Susan's Place Transgender Resources

Today I went to shul& there was a bat mitzvah.

I felt really sad sitting there. I had neither bar nor bat mitzvah.
Sometimes it makes me feel like lesser of a Jewish man because I obviously never had a bris, never had a bar mitzvah.

This post isn't just for Jews but for whomever. How do you view rites of passage that are directed at certain genders that
-you either had of the gender opposite than what you identify as?

or if

-you missed out altogether because you did not identify as the specific gender your parents tried to raise you as?

Not having a bar mitzvah ceremony doesn't make you less of a Jew.  Bar mitzvah just means a son of the commandments and just means you're at the age where you can be counted toward a minyan and can get an aliyah.   Jewish boys become bar mitzvahs whether they have a big ceremony for it or not.

All the same, I personally feel as if I am lacking& less than others in the community.

Yeah I'm trying to look at it like anything else..like how not getting a used car as a teen doesn't make a person any less of a teen/young adult.

Might not count as being quite the same, but there are a lot of family practices and traditions I've missed out on and been denied because of this. It makes me feel isolated and even weirder. My grandfather favors my cis male cousin and yeah...He's seen as a "real man", whereas I'm less than or some sort of fake because I've never been brought into these rites of passage.

You know you can do your bar mitzvah at any age right? Usually it's done at 13, but it doesn't actually have to be.

I never did it, personally, and don't really care much. While my dad is Jewish, my mum isn't. So according to a lot of folks I'm not Jewish and I've never felt entirely at ease with the whole thing. One foot in each world or something. When the rabbi of the Reform Temple I grew up going to offered to help me through conversion that kind of drove it home...

i had kind of a bar/bat mitzvah. i wasnt quite out yet but everyone knew i wasnt really a girl. people ended up just calling it a mitzvah cause they werent sure what to say lol. but anyways i do regret not having an actual bar mitzvah because then it would have helped my confidence of feeling like more of a man. but no youre not less jewish just because you didnt have a bar/bat mitzvah, hell i barely go to temple and i had one! plus theres not exactly a degree of how jewish you are. But you can have an adult bar mitzvah if you want, my mom had one when she was in her 40s. hope i helped a little.

Thanks for the input guys.

It's really something that makes I wish I had at the age of tradition..as my relatives did, as friends did..Something I want to talk of in the same context my community around here does.

Also because I actually study religion at my university, most peers in the academic realm assume I'm a bio male& will mention it; I just let them assume as to not complicate things.
At this point I'm feeling a lot better about it...people still treat me according to how I express my identity despite technicalities.