Make Space for Transgender Jews at the Kotel
http://blogs.forward.com/sisterhood-blog/212633/make-space-for-transgender-jews-at-the-kotel/January 13, 2015, 9:39am
By Joy Ladin
When Kay Long approached the Western Wall in Jerusalem last week, she was turned away because according to one of the Orthodox women supervising the women's side of the Wall, Ms. Long was not a woman. In Orthodox Judaism, religious space is gendered space. Men and women are rigorously separated, not just at the Western Wall but in synagogues, while studying sacred texts, and even at weddings, where men and women dance separately.
Halacha or Traditional Jewish law assumes that maleness and femaleness are unchangeable and self-evident. The Orthodox woman who turned Ms. Long away was charged with ensuring that only women and girls enter the women's section, so that the sacred space would remain acceptable and thus accessible to Orthodox women. In order to do so they rely on their ideas about what women should look like to decide whether those who approach their side may enter. Ms. Long, evidently, did not fit those ideas, despite the fact that it had been years since she had made the transition from living as a man to living as a woman.
I too visited the Wall after I began living as a woman. Though I was terrified that I would be turned away, in the midst of the turmoil of divorce and gender transition, I felt drawn to the Wall as a place where the heartbroken Jews have long come to pour out our hearts and pray for healing. I had come years before as a boy, then as a man, and I longed to stand there as my true self. Unlike Ms. Long's, my gender wasn't questioned, probably because my height is closer to what the Orthodox guardians of the women's section consider normal for women.
