Psalm 11:16

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for Nasia
You are making me now,
Right now, the clay of me
Warm in your hands,
The hands of me warmed
By your hands that shape them, shape a heart
That’s never beaten, been beaten,
Skin that shivers in secret places,
Places that will never be touched
Except by the maker
Hunched patiently over
The stupidity of matter,
Leaving your mark between my eyes, my hips,
In the clay turning slowly in your hands,
Blinking a little in your light
As I learn to forget
The tenderness you reveal
In the act of making, to confuse
The feeling of your fingers
Moving inside me
With smaller, less luminous fingers
That will never reach as deep, whose love
Will never make me
Something that can think, can suffer,
As your love, finger by finger,
Is making me now. The web versions of our print articles are now hosted by Duke University Press, Tikkun’s publisher. Click here to read an HTML version of the article or to download the PDF version. Tikkun 2017 Volume 32, Number 4:55

The Genesis of Gender

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A closer look at the Book of Genesis reveals how deeply the gender binary is ingrained in our culture. What would it mean to smash this binary?

Both Wilderness and Promised Land: How Torah Grows When Read Through LGBTQ Eyes

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B’reishit—in the beginning of the Torah, and the beginning of the world—there was God, a very queer God. Unlike other deities described in Iron Age texts, this God didn’t have a form or face or identifiable role in the natural world. In other Iron Age creation stories, deities are action heroes, creating order out of chaos by slaying monsters, other deities, and occasionally their parents. In Genesis, God brings order out of chaos simply by speaking. No blood, no pantheon, no rivals, no triumphs to portray on temple walls, nothing to visualize or imagine.

Once Out of Nature: Life Beyond the Gender Binary

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To truly include transgender people within Abrahamic religious traditions, we have to shatter the idol of the gender binary and face the truth that trans people embody—the truth that the gender binary represents neither the nature of nature, nor the nature of humanity, nor the nature of God.

The Stolen Blessing

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The Torah has little to say about transsexuality, but it has a lot to say about people who do hard-to-explain and sometimes terrible things in order to be true to themselves. My personal archetype was Jacob. I had never liked Jacob, but even as a child I recognized his life as an uncomfortably apt metaphor for mine.

Truth

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When I began living as a woman, my children’s world split open. As the truth of my gender collided with the truth of their pain at losing the man they loved, it seemed there was no world we could inhabit together — until love taught us that no matter what gender I expressed, I would always be their father.