The Jewish Body and the Trans Community after October 7: A Tale of Misidentification

Recently, I bore witness to events on the Yale campus that made me wonder about the meaning of being Jewish at the present, and that recollected to my mind the tales of the Mishnah, which delineate, in tractate Nezikin, judicial actions for damages. Section one explores how humans should behave in relation to the famous “goring ox.”^[1] Amidst the many concrete cases stands one in which the ox of a man of “sound sense” gores the ox of a “deaf-mute, an imbecile, or a minor” (m BK 4.4). In this instance, the sound-minded man is culpable for damages, whereas the opposite holds true for the owner who is deaf, intellectually disabled, or a minor. However, this matter cannot end there since the ox of these latter owners must be prohibited from inflicting further damage without consequence. The court “must appoint a guardian” over these owners unless their status changes, at which point the court can deem the ox harmless once again (m BK 4.4).

Few if any other faith-based traditions outside of Judaism would perceive tales of goring oxen and their owners as appropriate or intelligible subjects of religious discourse. But Judaism, a corporeal ethical practice, holds that even dangerous animals and ordinary humans must be redeemable through intentional, responsible human conduct under divine mitzvot. The oxen, even when they gore, are, like the differently situated humans who own them, deserving of respectful consideration as creatures made in the image and likeness of Ha-Shem.

In contrast to these embodied Jewish narratives, modern American religion has two contrastive discursive modes: a literalist obedience to a sacred text and a transcendent exaltation of feeling. Unlike the Mishnah, this construct evades the bodily dimension of human sacred experience in opposing the literal (concrete and rule-bound) and the spiritual (exalted and immaterial). Achieving transcendence means liberating persons from the snare of their bodies, implicitly inscribed as mindless or debased. Such binary formulations are doomed to failure as accounts of human existence, since without conscious thoughtfulness, the body becomes merely the site of appetite, whether indulged or constrained in excess. Any legitimate issue or concern arising from the body must be silenced or forced to vanish—not treated with mindful solicitude and regard.

This contemptuous and, at times, hateful vision of the, in this case, symbolic Jewish body helps to explain another seemingly unrelated but disquieting phenomenon in modern culture: namely, the virulent anti-Zionism that informs the trans community. This rejection—so intense as to pose real danger to trans folk—is everywhere on public display, particularly on college campuses these days: on posters reading “Queers for Palestine” or even on T-shirts proclaiming “Trans for Hamas.” What are dismayed, incredulous onlookers to make of this? Aren’t trans folk aware that if given the chance, Hamas would throw them off buildings in Gaza? Don’t they know that in the West Bank the Palestinian Authority would likely arrest them on false grounds or subject them to brutal abuse? Haven’t they heard about the deadly homohatred inflicted on many queer Palestinians, including Ahmad Abu Marhia, who, in 2022, was beheaded in Hebron after attempting to gain asylum in Israel?^[2] Why reject the Jewish state, a pluralistic democracy that provides trans folk with comprehensive civil rights? What in the world is wrong with trans and, to a lesser degree, gay and lesbian people?

To answer these questions, one must delve into how many—but not all—trans people see themselves in relation to their gendered and sexualized selves, and the ideologies through which they endeavor to wrap their arms around the cognitive dissonances that construct their subjectivities.

First, to be fair, the situation for queer people—at least outside Gaza—is not as dire as most people think.^[3] Queer folks contest what they position as the anti-Arab discourse of “pinkwashing,” which represents Palestinian culture as barbarically homophobic and backward as compared to enlightened Western and Israeli views of LGBT sexualities. Through pinkwashing, the West justifies its continued oppression of the putatively brutal and inhumane Palestinians.^[4] Further, although silencing, violence, and persecution persist, and are common, particularly for queer Palestinians who even appear to cooperate with Jewish Israelis,^[5] LGBT activists in the West Bank have in recent years eked out modest but real gains.^[6] Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian American, has a rainbow flag next to American, Palestinian, and Michigan state flags outside her office,^[7] and she actively supports American and Palestinian LGBT communities.^[8] Indeed, she recently teamed up with Rep. Ilhan Omar to speak out against restrictions on LGBT demonstrations in the West Bank.^[9]

Second, Palestinian queers are represented by rights organizations such as Aswat^[10] and alQaws, which address their humanitarian, health, and community support needs.^[11] Insisting that the putatively insane phrase “Queers for Palestine”^[12] makes sense in a LGBT Palestinian context, they aver that, like Russian and Iranian LGBT Jews, they navigate life in a traditional homophobic culture that they otherwise cherish and feel at home in.^[13] Although they can now seek asylum in Israel,^[14] some political Palestinian queer academics reject Western-style sexual liberation and the imposition on Arab cultures of the concept of “sexuality.” They claim to prefer “other social relations” organic to Arab culture, which Joseph Massad articulates in his influential if stridently anti-Western screed Desiring Arabs.^[15] In practice, these preferences translate into life within the closet, the use of coded language, and a public-facing emphasis on homosocial as opposed to homosexual relations. They compensate for their social predicament, which threatens them with shunning, violence, and disinheritance, by acting as vocal critics of the “Zionist colonizers.”^[16] Finally, they gain influence and legitimacy by sending queer Palestinian ambassadors to LGBT communities abroad, where they find naïve left-wing audiences primed, through their antisemitically tinged bodily dissonance and social marginalization, to lend credence to anti-Western and anti-Zionist narratives. Many queer Palestinian activists claim that Western “colonialist” accounts of oppression, violence, and silencing are anti-Palestinian propaganda.^[17] Through such familiar antisemitic discourse, which has no problems dissimulating for advantage, trans people both within and outside of the West Bank persuade others to sign on to anti-Zionism.

However, as outlined earlier, this ardent spurning of Israel—despite the seductive allure of civil rights, democratic culture, and social acceptance—originates in an oppositional relationship to the human body that in this context symbolizes the Jewish body. In Judaism, the material world can be sanctified through conscious, intentional performance of the mitzvot. This religion confronts rather than evades the embodied intricacies of human experience and rejects idealism as, at best, incomplete. The divine is everywhere, including in disputes for damages involving goring oxen and, in modern society, with the IDF in arduous, rapid-fire, nuanced decision-making processes on the battlefield, including what to do when error occurs.^[18] Finally, the very concept of nationalism—and Zionism signifies the tangible reality of the Jewish people in an actual ancestral home—requires a secure and vigorous conception of embodiment.

Yet far from secure and vigorous, trans folk feel dissociated from their bodies, a situation that makes them idealists by default who have “jumped outside” their corporeality. The latter becomes the site of dis‑ease in which the symbolic Jewish body of nation Israel serves as the traumatic trigger for anti-Zionist misidentification. In brief, Judaism and, more particularly, Zionism become prompts for traumatic memories that, being protean, attach themselves to all things Jewish when incited in these contexts.

Further, in contrast to the transparent narrative of the gay and lesbian civil rights movement, which proclaimed “Love is Love,” the stories of trans folks are arcane and sometimes close to impossible to convey. These narratives begin legibly enough with the conviction that trans folks have, from the beginning, been born into the wrong body. But here matters start to go awry. Under some conditions, they must transition into the right or more gender-conforming body, but when, how much, and under what conditions? All of these are fraught choices that in some jurisdictions have been made illegal for minors. But even when matters of time, place, and manner are successfully negotiated, there are issues regarding how one presents to others and the outside world. There are considerations surrounding self-disclosure, bathroom use, participation for trans men in women’s^[19] sports, top and bottom surgeries, the long-term health consequences of taking hormone therapy, the often-irksome requirement, for others, to comply with modern etiquette by using the appropriate pronouns, and, most of all, the hate-filled violence often inflicted on trans people through vandalism, assault, or murder.

But what if preceding experiences of body dysphoria contained unprocessed traumatic experiences instead of convictions that one had the “wrong body”? What if these attachments to a gender different from a biological gender emerged from memories rape, bullying, or fears of puberty? There could be interventions that would permit therapeutic dialogue and resolve inner conflicts before taking irreversible steps through bodily transformation. Avoiding such drastic steps, which signify rejection of the biological body, could prevent the descent into antisemitism when trans folk chance to encounter the secure embodiment that informs the Zionist nationalism.^[20] This could mean having the chance not to abuse but to reflect on the body with loving mindfulness. One could avoid being symbolically gored by the dangerous ox of irreversible steps into traumatic gendered dissociation. Doing so would also preempt the contempt for the human body realized in anti-Zionist projections in the post–October 7 world.

Notes

1. The rabbis adduce the case of the ox because the ox represents the example par excellence of a magisterially powerful, perilous yet economically indispensable animal who, as such, is regularly the subject of legal cases for compensatory damages.

2. “Gay Palestinian Ahmad Abu Marhia Beheaded in West Bank,” BBC, October 7, 2022.

3. Sarah O’Neal, “Gaza’s Queer Palestinians Fight to Be Remembered,” Nation, November 16, 2023.

4. Corinne E. Blackmer, “Pinkwashing,” Israel Studies 24, no. 2 (2016): 171–81.

5. Rajaa Natour, “New Play Exposes the Struggles of Queer Palestinians,” Fair Planet, January 19, 2023.

6. Sarah Prager, “Queer People Organizing in Solidarity with Palestine Continues to Grow,” Prism, February 19, 2024.

7. “Rep. Rashida Tlaib is flying a Palestinian flag and an LGBTQ pride flag outside her office,” Tiger Droppings, October 9, 2023.

8. “LGBTQI+ Rights and Gender Justice, Including Reproductive Justice,” Rashida Tlaib for Congress website.

9. Muri Assunacao, “Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib Respond to Palestinian Ban on LGBTQ Demonstrations: ‘LGBTQ Rights are Human Rights,'” New York Daily News, August 20, 2019.

10. “Aswat-Palestinian Feminist Queer Movement for Gender and Sexual Freedoms,” Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice website.

11. “About Us,” alQaws for Sexual & Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society website.

12. “CMV: ‘Queers for Palestine’is a perfectly valid/coherent opinion to hold, and not hypocritical or naive at all,” Reddit, November 13, 2023.

13. Ibid. However, the phrase “Queers for Palestine” does not make sense outside of a Palestinian context, unless one accepts that political beliefs can trump physical safety.

14. Jerusalem Post Staff, “LGBTQ+ Palestinians Can Request Asylum in Israel, Court Rules,” Jerusalem Post, February 5, 2024.

15. Joseph Massad, “The Empire of Sexuality: An Interview with Joseph Massad,” Institute for Palestinian Studies, March 5, 2015.

16. Peter Drucker, “Arab Sexualities,” Against the Current 137 (November/December 2008).

17. Nada Elia, “Palestine as a Queer Struggle,” US Campaign for Palestinian Rights website.

18. Norman Solomon, “Judaism and the Ethics of War,” International Review of the Red Cross 87, no. 858 (2005): 295–309.

19. For women’s one could substitute cis-gendered.

20. For these insights, I am indebted to Sandra Paulsen, with whom I spoke through an intermediary via email on May 5, 2024. See Sandra Paulsen, PhD, WA Lic Psy 0000311, Fellow of the Int’l Soc for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation.

Corinne E. Blackmer is Professor of English and Judaic Studies and Director of Judaic Studies at Southern Connecticut State University as well as Affiliate Professor at University of Haifa.

This post is part of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute Israel initiative. For more information about this initiative, please visit the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute website.