sexuality

Navigating gender, sexuality

Marion Rom, who works with gender-diverse youth, spoke as part of a Beth Tikvah-hosted panel on the topic Navigating Gender and Sexuality in the 21st Century. (screenshot)

“Almost one-third of people who have gender dysphoria will attempt suicide and have mental health issues, and that’s why we often have such a high rate of kids with eating disorders who are transgender,” said Marion Rom, a counselor who works with gender-diverse youth in the Lower Mainland.

Rom was speaking as part of a March 11 panel on the topic Navigating Gender and Sexuality in the 21st Century. She defined gender dysphoria as when “your body doesn’t match the sense of who you are.” She also explained to the 65-plus attendees of the discussion the difference between sex and gender, some of the terminology around gender, and a few resources for those who want to learn more.

The panel, which was hosted by Beth Tikvah Congregation, also included Dean Kaplan, who joined the conversation from Washington, D.C., and the Abelson family – Kay, Bernard and their son Jason – who live here. The discussion was started by the congregation’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Susie Tendler.

“I think that we have a special mission, as the Jewish people, of finding people who have a potential to be marginalized and always elevating them, along with elevating everyone, to ensure that we are all in a sacred space,” said Tendler. She described her rabbinate as being “about opening doors” and a kehila kedosha, holy community, as one that creates pathways for everyone to be welcome in sacred spaces. She thanked the Zoom participants for their efforts in opening the door of community wider to “welcome everyone as their authentic selves because that’s the only way that, I believe, we really approach God.”

Rom was asked to speak by BT congregant Linda Steiner, who had heard Rom’s talk at a Habonim alumni meeting last year. The presentation was geared to older people, like Rom herself, who is 63.

She defined sexuality, and explained several terms, including lesbian (a female attracted to another female), heterosexual (females attracted to males and vice versa), bisexual (someone attracted to both males and females) and pansexual (someone attracted simply to the person, irrespective of gender). She broke down the acronym LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer; with the plus including but not limited to asexual, two spirit, and allies). She also went through some of the gender terminology, such as cisgender (“either male or female”) and transgender (someone whose sense of self doesn’t match their birth gender). She spoke briefly about hormone therapy and gender reassignment surgery.

For people wanting to start learning more about gender and sexuality, Rom suggested the books Love Lives Here by Amanda Jette Knox and Transgender Children and Youth: Cultivating Pride and Joy with Families in Transition by Elijah Nealy, the Israeli documentary Family in Transition and the narrative film The Danish Girl (or the book from which it was adapted, written by David Ebershoff).

Dean Kaplan, 28, who goes by the pronouns they, them and their, came out as non-binary a couple of years ago. They spoke about how they see themselves and their relationship to how the world sees people like them. Describing themselves as Jewish, white and having grown up upper-middle-class and with privilege, Kaplan acknowledged that these factors have “contributed to me being able to live as myself comfortably.”

Despite that comfort, Kaplan first came out as queer in terms of their sexuality, at the age of 17 or 18, before identifying as gender-nonconforming.

“An important part of identifying as queer in almost any part of the world,” said Kaplan, “is not only understanding who you are, but also, in some ways, accepting this label as ‘deviant’ by society.”

In their early 20s, Kaplan began to realize “I very much enjoy connecting with parts of myself that would be considered feminine,” such as having longer hair and wearing tights.

From a young age, they said, “I’ve had this latent sense of difference in how I want to emotionally connect with people and that played a lot into my sense that I was gender-nonconforming. I think also a little bit of it is this sense that I want to live in a world and exist in space without a lot the negative aspects of masculinity that I was raised to cherish in a lot of ways. I’m still aware of the fact that almost all of my male friends are embarrassed to cry, even alone; it’s a sign of anti-masculinity. And so, being non-binary for me is very freeing in a lot of ways. I can be who I want to be and who I feel I am without the kind of embarrassment or labels that go with certain actions for certain genders.”

That said, the reactions to their coming out were mixed and some were hurtful. They get misgendered every day – “sometimes I correct, sometimes I don’t,” said Kaplan. That will depend, for example, on whether the person making the mistake is a superior at work or a peer. “Power and economics play into my ability to be myself in the spaces I happen to be in,” they said.

Jason Abelson, 24, started his transition in 2012, but his first memory of wanting to be a boy goes back to a gymnastics class when he was in preschool, so 4 or 5 years old. Initially, he attended an Orthodox elementary school in South Africa, where he was born, but his parents switched him to a public school. He used the fact that he was a swimmer to cut his hair short in Grade 4. He hated it when his parents would correct people who would mistake him for being a boy. “I just wanted to go and hide somewhere,” he said.

When his chest began to develop in puberty, he would try and hide it, but, eventually, he quit swimming. He has since picked the sport up again, and has joined an LGBTQ+ team.

When he was younger, he said, “I didn’t know what transgender was. I didn’t know that you could transition, that the feelings I had for wanting to be a boy were experienced by anyone else until an Oprah show that my mom was watching one summer’s afternoon. In that Oprah show, they had a transgender guy and his family, and shared his story.”

Seeing the possibilities for himself, Abelson thought about next steps and started the process of transitioning, one part of which is convincing a psychologist “that you are transgender.” He then saw an endocrinologist. In Grade 10 at the time, he stayed at the same school throughout. “I finished the first semester as a girl; came back five days later as a boy,” he said. “All we did was we changed the name on the class list.”

While he was given a key to the teacher’s washroom, he didn’t want to call attention to himself, so he avoided using the facilities. “Bathrooms still do give me a little bit of anxiety,” he said.

He started hormones nine years ago, at age 15. About a year after that, he had top surgery – prior to that he had used binders to keep his chest down.

With respect to going to an Orthodox shul after he started his transition, Abelson was told that he could come to services but would have to sit in the women’s section. Even now, attending a new synagogue and sitting on the men’s side, he said, “I don’t feel like I have a place in the shul. Being gay as well, I can’t get married in that shul, so that’s still a world that is being navigated.”

Kay Abelson spoke about both the emotional journey and the “very practical life journey.” She said she struggled with those early years when her son was asserting his identity – in his clothing choices and in his desire to cut his hair short, for example.

“I found it really hard, as a mother,” she acknowledged. “And it did cause some conflict in our family.” However, she noted, “For me, the time before Jason’s transition was more of a struggle than once he transitioned…. I found the earlier time hard, before we knew what we were dealing with. Bernard and I both always had a sense that there was something with Jason when he was growing up, but we just could not put our finger on it. And so, that moment of him watching the Oprah show and having that ah-ha moment was a huge turning point for all of us.”

It took time for her and her husband to understand and digest what was happening. She had fears about what people would think and say, but people were supportive and accepting, she said.

“When you start thinking about the history and the background about all those situations that Jason mentioned,” said Bernard Abelson, such as the first time he cut his hair short. “All I wanted to do was get him earrings so that he could look more feminine.” When people would refer to his son, “I was immediately defending, ‘This is my daughter.’… I thought I was

defending him. That’s the irony of all that, is that, as a parent, you think you’re doing the right thing by

defending them … but, at the end of the day, for him, as you’ve heard, it wasn’t working for him at all.”

One thing that helped the family was watching the documentary Becoming Chaz, about Chaz Bono’s transition. Watching it helped Bernard Abelson to accept, “This is real.”

“It’s been an incredible, incredible journey for all of us,” said Kate Abelson.

While some parents go through a mourning period for the son or daughter they once had, Kay Abelson said, “I never felt like I lost anything. In fact, I actually gained something through the process because, before Jason’s transition, as you heard in his story, he never felt comfortable with who he was. He was always yearning to be someone different, so he was never really happy within himself…. When he transitioned and he could actually stand loud and proud and be who he was … it was just so exciting.”

Rom reentered the conversation by stressing that the level of grieving varies among families. She then opened the question-and-answer session that included Dean Kaplan’s dad, Des Kaplan, talking about some of his challenges in understanding his child’s gender and sexuality. There was also discussion about Jewish tradition, which identifies at least six genders, and that some Jewish communities have changed the b’nai mitzvah rituals to be more gender-inclusive.

To watch the panel discussion, without the Q&A, visit btikvah.ca/inclusion-and-diversity.

Complexities of human sexuality

Some people still act as if same-sex attraction were a crime or, at least, an abomination and ought, therefore, not be tolerated. Russia, for example, recently announced that it will not permit any of its orphaned children to be adopted by people living in jurisdictions recognizing homophilic marriages, thereby ensuring that they will not end up in any of the more liberal democracies, including Canada. Perhaps this is based on the supposition that homosexual adoptive parents will somehow transmit their sexual preference to their charges, although there is no evidence that such attraction is a learned behavior, nor, indeed, that it is inherited. And, in either case, why should it be anathematized? It evidently does not harm consenting adults and becomes a crime only if we insist that it is.

For as long as there has been human heterosexuality, there has also been homosexuality. Overwhelming psychological and historical evidence demonstrates that same-sex attraction has been a consistent feature of human society, going back at least to the earliest days of antiquity, and that it harms no one who does not, somehow, insist on being “harmed.” The only people who may suffer are homosexuals themselves who, if they live in a bigoted environment, often have to conceal their sexuality or face expressions of disapproval, including imprisonment and violence, especially if they are men; female homosexuality seems more widely accepted.

There is no mention of homosexuality in the Christian Testament. The Jewish Testament, while decrying homosexuality between men, makes no mention of sexual attraction between women, which certainly existed.

God’s destruction of Sodom was allegedly a consequence of what is described as its “depravity,” (Genesis 13:10) interpreted as sodomy, a word still appearing in some criminal codes and defined as “the unnatural sex acts between two men.” (This became the basis for a criminal indictment in the notorious 1896 trial of Oscar Wilde, which my 1929 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica describes as “moral obliquity.) But Sodom was more likely destroyed because it was notoriously inhospitable to strangers, its sole survivor being Lot, the city’s only cordial resident. (And his wife, who shortly thereafter turns into a pillar of salt because she disobeyed God’s order by looking backward at the doomed city. As a side note, while Lot exhibited remarkable concern for his male guests, that evidently did not extend to his daughters, whom he offered to the mob.)

Leviticus is more explicit. In 18:22, it states: “Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is an abomination.” This inveighing against homosexuality was likely occasioned not by presumed morality, but rather as a consequence of a far more important remonstrance, viz., “Be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28), a demographic imperative necessitated by competition among various peoples, some of them more numerous than the Israelites, in the Fertile Crescent of Canaan. The “sin” of Onan (Genesis 38:9), for example, has been interpreted as not being simply that he cast his semen on the ground in coitus interruptus with Tamar, his widowed former sister-in-law, but that he subverted God’s command to “be fruitful and multiply.”

Much effort has gone into uncovering the underlying causes/motivation(s) for homosexuality. Theories have ranged widely, yet none has adequately explained same-sex attraction in spite of its apparent inevitability among persons of both genders, its long history, and its observed appearance in non-human species.

Much effort has gone into uncovering the underlying causes/motivation(s) for homosexuality. Theories have ranged widely, yet none has adequately explained same-sex attraction in spite of its apparent inevitability among persons of both genders, its long history, and its observed appearance in non-human species. Moreover, there may not be a single cause, but rather a constellation, perhaps including social, hormonal, genetic and environmental factors and, furthermore, one ought not assume that explanations for male homosexuality, no matter how cogent, can be extended to female homosexuality (lesbianism). To place this in perspective, the causes of heterosexuality, while it is evidently the norm and can result in progeny, are also not clear, although convention, conditioning and an impulse toward parenthood must be counted prominently among them.

In our current more-accepting environment, many homosexuals have “come out of the closet.” But we may never know the full extent of homosexuality because in disapproving social-cultural environments, even its self-acknowledgement may be difficult. Indeed, in many jurisdictions, homosexual behavior is still criminal, although its practitioners are rarely indicted. Far more common is that suspected homosexuals, especially men, have been the targets of blackmail, violence and murder. Even when the public is more tolerant, there is no uniform level of acceptance, so often homosexual relations are still clandestine for fear of the reaction of relatives, employers, fellow workers and others, including heterosexual spouses. “Coming out” by formerly “closet homosexuals” is still a life-changing and challenging experience. Consequently, public homosexual behavior still is dependent on local acceptability. What is permitted, for example, in Vancouver or Tel Aviv, may precipitate expressions of disapproval elsewhere.

It is estimated that exclusively homosexual men constitute about five percent of the male population, with approximately twice that number being occasionally homosexual. From an anatomic, physiologic, genetic or endocrine point of view, homosexuality offers no reliable markers. It is neither entirely genetic nor developmental in origin. The level of gender-related hormone production in most homosexuals does not differ significantly from that of heterosexuals and, ordinarily, male and female homosexuals, in their usual behavior and appearance, can be indistinguishable from their heterosexual peers or, on the contrary, they may, in the case of males, become “queens,” or of females, “butch.” Indeed, who has not speculated on what life might have been like, had he or she been of the opposite gender? (Interestingly, all human fetuses start out with external genitalia apparently female. While there are no proven instances of parthenogenesis – the development without spermatozoa of a complete embryo – among people, it can occur in other mammals.)

To offer additional revealing commentary on the idiosyncrasies of human sexual behavior, approximately 270 days after every nighttime power outage lasting a few hours, there is almost invariably a small but significant blip in the number of babies born in the affected area.

To offer additional revealing commentary on the idiosyncrasies of human sexual behavior, approximately 270 days after every nighttime power outage lasting a few hours, there is almost invariably a small but significant blip in the number of babies born in the affected area. Evidently, when it comes to TV versus sex, the data suggest that the former is frequently preferred.

However, our culture, if not obsessed with sex, is obviously mindful of it. Advertisers certainly have discovered that sex sells. “Sexy” has now become an adjective that defines anything from form-fitting or revealing clothes to a more permissive tax bill. It usually implores us to be more attractive (“sexy”) by the profligate and indiscriminate purchase and use of a great variety of products. In any case, any mention or hint of sex, almost without fail, attracts attention.

Sexual intimacy plays a prominent role in the way men and women relate to one another and, to be complete, the way women relate to women and men to men. The desire for sexual intimacy can arise from many sources – the release of sexual tension (a large factor in adolescence and youth), an expression of love, reassurance of one’s sexual attraction and capability and, since we live in a largely competitive society, to keep up with the purported national average. People being as variegated as they are, there are any number of other conceivable reasons and their combinations. So, while the heterosexual form of sexual intimacy is predominant (and the only one that can now give rise to progeny), finding the reasons can be difficult because, as is the case in uncovering the motivation for any human activity, although the final common pathway can be an objective behavior, the impulses for it are never in the singular, and may be arcane, derivative and complex.

It is clear that traditional Judaism does not approve of homosexuality, although congregations, individual Jews and rabbis may have a more accepting and realistic approach. Yet, the Talmud has the virtue of candor, suggesting, for example, frequencies, according to profession, of (heterosexual) intercourse, something quite unimaginable in Christian commentary, especially when one considers the Catholic priestly vow of chastity and that the preeminent female in Christianity is considered a virgin, even after the birth of Jesus’ younger sibling(s).

When it comes to all (non-coerced) sexual behavior, former prime minister Pierre Trudeau cogently declared that “the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.” It’s a sensible sentiment also expressed, in pithier form and broader terms, by Jimmy Durante, a popular madcap comedian of the 1930s and ’40s, known affectionately as “The Schnozz” because of his prominent proboscis: “Leave da peepul,” he vigorously intoned, “da hell alone!”

Eugene Kaellis has a doctorate in biochemical endocrinology. He is the author of several publications, including Making Jews, on the theme of the current basic problem of Diaspora Jewry, which is available from lulu.com.