An increasing number of Americans are coming out as non-binary: terms like genderqueer, gender-fluid, and agender describe a variety of identities that transcend being a woman vs. a man. While they share many of the same experiences as binary transgender people— as in, assigned male at birth and coming out as female, or vice versa, non-binary folks also have some unique obstacles. One major day-to-day example: The English language has a limited selection of pronouns; men are traditionally “he” and women are “she.” So what about someone who’s both, or neither, or something else entirely?

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Jewcy is on a summer residency! To read this piece, and our others for July and August 2017, go to our big sister site, Tablet Magazine!

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Here’s how to make some amazing #trans challah (as well as non-binary, intersex, and rainbow) this #PRIDE month, and any month.

1. Start with your favorite challah recipe, but the interwebs have countless recipes suit any dietary need like whole grain, vegan, or gluten freedom. There’s a challah out there for everyone, the way there’s a gender identity for everyone, even if it isn’t one you’ve ever encountered before.

2. For bold and solid rainbow colors, split your dough up while mixing into separate bowls and add food coloring into each mixture. For lighter, softer, marbled colors, which works great specifically for the trans flag, mix the dough fully. Only add in a drop or two of color at a time and keep kneading it, until the color appears consistently throughout. It’s kind of like hormone replacement therapy; a little goes a long way. Add drops of red and purple to make pink, and use blue very sparingly to keep it light.

Note to divide your challah up in the correct proportions: Trans flags have five stripes, so the one bowl that stays white should have half as much dough as the other two that will get pink and blue. For the pride rainbow, six equal portions can be used.

3a. (For sweet Challah) Transgender challah, like the people it represents, should be extra sweet on the inside, under that crispy shell the world gives us. As you form your strands to braid, roll in dried cranberries, raisins, or why not both? Add as many as you like to each strand until the rolls are smooth again. They should be secure within the dough strands, not clinging to the outside. Make a dusting of cinnamon sugar along the table, and roll your strands in that next.

3b. You can also make a savory transgender challah swapping out the cinnamon-sugar and raisins for garlic powder, sesame seeds, and lots of onion flakes. Pride, like challah, is best when it embraces all of our senses and tastes. It is Jewish tradition to place two challahs on every Shabbat table, to commemorate the extra portions God sustained us with over the sabbath, so one you can make one the main course and another for dessert.

4. Braiding of any 5 stranded challah requires a little thinking, as compared to a three or six strand, but the basic pattern is three strands over then two back and repeat. If you make a mistake, it will still look and taste awesome. When you are done, fold each of the ends under and place it either onto a flat plan or a bread-loaf tray.

5. A special part of consecrating kosher challah is to set aside a small piece of dough from each batch to burn. For transgender challah, and any pride challah, we intentionally take from both the uncolored and colored dough, to remind us that the queer community both visibly and remaining in closets.

6. (It’s part of the recipe, so you have to do it!) Share with friends and family, celebrating whomever they love and however they identify! Spread the light of Shabbat unto our world by affirming that as Jews, queers, and allies, that asserting our own and ensuring others’ freedom of expression, is the greatest expression of freedom there is. Shabbat Shalom!

Photos courtesy of the author.

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The transgender Jewish punk band Schmekel (Yiddish for “little penis”) is, alas, defunct, but at least we still have their songs about almost every Jewish holiday. For this time of year, there are numbers about the upcoming Tishrei parade of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, and Simchat Torah. These holidays are vehicles to explore what it was like to be transgender in conjunction with being Jewish, and they used some very Jewish tools to do so— like nerdiness, humor, passion.

Schmekel saw Jewish holidays as a resonant, familiar path to discuss that topic in varied ways. When interviewed for my book, Oy Oy Oy Gevalt! Jews and Punk, Schmekel singer/guitarist Lucian Kahn said that Schmekel aimed to “talk about all of these different times in the cycle of the Jewish calendar and find ways of relating those things to trans experience.”

“The Binding of Isaac” is a poignant song, in part because of an evocative “Avinu Malkeinu” interlude. The lyrics discuss how a transgender Jew named Isaac presents himself as male, binds his breasts, and sits in the men’s section in shul on Rosh Hashanah. “Old Marvin from the Y,” whom Isaac has known since childhood, asks Isaac’s father how his daughter is doing. The father brushes off the question by saying Elaine (Isaac’s birth name) “is fine,” as if Isaac isn’t present. Heartbreakingly, while the father just continues praying, Isaac looks down in dismay and his knees buckle.

As the listener hears the story, Isaac’s father is to blame for failing to acknowledge the presence of his transgender child. But Kahn explained that the situation was “based on snippets of truth” and wasn’t so straightforward.

Kahn said, “Old Marvin’s not a real person, but he might as well be, because all of us have had an experience … running into … some sort of not core person in your life, and having that experience of, okay, they don’t recognize me … because the last time they saw me, they thought I looked like a woman. … Should I reintroduce myself? Should I pretend I’m someone else? Should I just ignore them?” These questions represent complex practical considerations related to transgender transitioning. “The Binding of Isaac” puts them into a fictional context where listeners can understand and relate to the plight of a transgender person in this situation.

Whereas “The Binding of Isaac” was one of three Tishrei holiday songs on Schmekel’s 2013 album, The Whale That Ate Jonah, “I’m Sorry, It’s Yom Kippur” appeared on 2011’s Queers on Rye. The lyrics discuss “atoning for some shit I might have done wrong.” The atonement included transgender-related examples like assuming a heterosexual person was ignorant, coming out in an “awkward way,” and putting breast binders in the drier. The song includes a shofar blast as well as Schmekel’s take on the “Al Chet” prayer from the Yom Kippur liturgy.

The prestigious Jewish Music Research Centre at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem praised the song as a venue for “atonement through punk (and traditional Jewish music).” In the article, Kahn explained that the notion of “screwing up” was more relatable—and applicable to his life—than “sin.” He said that it was “more productive” to “reflect with a sense of humor upon my mess-ups.”

“I wrote that song when I was not supposed to be writing that song; I wrote it while I was fasting,” Kahn told me. “So I was also really amused that a song that I wrote, definitely breaking a commandment or a mitzvah or something to actually write it, ended up getting analyzed by” the Jewish Music Research Centre.

“Occupy My Sukkah” is a Sukkot-themed, X-rated song about a “broke-ass queer” looking for “somebody from the one percent.” The song includes Hoshana Rabba, the seventh of Sukkot’s eight days. The lyrics ask: “If you’ve got abundance, won’t you be my sugar abba [daddy] / And smack me with your arava [branch of a willow tree] ’cuz it’s Hoshana Rabba?”

“Maybe She’s Shomer Negiyah” has the strongest lyrics of the Tishrei songs, but it adheres the least to a holiday theme. The setting is a Simchat Torah party, but the holiday isn’t discussed beyond the opening line of the song.

Shomer negiyah refers to men and women not touching each other, and in the song, the transgender male narrator dances the hora with other men. He realizes that the men probably wouldn’t want to hold his hand if they knew he was transgender. He also discussed not shaking hands with a woman when he said “chag sameach” because “she’s keepin’ it kosher like Shmuley Boteach.”

Schmekel’s songs were more than just catharsis for the band members as they dealt with their transitions. The humor in their songs served a larger purpose: Schmekel deliberately used humor to lower the defenses of non-transgender audiences and make the topic seem more approachable. From there, people could learn about and empathize with the transgender experience.

The Jewish part of making the transgender experience seem relatable had to do with Schmekel’s expertise with Jewish topics. Kahn explained, “It’s probably a little unusual to have within one band somebody who has a master’s degree in history of religions and somebody who studied Jewish education and someone who was a Jewish studies major. It’s like … a brain trust of people who have studied Jewish history.” Writing clever lyrics like the “sugar abba”/Hoshana Rabba couplet would be beyond the capabilities of most Jews with casual knowledge of their religion.

Schmekel disbanded in 2014. Kahn still has a decent chance of making some High Holidays music, though. He lives in Crown Heights, and in his own words, “I cannot make it between my building and the subway two blocks away on Rosh Hashanah without being handed a shofar at least three times.”

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We’re super-excited about the debut of Jill Soloway’s new TV show Transparent, which started out as a one-off Amazon studios pilot, then got picked up by the book/entertainment/cat litter behemoth for development into a complete season. Episode one premieres on September 26. (Shana tova, indeed.)

Earlier this year Batya Ungar-Sargon offered high praise for the dark, comic family drama set in L.A.:

They say we are living in a golden age of television. If that’s the case, Jill Soloway’s new pilot deserves its own unit of commerce. Ruby? Sapphire? It’s a cut above the rest, and it’s fucking amazing and you should drop everything you are doing and watch it right now.

In the pilot, patriarch Mort (played by Jeffrey Tambor) tries—and fails—to reveal his transgender identity to his three children. Judging by the trailer for season one, though, it’s clear that Mort is officially out of closet. Meanwhile, his kids are dealing with their own emotional/professional/pyschosexual dramas. Who’s the most well-adjusted? The most repressed? Tune in and find out!

Also! There’s a great profile of Soloway in this week’s New York Times Magazine, where she speaks frankly about her fascination with gender stereotypes and sexual identity. Turns out there’s an element of autobiography in her art: her own father came out as trans in 2011.

Soloway has cycled through a lot of emotions about her father’s revelation since that phone call three years ago, but the first one she felt was relief. “No wonder I was so obsessed with these questions,” she said on a Sunday morning in July, sitting at the same table where she took the call. “Not even deep down. I think out in front these gender questions were part of our family — the discomfort with traditional roles of masculinity and femininity in our house.

Read on here.

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Praise be! The television Gods/Jeff Bezos have smiled upon us and picked up Jill Soloway’s wonderful pilot Transparent for a complete season.

Last month our own Batya Ungar-Sargon offered high praise for the dark, comic family drama set in L.A.:

“They say we are living in a golden age of television. If that’s the case, Jill Soloway’s new pilot deserves its own unit of commerce. Ruby? Sapphire? It’s a cut above the rest, and it’s fucking amazing and you should drop everything you are doing and watch it right now.”

In the pilot, patriarch Mort (played by Jeffrey Tambor) tries—and fails—to reveal his transgender identity to his three children, who are all too preoccupied with their own psychosexual dramas to give him space to speak. It’s brilliant, compelling, witty television set in Los Angeles’ creative (and often very Jewy) middle-class—a milieu that Soloway loves and satirizes in equal parts. We can’t wait to see how it unfolds.

http://youtu.be/dHpXcmiEIyM

Watch the full episode here.

Related: Must-watch: Jill Soloway’s New Amazon Original Pilot, “Transparent”
The Newest Best Thing on the Internet: Wifey.tv

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They say we are living in a golden age of television. If that’s the case, Jill Soloway’s new pilot deserves its own unit of commerce. Ruby? Sapphire? It’s a cut above the rest, and it’s fucking amazing and you should drop everything you are doing and watch it right now.

A dark family comedy about sex and self, “Transparent” is “Girls” meets “Parenthood,” with some “Louie” mixed in. The plot revolves around a classic Jewish L.A. family, including divorced parents Judith Light (sublime!) and Jeffrey Tambor (almost unbearably good, equal parts vulnerable and funny), and their offspring: Jay Duplass as Josh, a music producer who we meet in bed playing with the boobs of a blond cutie; Amy Landecker as Sarah, a housewife we first glimpse hurriedly rushing her kids to school; and the astoundingly good Gaby Hoffman as Ali, a depressive twenty-something with big ideas and no money. The kids are touchingly close, and they are called in by Tambor for a family summit in which the truth he plans to tell them ends up buried, rather than revealed.

The show is equally compassionate and disdainful towards its characters, both distant from and reveling in their upper-middle-class lifestyle. (“If you don’t raise five grand for Tu B’Shevat, Dana Goodman just implodes,” quips Sarah’s erstwhile lesbian lover during school drop-off.) But it also seems to be asking viewers whether to accept or deny the father’s accusation that his children are selfish and unable to see beyond themselves, especially since the carefully guarded secret of this family’s patriarch—his transgender identity—has seeped into his kids’ psycho-sexual lives.

As the pilot unravels, we see the siblings responding individually to the truth their father fails to reveal. They seem somehow to intuit that the masculine center of their family is in flux, or perhaps, was never quite there. Ali goes in search of a trainer in the park for an old-fashioned dose of discipline in its modern masquerade—a punishing workout. Josh finds himself in the lap of someone quite the opposite of his blond bedfellow, a woman with big curly hair and large floppy breasts who tells him to get comfortable. He lies down on the floor (in the exact position in which we first see Sarah’s son), and lays his head near the woman’s crotch. Is he looking to replace his emasculated father? Or perhaps searching for the mother figure he senses waiting to emerge? And Sarah finds herself reignited by her college girlfriend, seeking out her less hetero-normative former self. The kids do see their dad for what he is, if only unconsciously, evidenced by their search for a father—or mother—figure. And Dad, too, has something to learn, should the series get picked up.

In addition to being smart and sexy, “Transparent” is also genuinely funny. “Dad’s not getting engaged—he’s too much of a pussy-hound,” says Josh on their way to the summit. “Really he’s a Marcy-hound,” Ali corrects him. “Haven’t the last six been Marcys?” (I won’t ruin it, but when the three kids try to pronounce the Jewish last names of the Marcys, hilarity ensues).

With characteristic aplomb, Jill Soloway gives us something to wonder about, something to be surprised by, something to be aroused by, and something to laugh at. A lusciously downcast soundtrack lends the whole thing a distinctively Soloway melancholy; one senses that things are not going to be OK, but somehow, it’s better that way. The only weakness is the portrayal of minorities—Ali’s black trainer and Sarah’s lesbian ex-girlfriend seem a little too close to a white liberal’s fantasy. But perhaps Soloway means this as a critique of her characters, who put these individuals to use in satisfying their cravings. We’ll only know if the show gets picked up by Amazon, so watch it and say yes to “Transparent”!

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Though the transgender community in Israel is growing, their access to sex reassignment surgeries is not. An Israeli doctor has been sent to the U.S. to be trained in the surgery, and he’ll return in 2014. In the meantime, Dr. Marci Bowers, of Colorado, who’s renowned for her expertise in sex-change surgery, is flying to Israel in November to perform surgeries, Haaretz reports.

There is no official data on Israel’s transgender community. Nobody knows its size, how many sex-change operations have been performed in Israel over the years or their success rates. The waiting list for the operation comprises between 12 and 20 transgender men and women, who have completed the approval process and are eligible for the operation, according to the Health Ministry’s sex-reassignment committee. But for 14 months, no operations have been performed, mainly because the Health Ministry did not prepare in advance for the temporary departure of the only surgeon in Israel who is authorized to perform them.

That’s too long without any surgeries for people who need them. When will the Israeli transgender community have more access to the surgeries they need to live their lives? There’s a two-year screening process for those who want the surgery, and there’s always the posibilty they’ll be deemed unfit for the operation. More and more Israelis are traveling abroad to have the surgery.

Further, in the past, Haaretz reports, the Health Ministry didn’t treat the transgender patiends with respect, but things seem to be improving.

The first sex-reassignment surgery was performed in Israel in 1970. Since then, it is estimated that 20 such surgeries are performed per year, on average. Over the years, it has been claimed that members of the Health Ministry committee treated people undergoing the process in a humiliating manner. But members of the LGBT community say they feel new winds blowing. “The previous deputy health minister, Yaakov Litzman, wouldn’t meet with us at all. With the new health minister, it’s already looking different, and we anticipate meeting with her soon.”

Do you think the transgender community in Israel will soon be given more access to treatment?

(Photo by David Silverman/Getty)

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