Tel-Chai Nation

It's bad enough that across the Atlantic, the Nevada staff of the Miss USA pageant have allowed a transsexual man to compete in the contest, suggesting that, despite a recent court ruling against such things, the organization may be on the verge of decay after all. Meanwhile, over here in Israel, ultra-leftist Haaretz wrote a whole featured article about a Haredi family whose daughter tragically turned to transsexuality without even telling them (assuming that is the case here), yet the family has no issue, if at all:

On my first date with Yehoram, I offered him a sip of my prosecco at the hip Tel Aviv bar I had brought him to. He tensed, paused and quietly replied, “I’m not sure if I can. I don’t know if it’s kosher.” I immediately recognized his confession for what it was: a coming-out. I told him that it’s fine, that we can ask the waitress if the wine has a certification, that I grew up in an observant family too. He finally breathed.

I already knew that Yehoram is female-to-male transgender. In fact, it was the only thing written on his dating profile. Over the course of our year-long relationship, and then our seamless transition into friendship late last year, he explained to me that the queer community will often accept that he is trans but not that he is religious. But the same is not always necessarily true of the religious community – and particularly of his family.

There are many preconceptions about his family. The matriarch Mazal, 74, and patriarch Yehiel, 78, were both born in Sana’a, Yemen, and immigrated to the newly-declared State of Israel in early childhood. (Haaretz is honoring their request not to publish the family name.) They are visibly Haredi: Mazal wears long skirts and tucks her hair into modest black caps; Yehiel trims his salt-and-pepper beard, and wears a uniform of crisp dress shirts, black pants and a black velvet kippa.

They speak with heavy Yemenite accents – which have been at least partially adopted by their seven children – and their speech is seasoned with religious aphorisms and allusions. People are surprised to learn that Yehoram, 32, is accepted and supported by his parents, to a degree that is rare even in the secular homes of Tel Aviv.

And maybe that's the reason why these problems arise in the first place: because religious reps, of all people, are taking a lenient approach to those who abuse their bodies in ways described as cutting off one's nose to spite their faces. IMO, this is a very telling clue how these awful ideologies come about. And lest we forget, they also build up a bad situation by telling women their bodies are an abomination, even if their private parts aren't exposed, and this could explain why the current sad state of affairs where women and men take up transsexuality.

At their kitchen table in a town near Rehovot, central Israel, Mazal has set out water, juice and a homemade cake. Yehiel has set down a voice recorder of his own, to make sure he isn’t misrepresented. They have a story to tell about being the parents of a trans son, and they have decided that I am allowed to tell it.

‘I want to help’

Before we begin the interview, both are apprehensive. After much deliberation, they decide that I can publish their names but not their images. Yehiel is a respected figure in religious circles: he serves as his synagogue’s main cantor on the High Holy Days, is a mezuzah scribe and kashrut supervisor for the Chief Rabbinate. He spends his free time poring over religious texts, with Yehoram often alongside him. His son [daughter] no longer attends the local synagogue in which his father plays so large a role; the congregation knew him [her] before his transition, and it could hurt his family’s reputation.

If someone goes to the rabbi with this article in hand and tells Yehiel that he’s out of the fold, “at our age, there’s no fight left. There’s nothing you can do,” he says. “It would destroy me.” When he thinks I cannot hear him, he says that he suspects that one of his contracts as a kashrut supervisor was not renewed for this exact reason – because of his unconventional family.

But if getting his story out shows religious parents that they can embrace their own LGBTQ children, he wants it published. “I want to help,” he says.

Mazal chimes in. “Both of us do. You hear these stories about parents throwing their children out ... I don’t understand it. I don’t understand how you throw out your child.”

While shunning one's children in itself is bad, I would assume the reason some parents do it is because the child refuses to abandon the ideology he/she takes up. In which case, if it's something degrading they're subscribing to, then while it may be sad, some parents have no choice but to shun them, at least until they're willing to reconsider, if at all. Of course, here, the problem is that somebody may have gotten terrible operations may not be willing to get any to reverse the awful result she's now living with.

She recounts going to the shivah of a friend of Yehoram’s – the transgender queer activist DanVeg, who took her own life in 2016. “I saw them all in the living room, with their heads on each other’s shoulders. I started to cry. I wanted to hug them all, to go one by one. And they came to me; they saw the look in my eye. There was a man who had become a woman, who came to hug me. And a young girl, and more. I couldn’t take it,” she says, wiping away tears that are coming faster and faster. “More and more of them told us that they’re alone, abandoned by their parents. How can you throw out your child? The child of a human being!”

I get up to hug her, and she cries into my back: “Why? Why would you throw your child out of your house? Why?”

They say they never suspected that Yehoram was different before he [she] came out to them, if not unconventionally, as queer at the age of 18, some 14 years ago.

He [she] did not employ the usual lexicon: “I told them, this is how I am – I’m wearing pants from now on and I’m not interested in men,” he [she] recounts. In Yehoram’s absence, Yehiel recalls it as well. Yehoram sat his parents down in the living room and said his piece, and then asked his parents for a response.

“We got up immediately, as if it were coordinated,” Yehiel says. “We hugged [him] from both directions … and we told [him], ‘You have nothing to be afraid of, no need to worry. You’re our daughter, it doesn’t matter what you do.’” Yehoram then opened his backpack to show a couple days’ clothes inside. “If you didn’t accept me, I would have killed myself,” he told his parents.

So basically, what we have here is a lesbian who may have wound up that way because, when she was young, she presumably wasn't allowed to communicate with boys, and if any such restrictions occurred, it may have precipitated a terrible state of mental health that affected her into eventually taking up this awful transsexual ideology. And the paper's writers make things worse by going the Orwellian route and refusing to acknowledge this is a biological woman presumably in focus (although there's a picture on the leftist site that sure looks like a man, and if it actually is a man, then is there some bizarre case of pulling everyone's leg going on here?) All that aside, it's offensive if the woman was going to commit suicide over non-acceptance just because the parents wouldn't approve of her new bizarre turn to transvestism.

From there, they worked to make sure that their son (daughter) wouldn’t, for one moment, forget that he is loved and cared for. They also made sure that he could live a normal life. “It was important that he be self-sufficient, have a respectable career, be able to build a life without us,” Yehiel explains. “Every day, I’m afraid that he won’t be here. I think about how he can build his life so he’s not dependent on anyone else.”

Mazal and Yehiel tend to refer to Yehoram with female pronouns when he isn’t in the room, and occasionally slip into them when he is. To her, Mazal says, he will always be their daughter. “It’s hard for me,” Yehiel concurs. “[He] should be patient.”

Mazal calls him by his chosen name – an anagram of his birth name – to make him happy. “And to connect with [him] – what can you do? We love [him] either way. [He’s] our daughter.”

Well at least the parents are willing to exhibit some sanity here regarding the daughter's gender, in contrast to the disgusting reporters and editors, who aren't. But normal life? It goes without saying they delude themselves.

There have been difficulties in accepting him along the way, she concedes. But like many parents of LGBTQ children, they are mainly rooted in concerns that he will be able to live a safe, fulfilling life.

A male soul

No one should mistake their acceptance for liberalism – they repeatedly note that the Pride Parades, with their scanty clothes and glitter, are unsightly. “The left brings it in,” Mazal says. “Non-Jews from abroad, with all their tattoos and whatnot.” However, their embrace of their transgender son and the many queer people who have passed through their doors does not come in spite of their firm religious beliefs, but is the direct result of them.

On that, they certainly got something right: if the Haredi parents are socialists, then they basically embraced an ideology upheld by liberals (but safe and fulfilling life? Again, they delude oneself). But here's where things get dismaying again:

Yehiel, a lifelong religious scholar, has poured over sources biblical, talmudic, rabbinic and kabbalistic. The kabbalistic concept of the soul provides a simple explanation for the transgender phenomenon, he believes.

“We have the knowledge that Jewish souls can be reincarnated into anything – into non-Jewish families, into animals, even into food,” Yehiel explains. “We were taught that the soul of a man can be reincarnated into a woman, in order to remedy something he had done in a past life.”

When Mazal was pregnant with Yehoram, she had already given birth to five daughters and was hoping for a son. The couple went to a respected rabbi, who told them to buy a bottle of wine for the circumcision ceremony and to come see him 40 days into the pregnancy. Yehiel says that when the time came, it was hard to get hold of the rabbi to schedule an appointment, and they were only able to see him eight months in. The rabbi gave them the blessing regardless.

“The body was already formed female,” Yehiel says, but the prayers had worked: “The soul was male.”

And there is scripture to back up the existence of LGBTQ people within Judaism. “You’re not different, you’re not strange,” Yehiel says. “This [phenomenon] has always existed. It’s in the Torah, and it’s in the mystical sources.” Mazal adds: “It’s a shame that we don’t lay this out these days, to have everything written up and organized to say that it’s all there in scripture.”

Wow, what a groaner this is. But not all that shocking certain "kabbalists" would believe this possible in every way. Their daughter hasn't been reincarnated in a different body, so much as she has undergone operations on her living anatomy proper. Of course there obviously was homosexuality in Biblical times, but it's not like everyone thought it acceptable or healthy. Certainly not for men, seeing how corrupting it's been over past decades for menfolk in showbiz.

At 26, Yehoram told his parents he [she] was transitioning. He [she] underwent top surgery – a double mastectomy – without informing them. “On the one hand, it hurt us,” Yehiel admits. “For us, it meant that’s it – it’s sealed. If he’d told us in advance, we would have told him to wait. Maybe the situation would change.”

But what’s done is done, Mazal says. “What hurt me is that [he] underwent the surgery and I wasn’t there. That ate at me.”

Both loudly agree that the important thing is that he [she] is happy and healthy. “We hope just for success – and thank God there are many successes, so everything is alright,” she says. “I’m just waiting for children,” she laughs.

But she's not healthy. If she's gotten horrific cosmetic surgeries to look more absurdly like a man, she's desecrated her own body. Whether she can still bear children (and will any man want her that way so long as she remains with that kind of surgical alteration?), it could be difficult to breastfeed them, now that she did something terrible to her body, similar to Ellen Page, who underwent such operations of recent.

Yehoram, who has taken a seat next to her, smirks. Mazal jokes about him coming home pregnant one day. He’s slightly irked, but jokes along. A couple of years ago, he froze his eggs through Ichilov Hospital’s fertility clinic for transgender men, and hopes to one day become a father, no matter how he has to do it. His parents strongly supported the move. They have 31 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

If they're alluding to pregnancies by women, doesn't that prove the gender does not change, since most women who undergo such repellent operations can still become pregnant? Not that Haaretz is any more devoted to logic than most other left-wing news sources.

On my side

Yehoram asks a question of his own: Whether his parents want to talk about the time they took him to an esteemed rabbi in Tel Aviv, after he came out at 18.

“After he told us everything, we consulted with a rabbi,” Yehiel relays. “I remember that he got angry and yelled at him. I didn’t like that. He hurt him, and I couldn’t stay any longer, so we left.”

“The rabbi told me that I had lapsed, deteriorated in my spirituality,” Yehoram explains. It’s clear that he remembers it vividly. “That I had fallen.”

After that, the rabbi told him to leave the room, and for his parents to stay. “I heard shouting, and then you left the room,” he says to his parents. “You didn’t say anything, I didn’t say anything. We were quiet all the way home.”

No one discussed the incident for days after, and they barely spoke at all. After three days, Yehoram says, he asked his mother what had happened after the rabbi told him to leave the room.

“I didn’t know what happened, I assumed the worst. You told me that [Dad] got very angry and told [the rabbi], ‘How dare you hurt and belittle a Jewish soul?’ You said you had to give him however much money, and that you just threw a small bill onto the table and left the room,” Yehoram tells his mother. “It really surprised me. I thought you were on his side, and then I suddenly heard that you were on mine.”

Well I do know that, if this was a Haredi rabbi who believes women not dressing according to his repellent standards of modesty (and shaving heads upon marriage) is a problem, then he's basically the problem. On which note:

When he is with us in the room, Yehoram sometimes seems agitated by his parents’ insistence that their acceptance has always been complete. He tries to direct them toward other instances, other rabbis they don’t or won’t recall. It is often difficult for parents to acknowledge the pain or discomfort that their actions caused their children, even if they were accidental. Mazal brings out a picture from Yehoram’s bat mitzvah, of them embracing the young girl he was. They look almost exactly the same, 20 years later, beaming. Young Yehoram, in a long-sleeved, high-necked dress, is smiling, but the smile does not reach his eyes.

So we see, that when she was young, the woman who took these terrible operations was required to dress modestly, and was surely subject to other similar restrictions like not talking with boys. Couple that with any leftist propaganda she eventually fell victim to, and a girl who was body-shamed when she was young fell victim to a belief she should've been born male, and later took up awful steps that desecrated the gifts God gave her even more than what her parents/rabbis/community were already doing. What they did was a desecration of Judaism, gives religion a bad name, and only enforces my belief that, depending on how it's managed, religion causes homosexuality, and influences transsexuality by extension. In other words, it's an elephant in the room nobody's willing to ponder.

Accepting every aspect

Elisha Alexander, co-CEO and founder of the transgender advocacy and information organization Ma’avarim, says that even though Yehiel and Mazal’s acceptance of their son may seem unique, he would like to think it’s more common than we assume.

“There are religious and even ultra-Orthodox people who accept their trans family members, but it’s usually in secret. The main problem in these communities is the leadership,” he says.

But if more of them realized that embracing their children was a matter of pikuach nefesh – the Jewish concept that saving a life supersedes most religious commandments and norms – they would be more inclined to find a halakhic solution to integrating transgender people into these communities.

There is also a misconception that acceptance is a binary choice: That any parent who does not kick their transgender child out of the house or disown them has, by default, accepted them. “This could not be further from the truth,” Alexander says. “Accepting your child means accepting every aspect inherent to them, including their gender identity, pronouns and so on.”

See, that's the problem. It's like two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, they believe a woman not dressing modestly is an abomination, or more precisely, that her entire body/anatomy is, and that for a woman to look attractive is also an obscenity. On the other hand, they accept this transsexual propaganda and operations because they must believe "well, at least she won't be immodest this way." Ugh. No wonder such insular people have come to make me sick. Insular go with the insular hand-in-glove. And the ultra-Orthodox leadership doesn't help because they uphold body-shaming women, so it's also the leadership that's unwittingly influenced the children falling victim to propaganda to wind up in these situations.

When parents refuse to do so, their child may seek acceptance elsewhere. He adds that studies show that acceptance within the family drastically reduces the suicide rate among transgender people.

Umm, I don't think so. Some seem to come to a realization along the way they've only hurt themselves a lot more, by doing something the Nazis experimented with in the past century on human subjects. And that clearly has a devastating impact on such people, because they realize they've cut off their noses to spite their faces, making themselves into a Frankenstein-like creation, and it could be exceedingly difficult to mend the damage.

Knowing this, Yehiel says that any parent in his position must continue loving and supporting their child. “This child can fall,” he says. He does not mention it, but he is aware of the stories and statistics: trans youth who find themselves on the street face high rates of abuse and exploitation. Thirty to 50 percent of transgender teens report suicidal thoughts and behaviors – a rate three times higher than for teens overall. But that figure falls to 4 percent when families accept and embrace them, says Sarit Ben Shimol, manager of the Lioness Alliance for families and transgender children and teenagers.

Yehiel adds that it is the duty of parents to give children the support they need to thrive. “As a parent, it is your responsibility to tell your child: You are my child and you are my life. My life depends on you. Watch over me so that I can watch over you,” he says.

As we get up from our seats, Yehiel looks at me for a moment and asks, “If it’s not too personal – since we already opened up the topic – what is your relationship like with your parents?”

I tell them that I talk to my parents, and especially my mother, almost every day. That it was difficult for them to come to terms with my sexual orientation as well, and that sometimes I have an inkling that it still is, even if they won’t say it outright. But I try to be patient.

“Good,” Mazal says. “It’s important to be patient – they’re learning too.” She embraces me again, and Yehiel rests a hand on my shoulder. They invite me to come again, whenever I like. “After all, you’re like our daughter, too.”

Well I guess that sums up what's wrong with some liberal parents too, and even conservative ones. They don't know how to argue that it's not a good idea to be an Opposite Sex Rejector (OSR), and act like a person of the opposite gender of one person is worthless or filthy because they're not of the same gender as the other person. They're right that these transsexual practitioners do face abuse and exploitation, but at the hands of the leftist propagandists who've influenced them into doing something where they end up segregating themselves from society while hurting themselves in many ways. That's why religious parents cannot continue to take any kind of sex-negative viewpoint, because it's clearly backfiring, and they don't have what it takes to question their own approach.

And this all explains why I've become so disgusted with insular Haredi clans, because they explain what's gone wrong with religion, and how it can be just as guilty as liberal propaganda of influencing children for the worse, into taking up all sorts of bad, trendy lifestyles where they ultimately end up hurting themselves in some of the worst ways possible.

Labels: haredi corruption, Israel, Judaism, lgbt cultism, misogyny, Moonbattery, msm foulness