January 26, 2021 by admin

reConceiving Infertility •

A national information and advocacy campaign to demystify infertility and the inability to conceive also encompasses pregnancy loss, adoption, foster parenting, becoming a single parent by choice, LGBTQ+ family-building, and blended families. Training sessions help women advocate for insurance changes and empower them to speak openly about their pathways to parenthood—or their decision “to live child-free.” The initiative considers the feelings of the entire family, including parents who may never be grandparents and siblings who may never be aunts or uncles. It complements Your Family Building Story.

hadassah.org/advocate/reConceivingInfertility.html

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January 25, 2021 by admin

Coming Out While Being Locked In

ABIGAIL FISHER, 19

Throughout this pandemic, I haven’t let myself journal, despite having kept one for most of my life. Instead, I’ve spent the time looking over past journals. Only recently have I begun to understand why. Not writing was the only way to allow myself to grow. It sounds counterintuitive for someone like me who has always used writing to express myself, but by revisiting my journals from the past few years, I’ve been able to see myself more clearly.

I had always expected that the first person I’d come out to would be my journal. In reality, coming out had to happen without it. Over the course of the past two months, I’ve realized, or rather finally allowed myself to admit, that I am a lesbian. It’s all very new, and still sensitive.

In fact, I cringed writing the above sentence just now. I’ve also realized that one of the reasons I was finally able to embrace my sexuality was because I haven’t been journaling. In past journals, I circle around this knowledge about myself, and then ultimately write my way out of it.

Yes, I was an active LGBTQ+ ally, speaking up in classes and on social media throughout high school, and yes, I have a welcoming family. But the social stigma and compulsory heterosexuality that ran rampant in my social spheres made it extremely difficult for me to come out, even to myself.

The spring before senior year, I came out as bisexual, to test the waters. Coming out as queer while leaving open the potential for male romantic partners felt less scary. There was still the possibility that one day I would conform to the norm. I could exist in the world in a way that hid my queerness. Immediately after coming out on Instagram, I was euphoric. I had revealed a part of myself that I had hidden for a long time. And just as quickly, I had a sinking feeling. Had I just lied to the world? Worse still, had I lied consciously?

That July, I wrote in my journal, “When I look into the future and consider a husband, I just don’t feel like I’d be satisfied or even truly happy. But I feel like it would be so much easier to raise kids as a traditional straight family.”

The rest of my entry is a rambling run-on sentence where I twist myself into a pretzel to avoid the inconvenient truth of my identity. I continued, “And I also don’t want to prove my middle school bullies right but it might make everything better if I come out but I’m not even sure that I’m gay but also I’m pretty sure I am and the line between what I want and what I want to want is getting so blurry.” Despite the “ands” and the “buts,” this is the most explicit any of my journals ever got when it came to my sexuality.

Maybe it’s no accident that I journaled in pencil that summer.

While I may not have been aware of it, the choice not to journal during lockdown was a choice to confront the parts of my identity that I’d tried to talk myself out of for so long. Each time I’d gotten up the courage to write about the possibility of being gay, I’d either scribbled it out or explained why it wasn’t true. Not writing gave my internal monologue permission to be free and honest without the gravity that comes with existing in hard copy.

When I came out to my family, I felt the same euphoria I’d felt that spring when I came out as bisexual, only this time it wasn’t accompanied with the dread that I’d told only a partial truth.

While the pandemic has taken so much—lives, livelihoods, hugs—it has provided me the humble gift of stillness. It’s these moments of stasis that allowed me to grow. And when I emerge from this pandemic, I can emerge as my full self.

Abigail Fisher is a Lilith intern and a sophomore at Wesleyan University. She appeared on the Lilith blog in high school.

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April 20, 2020 by admin

LGBTQ Jewish Hero of Color Poster •

Rabbi Sandra Lawson is a veteran, a vegan, a weightlifter, one of the first queer women
rabbis of color, and Associate Chaplain for Jewish Life at Elon University in North
Carolina. “One of the things I want the larger Jewish community to understand is
that rabbis today are a diverse group. Many are people of color. Many are not straight.
Many might be married to non-Jews. My difference, my diversity, is helping people
become aware of that.” Keshet’s LGBTQ Jewish Heroes poster series is available to
synagogues, day schools, JCCs, and other Jewish institutions to demonstrate their commitment to LGBTQ equality and visibility.

keshetonline.org/resources-and-events/lgbtq-jewish-heroes

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January 10, 2019 by admin

Standing with Trans People

Our Jewish textual tradition has always had a place for those who do not fit neatly into binary boxes of sex and gender. From the creation of the first person in Genesis, we learn that humanity is created in God’s image, and that “male and female God created them.”

The ancient rabbis of the Talmudic and Midrashic eras understand this verse to mean a variety of images, including that God created one person with a male side and a female side, or that God created a golem that spanned the earth.

“My gender is golem,” a trans young person joked when we studied this text recently.

A joke, yes, and also an assertion that this young person has existed since the beginning of humanity.

The rabbis of the Talmud explore what it means for a person to be one of six sexes, four of them beyond the simplistic male and female. Both Rebekah and Joseph can be read as being gender non-conforming.

As a transgender rabbi, I know well the obligation to live out this Torah, the obligation to both honor the sacred texts that speak specifically about gender and to live into those texts that speak of compassion and community, which remind us that as Jews, we must act in such a way that honors our own history of oppression.

RABBI BECKY SILVERSTEIN, “Jews Must Support the Trans Community: Our Lives Depend on It,” Forward, October 23, 2018.

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