This comes as a profound relief to me.
For years I’ve worried about the lack of respect Jews show to their transgendered rabbis.
You’d think the Holocaust would’ve educated us to be more sensitive.
Does not our Holy Torah command us not to judge men who dress as women?
I don’t see why a person’s unconventional gender choice should be a disqualification from the rabbinate.
Is a man wearing a woman’s clothing any less likely to work in Torah? Is a woman who chooses to live life as a man any less qualified to lead the davening?
What about a Yisrael who chooses to identify as a Cohen and tries to deliver the priestly benediction in an Orthodox shul?
Why not?
I’m not a cross-dresser myself, at least not on Tuesdays, but I can totally understand how wearing silky girly lingerie helps a man with a penis who has a yen to be a woman to delve more deeply in Talmud.
Only now can the truth be told. I wasn’t raised with the name Luke Ford. I was raised as “Lucy Ford.”
Normally, I won’t elaborate on this. It’s too painful. But I’ve decided that today I will tell my story so that more Jews will act more kindly towards their transgendered rabbis.
On Tuesdays, my parents made me put on women’s clothing and hang around in juice bars.
This was an unconventional choice for the Avondale College Seventh-Day Adventist community of Cooranbong, Australia and I suffered keenly.
I may have been a little ponce, but if you pricked me, did I not bleed?
One day a group of my classmates tied me to a gum tree with my lacy lingerie and had this big mean wallaby with a really thick thingamajig repeatedly sodomize me while these abos danced around in war paint pointing their bones at me.
In the distance, this group of retarded kids who were visiting the school rocked jerkily in their wheelchairs, their heads bobbing like dodo birds.
The rest of the school was at assembly where the pastor spoke about righteousness by faith.
My screams could be heard across the college and yet nobody came to my rescue.
That’s why I left Adventism and converted to Judaism.
As a child, Reuben Zellman found life anything but cut-and-dry.
