Beyond Stick Figures
by Rabbi Elliot Rose Kukla on Friday January 09, 2009
13 Tevet 5769
Genesis 47:28-50:26,
http://www.jewishmosaic.org/torah/show_torah/139[Reprint of Sermon on Parshat Va'yehi Delivered at the Danforth Jewish Circle, Toronto Canada on January 6, 2007. Archived in Jewish Mosaic's LGBT Resource Library.]
You're in a mall, a restaurant, a movie theatre, a synagogue... you look up and see a sign with two stick figures, one in pants and one in a triangular skirt. What does it mean? To many of us this is the most familiar and unquestioned symbol we could possibly encounter: a bathroom. But for some of us, standing underneath this sign and trying to choose between the two options can be the scariest moment in the day.
Jason plans his entire schedule carefully in order to not need a public restroom and face these two possibilities and the exclusion and humiliation that can lie behind each door. Jason is a transgender man; he was assigned female gender at birth and raised as a girl, but transitioned into living as a male as an adult. He is regularly shouted at and harassed in men's and women's bathrooms. In crossing the threshold into the segregated space of a public restroom, Jason is crossing one of the most fiercely defended borders in modern society. Many of us assume that there are only two possible answers to the bathroom dilemma and we must fit under one sign or the other: either the stick legs or the pyramid skirt. We refuse to see how many of us can't or don't want to fit into the confines of these 2-dimensional symbols.
