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ibilenews · 5 years ago

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Ultra-Orthodox and trans: 'I prayed to God to make me a girl'

When Abby Stein came out as trans, she sent shock waves through the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic community. A direct descendant of Hasidic Judaism's founder, The Baal Shem Tov, Abby's parents considered her their first-born son and a future rabbi - but she was adamant that she was a girl.

My dad is a rabbi, and having a son was a big deal. He would always tell me that after five girls he had almost given up on having a boy, and how much it meant to him. I almost felt bad for him throughout my childhood - a feeling of: "I'm so sorry, but I can't give you what you want."

I didn't know there were other people like me, but I knew what I felt - I just saw myself as a girl.

I sometimes wish that I'd had a teacher who was transphobic, because that would have meant I knew trans people existed. In the Hasidic community they simply never spoke about it.

What kept me sane during my childhood was my imagination.

When I was six I started collecting newspaper clippings about organ transplants - lung, kidney, heart and so on. In my mind, the plan was simple: one day, I would go to a doctor, show them my impressive collection of newspaper clippings, and they would perform a full body transplant, turning me into a girl.

When I got a bit older, I realised that wasn't realistic, so I came up with my next idea, which was to ask God. I grew up in a very religious family, and we were told God could do anything.

So, aged nine, I wrote this prayer that I said every night: "Holy creator, I'm going to sleep now and I look like a boy. I am begging you, when I wake up in the morning I want to be a girl. I know that you can do anything and nothing is too hard for you...

"If you do that, I promise that I will be a good girl. I will dress in the most modest clothes. I will keep all the commandments girls have to keep.

"When I get older, I will be the best wife. I will help my husband study the Torah all day and all night. I will cook the best foods for him and my kids. Oh God, help me."

The Hasidic community is the most gender-segregated society I've ever known or heard about - and I have researched gender-segregated communities quite a bit.

There are even some Hasidic communities in upstate New York where men and women are told to walk on separate sides of the streets - it's the closest thing that exists now to a 19th Century Eastern European Jewish shtetl (village).

From the second you start preschool, the sexes are totally separated. Boys and girls are told not to play together.

Even though in Jewish law there is no prohibition against hugging or holding hands with your sister or mom, when I was growing up it was still considered something Hasidic boys shouldn't do.

I never saw anyone naked. I did not know that my sisters and I had different body parts down under. It was never discussed.

Even so, when I was four years old I had this intense feeling of anger towards my own private parts. They didn't feel like part of me. It was an extremely strong feeling that I cannot explain to this day.

At that time, my mom would prepare the bath and let me play with the toys in the bathtub.

She used to keep a small tray of safety pins in the cabinet by the sink, so I would sneak out and take these safety pins and prick this one very specific part of my body.

It's not something that I encourage anyone to do, but I wanted to make it feel pain, almost like punishing it.

One time my mom walked in on me as I was doing this and she freaked out. I don't remember what she said exactly, but it was a very clear message that: "You are a boy and you're supposed to act like one, and don't ever say anything that might challenge that."

At the age of three, Hasidic boys have their first haircut, called the upsherin, which is when you get the side curls, or payos. That's the first kind of physical manifestation that indicates to the world - and to yourself - that you are a boy.

I did not want to have that haircut. I was throwing a temper tantrum for hours. "I want to have long hair! Why can my sisters have long hair and I can't?"

At 13, I had my bar mitzvah, which is when a boy becomes a man - so that was very tough.

I have some positive memories of it, like having a party and getting lots of gifts, but the concept of: "You are now a man," was really challenging. It was a celebration I felt I shouldn't be having.

If you want to get a sense of how isolated the Hasidic community is, until I was 12 I thought that the majority of people in the world were Jewish and that the majority of Jews were ultra-Orthodox - neither of which is correct.

Take any aspect of pop culture of the 90s - Britney Spears, or Seinfeld - I didn't even know it existed.

I didn't speak English until I was 20, just Yiddish and Hebrew. At school we just learned the ABCs and how to write our names and addresses, and that only lasted from fourth to eighth grade, for an hour a day - and even that hour was split between English and maths. Maths only went up to the level of long division, and we never touched any science or history, outside of some Jewish history.

The expectation, growing up, was that I would work as a teacher or rabbinical judge.

If you lead a synagogue or teach at a school in the Hasidic community, you're also called a rabbi, regardless of whether you have been ordained or not - but I actually wanted to be ordained. There were several reasons why.

Part of it was that I wanted to know exactly what I was rebelling against - my struggle with my identity as a woman meant I questioned everything I was being told about religion and God. At school, they called me the "kosher rebel".

At the same time, another part of me was hoping that if I really gave my entire self to it, all these feelings about who I was were just magically going to go away.

When I was 16, I immersed myself in Jewish mysticism, called Kabbalah. That was where I first came across a religious text that justified my existence.

In a 16th Century study of human souls called The Door of Reincarnation, I read: "At times, a male will reincarnate in the body of a female, and a female will be in a male body."

It gave me hope that maybe I wasn't crazy.

Even though I knew I was really a woman, I had an arranged marriage like everyone in the Hasidic community. You're born, you eat, you breathe, you get married at age 18.

My parents set it up. My bride had to come from a rabbinical dynasty and adhere to the same dress codes, which in my family are extremely unusual - so much so that there were probably only 20 to 50 girls in the entire world that were acceptable matches.

Fraidy and I met for about 15 to 20 minutes, and then we were engaged. We didn't meet again until our wedding, a year later.

At first, things went well. I liked her, she's an amazing woman, really smart and loving. We had great conversations, we never fought. As far as arranged marriages go, it was perfect.

It was the first time I had lived with a woman, which felt good. She was quite fashionable, and when we went shopping it was a way of putting myself in her shoes and thinking: "Oh, what would I get?"

Hasidic men wear black and white clothes with almost no choices whatsoever. Women get to explore a bit more, although it has to be modest, and certain colours, like red and pink, are off-limits.

But when Fraidy got pregnant, I really struggled. It was as if everything - gender, religion, my family, my son - was collapsing in on me and punching me.

It was like gender was hitting me in the face, it was just so present - what kind of clothes we were going to buy for the baby, whether we were going to do a circumcision on the eighth day - it was impossible not to face it every second.

My son's birth was the final, knock-out punch. I wanted to give my child the best life possible, but how could I, if, by the age of 20, I didn't even know what "a good life" was?

So I went online.

I knew that there was a place called the internet where you could connect with people and find information. There was such a strong focus on telling us how not to connect to the internet by mistake that I had learned about Wi-Fi and Google.

I borrowed a friend's tablet and hid in a toilet cubicle at a shopping centre that had public Wi-Fi.

My first search was whether a boy could turn into a girl - in Hebrew, I didn't speak English at the time - and on the first or second page of the results, there was the Wikipedia page about transgender people. That was the first time I learned the term and realised there were other people who felt like me.

Imagine struggling with something, whether it's physical or emotional, and you go to a doctor or therapist who for the first time in your life tells you: "Oh, what you are feeling is called XYZ, and here is what you can do to feel better, to find your place in the world."

Another amazing discovery was that there was a community of people online who had left ultra-Orthodox and Hasidic communities and had not just survived, but thrived.

A few weeks later I stopped being religious. I don't think it was obvious to many people because I was still living a religious life outwardly, but I stopped observing - for example, I started using my phone on Shabbat... anything that people wouldn't see.

My wife was the first person in the community that I spoke to about it, about six months after our son's circumcision.

I didn't leave my marriage. For a year, we tried to save it, but my ex was forced to leave me by her family. They took her away, quite literally. I lived in our apartment for the next few weeks, hoping that she and my son would come back.

Then, for a while, I moved back in with my parents. When I came out to my dad as an atheist, he said, "No matter what happens, you are still my child."

Once I realised that there was no way for me to live with my son full-time, I decided there was nothing left in the community for me.

Leaving is like emigrating - not just to a new country, but a new continent. It's a new century. It's time travel!

Suddenly, I was in a world where there were unlimited options for food and clothing. I bought my first pair of jeans and a red-and-white checked shirt. I always sucked at male fashion.

Language was the biggest obstacle to overcome, because when you grow up in New York, people expect you to speak English.

For three years I didn't speak to anyone in my family about my gender. I came out to my dad on 11 November 2015, a few months after starting hormone therapy.

It took my dad about an hour to even grasp what I was telling him, and that was thanks to certain religious texts that I showed him - one of which was the passage about male and female souls that I had discovered when I was studying Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism.

My dad admitted that trans people exist, which was quite impressive, because a lot of fundamentalist religious communities don't.

Then he told me: "You need to have a person who has Holy Spirit, in order to be able to tell you if you are really trans."

My reaction was: "I think two therapists and a doctor are good enough."

But he obviously disagreed, and a few minutes after that he pretty much told me that he would never talk to me again.

At that moment, it really hurt. But the reality was that by the time I came out, it was already three years after I had left the Hasidic community. I had enrolled in college, and was a member of some extremely progressive and amazing Jewish and queer communities - so I didn't lose any friends and my life wasn't upended by the rift with my family.

I still text my parents every week - my dad, my mom doesn't even have text messages - and the day that they are ready to talk to me, I will talk with them.

My ex-wife was not allowed to speak to me from the second we got divorced. My son is the love of my life.

I like to focus on the silver lining: instead of thinking about the 10 siblings who don't speak to me, I focus on the two who do. Anyway, most people I know nowadays outside the Hasidic community only have two siblings, if that.

Life is actually better than I could have ever imagined. I used to struggle with depression almost non-stop. Since I came out, I haven't had a day of waking up and feeling that there's no reason for me to wake up. Before I transitioned, there were days that I felt like that.

Being out as ourselves, being trans, being LGBTQ, is something that creates a life worthy of celebration, not just worthy of living. It's beautiful.

I was the first person in the Hasidic community to come out as trans, but there have been quite a few people since, and obviously, I'm being blamed for that.

I definitely think I can take some credit for it - the Hasidic community is never going to be the same again.

Abby Stein's autobiography is called Becoming Eve: My Journey from Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi to Transgender Woman

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captainserval · 7 years ago

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The Anxiety Industry

I was watching this clip of jack reacher reflecting on how little ‘freedom and democracy’ meant for the masses, looking upon the ill and broken backed corporate workers in a plush glass walled office - the kind people aspire to work in… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWs8J-rz-7A

Jack Reacher: Well, imagine you’ve never seen it. Imagine you’ve spent your whole life in other parts of the world being told every day you’re defending freedom. And finally you decide you’ve had enough. Time to see what you’ve given up your whole life for. Maybe get some of that freedom for yourself. Look at the people. Now tell me which ones are free. Free from debt. Anxiety. Stress. Fear. Failure. Indignity. Betrayal. How many wish that they were born knowing what they know now? Ask yourself how many would do things the same way over again? And how many would live their lives like me.

It seems like the global mainstream media, marketing and outrage ‘industry’ sustains some of its life energy from

creating and spreading fakenews

breaking news

laying guilt trips on people

the Shame Stick.

People are sought to be kept in a constant state of low agitation and anxiety, not enough to go nuts immediately but demoralized and cowed down by circumstances over the long term so as to be fed “solutions” by the very same set of entities that create and project these “problems” (via a amplification lens). All coupled with pervasive data mining to figure out how people are reacting to the barrage of stimuli and respond with targeted ads and campaigns - brings in the big money.

Fakenews - we already see it being mainstream media funded deliberately to blatantly support whichever set of shadow lords are behind them. There is not even the pretence of just being a impartial observer anymore and reporting things, no - the news has to be delivered as a form of political and social commentary in alignment with those funding the message and buttering the bread. Eminent patrakars are the well rewarded “workers” for political and corporate interests and what will be the slant of news gets decided over rounds of single malts and kababs in deep leather armchairs of plush clubs with decades long waiting lists for the hoi-polloi.

Breaking news - lest anyone have any peace and quiet during the workday, the breaking news cycle was invented to keep people anxious when they are having lunch in the office cafetaria, after a rough morning in the salt mines and more work piled up for the afternoon. This task is given to breathless young newbie reporters with photogenic faces, because if the breaking news is not alarming enough, atleast people will keep admiring the reporters looks and impeccable diction! anything and everything can be breaking ranging from “xyz rogue country’s leader released a giant fart which killed ten migrating geese” , “eating roti can cause cancer a new study claims”, “pink fox spotted near the london bridge” and old faithfuls like “xyz lashes out at Modi, says enough is enough” or threats to personal and family security to incite mild panic and pervasive paranoia as in “every human on the street is a potential rapist and child predator until proven innocent”

Laying guilt trips on people - this can be anything that one did, or ones ancestors did, or allegedly did, or one might allegedly do - oppressing other communities, not doing enough for whatever are the anointed morally righteous causes of the day, just belonging to a particular culture or religion or country deemed as inferior by the ubermensch buddhijeebis who write history to suit their narrative..one can be a guilt soaked criminal just by passively existing in a glass box, because all this is not based on our deeds or thoughts, but on bucketing and marking people by self proclaimed moral pillars and scholars who say they know everything and their intrepretation of nebulous events is the law. any disagreement is ThoughtCrime and must again be punished. The penitent must be forced to admit their inferiority and disengage from their past, to align with the “right directions” which will be shown to him or her. The monetary inducement side of the religious conversion “industry” operates on this model. As does those who prey on young idealistic students fresh in university, who want to do good, are not sure how and are ripe for mentoring and brainwashing into the desired ‘worldview’ by older ‘thought leaders’ and ‘change agents’.

The Shame Stick - While some measures above are like a area based artillery salvo, damaging everyone in the general vicinity, this is a well oiled stick for targeting the individual and enforcing control, anxiety inducement and even monetary gain from targeted gap-filler / feel-better / solution marketing. How does a lion catch a deer?, first it scatters the herd, breaking off vulnerable individuals from their mutually interlocked protective system, then chasing them alone until caught. The same dynamics are at play here - isolate and attack, isolate and attack!

For men some example levers that are commonly used

you are not fit or handsome enough

you do not earn enough

you are unable to satisfy or measure up to your partner

your job is not glamorous and powerful - how many people in your team?

your car / house / tv is smaller than Mr.X

you are not able to give the kids whatever luxuries Mr.Y does

questioning and making fun of deeply held religious and cultural beliefs

for women, some examples are

you are not beautiful enough

you are fat

you are of loose character

you are rebellious, talk back insolently and not obedient to your man

you neglect the kids and do not keep house properly

you are not educated enough

you are dumb and not bright enough

you cannot face the tough outside world alone

your cooking is poor - with others present to overhear

criticism of her family background

peer pressure to look good on social media

Each of these levers of control has two aspects

there is one or more industry that benefits from the anxiety and unmet expectations and the need to “close the gap” to feel better - whether it is the huge cosmetic industry, apparel, shoes, aphrodisiacs(!), lenders, fitness, cos who have staked it all on selfie cameras … everyone has a hand in people’s pockets

control and modulate the recipients behaviour to the advantage of those doing the messaging

To meet someone who understands the nature of these mental traps and has escaped the net that has snared billions of hapless sheeple is to meet a really “free” human being in the true sense. They are not common, but they exist, often hiding quietly in between the sheeple, to not present a target to powerful thoughtpolice drones always patrolling and sniffing for signs of dissent and rebellion in the ranks.

The world continues in this state of semi mental slavery, not too different from the ancient and middle ages where the feudal lords and mansabdars told people what to think and any dissent was harshly punished. Socrates, Galileo, Hypatia of alexandria..the list is endless.

90% people have no appreciation of being in the matrix and no idea of why certain things “just happen”. They exist, they produce, they reproduce, they consume. They do not matter to the powers-that-be.

9% have no control or shaping ability over the happening, but atleast understand the why of it after the fact, after some deep thinking.

The 1% elite who understand what is going to happen and why it is being made to happen, before it happens, and can change the course of events to a more dharmic/adharmic direction per their interest are a mixture of the most accomplished white-collar-criminals/oligarchs/’thought shapers’ walking around plus a small subset what I call the surviving True Jedi. Their temples have been razed and their ranks thinned by the Imperium but they do exist and continue the rebellion.Hope survives, albeit on a thin thread.

Over time, falling prey to the anxiety industry takes a emotional and physical toll on people and affects their productivity and enthusiasm in all other parts of life. Paranoid, demoralized, browbeaten, sheeplike obedience, fearful, defensive, lacking in confidence - is that the future of the world unless this industry is taken apart or atleast the messaging roundly ignored by all ?

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