Bans on drag performers are direct attacks on trans people
Re “Tennessee’s new anti-drag laws would make Purim celebrations illegal” by Mordechai Levovitz
To the editor:
The op-ed “Tennessee’s new anti-drag laws would make Purim celebrations illegal” by Mordechai Levovitz is both misleading and distracting from the real and urgent issues that need our attention: threats to trans dignity and rights. The choice of title in particular is inaccurate at best and demeaning at worst.
Bans on drag and gender presentations that violate conventional norms are attacks on trans people. Over 400 bills in 39 states have been introduced in just the first two months of 2023 that seek to restrict the rights of transgender people, in addition to the many passed in recent years. Over 300 of these bills target children: banning access to bathrooms, sports teams, and health care. Others have begun targeting trans adults. We would have welcomed a piece by Levovitz alerting Jewish communities to the extreme danger that trans people are facing across the country — including, yes, trans Jews. Instead, Levovitz chose to center cisgender Jewish men who might engage in drag one day a year.
We do a disservice to ourselves as Jews and to the world at large when looking through a Jewish lens means that we forget who is truly harmed and miss the scale of harm. Our central question should be: What is the obligation of the Jewish community at this moment, as we see law after law harming the transgender community?
As the story of Purim — and the rest of our history — teaches us, silence and complicity are not the answer.
— Rabbi Becky Silverstein
(he/him) Co-Director, Trans Halakha Project
— Idit Klein
(she/her) President & CEO, Keshet
— Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg
(she/her) Scholar-in-Residence, National Council of Jewish Women
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO