Purim and Celebrating Trans Womanhood

Purim is our joyful, positive Jewish Holiday that falls between 28th February and March 1st this year.  It is a festival celebrating freedom from oppression and the bravery of Queen Esther. Esther married the Persian King Ahasuerus after winning what would now be considered a beauty contest! But she was not what she seemed to be. Like myself, she had changed her name. A Jewish girl born, Hadassah, she refused to reveal her heritage and identity, living in secret; a closet Jewish girl in a potentially hostile community. When political events led to the planned genocide of her fellow Jews she was brave enough to come out to the King as Jewish. The event saved her own people but also herself from certain death.

When you're a child, Purim seems just a heroic story.  One of those rare tales in which the hero is a girl and everything ends happily ever after. As I grew up through a conflicted and confused childhood, tales like this took on a new and more personal meaning. Esther had a very real reason to hide and remain in the closet.  Her predecessor Queen Vashti had met her end for failing to (obediently) comply with her husband's wish to show her off naked in public, wearing only her crown. The Prime Minister, Haman, was plotting to have all Jews killed for being disloyal to the King. Queen Esther might well have been safe, living incognito in the Palace but it was a secret life of being untrue to herself and who she really was. Would she keep quiet while she saw others just like her being put to death?

Growing up, so many of us live in hiding, accepted as long as we agree to keep up appearances. . For me it was agreeing to behave and look like a boy in spite of repeated protestations that I was a girl and always would be. When I was born I was given the name Robyn. I could only be myself in secret, sneaking out in my mid teens to go shopping in town dressed as I pleased, my long hair up in bunches. Aged 13, I risked so much to do that, carrying my girl clothes in a backpack and getting changed at the loos in the city park.  Yet that too felt strange; I passed well and was treated like a girl but nobody knew my given name or who I really was. Aged 18 I came close to death, attempting suicide after years of self-harming. I felt real fear contemplating a future of living someone else's life and never being true to my identity. 

I was lucky, I'm still here. Like Esther, somehow I had the resilience and courage to come out instead and make a stand to save my own life.  When I completed my transition, I seriously contemplated going stealth. Recovering in hospital after surgery, it seemed like a plan. The pain of being stigmatised and harassed had been so tough at times. I had lost my job and I found it hard to get a new one that suited my qualifications. In a new, low paid job, someone had scrawled "Robyn Must Die" on my locker.  Why should I put up with death threats because I was openly out? I knew that I passed well. I had been out long enough to know that men found me deeply attractive. Surely, if I went somewhere new and returned to the closet, I could just get on with my life, have a husband, a family, a life and everything that other women take for granted? A bit like Esther I was tempted to just accept the beauty contest and live in secret. However, beauty is just a genetic lottery. When I looked around at others on the hospital ward I knew I couldn't live in stealth. Not everyone is so lucky, why should I let them face suicidal feelings and death threats because of hatred and stigmatisation. I made a decision to be publicly out and carry on activism and blogging.

Last summer my husband and I were peacefully walking down from our home in Manchester to Sparkle, the National Transgender Celebration. As we headed through a quiet car park a man in a white van drove at speed, straight at us, hurling abuse about 'Tranny Faggots' from his window as we ran to get out of his way. I'm not sure if he meant to kill or injure me but I felt real fear for my life.

So at Purim, I remember Queen Esther's example and celebrate.  In Judaism we have a tradition of dressing up in costume, however we want on this day.  So please, dress how you wish this Purim. In a world where some still want to see Trans people and Jews cleansed for society, it's important to be you and to claim your right to be who you are.

Freilichen Purim, 

HUGGS, Jane xx

LGBT History Month UK - Reading About Sylvia Rivera Helped Me Realise I Wasn't Alone

Kay Tobin/New York Public Library Digital Collections

I have a love/hate relationship with LGBT History Month.  History can be like a drug, we can get very high on the stories of how our elder sisters and brothers fought for our rights. We can do that without committing ourselves to carrying that struggle forward. If LGBT history becomes a sanitised, self congratulatory pat on the back; a look back at how far we’ve come, we are missing something important. 

History isn’t an island in the past, it is a moment in a continual collective struggle, something against which to define and measure yourself. Trans teens and children have few role models and reference points. Discovering about Sylvia Rivera when I was younger was a wake up call to action and a realisation that I wasn't alone. Here was someone I could finally understand and identify with.  I had found gender a bewildering and confusing concept. Sexually precocious, I grew up knowing I was a girl yet was treated as an effeminate boy.  I grew up suffering sexual abuse at the hands of a Gay man. It made me feel dirty and used but it also convinced me I wasn’t homosexual. Sylvia Rivera had been abused too, she was a gender non-conforming outcast and campaigner who unashamedly used sex work to survive and fund her campaigning.

Stonewall was already a thing when I came to adulthood. The name applied to an organisation fighting for Gay and Lesbian rights. I was pretty sure I wasn’t included. A kickass non-binary gender rights activist, Sylvia Rivera was there however during the June 1969 riot at the Stonewall Inn. She is credited as having thrown one of the first bottles! It was an event I had associated with Gay men. To find that gender queers and trans people had been involved too was a revelation.  I felt empowered to learn that someone from my community had been there at the start of a long struggle for equality and inclusion. Sylvia Rivera subsequently joined the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) to campaign for a Gay Bill of Rights in New York City.  Sadly, as Gay issues developed a more mainstream momentum, GAA dropped their inclusion of gender rights in a bid to make their campaign more acceptable.  Through it all, Rivera never stopped campaigning. What isn’t as widely remembered is her work supporting young homeless trans girls of colour working in the sex industry.  Together with Marsha P Johnson, Rivera founded the STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) house to protect and care for young trans kids hustling on the streets of NYC.  She fought continually for the inclusion of black and trans voices in the struggle for Gay rights at a time when the assimilation of Gay culture meant that gender rights got left behind.

Sylvia Rivera passed away on February 19th 2002. She died in poverty but she gave the gender variant community the inspiration to fight for inclusion that we continue today.  In spite of advances, Trans rights are still an afterthought in the struggle for fairness and equality.  Barely a week goes by without one element or the other of our community being vilified in the press.  Feminists we fight alongside want to deny our right to self identification. While society has begun to accept equal marriage, the plight of trans children is not so good.  Parents supportive of their trans children are branded as conniving in a delusion that gender can be fluid or reassigned.  Trans women are still dismissed as ‘men in dresses’ by radical feminists. Trans women like Rivera or myself, who choose to work in the sex industry are stigmatised by a society which sees us as either deviant or reinforcing gender stereotypes. Rivera fought for our acceptance as human beings, regardless of gender norms or stereotypes.  She did so long before many of us were born.

Gender queer individuals have at times been seen as an embarrassment to the LGBT Community.  Too often we iconise our heroes. We sideline individuals who are controversial and hard for the masses to identify with. If someone is uncomfortably difficult to like we can write them out of history. I want to write Sylvia Rivera back in. Sylvia Rivera was a different kind of hero, not an icon but a passionate human being. We need more like her today.

Huggs, Jane xx