Seeking an Authentic Religious Voice on Transgender People

April 2, 2025

Rabbi Gordon Tucker, Vice Chancellor for Religious Life and Engagement, writes in the spirit of and the time following International Transgender Day of Visibility.

Among the students I am privileged to know, to teach, and to learn from in my role as the vice chancellor for Religious Life and Engagement at The Jewish Theological Seminary are several who are transgender. I have come to know their spiritual energy and dedication to the religious, educational, and intellectual leadership for which they are preparing. Recognizing the great potential of these students for living, teaching, and preaching has accentuated the dissonance that has been created by recent events in American politics.

President Trump couldn’t wait for the sun to set on the first day of his current term before signing an executive order stating, “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” This action was a prelude and basis for the widespread discrimination that is being visited upon people who have courageously transitioned to the gender identity they know to be their personal truth. A whole range of their rights have been revoked; access to medically prescribed treatments has been restricted or even criminalized in some cases; and the very recognition that there are American citizens impacted by these governmental actions has been systematically erased from federal documents and websites. The slightly more than one-half of one percent of the American population who are trans are thus being repressed and silenced with the stroke of a pen. Among them are our students, all of whom will one day take up the mantle of leadership and mentorship in the Jewish—and often wider—world. They deserve gratitude, not a deprivation of their rights.

It was against such degradations of God‘s children that Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a Jewish theologian and philosopher, famously said, “Any god concerned with me but not with you, is an idol.” And so it is both lamentable and a distorted representation of religion itself that too many people who call themselves people of faith have lent support to this erasure of the genuine lived experience of some 1.6 million Americans. Those religious communities and their leaders seem unmoved by the fact that because of the discrimination and debasement to which they are subjected, trans people are seven times more likely to consider taking their lives and four times more likely to have attempted it than the average American. It is, in fact, a terrible misreading of one of the highest religious imperatives. For one of the simplest and yet most far-reaching characterizations of the God of the Bible appears in Psalm 145: “The Lord is good to all; God’s mercy extends to all that God has created.”

Indeed, Malachi 2:10 famously reads, “Have we not all one Parent? Did not one God create us?” Take this metaphor of God as parent to all humans seriously. If you had several children, and one of them felt in their bones—in a way no one else could know so truly—that they were not of the sex they were assigned at birth, it would be unimaginable to tolerate your other children bullying, debasing, and humiliating their trans sibling to the point of making them feel worthless. Why, then, should we not imagine God filling up with anger and deep sadness to see people who simply tell the truth about their lived experience being treated as if they either don’t exist or do not deserve to exist as they are?

There have been authentically compassionate religious voices in this matter. One of those voices was heard some six years ago in Alon Shvut, an indisputably passionate Jewish community of faith and religious observance in the West Bank.

A young woman, who had been welcomed into her family at birth as a son, transitioned to be the woman she knew herself to be. The experience of both belonging and not belonging to the community in which she was raised and the reality of being denied the acceptance every human being needs contributed to her eventual suicide. Since there is warrant in Jewish law and practice to treat suicides in a very private way, eschewing public burial and community-based mourning, one might have expected that in this trans woman’s case. But this religious community instead came out in large numbers for her funeral and in a similarly massive way a month later at a gathering that was called to process what had happened. And it was at that convening of the religious population of Alon Shvut that the father of the deceased woman stood up and made the following remarkable statement:

To be a father to a child who is transgender is a serious struggle that was not simple, but you’d be surprised that it can bring you to a kind of serenity . . . We need to exhibit empathy . . . In essence we are spiritual beings who undergo experiences as human creatures. Just as a soldier at his induction base may receive a uniform that does not fit, it may also be that someone can receive at birth earthly garb that does not fit. We believe in spiritual complexity, not in a simplistic world. And that complexity is here to challenge us; it comes from the Blessed Holy One.

In that we heard what should be recognized as an authentic religious voice.

The trans students I have taught and learned from and those who are preparing for leadership roles in many other faith groups know the authenticity of that voice of humble kindness and empathy. They wish to devote their lives and careers to preaching and amplifying it. Religious institutions of every faith group in America will be fortunate to have such spiritual beings and teachers from within their own communities. Those who dismiss them and celebrate the attacks on their rights are the ones who are bringing religion itself into ill repute. We ought to pray and hope that the true notes of faith in the God who is good to all will ring out and reach the hearts of people everywhere. It is time.