My Two Pennies Worth
an attempt to Educate
and take away misunderstandings

While writing this section of my homepage I'm very well aware that I may be overrating my own qualifications, I'm not TS, not a religious scholar, all I am is a computer programmer with a physics background and a hang to philosophical questions. Nevertheless I'm also a human being with some common sense and a love for people, this combined an ability to observe and to learn makes me believe that I can make a contribution to the removal of misunderstandings and outright hostility.

Initially I wrote an single document called "My Two Pennies Worth" in which I make the attempt to counter some of the, in my view, horrible things said about Dana and TS/TG people in general. In this article I reach the conclusion that most if not all hostility finds its root in fear and insecurities within those who either straight-out condemn or otherwise engage themselves in ridicule when confronted with the subject of TS/TG. I further conclude that those fears and insecurities are equally valid within the ultra-orthodox/fundamentalist (within Judaism and its two major offspring's Christianity, Islam) as in the more secular segments of society.

Please read my first article My Two Pennies Worth.

My own conclusions are the following:

1) Somebody born with a male body and a female essence, who underwent an operation aimed at a gender change, is a woman. In this context, I will argue that in essence this person always has been a woman who merely had the bad fortune to be born "wrong" body.

2) Contrary to what has been claimed by some the desire to undergo such surgical procedures has nothing to do with a fancy or a self-induced misconception in respect to true beingness.

3) Adverse reactions in both male and female subjects are essentially fear driven and originate from personal insecurities.

4) There are no valid religious objections which can be made against surgical procedures geared at a gender change and subsequent sexual activities. What I will show is that in most if not all cases the application of religious argumentation in an attempt to demonize trans-sexuality, consist of an abuse of God's name in order to mask that what is pointed at under (3).

In an excellent article, What Transsexuality Is: Definition, Cause, and History, Jennifer Diane Reitz reaches the same conclusions as I pointed at in my own article. To be honest I'm a little proud of that as I hold her in high regard.

Transsexuality means having the wrong body for the gender one really is. (a transsexual is a mind that is literally, physically, trapped in a body of the opposite sex.)

Transsexuals suffer because they are trapped in a body of the wrong sex. This hurts so much that they are driven to fix that problem, or die trying. Transsexuality begins in the womb and occurs in many animals besides man. Transsexuality and homosexuality seem to share a common prenatal causality, but are not the same thing. Transsexuality is sometimes associated with things it is not really related to, such as crossdressing, for social or political reasons.

Transsexuals have always existed. In the ancient world, transsexuality was both accepted and respected. Throughout the ages, transsexuals have attempted to correct the error of their bodies, with varying results. The modern, technological world at last provides a real chance for the transsexual to finally, truly correct the errors of Nature.

I strongly suggest to read her article, What Transsexuality Is: Definition, Cause, and History, before reading any further.

Politics and Controversy
(I found this article somewhere on the net, I'm not sure who wrote it)
(article in italics)

After winning Dana said "I can't believe, even now, that I am number one. But I did it for Israel and no one can take that away from me". True, no one can take the experience from her but they can, and have, attacked her gender from moral, political and religious perspectives. I believe that it is important that Dana is both Israeli and Jewish. The Jewish culture is steeped in a richness of history and ritual and because of this issues of transsexuality are thrown into sharp relief against the backdrop of 5758 years.

The issues that Dana's success high lighted for the Jewish and Israeli people are those transsexuals of all cultures face everyday.

Outside her Tel Aviv apartment the fans were so dense traffic had to be stopped and the celebration was relayed around the world by CNN. But others were not so pleased. A member of the orthodox religious Shas party Shlomo Ben Izra called her an "abomination". Rabbi Shlomo ben Ivri, of the Knesset stated that "undergoing a sex change is worse than an act of sodomy ..... choosing her is sending message of darkness to the world". The Shas party even threatened to defeat the government if she were selected. "A hybrid creature, a cross between a man and a woman, is not the kind of produce we need to represent the chosen people. Such things were even unheard of in Sodom" they added.

Many mistakenly believe that Judaism is a homogeneous and uniform belief system. The truth is that there are as many factions as in Christianity. Rabbi Dr. Jonathan Romain of the Reform Synagogues of Great Britain said "Dana International's sexuality is totally irrelevant to her ability to sing well or perform on behalf of her country, just as anybody else's sexuality should have no bearing on their professional life unless it interferes with their work".

In the face of open hostility in her own country Dana did not withdraw "winning was sweet revenge" she said and described the internal struggles in Israel between the conservative orthodoxy and the people outside her apartment "cheering for freedom, human rights, for democracy. I do not need the Rabbis to tell me that I am acceptable to God. I have my own romance going on with the Lord".

Modern day Judaism and Israel are curiously tolerant of homosexuality but not so in matters of gender. Talmudic law is complex. Generally gender reassignment surgery is forbidden, as for men it involves castration and for women sterilization (Leviticus. 22:24, The Gemara: Shabbat 110b). Hormone treatment is also religiously controversial. Post surgery there are religious and state legal questions. In strict Halachic law gender is determined by the nature of the external sex organs. As state and religion in Israel are linked what follows are serious questions about, marriage, divorce, birth documentation of sex, "appropriate" sexual partners and even circumcision.

The orthodox position is articulated by Professor Bleich of Yeshiva University who states that as gender is irreversibly determined at birth and surgery cannot result in reproductive organs then there cannot be "true change". The strict Halachic position says that ones subjective sense of gender does not allow surgical correction. Following this then a transsexual is not permitted to have sex with man, even after surgery as surgery did not change the legal (religious) gender. However Rabbi Waldenberg of the Supreme Rabbinical Court maintains that surgery does effect a change, but this is a minority position.

These are highly complex issues and steeped in tradition, religious and societal beliefs. I am not Jewish and I apologize for any transgressions I may have made.

My purpose in writing this is that there is a clarity about Judaism, even with it's different factions, that is missing in many other cultures, especially the "melting pot" of North America. Dana's winning threw discussion of what transsexuality is and is not into the public arena along with all the societally determined extremes.

Christianity was born of Judaism and in general the belief that genital sex determines gender identity is the predominant conviction of Western society. The issues outlined above are observed in American Republicanism, the Canadian Reform Party, Roman Catholicism, Evangelicals of all persuasions, "rural North America", the British Tories, "downtown" business types, middle class social gatherings, soccer and hockey fans. Transsexual individuals invoke unease and disease in others. That which we cannot understand we condemn and destroy. Transsexualism challenges the fundamental doctrines upon which our society was constructed.

In my first article I made a number of assertions in regards to the religious controversy surrounding the subject of TS. From my own perspective there is in fact no controversy and I fully agree with Dana when she speaks of an own romance with God. Nevertheless there will be many people, TS or otherwise, who find themselves in an inner conflict in regards to the religious implications of undergoing a sex-change. As Jennifer Diane Reitz made it abundantly clear that we are not speaking of a matter of choice, I feel it extremely important to clear the religious controversy up as not doing so would leave, at least some, in a catch 22 situation. As I pointed out earlier, I'm not a religious scholar, but nevertheless with the application of some logic I may well be able to at least contribute to the resolution of the controversy. In order to illustrate the extend in which religious aspects can impact on an individual I include an extract of an article by Esther Hecht written for the Jerusalem Post.

Dana International speaks about her change of sexual identity in the most matter-of-fact way. But many transsexuals - those who are still experimenting with plucking their eyebrows or manicuring their nails (gestures the uninitiated wouldn't even notice) and those who have undergone the complex process of a full identity change - don't dare reveal who they are.

Bracha is one of them. So fearful is she of being found out that she agreed to be interviewed only by phone and asked that her real name not be used.

In a voice that is startlingly and unmistakable feminine, Bracha - today in her thirties - says she was only four years old when she began to sense that her male body was a cruel mistake. In her home in Europe, the boy lived in terror that someone would find out his secret desire to be a girl. I was sure that if I ever let anything slip, everyone would know," she recalls. "I would fix in my head that something was a 'girl' thing, and I would stay away from it. For a long time I wouldn't wear white socks, because I saw my little sisters wore them."

The boy never felt he could tell his parents. Instead, they saw only the result of his pent-up frustration: uncontrollable rages. When he became religiously observant while in college, they saw this as yet another of his strange behaviors. When he married in his early twenties and decided to move to Israel, this was seen as even stranger.

One month after the couple arrived here, something snapped. He had thought marriage would help him live with his secret desires, but it did just the opposite. It was then he told his wife about his realization that "who I am is something I want, but what I am is a mistake. I'm not a guy with a mental problem, but a girl with a physical problem."

The couple managed to stay together for several years and have children. "I loved my wife, and I figured that by force of will I could fight this down," Bracha recalls. Like other new immigrants, the young man enlisted in the four-month IDF [Israel Defense Forces] basic training program, but was released soon after on medical grounds unrelated to gender. He even started studying for Orthodox rabbinical ordination.

But routine acts, like haircuts, revolted him. He hated shaving, yet he was also disgusted by how he looked when he let a beard grow, during the counting of the Omer, for example. When he felt he could no longer live as a man, the marriage broke up. Following their divorce, his ex-wife refused to allow him to see their children. It is a ban Bracha understands.

"It's difficult to explain to a child, and more difficult to a child you want to bring up religious." Nevertheless, she hopes to contest the ban someday in a rabbinical court, because she doesn't want her children to think, when they are older, that she was here along and didn't care about them. Bracha says she has heard of couples who have stayed together while one of them was "transitioning" - going through the process of gender change - but this is rare. In the Orthodox world, it is virtually impossible.

And, for Bracha, it was an all-or-nothing decision. Changing her social identity without changing her body - as many transsexuals do - was out of the question, though, she confesses, "the idea of somebody changing their sex is as strange to me as it is to anybody else." She turned in succession to a sex therapist, a social worker and an endocrinologist here but found them unhelpful. Nor could she learn much from magazines aimed at a transsexual audience. Today such publications are informative and sold openly in book stores, at least in the US, but at the time they were available only in adult book shops, and, Bracha recalls, "there was stuff in them that was pornographic. It made me feel very uncomfortable."

Desperate for help, Bracha moved to New York, where she started psychotherapy and then hormone treatment and began to live as a woman. She also experimented with her new identity in a transgender chat group on the Internet, and experience she says was very helpful. "You can be anybody you want, you can try out your personality, you can meet people from all over the world." But it was only after the surgery that Bracha made another startling discovery about herself. Though she had become a woman in virtually every way, she found she was sexually attracted to women rather than to men. She became close friends with another Jewish transsexual woman and she met her first lesbian lover through the Internet. [Right on, sister! � R.]

Eventually, she returned to Israel a woman. The Interior Ministry says it does not issue a new birth certificate in such cases, but it will register a change in the ID card on the basis of a court order or on presentation of documents from a medical institution recognized by the Health Ministry. Today Bracha works in the center of the country and lives in what she describes as "a committed relationship" with a gay, religiously observant woman.

Some people in the community suspect Bracha is gay. No one but her partner and her ex-wife knows she is a transsexual. Having grown up hiding her longing to be a woman, Bracha must now hide her former identity as a man. "Stealth" - the most extreme form of secrecy - is how she describes the degree to which she must conceal her sex change. At the same time, she revels in the success with which she has carried it off.

"There's an idea of 'passing,' but there's a level beyond passing - being a 'natural,' [so] even somebody else who is a transsexual might not guess," she says. "It's a very elitist thing. It's obnoxious. I'm guilty of it. Thank G-d I'm in a position to be guilty of it......

Bracha, who studied in a yeshiva, was fully aware of the halachic prohibitions. "Halachically, I was wrong to transition," she says. She didn't ask a rabbi for a ruling, because if the answer had been negative, she wouldn't have been able to go ahead with the sex change. "I look at it like this: It's forbidden to use the telephone on Shabbat, but if you life is in danger, you are obligated to use it. I was desperate. I had considered killing myself many times. I'd be dead right now if I hadn't transitioned."

TS and sexual orientation

Another important aspect of the Esther Hecht article is the fact that in Bracha's case she now is a lesbian woman. The significance of this is that there are actually two different aspects, the real gender of a person and secondly the sexual orientation of a person. The true gender of a person is determined by his/her, what I call soul gender, and stands apart of the persons sexual orientation. Whereas Dana is a hetero-sexual woman, who was born with the wrong body for her gender, Bracha is a lesbian woman who also got born with a body incompatible with her gender. To most transsexuals it may seem needless to emphasis the distinction between a person's true gender and the person's sexual orientation but in an attempt to educate the general public it is of great importance.

In the general perception transsexuality is more often than not understood as a special form of Homo-sexuality, which is however utterly wrong. A pre-op hetero-sexual transsexual who is female-gendered and has a sexual relationship with a male partner is not engaging in an Homo-sexual relationship herself. More often than not the partner will be Homo-sexual which in the post-op stage will probably terminate the sexual aspect of that relationship unless of course the partner would be bi-sexual.

This may seem somewhat confusing but it really isn't when the nature of that what constitutes gender is clearly understood, whereas gender determines what a person is, sexual orientation determines to which gender a person is sexually attracted.

The author of Politics and Controversy makes an apology when she/he writes "These are highly complex issues and steeped in tradition, religious and societal beliefs. I am not Jewish and I apologize for any transgressions I may have made." and I will do likewise, nevertheless on the other hand I know that I will transgress even more and feel that I'm justified to do so. My own denomination solely consists of a believe in and a love for God and all He/She created. I do respect all religion and normally would not engage in a public discussion, however in this case I feel that the first shots where fired, by some of the Rabbi's, Priests, and reverends, and not by Dana, or myself or anyone else. Some of the accusations were of such fanatism that I feel no hesitation to transgress.

Another thing which should be abundantly clear is that even though in general it were Rabbi's who voiced the accusations, Israel can be proud of itself for having been the first and only country which proofed sufficiently enlightened to have Dana represent it at the Eurosong festival. It still remains to be seen if there are others who have the courage to follow suit. Promise my next vacation will be spend in Israel.

Please read my new article Why The Fundamentalists Are Wrong, suggestions and/or corrections are more than welcome.

Important Links

Jennifer Diane Reitz Homepage (an absolute must)

Jeri Ann�s Homepage

Jaqueline P�s Homepage

Anna�s Trans-Gender and Trans-Sexual Links