“I was born female and raised as a girl. My Jewish history is kind of complicated, but from the age of six on, I grew up in the ultra-orthodox Jewish community. That community is extremely binary. You are either a boy or a girl, and you sit in your designated place at synagogue, school, or camp. So I grew up in a very segregated community where I was always with the girls. I felt from a very young age that I should have been a boy, and wished I was a boy. I didn’t know that it was even a possibility because I was very sheltered from the media; though back then there wasn’t much in the media anyway about LGBT at all. When I was 21, I met a transgender person for the first time. He was actually also a Jew. Someone told me “that person used to be a girl,” and my mind was blown. I realized that I would be transgender if I wasn’t orthodox. I really believed that god doesn’t make mistakes, and this must be the thing I have to work through and force myself through in my life. That was the message I was always given growing up. I went to therapy, and my therapist who was an orthodox Jew encouraged me to get manicures on a weekly basis and we did a lot of inner-child work and talked about the possibility of sexual abuse. All these things are okay, but at the end of the day it didn’t change the fact that I had gender dysphoria and felt uncomfortable in the gender I was assigned at birth. Between the ages of 20 and 25 I essentially came out as bisexual, and was perceived to be a lesbian because I looked really masculine. I was then out for a little while as gender queer, and then finally came out to myself as transgender in 2007. I began the process of transitioning that summer, and have been living happily ever after even since.”
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