I don’t think I would have ever gotten top surgery. There are seven billion people in the world, which means there are seven billion genders. Everyone performs their gender differently.”

Beyond Digital Inclusion

Despite the physical, spiritual, and emotional dangers of being trans, Sikh, and online all at once, trans Sikhs continue to find strong value in the internet as a sangat-building tool. Digital access is an invitation to affirmation that remains largely absent in physical Sikh spaces, like gurdwaras. But the dangers of virtual sangat-building, like harassment and doxxing, reflect a much larger problem of systemic exclusion in Sikh worship spaces.

At Kartarpur, Guru Nanak established the institution of sangat, modeling what a compassionate, inclusive community can and should look like in the face of oppression. To honor Guru Nanak’s vision, trans Sikhs assert that serious changes must be made to make gurdwaras and other physical spaces accessible to queer and trans worshippers.

“Since stepping into my transness, the fear of going to the gurdwara starts with, ‘Where do I sit?’” explained sahiba, describing a time they attended services at a local gurdwara while wearing traditionally feminine attire. “I was wearing a chunni [a head scarf] and had my nails painted. After Ardaas [a prayer performed at the start or end of a service], I immediately left. I felt so unsafe because I was also sitting on the side that’s designated for ‘women.’”

“I would feel safe [in a gurdwara] when a group of queer folks and I can…sit anywhere we want,” said Armaan, exploring a similar tension. “I say that because I present as masculine, and I can sit on the masculine side, but even still, my community is not there. We shouldn’t be gendering religion, especially in a Sikh space. Sikhi is about an inclusive and genderless Guru.”

A nascent movement for queer inclusion in physical Sikh spaces is continuing to grow, with community organizations like Sher Vancouver hosting Queer Kirtan for local members and organizers like Gurleen Kaur now thinking beyond the virtual potential of the Queer Sikh Network.

“Community is the center of our [Sikh] teachings,” manpreet reflected at the end of our interview, his eyes glistening as tears formed. “If we centered community in our lives every day, there would be no homophobia … Because [we’re] doing this work, ten to twenty years from now, young Sikhs will be okay.”

As we thanked each other for our time and our presence, manpreet shed a tear, a drop of amrit, or sacred water, blessing the liberative task that he, I, and countless others have taken up in the spirit of our Gurus. manpreet left the Zoom meeting, and I was left staring at myself on the screen, just as I had done before that first fateful Queer Sikh Virtual Meet-Up. But as my pixelated face looked back at me, I was comforted knowing that behind those pixels was a virtual sangat ready to hold me, love me, and affirm me like never before.

Harmeet Kaur Kamboj (they/them/theirs) is an interfaith educator, performing artist, public scholar, and zine-maker. Their writing is featured in the Religion News Service, Sojourners, and Interfaith America Magazine.

The post Virtual Communities are Critical Lifelines for Transgender Sikhs appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: thepridela.com)

“I just can’t be afraid of myself anymore,” says La Sarmiento, a transgender Buddhist teacher based near Baltimore, Maryland.

La, who describes themself as “an immigrant non-binary person of color,” is a leading instructor of mindfulness and meditation in the United States. For 16 years, La served as a teacher at the Insight Meditation Community of Washington (IMCW), a renowned Buddhist center in Washington, DC., eventually leading IMCW’s BIPOC and LGBTQ+ sanghas, or meditation groups.

La’s life has changed significantly over the past few months. In March 2022, they resigned from their position as IMCW’s Board President. La took on that role in 2021 with the hope that IMCW could forge a more socially just and equitable community. But La felt the board showed little progress in meeting the needs of marginalized Buddhist practitioners.

For La, leaving IMCW was a proclamation of a fundamental fact about their life as a Buddhist non-binary person of color: “I know that I deserve to exist.” They add, “It’s all about, for me, where the placement of power is. I had been giving my power away for so many years. And part of my healing was to reclaim my power.”

La now serves as a mentor for The Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program, where they mentor students to become meditation instructors. In contrast to many white Buddhist teachers who do not grapple with issues of social injustice, La believes Buddhist practice must address marginalization and oppression.

Over the past several months, I met with six transgender Buddhist teachers, many of whom have had to make choices similar to La and who have developed communities that explicitly affirm trans people’s lives. As a trans man, Buddhist, and Religious Studies scholar, these conversations allowed me to discern how trans Buddhist teachers are re-conceptualizing Buddhist teachings, or dharma, to meet the needs of gender-diverse people. By taking into account the trauma, joy, and experiences of trans people, these teachers are revolutionizing what a Buddhist path may look like for trans Buddhist practitioners who seek bodily peace and liberation.

Part I: Body
“To me enlightenment is fully inhabiting the body.”

For many trans Buddhist teachers, their story begins not with how they learned meditation or dharma, but with the history of their own bodies.

Phoenix Song, a Bay Area Buddhist teacher, shares how “It’s been really, really hard to be in this body. Like I did not want to be in this body in this lifetime.”

Phoenix is a queer and trans Asian American who was adopted into a white family as a child and separated from their Korean language and ancestry. As a teacher, they now work to heal their traumas.

“I feel like as a queer trans person, as an Asian American person who’s adopted and grew up in a white family in a white part of the country, there are many, many reasons why I felt like my voice was really shut down. It was hard for me to kind of speak my truth. To stand in my identity. To stand in my power.”

Like Phoenix, many trans Buddhists must re-learn what it means to find peace in their bodies. One of the main ways they do is through gender-affirming medical care, like hormone therapy or trans-affirming surgeries. While not every trans person decides to pursue these treatments and procedures, for those who do such steps are an important part of their journey.

Yet a problem that trans Buddhists often face is that, historically, Buddhist teachers view the body as an obstacle to liberation and, from this perspective, trans people should not alter it medically to find peace. This normative view, however, has contributed to trans people denying their body’s distress and need for trans-affirming medical care.

Martin Vitorino, founder of the “Mindful Transitions” group at Insight LA Meditation Center, a bi-monthly meditation group for trans and gender-diverse people, explains how for many years he used Buddhist teachings to try to “transcend,” “override,” and “supersede” his physical body.

Martin’s words draw on a foundational Buddhist concept known as “the doctrine of two truths,” which represent two realms of existence. The first, “relative truth,” characterizes the world as we live it, existing in bodies that are raced, gendered, and subject to conditions of violence and oppression. The second, “ultimate truth,” captures how all phenomena are empty and lacking an essential core. While we may have these bodies on Earth, fundamentally, these bodies, like all phenomena, are impermanent.

(Image source: Insight LA)

When transgender Buddhists describe their relative truth, Buddhist teachers too commonly pressure them to focus instead on the ultimate truth, thereby ignoring the realities of their bodily experiences. For example, trans Buddhists have been told that pursuing hormone therapy or gender-affirming surgery is a “materialist way of handling the problem” of our suffering. In the eyes of some cisgender teachers, trans people lack spiritual ability and discipline because they focus more on their bodies than on overcoming attachments to ideas that cause suffering. When trans Buddhists strive to transform their body, they are charged with reifying their “self” (ātman in Sanskrit) and failing to grasp the higher Buddhist teaching of “non-self” (anātman in Sanskrit), in which no separate realm of an individual body (a body that can be claimed as “mine”) exists.

But privileging the ultimate truth and demeaning the relative body has harmed trans Buddhists.

Martin shares how the effort to “supersede” his body through Buddhist practices actively “contribut[ed] to [his] suffering.”

“It sometimes felt like a failing that I couldn’t get over my dysphoria” or generate “enough compassion” for the suffering “to go away,” Martin says.

Martin ultimately refused to deny his body to achieve piece. He chose, instead, to “fully descend into [his] body” by pursuing top surgery.

“Getting top surgery saved my life,” Martin shares. “I mean so much peace, so much suffering alleviated just from being able to align my body with my gender.”

Learning about the mental, emotional, and physical benefits of gender-affirming surgery has been key for trans Buddhists. For many, it was only through working with transgender Buddhist teachers that they discovered gender-affirming care was not only possible, but a meaningful part of their spiritual path.

Part 2: Buddhist Teachings
“I felt like there was a way that I was doing it wrong if I wanted gender-affirming surgery.”

While gender-affirming surgery has positively transformed the lives of multiple Buddhist teachers, some felt internal pressure not to pursue gender-affirming care.

“Because there was an assumed and centered cis-normative embodiment,” Martin explains of his experience with cisgender teachers, “I was left to copy and paste teachings and try to apply them to my experience of dysphoria. And my internalized transphobia combined with my fear of medical transition created a perfect storm with teachings about ‘acceptance’ and ‘equanimity’ in that those teachings helped me to spiritually bypass my dysphoria and delay seeking gender-affirming care.” He finishes, “The absence of trans inclusive and affirming teachings applied to our unique embodiments creates this vacuum. And in that space, we are vulnerable to misinterpretations of the teachings.”

Martin’s reflection underscores a struggle transgender practitioners face, namely that they are forced to translate cis-normative Buddhist teachings to fit with their experiences as trans people. When this happens, Buddhist institutions fail to address the specificity of trans life.

Buddhist teachings on “acceptance” especially contribute to trans practitioners postponing trans-affirming medical care. “Acceptance” is a common word invoked within mindfulness and meditation spaces. “Acceptance” represents the idea that a meditator must be aware of the feelings and thoughts that arise for them while meditating, “accept” that these feelings and thoughts exist, but not try to transform them during the meditative experience.

But for some trans Buddhists, a harmful relationship exists between “acceptance” and the flourishing of trans lives. Phoenix explains, “I never really thought for myself that I can have the possibility of top surgery. I think that there’s been such an emphasis in Buddhism, and just in my life, of like accept, accept, accept.” They continue, “Accept reality as it is. My whole life has been like: I was born into this body. I should accept this body.”

Rion Pendergrass, a meditation teacher in the Bay Area, expresses a similar experience of Buddhist teachings, this time invoking the Zen concept “don’t know mind.” “Don’t know mind” is a practice in Sōtō Zen Buddhist meditation where a person pays attention to their wandering mind, especially when their mind cultivates thoughts that are grounded in fear and worry. Don’t know mind can help a person not spiral into panic, such as when their mind believes a “worst case scenario” is about to come true.

But the teaching of don’t know mind can also dismiss marginalized peoples’ experiences, as I’ve written about elsewhere. Trans Buddhist practitioners feel that, to practice “don’t know mind” correctly, they must eliminate thoughts related to their gender transition. For example, if a trans Buddhist speaks about a future yearning for gender-affirming surgery, or desire to start hormone therapy, or to change pronouns or one’s name, they may be told that they are failing to experience and fully exist within the present moment by placing themselves in the future. For many, expressing a trans-affirming desire equates to practicing Buddhism incorrectly.

As Rion shares, “I felt like there was a way that I was doing it wrong if I wanted gender-affirming surgery. Because if I’m supposed to accept things how they are, and be in ‘don’t know mind’ and things like that, I was like is it wrong for me to want these things, want these changes?”

Ultimately, teachings of “acceptance” and “don’t know mind” can converge to deny the needs of trans people: one either feels pressure to “accept” their body as it is (and thereby not medically change it) or reside in “don’t know mind” (and thereby not make a solid and enduring claim to one’s needs as a trans person).

Combatting these injurious applications of dharma requires an increased number of trans teachers who can respond to trans people’s unique experiences. For trans practitioners experiencing gender distress during meditation, Martin argues, “You need somebody to walk you through the maze that is dysphoria, dissociation, and the trauma of being in a body that you don’t feel aligned with and that the rest of the world is telling you is one thing and you’re like, I don’t feel that way.”

For other trans Buddhist teachers, supporting trans people requires not only trans representation, but an active discussion of the difficulties that may arise within meditation spaces, even those designed for trans people. Bri Barnett, a meditation teacher who has previously taught at the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, CA, addresses the experiences of trans-feminine people in meditation spaces. She explains how the presence of trans women and trans feminine people remains limited in Buddhist gatherings, making it challenging for trans women and specifically trans women of color to exist and flourish in them.

While meditation spaces for queer and trans people are often supportive, allowing “a group of people with shared identity [to come] together,” as Bri puts it, this experience does not “always resonate for everyone.”

Ultimately, cultivating an affirming community for trans Buddhists requires effort. A growing number of trans Buddhist teachers are taking on that challenge, at times even transforming long-revered teachings so trans Buddhists can thrive.

Part 3: Voice
“That is my journey to continue freeing my voice, to speaking my truth.”

For many trans Buddhist teachers who strive to help trans people honor their feelings, experiences, and desires, they have learned that they need to give trans practitioners a choice about how they meditate. Simply, trans teachers do not want to force a single practice onto their students.

Leading a body scan meditation, Rion says to his students, “If this [practice] doesn’t feel right to you in this moment, I don’t want you to go through [with it.] I don’t want you to try to follow along.” Trans teachers want their students to listen to the experience of their body and choose what is best for them in that moment. This may mean the student leaves the meditation room during the practice, or chooses to sit in the room without following the instructions.

One of the most important ways transgender Buddhist teachers are helping trans people is by allowing them to use their voices during meditation retreats.

In 2019, Martin managed the “Creating Joy in Community” retreat, the first-ever residential retreat for transgender, gender-queer, and gender-expansive people. Taught by JD Doyle, René Rivera, Riya Christie, and Fresh “Lev” White in Big Bear, CA, the retreat illuminated the benefits of turning away from silence and creating more opportunities for collective expression.

“In a traditional residential retreat, it’s silence,” Martin explains. “And you do develop these beautiful bonds with people in the midst of silence.” But at the non-silent “Creating Joy in Community” retreat, Martin says, “What we were finding is that, for some people, silence is their whole life. They’re in silence around their experience and that can be really activating when you’re being ignored by somebody who’s looking straight ahead and not making eye contact with you. That can reinforce how you feel in your everyday life.”

At this retreat, the teachers took specific steps to mitigate potential traumatic responses by transgender practitioners. JD Doyle serves as Guiding Teacher at Insight Santa Cruz. They explain how Buddhist spaces can leave trans people in vulnerable positions because they are unable to respond to the teachings in the moment that they are given. For example, meditators often sit in silence while the instructor offers meditation instruction. During meditation, the mind typically wanders to various thoughts, and so students are encouraged to return to the breath as it goes in and out of the body. If the body can be quiet, the thinking goes, so can the mind.

Yet, the body is not a simple space, and the breath is not always a source of refuge. JD explains how meditators are often told to simply “‘Close your eyes, follow the breath.’” But this can “be really trauma-inducing,” JD says, because “finding the breath in my body is too hard because it draws me to my chest. I have all sorts of associations with my chest.”

JD’s reflection helps me to consider my own experiences prior to top surgery. For many years, I experienced panic attacks during meditation. I could not breathe deeply due to wearing a chest binder. When I did focus on my breath, this attention would bring me closer into a body that I did not like and did not want to be in. Yet my dysphoria was not only related to my physical distress, but to the loudness of my mind. My thoughts ran rampant, thinking of and then embodying those past experiences of distress when I was shamed for my gender. Looking back, I can see how meditating, held in silence and a fierce attention to my body, often caused me greater psychic harm. While I came to meditation thinking it would help bring clarity to my body and mind, the process of meditating in silence facilitated the spiraling of my mind and heightened the gender distress of my body.

(Image source: europeanbuddhism.org)

Trans Buddhist teachers have found that the use of voice is a critical apparatus by which trans people can connect to their body, especially amidst moments of panic. For example, in between meditation sessions, teachers prioritize small group discussions where students can ask questions of their teachers. If students experience a troubling feeling during meditation, they do not have to keep this feeling to themselves throughout the retreat (and risk further devolving into panic and traumatic response). Instead, they can receive guidance on how to address their struggles from both teachers and co-participants.

JD explains, “Meditation and mindfulness is staying in contact with everything. And so sometimes, in order for that to happen, we need to have speech in there. Because if the body is inaccessible because of all the trauma, then being able to say, ‘oh this landed this way’ and speak it out, allows me to reconnect with the body.”

Phoenix has long known the importance of the voice within spiritual spaces. “When there’s so much trauma stored in the body, it is impossible to sit still,” Phoenix explains. “Most of my life, I have felt silenced, unable to get my voice out. It’s been incredibly healing and liberating. That is my journey to continue freeing my voice, to speaking my truth.”

“Part of what I’m doing as a teacher is I’m constantly trying to model vulnerability for people. And that like it’s okay to not be in a good [place]. It’s okay to be messy. It’s okay to not be okay. So often when I’m sharing, I’m modeling for people: keep talking through the tears. Speak your truth. That allows everybody else in the room to kind of drop into, touch into like ‘Oh, these are some painful places’ and to be witnessed and be held by others.”

Phoenix’s pedagogical decisions allow people to experience grief, dysphoria, joy, and pain without interruption. It’s about, as Phoenix puts it, “Allowing people, in a really gentle way, to hold all the grief, the dysphoria, and just help people move slowly, slowly into the type of voice that feels more in resonance with who they are.”

A Trans-Affirming Path Forward
“Reality is more beautiful. Reality is our bodies are beautiful. Reality is we’re sacred. That’s what reality is.”

These transgender Buddhist teachers are striving to help trans people belong—in community, in their bodies, and on their spiritual journeys. They are not afraid of carving their own path and crafting new pedagogical tools so trans lives flourish.

“There are so many ways to get to freedom. There are so many ways to access freedom, to get connected to support that is outside yourself. There are just so many ways. And so I want people to feel like that is available to them,” shares Rion.

Deeply aware of the challenges faced by trans practitioners, these teachers are helping their students to cultivate wisdom and fierce compassion. As La explains, “Every trans person has to find their own way, find whatever configuration works for them. All of us just honoring that… whether it be having top surgery or taking hormones or not taking hormones. Whatever it happens to be. These are the choices that I have in this life.”

There is a beauty in being able to make these choices. There is a beauty in finding refuge in one’s trans body. There is beauty in trans people trusting who we are, what we want, and what we need.

For these trans Buddhist teachers, this is the power of trans Buddhist spaces. Of the growing trans Buddhist community, Martin says, “I can see the world more clearly as it is. Because all of the transphobic shit kind of fades and like: this is reality. Reality is more beautiful. Reality is our bodies are beautiful. Reality is we’re sacred and natural and whole and gorgeous and divine radiant sacred beings. That’s what reality is.”

Ray Buckner is a Ph.D. student in Religious Studies at Northwestern University. His research focuses on trans studies of Buddhism in the United States and Thailand. 

The post Many Paths to Freedom: Transgender Buddhism in the United States appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Shutterstock)

When I converted to Islam in 2009, I was eager to find a queer and feminist Muslim community. I was lucky to discover Muslims for Progressive Values (MPV), where I soon became an active member in its Los Angeles chapter and in its Facebook group, which today boasts close to 20,000 members globally. But when I moved to Madison, Wisconsin, in 2013, I did not find the same kind of inclusive Muslim community. I became more active in online Muslim groups, getting to know many queer and trans Muslims (and those in solidarity with us) worldwide. Those connections proved invaluable when, three years later, I began to research North American Muslims I consider “nonconformists”—those who are marginalized in most Muslim communities for various reasons, including gender and sexual identity.

Many Muslims I have gotten to know have talked about the importance of finding inclusive communities for their sense of wholeness and acceptance as Muslims, much as I experienced when I first found MPV. One Friday in 2017, I had lunch with Mahdia, a white-presenting American convert and a woman of trans experience, at a Chicago diner before Friday prayers at Masjid-al-Rabia, the LGBTQ-affirming mosque she had helped found the previous year. As we ate, Mahdia told me about her first experience sharing physical space with other queer and trans Muslims at a retreat: “Before that moment, I had known hypothetically that LGBT Muslims exist and this is okay, and there is family.  . . . But it took to actually be there and to not just see the theory of it. To see those possibilities in action was really phenomenal.”

For the past six years, I’ve been meeting with and interviewing Muslims like Mahdia throughout North America in person and online. I am sharing the stories of three such Muslims—Salma, Keegan, and Ameera—here. Each was involved in inclusive Muslim communities where marginalized Muslims could practice Islam together. As in my forthcoming book Muslims on the Margins: Creating Queer Religious Community in North America (due out from NYU Press in early 2023), I use a mix of pseudonyms and real names, depending on participants’ preference, but without indicating which is which.

The issues facing trans, nonbinary, and queer Muslims are multiple and complex. Many Muslim religious spaces are gender-segregated, making them unwelcoming to trans and nonbinary Muslims. In countless places today, trans and nonbinary Muslims could be refused entry to mosques, told to pray in an area that does not correspond to their gender, or denied Islamic funeral rites. For example, Ameera told me she was kicked out of a mosque in Wisconsin because she tried to pray in the women’s section. The other women realized she was trans and had her removed.

In response to such problems, Salma, Keegan, and Ameera have each contributed to inclusive communities where trans and nonbinary Muslims can be open about their religious and queer identities. They are part of a global network of nonconformist Muslims connected via Facebook groups and, for the past couple of years, Zoom meetings.

Most groups for nonconformist Muslims have made it clear that queer Muslims are welcome and fully accepted. The first rule in MPV’s Facebook group says that, “Bigotry, misogyny, and comments that are degrading to others with things like race, religion, culture, sexual orientation, gender identity will not be tolerated.” Those who violate such rules are quickly warned and, if they continue, are banned from the group. El-Tawhid Juma Circle (ETJC) Unity Mosque in Toronto, which has hosted LGBTQI-inclusive Jumas (congregational Friday prayers) every week since 2009, has similar rules which they post in their online group and read aloud at every meeting.

The groups I studied that had in-person meetings—like ETJC, the Atlanta Unity Mosque, and some MPV chapters—also reimagined Islamic practices so that everyone will feel included. In most Muslim communities, prayers are led by men, with male congregants in rows behind the imam (prayer leader) and women in rows behind the men, possibly in another room or even excluded altogether. In contrast, ETJC has encouraged women-led prayer for its mixed-gender congregation for many years as part of its commitment to feminist practice. And in 2019 when a congregant who had previously identified as a woman came out as nonbinary, the mosque quickly adjusted its language to refer to “non-male-led prayer.”

Another departure from Muslim norms is ETJC’s approach to ablution, the ritual washing that Muslims do before they pray (typically in gender-segregated bathrooms). Whereas in most settings, Muslims perform wudu, individual ablution with water, ETJC encourages congregants to practice tayammum or “dry ablution” as a group, which—alongside other possible benefits—means that trans or nonbinary participants do not have to enter gendered public bathrooms to achieve ritual purity before Juma.

Through both words and deeds, inclusive communities create space for people like Salma, Keegan, and Ameera to thrive. Their stories illuminate what is possible for a more accepting Muslim community and for queer, trans, and nonbinary Muslims.

Salma: Finding “Mecca Away from Mecca”

Salma (they/them) is an American-born Pakistani Shia Muslim in their mid-thirties who moved to Canada for graduate school when they married a Pakistani-Canadian Shia man in 2013. “Gender is super important to me,” Salma told me. “Gender identity is something that’s evolving. I think right now, I’m identifying as a nonconforming individual. I was identified as female at birth, [but] was never very good at being a woman, a girl, or whatever.”

As a teen in the northeastern U.S., Salma attended a gender-segregated Shia mosque. While Salma is confident that some of their friends at the mosque were “queer and gender nonconforming,” it was not something they felt safe openly discussing. While Salma was in college in the south, the Shia community was so small that the mosque had one prayer room for all and allowed families to sit together, rather than separating everyone according to gender. “I liked it a lot,” Salma said. “It made sense.”

When Salma went to Mecca, their perspective on gender segregation shifted more radically. Like most Muslims, Salma considered the pilgrimage (hajj) to Islam’s birthplace in Mecca a religious obligation and a once-in-a-lifetime experience. But what is radical about it is that, despite Saudi Arabia’s conservativeness, the number of people present makes gender segregation impossible to uphold. “There was nothing separating us,” Salma said. “Our gender identities didn’t matter; the fact that we were different sectarian affiliations didn’t matter.” After praying in Mecca, Salma said, “the gender segregation of these spaces here”—by which they meant most mosques—“just really didn’t sit well with me. …  I don’t want to be separated from my husband just because he has a different gender identity in this room of strangers.”

In addition to being gender nonconforming, Salma is also out about being queer and polyamorous. When they came out to a gay friend in Toronto, he referred them to Salaam Canada, a support group for LGBTQ+ Muslims. In turn, they learned about El-Tawhid Juma Circle (ETJC). The first time Salma attended Juma there, during Pride, it was also the wedding of two of the mosque’s founders and leaders, El-Farouk Khaki and Troy Jackson.

“I was crying hysterically,” Salma told me. “I was uncontrollable with sobs because seeing their marriage ceremony for me was very healing, as someone who is queer-identified who was closeted my entire life, including to myself, to be able to see this. It was just like, wow. You know, Islam! And it’s in a masjid!” they exclaimed, using the Arabic term for mosque. “And we just prayed Juma, and I listened to a khutbah [sermon], you know?” Salma now regularly brings others to ETJC for Juma. “When they’re in that space for the first time, they just cry hysterically because there’s something so beautiful and so meaningful and authentic. It’s a taste of truth that you don’t get from … misogynistic masjids.”

While Salma finds it uncomfortable to pray as a Shia in mainly Sunni mosques, at ETJC Salma prays alongside people from various sectarian and non-sectarian backgrounds and regularly gives sermons or leads prayers for the congregation. It was only there that Salma had the “experience of the unity that comes up when there’s absolutely no barriers between individuals.”

“I didn’t have to look around [asking], ‘Where are other femme-identified folks going?’ I could just stay where I was and … pray right there between two masculine-presenting individuals. It reminded me of Mecca. … El-Tawhid Juma Circle is my Mecca away from Mecca.”

Keegan: “We Are God-Made Creatures” 

Keegan (they/them) identifies as a queer immigrant, a refugee, and a war survivor. They are both Muslim and Jewish, raised in an interfaith family by atheist parents. Originally from Iraq, Keegan now lives in Southern California and is occasionally involved in the Los Angeles chapter of Muslims for Progressive Values (MPV).

We first met in MPV’s Facebook group and eventually in person at the West Hollywood Pride parade. “Marching in the LA Pride, as a Muslim queer, with my crew, being pretty proud: that’s a big deal, you know,” Keegan said, laughing. “That was a really, really big deal.” Keegan sees the work of LGBTQ-inclusive Muslim groups like MPV as “the core or the original spirit of Islam, when Islam first came as a liberator from slavery, from manhood, from a sexist, racist society.” Here Keegan drew on a common discourse among progressive Muslims: Islam was originally a progressive religion and the Prophet Muhammad a feminist, an argument used to claim authenticity for what more conservative Muslims might see as deviance.

I asked Keegan about their “very non-Muslim name,” and they said, “It’s a chosen name. … My birth name was [a] very, very, very Arabic name,” Keegan said, laughing. “Very, very Muslim name,” one that Keegan felt didn’t represent them. “I identify as a non-binary, gender-nonconforming person,” they added. In contrast, Keegan’s birthname was a “strictly masculine male name. Keegan “is a more non-binary name. It’s also a nonreligious name, you know? I don’t think it’s fair that I am identifying with a specific name that is exclusively for one religion, one race, one gender, ‘cause this is not who I am. … I choose the name that I identify with.”

I told Keegan that when we first met online, I had assumed they were a convert because of their name. They laughed in response. “You can still call me a convert if you want to. ‘Cause I think the Islam I grew up practicing is not the Islam I believe in now.”

Keegan described the relationship between their queerness and religious beliefs and practices: “I think we are God-made creatures. So, we’re created by God; we are loved by God no matter what religion we are, we are God’s creation, so we should be proud. And the community must accept us whether they want to or not because we are not something abnormal or not natural. We’re pretty natural, pretty normal.” They continued, “Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, never prosecuted anyone for being homosexual. I dare any Muslim, any sheik, … any religious scholar to find one example of Muhammad prosecuting somebody for being homosexual. Prosecution came way after when Muhammad died. And that’s man-made laws; they were not God-made laws. … Nothing in Qur’an says, ‘Kill the homosexuals,’ nothing. It’s our book; it’s our constitution as Muslims, and … when we create ideas, we should go back to Qur’an and make sure that it is okay with God to make it.”

Ameera: “Fully Muslim and Fully Queer” 

Ameera (she/her) is a Bengali child of immigrants in her late twenties, a transgender Muslim, and a lesbian-leaning bisexual with a strong theological background in Sunni Orthodox Islam. She is particularly proud of having memorized the entire Qur’an in 2009, an impressive feat highly valued in many Muslim communities. During our interview, Ameera told me, “I take a lot of that with me, that theological understanding, as I have learned to transform elements of orthodoxy into elements that are more progressive, inclusive, and … life-giving to me. … Parts of that also include liberation theology and social justice and activism.” Early in college, Ameera underwent what she calls “a transformation period”: “I was learning about my identity, as well as learning about the struggles of people with other marginalized identities.” Through what she calls a “one for all, all for one mentality,” Ameera was able to “learn and immerse into the world of … social justice activism” that is important to her today.

Before coming out as a trans woman, Ameera had gone through a period where she identified as a gay man, during which she began struggling with her religious identity. “Because I didn’t know how I could be gay and also a Muslim, right? And not just a Muslim but also someone who has worked their entire lives and built their identity about being a role-model Muslim. So, I had a lot of grief during that time … I would yell at God on my prayer [rug] and be like, ‘Allah, why did you make me this way? … Why are you giving me a test that I can’t bear?’”

In 2017, however, Ameera came out as a trans woman, began using she/her pronouns, and became more comfortable with herself. “Part of me misses the male privilege that just comes with being male,” she said, laughing, “but part of me is so, so, so grateful for everything, for all of the really insightful and powerful activist voices and spaces that I’ve been connected to, because, I learned through … being trans … what oppression looked like.”

During college, Ameera was active in interfaith groups. After she moved to Madison, Wisconsin, she became involved in ETJC’s Facebook group, where she and I first met. She and I eventually co-founded a Madison chapter of ETJC, which we led together until she moved away.

Now married to a convert and living in Minnesota, Ameera says, “My Muslim community is where I feel the most safe, … held, and authentic,” especially in “queer-Muslim-centered spaces.” ETJC’s online group, she told me, “has been a space where I have really been able to feel like myself and also fully Muslim and fully queer.” Other communities that have been important to her are the Facebook group Radical Muslims and the Muslim Youth Leadership Council. “It was life-changing,” she said, “to be connected with all these other queer Muslims,” and “also learn what activist spaces look like.”

Finding an online community with whom to pray Juma has been critical to Ameera. “I would prefer to have a brick-and-mortar masjid,” she says, but, “I think the people make up more substance than the material.”

***

As Salma’s, Keegan’s, and Ameera’s experiences reveal, finding or helping to create inclusive communities is essential for trans and nonbinary Muslims to feel like themselves and to honor their entire identities. It is challenging enough to be a Muslim in a largely non-Muslim society, but it is more so when one does not conform to gender or sexual norms. Both Muslims and non-Muslims alike have much to learn from the experiences of trans and nonbinary Muslims, who reveal what a more inclusive Muslim community might look like and why it is so badly needed.

Katrina Daly Thompson (they/them) is Evjue-Bascom Professor of the Humanities and Professor of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with affiliations in Anthropology, Religious Studies, and Gender and Women’s Studies. Their book Muslims on the Margins: Creating Queer Religious Community in North America is due out from NYU Press in early 2023.

The post Breaking Down Gender Binaries, Building Muslim Community appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

In 2014, Black transgender actress Laverne Cox appeared on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline, “The Transgender Tipping Point.” For Time, Cox’s role on the popular show Orange is the New Black represented a seismic cultural shift where, for the first time, stories about a Black transgender woman entered millions of Americans’ homes through their televisions and computer screens. The accompanying article suggested that transgender Americans would become increasingly common in mainstream media and politics. Time, as it turns out, was right. But more attention did not translate into greater equality.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

The following year, 2015, witnessed a barrage of anti-trans legislation. The most common were “bathroom bills,” laws that were designed to force people to use restrooms that corresponded with their assigned birth sex. Most of these bills appeared in state and municipal legislatures soon after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that same-gender couples have the constitutional right to marry. Following that decision, groups that had opposed gay marriage quickly turned their attention to a more vulnerable portion of the LGBTQ community and portrayed transgender Americans as threats to the country’s children.

As right-wing groups drafted anti-trans legislation, a roster of figures toured evangelical and conservative Christian churches to stoke fears about transgender Americans. Speaking at the National Religious Broadcaster’s convention in 2015, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee derided transgender people and mocked their opposition to the bathroom bills. He told the televised crowd, “I wish that someone told me that when I was in high school that I could have felt like a woman when it came time to take showers in PE. I’m pretty sure that I would have found my feminine side and said, ‘Coach, I think I’d rather shower with the girls today.’” The crowd roared with laughter, failing to see Huckabee’s statement as the description of a sex crime. They also missed, and were not told, that when it comes to public spaces, transgender people are exponentially more likely to be the victims of violence rather than the perpetrators (in no small part because of rhetoric like Huckabee’s running freely in conservative Christian churches that portrays transgender individuals as sex criminals).

In the years since 2015, transgender Americans, as Time predicted, have appeared in greater frequency throughout mainstream media. But anti-trans bills have proliferated, and 2022 has seen more anti-trans legislation than any year in history. The newest form of this gender terrorism has been the targeting of transgender kids who have supportive families. In Texas and elsewhere, state governments have decreed that helping transgender youth access gender-affirming healthcare poses a danger and warrants investigation by Family and Protective Services.

Given the multiple attacks on transgender people in state legislatures, school boards, and in public places across the country, I felt strongly that the Revealer’s 2022 special issue should address these concerted assaults and illuminate more robust stories about transgender Americans that rarely get media attention. I am, therefore, enormously pleased to share with you the Revealer’s special issue on trans lives and religion.

The special issue breaks down binaries – not only of gender, but also of religion. Too often the stories people read about religion and transgender Americans involve religious oppression. Those are important stories, to be sure, that raise awareness of the traumas transgender individuals endure at the hands of religious people, and that spotlight religious institutions’ influence on anti-trans legislation. But those are not the only stories about trans people and religion. Transgender and nonbinary individuals have been forging new paths within religious communities and transforming religious traditions in the process. These, too, are narratives the world needs to know.

Our special issue on trans lives and religion opens with stories of trans people reclaiming their religious traditions and creating spaces specifically for trans and nonbinary individuals. The issue begins with Katrina Thompson’s “Breaking Down Gender Binaries, Building Muslim Community,” where she profiles transgender and nonbinary Muslims who have built trans and queer-inclusive Muslim spaces in the United States and Canada. Next, in “Many Paths to Freedom: Trans Buddhism in the United States,” Ray Buckner explores how transgender Buddhist teachers are transforming Buddhist practices by taking trans people’s existence as their starting point for new insights on Buddhist teachings. Then, in “Virtual Communities are Critical Lifelines for Transgender Sikhs,” Harmeet Kamboj investigates how trans and nonbinary Sikhs have used social media to form communities that offer important connections and opportunities to reassess Sikh teachings about gender.

The next two articles in our special issue toggle between the present and the past to show how people have lived outside of the gender binary for centuries. In “Two-Spirit Indigenous Peoples Building on Legacies of Gender Variance,” Abel Gomez writes about Two-Spirit Native Americans and First Nations peoples and how, prior to European colonialism, many indigenous nations revered those who were neither male nor female. Then, in “Turning to the Talmud to Find Gender Diversity that Speaks to Today,” Max Strassfeld shares how the rabbis of the Talmud, writing during the first six centuries of the common era, identified eight gender categories and codified those gender possibilities within Jewish law.

Our final two articles focus on today’s anti-trans politics. In “Beloved Transgender Children and Holy Resistance,” Justin Sabia-Tanis shares what Christians and other religious people should do to support transgender equality. Then, in “For We Were Strangers: Trans Refugees and Moral Panics” Gillian Frank considers how legislation that targets transgender teens mirrors some earlier anti-gay and anti-abortion legislation, in turn offering a roadmap on how to respond to this wave of anti-trans bills.

The issue also features the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “Gender Diversity in Islam and Judaism.” Katrina Thompson joins us to discuss how transgender and nonbinary Muslims are creating supportive spaces for trans and queer Muslims. And Max Strassfeld joins us to chat about the rabbis’ eight gender categories in the Talmud and what their awareness of bodily gendered diversity can tell us about transgender politics today. You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

As the articles and podcast episode in this issue demonstrate, transgender individuals are refusing to let anti-trans bigots monopolize their religious traditions. Instead, they are claiming space that is more inclusive for everyone. I hope the articles in this issue find their way to many different communities, including transgender people who are curious about religious possibilities, educators who want their students to know more about trans people and their experiences, religious leaders who want their communities to welcome trans and nonbinary individuals, and everyone who, during this time of anti-trans hostility and legislation, needs more stories about transgender people who are thriving and transforming and our world for the better.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post Special Issue Editor’s Letter: Trans Lives and Religion appeared first on The Revealer.