I. Looking
“The right to look is not about merely seeing. It begins at a personal level with the look into someone else’s eyes to express friendship, solidarity, or love. That look must be mutual, each inventing the other, or it fails.” – Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Right to Look”
Growing up, I hated davening. The women’s side of the mechitza positioned me as a passive actor, overlooking the men’s prayer. When I was younger I would insist I wanted to be on the men’s side so I could be a part of the action. The high barrier, erected from wood with curtains drawn shut, meant I could hear, but could not see, the men who led the prayer and read from the Torah. Even in synagogues with low or glass mechitzas, prayer was an act of voyeurism. I looked, but no one was looking back.
The mechitza erased women from the visual imagination of the Orthodox men who attended services, reducing them to mere onlookers of community life, but it did not allow them to escape surveillance in the form of modesty laws. Surveillance defined my early teenage years, from dress codes to skirt checks to physical barriers. My high school taped the school dress code to the lockers of all of the female students—a reminder, or a warning?
I started to wonder whom modesty laws served to protect in high school, when my principal checked my skirt length—and the skirt length of all the female students—every morning for four years straight. To be coded female meant to bear the dual burden of being a passive onlooker and a surveilled subject. The visual imagination of Orthodox Judaism meant women were disappeared into the margins, transformed into onlookers, but at the same time, ever-present in the minds of the men who surveyed them.
II. Contagion
“Tell me how your community constructs its political sovereignty and I will tell you what forms your plagues will take.” — Paul B. Preciado, “Learning From the Virus”
What does it mean to be a threat? My classmates’ mothers ordered them not to talk to me after outing me as queer. Were they scared I was contagious? Were they scared of what I could do?
Ironically, I was much more scared of them than they were of me. For all the social contagion panic, I spent the entirety of my time in high school trying desperately to convince myself and everyone around me that I was a good, heterosexual girl—the kind your son would want to marry, and you would want to raise your grandchildren. An ideal shidduch with a perfect resume.
Of course, I was much more interested in the things that made men into good shidduchim. I studied Talmud daily and learned to recite Torah. Despite my efforts, I could never figure out how to be a good Orthodox girl. Even when I wasn’t presenting queer, I was too manly, too outspoken, too zealous. I could never get it right—I was a source of my parents’ unending embarrassment.
Even outside of religious expectations, I couldn’t be a teenage girl correctly. I surveyed my classmates relentlessly, buying the same clothes, makeup, perfumes, and soaps as them all in the hopes of someday feeling like I performed femininity correctly. For all my efforts, I could not escape the haunting and pervasive belief that I would never be a woman correctly, at a great risk to the women around me. What does it mean to know you are a threat?
III. Transgression
“Being queer saved my life. Often we see queerness as deprivation. But when I look at my life, I saw that queerness demanded an alternative innovation from me. I had to make alternative routes; it made me curious; it made me ask, ‘Is this enough for me?’” – Ocean Vuong
The night after I kissed a girl for the first time, I was visited by a strange dream. I stood in a kitchen facing the girl I kissed. We were married. She wore a sheitel, a long black maxi skirt, and an oversized sweater, with a baby propped on her hip. A happy domestic scene—the future I was told awaited me. But I was disembodied, incorporeal—there was no space for a second woman in an Orthodox marriage. When I awoke, I knew there was no future for me here.
My father’s friend once joked that in Orthodox Judaism, what really mattered was being a good person deep down. To be an Orthodox Jew always meant your actions were important. My day was divided into ritual observances, daily commandments, and an ever-constant knowledge of what was and what was not allowed. I must pray three times a day. I must cover my collarbones and my knees. I must put on the right shoe first and the left shoe last. I must first tie the left shoe and then the right one. Eating pork is an aveirah. Using the computer to do homework onShabbat is an aveirah. Being alone in a room with a boy is an aveirah. Sharing a bed with a girl is allowed, but it is an aveirah to kiss her.
I couldn’t seem to get out of trouble, no matter how hard I tried. Everything I did was an aveirah, a transgression. Talking back was a transgression. Asking the wrong questions was a transgression. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time was a transgression. Having the wrong friends was a transgression. But the biggest transgression of all was the things I thought about—kissing girls, transitioning, kissing boys the way I wanted to.
Despite my inner turmoil, I still wanted to believe I could fit into the framework and life path I inherited. I still desired an Orthodox marriage and family. After all, I had never known an alternative vision of what I could do with my life. Every adult in my life expected it from me, and no one ever told me there was a different option in life. Kissing a girl made me realize that that future was never going to happen for me—and if I was never going to be an Orthodox mother and wife, I started to ask for the first time what I could be.
IV. Haunting
“Wronging wrongs, so reviled in a waking life, seems to be the work of nightmares and hauntings and all the stuff that comes after opportunities to right wrongs and write wrongs have been exhausted.” — Eve Tuck and C. Ree, “A Glossary of Haunting”
In college, my brother and I liked to play a game at the shabbes table. He would share a story about something unspeakable that happened at our high school, I would laugh, and respond with a worse story. We went back and forth until my father’s face, usually a picture of cool calm collectedness, became flushed with anger. Everybody lost when we played this game.
My father tried to mollify me and my brother by telling us it was a long time ago and that our Rabbis didn’t know any better but I just couldn’t get over the mistreatment and homophobia I endured. I felt desperate for my father to acknowledge the pain that was eating me alive, but he was consumed by grief that his children abandoned the path he fought to carve out for himself. We could never see each other past our own anger and hurt.
I haunt my father. I remind him of all of his perceived shortcomings. I refuse to be subtle. My brother gently and quietly rebels, following his own path assuredly and steadfastly—I loudly declare my rebellion for the world to see. I worry that my father faults me for the fact that he has no Orthodox children and certainly no Orthodox grandchildren (my grandmother tells me trans people can’t even make grandchildren, much less Orthodox ones). I confounded him in my mess and my righteous anger. He never knew what to do with me.
I’ll always hold out hope you become observant again, he whispered with his eyes closed when I confessed I wasn’t Orthodox anymore.
V. Being
“…crushing scrutiny is compounded a hundred-fold for trans subjects who must always navigate others’ relentless attempts to read their body as evidence of the past instead of seeing them fully as a person in the present,” — David J. Getsy, “Ten Queer Theses on Abstraction”
My ex was quick to declare that religious Jews (them) were so behind secular Jews (us). Never mind how many times I gently, and then angrily, reminded her the religious Jews in question were my entire extended family and closest loved ones. Despite my indignation towards my ex, when the president of the synagogue I attended in my youth told me years later that secular Jews—motivated by sex and drug use—can’t handle the spiritual requirements of Orthodox Judaism I stood silently, feeling like a child being admonished by my rabbi again.
Truthfully, I have found secular Jews, and people at large, just as capable of policing, surveillance, sexism, homophobia, and racism as their Orthodox Jewish counterparts. The world on the other side of the metaphorical mechitza does not resemble an enlightened bastion of humanitarian ideals, nor a perpetual den of iniquity.
In this body, in this world, my being is perpetually subject to others assumptions. In the five years since I left, no one bothered to ask me why I stopped being Orthodox. If they did, I would tell them I was pushed out before I ever had the choice to leave or stay.
