Half-Jews and transwomen
Aug. 4th, 2010 11:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lavendersparkleA while ago a friend of mine, who is sort of patrilineal, possibly matrilineal and either way planning to convert, asked whether I ever thought that being a Jewish convert was oddly like being transsexual. There's the feeling that ones internal identity doesn't match the way one was originally perceived; trying to convince big important gate keepers of the validity ones identity; holding oneself to behavioural standards far beyond those of people who had your identity from birth; trying to 'pass'; getting into pointless counter productive hierarchies over who's a 'better' Jew/woman/man based on (among other things): being a bit Jewish to begin with (based on ancestry), who was a bit male/female to begin with (based on hormone levels/physical characteristics), who's frummer, who's more feminine/masculine, who was younger when they made the decision; and finally, for some, there's the genital surgery.
Another way in which they're similar is in the importance of accepting and respecting people's identities and the labels they use for themselves. Every so often you get someone in a queer/progressive/feminist circle declare that gender is just imaginary and doesn't really exist and ze is going to only use gender neutral language from now on and anyone who thinks they're a particular gender is just a schmuck to patriarchy and actually reinforcing it through their actions. This tends to be responded to by a transsexual pointing out that she wouldn't have gone through all of the cost and pain and hassle and side effects and loss of cis-privileged of transitioning if gender didn't fucking matter.
Sometimes, in discussions of religious matters, I feel like the pissed off transsexual woman. Sometimes during cuddly, cotton candy, 'we're all the same really' interfaith dialogue I feel like screaming "No, no actually. We're not all the same. I wouldn't have gone through the expense, hassle and exposure to antisemitism of becoming Jewish if all religions were the same really and it didn't really matter. It matters a fuck load to me."*
Things get a bit more complicated because there are some people who are genderqueer/intersex/don't really care about gender, who have been really hurt by a binary system of gender. They need to advance a concept of gender which is more fluid and muddy and liminal. Similarly, there are people who come from interfaith families or have an interfaith religious identities who find the binary of Jew/non-Jew limiting and advance a more fluid concept of Jewish identity and claim for themselves identities such as interfaith/multifaith and half-Jew.
Ideally, this shouldn't cause problems. The fact that one person is genderqueer doesn't mean that another person isn't a woman, even if she wasn't identified as female when she was born. Just because one person is interfaith doesn't mean that another person isn't a Jew, even if she was born to gentile parents. The problem comes when that in our attempts to assert our own contested identities we can over step a mark and start denying each others identities. A Jew with a non-Jewish father might assert "You're either Jewish or you're not Jewish and I'm as Jewish as fucking Tevyeh". People campaigning for acceptance of interfaith and half-Jewish identities may sometimes claim people as the one of theirs regardless of how those people identifies themselves. I'm sure you can imagine equivalents for gender. It's further complicated because, simple as it should be to understand that people with similar backgrounds often have different identities, inevitably we're going to get labelled with each other's labels, even if we don't do it ourselves. That doesn't stop being mislabelled smarting. And of course there's the age old problem that we're all arguing over the scraps from the master's table and it's really tempting to try to get up the ladder by treading on each other's heads.
I don't really have a solution other than to appeal to us all being a little bit more careful and considerate with each other. I'm not perfect in this because my approach to Judaism is really binary and I struggle to fit half-Jews into it. I'm just saying that I'm not interfaith or multifaith or half-Jewish or Jewish identified or both, and I'm going to get pissed off if you call me those things. I'm a Jew and I'm a convert. I'm a Jew-by-choice but I'm going to get pissed off if you use that term and then go on to refer to Jews-by-birth as just 'Jews'. Now to the deliberate mistake in the title. Lots of women who are perfectly open about being transsexual get pissed off by the term transwoman because almost everyone who uses it doesn't use the term ciswoman when referring to women who aren't transsexual. If your fluid concepts of identity are contesting the identities of people whose identities are already marginalised and contested, more than people whose identities are reinforced by existing power structures, you're probably making a mistake somewhere along the line.
*There's a whole n'other issue about the way that so much interfaith dialogue relies upon ignoring differences between religions. Ignoring the ways in which I differ from you is no more accepting than ignoring the ways in which we're similar.
Another way in which they're similar is in the importance of accepting and respecting people's identities and the labels they use for themselves. Every so often you get someone in a queer/progressive/feminist circle declare that gender is just imaginary and doesn't really exist and ze is going to only use gender neutral language from now on and anyone who thinks they're a particular gender is just a schmuck to patriarchy and actually reinforcing it through their actions. This tends to be responded to by a transsexual pointing out that she wouldn't have gone through all of the cost and pain and hassle and side effects and loss of cis-privileged of transitioning if gender didn't fucking matter.
Sometimes, in discussions of religious matters, I feel like the pissed off transsexual woman. Sometimes during cuddly, cotton candy, 'we're all the same really' interfaith dialogue I feel like screaming "No, no actually. We're not all the same. I wouldn't have gone through the expense, hassle and exposure to antisemitism of becoming Jewish if all religions were the same really and it didn't really matter. It matters a fuck load to me."*
Things get a bit more complicated because there are some people who are genderqueer/intersex/don't really care about gender, who have been really hurt by a binary system of gender. They need to advance a concept of gender which is more fluid and muddy and liminal. Similarly, there are people who come from interfaith families or have an interfaith religious identities who find the binary of Jew/non-Jew limiting and advance a more fluid concept of Jewish identity and claim for themselves identities such as interfaith/multifaith and half-Jew.
Ideally, this shouldn't cause problems. The fact that one person is genderqueer doesn't mean that another person isn't a woman, even if she wasn't identified as female when she was born. Just because one person is interfaith doesn't mean that another person isn't a Jew, even if she was born to gentile parents. The problem comes when that in our attempts to assert our own contested identities we can over step a mark and start denying each others identities. A Jew with a non-Jewish father might assert "You're either Jewish or you're not Jewish and I'm as Jewish as fucking Tevyeh". People campaigning for acceptance of interfaith and half-Jewish identities may sometimes claim people as the one of theirs regardless of how those people identifies themselves. I'm sure you can imagine equivalents for gender. It's further complicated because, simple as it should be to understand that people with similar backgrounds often have different identities, inevitably we're going to get labelled with each other's labels, even if we don't do it ourselves. That doesn't stop being mislabelled smarting. And of course there's the age old problem that we're all arguing over the scraps from the master's table and it's really tempting to try to get up the ladder by treading on each other's heads.
I don't really have a solution other than to appeal to us all being a little bit more careful and considerate with each other. I'm not perfect in this because my approach to Judaism is really binary and I struggle to fit half-Jews into it. I'm just saying that I'm not interfaith or multifaith or half-Jewish or Jewish identified or both, and I'm going to get pissed off if you call me those things. I'm a Jew and I'm a convert. I'm a Jew-by-choice but I'm going to get pissed off if you use that term and then go on to refer to Jews-by-birth as just 'Jews'. Now to the deliberate mistake in the title. Lots of women who are perfectly open about being transsexual get pissed off by the term transwoman because almost everyone who uses it doesn't use the term ciswoman when referring to women who aren't transsexual. If your fluid concepts of identity are contesting the identities of people whose identities are already marginalised and contested, more than people whose identities are reinforced by existing power structures, you're probably making a mistake somewhere along the line.
*There's a whole n'other issue about the way that so much interfaith dialogue relies upon ignoring differences between religions. Ignoring the ways in which I differ from you is no more accepting than ignoring the ways in which we're similar.