By Rabbi Chaya Bender
Note: This blog post was featured as part of our #HeshbonHodesh: Sivan monthly newsletter.
Often over the years I have had either a negative or ambivalent relationship with my gender. I identify as a woman, but never wanted that to “define me.” Whatever that meant.
I am not sure when my toxic relationship with my gender occurred. However, I have spent my life with the mentality that I will strive for excellence despite starting life out a few meters behind the starting line. When I found out I was pregnant with a girl last summer, I felt a strange sadness wash over me. Not because of her assigned gender at birth, but because I didn’t want her to ever be held back from reaching her highest heights.
While shopping for clothing for my yet unborn daughter, my wife and I wanted to get her a variety of clothes in order to match the gender she will share with us in the future. Still, I found myself scoffing at anything too frilly. My wife said to me, “There will be no misogyny in my house,” and that statement shook me to my core. I discovered that it was misogynistic for me to say that girls can’t wear girly things. It was just as misogynistic of me to limit my future daughter’s exploration of her feminine side as it would be to shame her for exploring her masculine side. Gender is not a neat little box of masculine and feminine, and clothes, after all, are just clothes and do not encapsulate the complexity of an individual's identity. In my attempts to find myself, I had accidentally come to harbor a hatred for my own gender. While trying to push back against the patriarchy, I had let its messages seep into my subconscious. It was a revelation for me, albeit in the form of a bitter pill.
I spent the rest of my pregnancy proudly sharing that I was carrying my unborn daughter (for now, anyway, until she tells me otherwise!--I would add). I would rather create a world in which no one would think any gender is less than. While I am still ambivalent about my own gender, my now two month old daughter is being raised in a house where one can feel just as powerful in their orange tutu as their black suspenders (both of which she looks adorable in). We also gifted her with the names of three heroic ancestral Jewish women: Shlomtzion, Miryam, and Dvora.
I challenge all of us to embrace the beauty of the Shekhina as we enter the Holiday of Revelation. I offer Batya Diamond’s Omer Week Seven Shiviti as a starting point:
May Shekhinah bless you and watch over you
May She light up to you
May She rise up to you
And may She bring you peace
Finally, I challenge you to think long and hard about your own biases you hold and that are holding you back. Choose one and speak it out loud. Then you too can birth, co-create, your own steps to healing.
Rabbi Chaya Bender was ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary in 2019. Chaya lives in North Carolina.
Read the Other Blog Post in This Series:
Her Bat Mitzvah and Ours