When I was in the queer scene, no matter how I experimented with my gender, I felt just as much of a failure as I had trying to be a Midwestern good old boy.
I could present myself as any gender; man, trans woman, or any of a host of nonbinary genders, and be joyously accepted by my community. So why did I still feel so dysphoric? I think that it was because I did not really believe. The gender pallete may be endless, but on ontology, the basic understanding of being and reality, the expectations and standards of the Lefty Queers were just as uncompromising and fundamentalist as the demands and implicit expectations of the cis-het world. In a community that claims to practice radical acceptance, I always felt wrong, and transgressing, and not-good-enough.
So maybe gender wasn’t my fundamental contradiction, the source of my feelings of wrongness and not-belonging. If that’s the case, my lack of a sense of belonging can’t be solved by the queer community. Maybe what I was rebelling against wasn’t actually the cishetpatriarchy but something else, something that you can’t unlock by taking Western, liberal ideas of individualist self-determination just one step further. The mandate to be just myself, as hard as I could, to devote myself to uncover my individual uniqueness, to study it and understand it like it’s the only thing that really matters, that really, fundamentally, exists (A distinction that in Judaism is reserved for The Holy One, Blessed Is He), and against everything to embody it, without compromise, as a perfectly unique, free, and autonomous individual, this mandate lay as heavy on my soul as the mandate to be tough an unflappable or flawlessly soft; and a cadre of self-determining individuals, each one as unique as a crystal or a non-fungible mathematical expression, and endlessly loving and supportive so long as you agree on everything that counts, maybe that is not the community my soul demands.
Which brings me to the second thing I want to talk about: that I didn’t feel so different about my time in the Queer scene as my time in the IDF. This, given the lack of rainbow court martials and heavily armed threats of indefinite transgender jail time, is maybe an exaggeration. Also I spent much longer in the Queer army than I did in the Israeli army. I think that instead I should say that my experience “trying to be a queer” wasn’t so different from my experience just growing up in the Bunker State.
So long as you toe the line, they love you, and care about you, and want you to succeed… But when you stumble, when you don’t fit in, when you transgress against some ideological line that is considered outside of the pale of legitimate disagreement; when you doubt a premise that shouldn’t be doubted, ask a question that shouldn’t be asked; then, you’re not just the enemy, you’re no longer who you are. Maybe you’ve even never been. Not a Jew, not trans are both things I was called when I transgressed on some basic assumption: what if everyone isn’t the enemy; what if we have a duty to someone or something other than our personal self.
You don’t have to be a fully formed rebel, or even have a strong critique. Sometimes it’s enough to just be too foreign, or too slow to assent. In my case maybe those are connected: part of my Jewish upbringing to question dominant narratives, and I clearly wasn’t good enough at distinguishing them, who should be questioned, from us, who should be implicitly trusted and absolutely believed. In Israel, I didn’t start out as a committed rebel, a self-styled epikorus. But the fact remains that the first thing I was told when I questioned Israel’s claims of ultimate justification was that I wasn’t a Jew, and for a while I believed that. In the end, I chose to be a Jew anyway; this is not something a handful of nationalist fanatics with political power can take from me. But Queerness notoriously has no God but the Self, and no law but the approval of peers. When I questioned the primacy of the Self - that is, prevailing individualist views on self determination and body autonomy—I was overwhelmingly told that I was no longer, and actually have never been, a trans queer.
This told me that queer isn’t something that you are. Rather, it’s an ordinary in-group, with a value system and a worldview as markers of belonging. Like with Zionism, this is an identity with an ideology, and fierce loyalty forged on the anvil of a history of suffering; and a price to pay if you cross the ideological lines.
The more I cross such lines, the less I seek to fit in, the more times I fail, the easier it becomes for the questions to turn into answers. It turns out that when I’m told that I am different, I say “no I’m not,” and when I’m told that I must think for myself, my response is “I don’t want to.” I don’t wish to be held to account by an ideology of the absolute uniqueness and independence of an individual. Maybe it’s a paradox when I, a lifelong rebel and serial dissident say this; but I don’t really want to find myself, I want to find my comrades. I’m not so interested in who I uniquely am, but in what kind of relationships I want to have. Not in the project of immortalizing my self, but in the project of serving the Living God, who was here before us and will still be here when we are gone.
I’m a Jew. My gender can take care of itself; I didn’t make a very good good old boy or trans woman. I also don’t make a very good Jewish man, either: I am not a Torah scholar, I don’t have a college degree, and I don’t even make a lot of money. But I don’t have to. I am growing out my beard and payes; and the precious treasure that I earned from a lifetime of rejection and mistakes, my faith, is not something anyone can take away from me.