Home > About

About

This archive is a repository of online reflections by, and about, transgender and nonbinary converts to Judaism. (I use “convert” and “Jew-by-choice” interchangeably here.) This includes things like news articles, Jewish legal opinions, blog posts, videos, and more. Many of these texts come from people living in the United States, although some are written and created by those living elsewhere. There are some documents online that I could have included in the archive but either contained overly sensitive information, or the people I contacted asking to use them in the archive declined. If you’d like an item of yours removed from the archive, please contact me (see the “Contact” page).

About Me: Short Version

I’m a PhD student at Brown University, where I’m studying LGBTQ+ Jewish life in the contemporary US—specifically, trans and nonbinary converts to Judaism. (I use “trans” as a catchall for these and related identities here, but I specify where necessary, e.g. “trans man.”) I, myself, am a trans woman and a convert to Judaism. 

About Me: Continued

I came out years before I found or decided to convert to Judaism. I grew up Catholic, was an altar server, and had dreams of becoming a priest one day. After coming out as trans, I grew away from the faith in which I was raised, but I still felt connected with some form of spirituality, Godliness—whatever you’d like to call it. I’d grown up surrounded by Jewish tradition but never really engaging with it. In the summer of 2022, and I don’t know why, I suddenly began to learn more about Judaism and immediately became obsessed with it: the tradition, the arguments, the texts, the ways of reckoning with exile, and—crucially for me—the ways I felt it wrestled with questions of LGBTQ+ inclusion. (To that end, I was particularly indebted to the Trans Halakha Project for their efforts to think Judaism and transness together, not in a way that ignored the halakha [Jewish law], but in a way that tried in good faith to see where halakha can, on its own terms, speak to trans people.) When I officially began the conversion process at a synagogue outside of Boston, I noticed that a surprising number of people converting in my “cohort” were also trans. Upon talking to both other trans Jews, and to scholars in the small but growing field of trans studies in religion, it turned out that converting to Judaism is, as they put it, “a trans thing.” I felt that deeply, and wanted to figure out why. I’m now in my PhD program studying exactly this, interviewing trans Jews-by-choice wherever I meet them, and doing an ethnography of a digital yeshiva that is made up of many trans converts. I want to figure out where, and how, the processes of gender transition and religious conversion interact and/or intersect (if at all!) for trans converts, and why they chose Judaism. 

This Archive

A big part of my research on trans Jews-by-choice has, so far, involved collecting and analyzing writing by and about them that’s already “out there” in the world. This has meant asking questions like: Where have trans converts shown up in previous literature, academic and non-academic? Where have trans converts written about their experiences online, and what can we learn from these blog posts, memoirs, book chapters, etc.? What have poskim (Jewish legal experts) written about trans people, and about converts, in the past—and where have they written about trans converts specifically? My goal in collecting these documents is to compare these already-existing reflections and writings with my interviews with trans converts and the ethnography I’ve been doing for my research. 

Very early on, years ago, when I began to do this research, I was once told—much to my dismay—that one cannot research trans converts for a dissertation-length project because “there’s no archive and no canon.” In other words, since there wasn’t already a body of research done on this population, and robust theoretical literature about them, there was nothing to “refer back” to in my own research, and so as I understood the objection, there couldn’t be objectivity in the research. The research was, in this view, a non-starter. Without an archive of the experiences and reflections you want to analyze, you cannot have a theory about it, and you cannot have a canon of core works talking about this archive; and, in a circular way, you cannot have this archive without the theoretical tools to theorize about the objects in the archive—theoretical tools which, by the way, would be created and honed by the archive. So how does an archive, and a line of inquiry about trans converts to Judaism, even start? This discouraged me for an embarrassingly long stretch of time, until, with friends’ support, I was able to give this reply: “If there’s no archive and no canon, then I’ll make one!” Much to my luck, even if there isn’t already an established body of literature about trans converts, they have certainly received their fair share of coverage in Jewish legal literature and in news articles online—not to mention the numerous reflections they have produced, both on the Internet and in print, discussing their experiences.

This archive intends to be an activist one, following the definitions of “archival activism” that scholars Andrew Flinn and Ben Alexander provided in the introduction to a journal issue discussing activism and archiving. They write (and I apologize for the lengthy quote): 

“an active archiving or active archiving describes an approach to archival practice which, rejecting professional advocacy of neutrality and passivity, acknowledges the role of the recordkeeper in ‘actively’ participating in the creation, management and pluralization of archives and seeks to understand and guide the impact of that active role.… Archival activism describes activities in which archivists, frequently professionally trained and employed but not exclusively so, seek to campaign on issues such as access rights or participatory rights within records’ control systems or act to deploy their archival collections to support activist groups and social justice aims. Finally, activist archiving describes the processes in which those who self-identify primarily as activists engage in archival activity, not as a supplement to their activism but as an integral part of their social movement activism” (Flinn and Alexander 331).

I wouldn’t necessarily call this effort of spreading knowledge with this trans convert archive activism in a strict sense—although one of my interlocutors did use the term “trans convert movement”—but I have nonetheless remained active throughout this effort or archiving, attempting to conscientiously highlight key documents that speak to, from, about, or with trans convert experiences. Of course, this archive doesn’t quite focus on people who went and marched in the street in support of one specific movement, and I did not attempt to organize the archive as a way to espouse one specific activist stance on an issue or set of issues. Instead—and although I am running the archive as a PhD student at a university—I hope to (like Flinn and Alexander describe) broaden “access rights”/“participatory rights” to, and with, this archive, by framing as a phenomenon the numerous trans people converting to Judaism. It is my hope (and this is perhaps where the activist element comes in) that others studying similar things—trans converts and beyond—will be able to use this collection as their canon, their archive, their jumping-off point for research. I discuss this aim further in the “Conclusion” section of this page. 

I also want this archive to, in a way, be a kind of bridge between the advocacy work I am attempting to do within the academic realm of Jewish studies and the lived experiences of trans converts outside of academia. A number of the items in this archive were ones I had already collected in a Google Drive folder when going about my research. I realized, after talking to a number of other trans converts, that there would be much benefit in letting others see this archive, in hopes that it will both prove that trans converts do exist and that others should feel free to share their experiences here (see the “Contact” page).

(Additionally, on account of how anti-trans the current American presidential administration has been since its inauguration, I view it as a radical act to collect and share trans voices in one publicly accessible place like this.)

For the rest of this page, I’ll be talking a bit about some of the history of trans Jewish studies—mentioning, where relevant, how trans converts fit into that history—after which I’ll then highlight some of the items in this archive that I feel are the most representative of the productive challenges trans converts pose both to mainstream Judaism (whatever you want to understand that as) and to understandings of transness that ignore religion.

Trans Jewish Studies (and Trans Converts)

While Jews that we might today call “trans” have existed throughout its history—like Rabbi Yoḥanan bar Nafḥa, aka just “Rabbi Yoḥanan,” who has been recently reclaimed as queer and/or trans; and Berel-Beyle, an Eastern European Jewish man now believed to have been trans—only recently has the relatively organized effort to study non-cisgender Jews began to take shape. Although the literature on trans Jews is relatively small at the moment, I won’t try, here, to give a complete history of the field. Instead, the way I’ve talked about this area of study to people (especially when I have to do elevator pitches about it, either to academics or to other Jews who weren’t aware trans Jews were even a thing) has been to narrate it around six important publications that have oriented, served as guideposts for, the development of the field. I’m no expert, but as someone with skin in the game (that is, as a trans Jew), this is the read I’ve gotten on trans Jewish studies.

I usually start with Noach Dzmura’s 2010 volume Balancing on the Mechitza, which was, as far as I am aware, the first text to collect in one place essays about, and reflections from, trans Jews. Interestingly, a number of pieces in the book discuss being trans Jews-by-choice—including this one, included in this archive. What I find so compelling in this short reflection—which recounts the author’s experience, as a trans man and as a convert, serving as a witness to another man’s circumcision ritual for conversion to Judaism—is that it demonstrates how intersubjective the experience of being trans, and a convert, can be. The author writes of his experience: 

“As a convert myself, I experienced new depths of connection to my own Jewishness through witnessing the entry of another man into the covenant. I underwent both of these life-changing transitions at the same time—from female to male and from non-Jew to Jew. At times it felt like walking on a balance beam. But one journey reinforced the other: my solid queer identity assisted me as I came out to my mother again as a convert to Judaism, a mother who was very much invested in both my heterosexuality and my immortal soul” (Rawlings-Fein 111).

(It is worth noting here that it is clear in the context of the passage that the phrase “queer identity” above includes the author’s identity as a trans man.) To Rawlings-Fein, transitioning genders gives language to (“reinforces”) converting religions, and vice versa. And as he explains in the rest of the short chapter, the experience of these two processes interacting allows him to be there, emotionally and literally, for his friend during the ritual of hatafat dam brit. Rawlings-Fein’s reflection on being a trans convert is just one of many of Balancing on the Mechitza’s numerous and moving reflections by trans people about what Judaism means for them—and what they mean for Judaism.

Another anthology, A Rainbow Thread, is almost always mentioned in the same sentence as Balancing on the Mechitza as an exemplary collection of writings by LGBTQ+ (not just trans) Jews from across history—ranging, in this case, over about 2,000 years. It doesn’t, as far as I’m aware, contain writings by or about trans converts, but it is an ambitious and wide-reaching attempt to read queerness across the entirety of Jewish history, asserting, boldly, that Judaism has always been to some extent queer. This, like Balancing on the Mechitza, continues the effort to frame Judaism and queerness as not only compatible, but more specifically Judaism as already long having had a place for LGBTQ+ Jews.

Rabbinic scholar Max Strassfeld’s first monograph, 2022’s Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature is both a fascinating study of where and how gender variance appears in the Talmud—the central text of rabbinic Judaism—as well as a general statement on how research on trans people throughout history (not just in Judaism and Jewish studies) should be done. Strassfeld’s text is of course significant for focusing on trans Jews in such an ancient context and with such extended focus, but one of the other pertinent lessons to be drawn from the book is the way he attempts to strike a balance between overly literalist readings of this gender variance (i.e., “since they didn’t use our modern terms back then, we can’t call them trans”) and ones that rely too much on projecting our modern understandings of gender on the past (i.e., “we would call them trans today, so we will call these historic figures trans without qualification”). Trans Talmud is, even just a few years after its publication, a landmark in trans Jewish studies, both a wonderful example of trans people being studied in a positive and objective light, and also a how-to for writing and researching trans Jews.

In 2023, the queer yeshiva SVARA published the first collection of responsa (Jewish legal opinions) by, for, and about trans people: the Trans Halakha Project. This was, and is, a significant publication for centering trans people in a field (halakha) that had previously, in the mainstream, assigned them a marginalized and often maligned role. The Project is guided by a principle of “euphoric halakha”: as trans Jewish scholar Laynie Soloman describes it, “the process by which we uncover legal principles and applications that enable us to find the authentic, affirming, joyful and liberatory expressions of who we are.” Giving a practical example of euphoric halakha, Soloman adds: “Instead of asking ‘What are the points of dissonance between our tradition as it has been [practiced] and trans experiences?’ we must ask, ‘What are the profound opportunities for revelation that trans people can offer our learning communities and legal tradition?’” To Soloman, we not only should but must be attentive to the ways trans folks can be understood—and understand themselves—in, and through, halakha. Soloman and the Project’s writers attempt to grapple with Jewish law while also taking it on its own terms: neither ignoring it nor the lived experiences of trans Jews. At least two of the essays published through the Trans Halakha Project (so far!) deal with the halakhic issues faced by trans folks undergoing conversion to Judaism: most explicitly, brin solomon’s “Conversion & Circumcision: A Trans Approach,” which is included in this archive, analyzes the question of whether trans women need to be circumcised to formalize their conversion to Judaism. (Also included in the archive is an interview solomon gave on a podcast talking about the article.)

Avraham Kolenski’s book As Long As I’m Still Breathing, published in 2023, is the first memoir written by a trans convert about their experiences transitioning and converting. In Kolenski’s case, he converted a total of four times due to being dissatisfied with the Reform Judaism with which he first converted, and then being rejected in various ways by the Orthodox synagogues with which he converted on account of his transness. His is a moving story and one that, as far as I am aware, is the first book-length text on trans Jews-by-choice. This archive contains the first chapter of this memoir, which discusses Kolenski’s motives for converting to Judaism, as well as the benefits it had for him in dealing with past trauma. That—the healing power of conversion for trans folks—is a pattern I have noticed frequently among my conversations with trans Jews-by-choice, and Kolenski’s is an insightful and articulate reflection on how gender transition and conversion to Judaism can both be life-changing, and life-altering, experiences.

In 2024, Jewish studies scholar Gregg Drinkwater wrote what I understand to be the first essay theorizing and demarcating queer and trans Jewish studies as a field. Published in the new journal QTR: A Journal of Trans and Queer Studies in Religion, “Queer and Trans Studies and the Jewish Question: Looking Back, Looking Ahead” traces the history of, broadly speaking, LGBTQ+ focused Jewish studies, summarizing important texts and pointing to problems of terminology, gaps in existing literature, and promising new directions in the field. It is absolutely worth a read for those wanting a more comprehensive history of the discipline than I have been able to give here. Drinkwater’s paper has been tremendously helpful in orienting me to queer and trans Jewish studies, as well as to where my research on trans converts fits into it. I am incredibly grateful for his work.

Five Highlights from the Archive

In addition to the seminal works in and around trans Jewish studies I discussed in the last section, there have also been a number of less formal pieces by, and about, (queer and) trans converts to Judaism that have identified these individuals as significant: either for Judaism, for LGBTQ+ people, or even for America in this political moment.

2013: “For Transgender Converts, Changing Gender and Finding Faith Come Together” (news article, The Jewish Daily Forward)

This is, I believe, the first article describing, in any comprehensive way, the phenomenon of trans people converting to Judaism. Drawing on interviews, the author, Naomi Zeveloff, writes that: “Transgender converts constitute a vocal—and some say growing—minority within the small community of LGBT Jews.” She continues: “For some trans converts, or, as many call themselves, ‘Jews by choice,’ conversion was intrinsically linked to gender transition; the process of soul searching unearthed one truth after another.” This fascinating article is an early example of trans Jews-by-choice beginning to narrate their experiences publicly, and some of the sentiments expressed in the article, like the one quoted here about “soul searching” revealing “one truth after another,” sounds a lot like what Kolenski describes about conversion as being healing. This article is pinned to the top of the archive’s homepage because of the pertinence of its themes and the ways that many of its points have been confirmed and reiterated by almost every other item in the archive.

2019: Choosing to be Chosen (documentary, Martin Rawlings-Fein)

With a runtime of only about ten minutes, this documentary short interviews a number of queer and trans Jews-by-choice at Congregation Sha’ar Zahav in San Francisco, a historically LGBTQ+ synagogue. This is a valuable document that, in addition to highlighting trans converts (among others), also provides a look into what queer synagogue life looked like before the COVID-19 pandemic. With much Jewish worship moving online during the pandemic—and some of it staying that way afterward, like the all-online organization Judaism Unbound—Rawlings-Fein’s documentary observes queer and trans Jews-by-choice in a truly unique and, until now, not frequently documented environment.

2021: “‘I am here for my relationship with God’: Why [Redacted] has spent his freshman year converting to Judaism” (newspaper opinion piece, Student Life: The independent newspaper of Washington University in St. Louis)

This anonymous op-ed is an interview with a trans convert who talks quite explicitly about his transness and convert status. The interviewer remarks: “In an age when it feels like many young people are turning away from religion, sometimes for the very reason that many religious people espouse anti-LGBTQIA* rhetoric, I found it quite novel to talk with someone who sees religion not only as non-inhibitive to his identity, but in fact helpful for his transition process.” The first part of this quote, regarding trans people reclaiming religion, in a way, from homophobic/transphobic religious actors and groups, is one way in which trans converts pose a challenge to mainstream Judaism, as well as to LGBTQ+ communities that are, understandably, wary of organized religion. And, like Kolenski’s memoir and the Forward article above, transitioning and converting seem to be processes that clarify one another, conversion specifically often aiding in the difficulty of gender transition. This is just one of many themes that these documents have as a through-line.

2022: “Curious as to the reason behind so many posts from the trans community here looking to become Jewish” (Reddit post)

This is a Reddit thread in which the poster wonders why so many trans folks—at least in that particular corner of the website—are curious about converting to Judaism. “Is there a particular reason why?” the user asks. There are more answers given to this than I can cover here (they’re absolutely worth a read), but some particularly interesting ones argue that: Judaism has “adapted to the inclusion of these identities quicker than Christianity and Islam” (because “a good majority of Jews are not orthodox and rather reform and conservative—which are openly gay friendly”); that Reddit might attract people who are, to begin with, younger and more politically engaged than other Jewish communities, online and offline; and that there is something about the marginalization of Jews that feels, for trans folks, somewhat similar, and perhaps for that reason attractive to them (see the quote below). A lengthy comment on this thread, which I’ve taken the liberty to quote here in full, is a powerful rumination on why trans folks might feel a connection to Judaism (I’ve bolded the parts that feel the most relevant to the themes already touched on in this section):

I think people are misunderstanding your question (or I am, we’ll see). You’re not asking why trans people might feel welcomed by Jewish people or which denominations are safe for trans people or why certain denominations are welcoming to trans people. You’re wondering why the rush of converts and why so many trans people, especially young ones, are coming here to want to convert. Like why convert to Judaism? What’s the connection?

I only have theories, bits of pieces of which might be true for some individuals and not others, and all of which are interconnected.

The first is that these are people who were raised with a faith that rang false when they grew up, aided in its falseness by its rejection of them. But still, they long for that community, for an authentic faith, to believe, but to do so in a way which feels true.

The second is that Judaism—either in spite of (or more likely because of) increasing antisemitism—can be seen as desirable. We, too, are minorities, and we’re an ostensibly protected but still vilified one. Inclusion in such a group can therefore feel less like joining a big party and more like an invitation to a walled city. For a group of individuals who have been disproportionately ostracized from their communities, that walled city represents that which they’ve never experienced.

The third is that many Americans seek the inclusion which goes along with membership in a defined group. I’ve heard this echoed from white, vaguely Christian friends: they feel devoid of a community. There is plenty of division within that group, and that group represents the majority of Americans. There’s a joke in my family that when we find out someone is Jewish, we automatically shift our feelings towards them, adjust our standards. “Oh damnit, she’s Jewish. I guess we have to like her now.” This obviously doesn’t apply to everyone, there are some shit Jews out there—but how appealing, for someone who has never experienced the automatic camaraderie of a closed group.

If any of this sounds reductive, it probably is, but this is already too long. If it sounds offensive, it’s not meant that way—I welcome my trans brothers, sisters, and others to our community, and for those already here, you’re always welcome at my synagogue. That’s the place where I met my first trans person, when both of us were children. (Nat, I hope you’re doing well.) But it is an interesting question, especially since I never thought of Judaism as a place you’d want to join (outside of marriage reasons), just a place you already are.

Maybe some of those who’ve posted recently about conversion will chime in?

Persisting religiosity after coming out as trans and feeling rejected by the religious community in which one grew up; Judaism, in its marginalization, being able to speak to the experiences of other marginalized groups, specifically trans folks; group membership feeling comforting and desirable—all of this sounds much like how a number of trans converts have described themselves, and their experiences, in this archive (and as quoted above). And, just in terms of the academic research I’ve been doing, it sounds very similar to what a lot of my trans convert interlocutors have described. (It certainly hits the nail on the head regarding why I felt compelled to convert.) If nothing else, this item from the archive shows what can be gained, in a collection of this sort, by including more informal entries (e.g., Reddit posts) that are written by non-trans, non-converts.

2024: “How Queer and Trans Converts Are Saving America’s Red State Synagogues” (news article, Haaretz)

Whenever I explain my research on trans converts to people, and they seem incredulous that it is a group of people or a phenomenon significant enough to study, I send them the above Forward article from 2013. And whenever I want to explain to people why trans converts matter for American Judaism, and perhaps for America, writ large, I send them this article from Haaretz. The author, Judy Maltz, shows through interviews and research how the participation of LGBTQ+ converts in, as Maltz describes it, “ailing non-Orthodox congregations.” These converts, Maltz argues, are the people breathing life into these synagogues. They—and trans converts, specifically, in the context of my research—are not a superfluous, boutique group of Jews of interest only in the name of inclusion (but not, crucially, engagement). Rather, these converts are some of the main people making these synagogues tick, and in this way they have become one of the faces of modern American Judaism.

All five of these items from the archive, I believe, provide unique looks into the phenomenon of trans people converting to Judaism: their motivations, their experiences, and their significance for the changing landscape of American Judaism. 

Concluding Remarks: Here’s the Archive, Make Your Canon

Earlier, I shared a story about how I was told that I couldn’t do my research on trans Jews-by-choice because there wasn’t a canon or an archive on which I could base my work—to which my response, now, is: “Here’s the archive, make your canon.” It is my hope, additionally, that this (albeit brief) reflection-plus-overview-plus-literature-review will itself serve as an entry in the growing activist archive of trans Jews-by-choice speaking about and for themselves. In this “About” section, I have identified a small number of themes I’ve noticed across the archive’s documents: for example, that a number of trans converts feel that their religious conversion helps them grapple with their gender transition. In the spirit of archival activism, and of creating an activist archive, I want to encourage the reader to read this archive however you’d like. Draw the connections you feel most pertinent across the documents. Make the canon yours! Use these data, I hope, for good, and enjoy diving into the Jewish future. As the queer American Jew Tony Kushner once said: The Great Work begins.

And in this spirit, an archive like this is never necessarily closed off to the addition of new perspectives and experiences. So please let me know if you want to submit anything to the archive, or know of anything more that should be included. I say more about this in the “Contact” page.