Among Men
Years ago, in the liminality of early transition, I worked a brief labor job. I hadn’t started hormones and looked like, what until recently I had been: a dyke. At the café where I hung out was a private contractor, with a crew of macho-seeming mostly Hispanic workers, doing construction and remodeling. He liked the Republican Party and surfing; hard work, hard rock, and weed. He hired me for a three-day trial, at minimum wage, to impress a mutual friend. He was sleeping with her.
I lacked the skills for complex or unsupervised tasks. Instead, he had me drive with him to different job sites, sometimes carrying things, while he smoked and expounded on life: Women should not do construction, because they lacked physical power. He hired a woman sometimes, an electrician, but she worked slower and cost more, so he only did it to mix things up. I wanted to be a man? I didn’t want to be a man. Being a man was wanting to—he made a sound between a roar and a grunt, hitting the steering wheel—all the time. “You know what I mean?”
“No.”
“That’s being a man. You just—agh!”
He didn’t want to use my new name (my current name), but I refused to say the old one. He tried to buy it. Anytime I wouldn’t do something, he wanted to pay. At lunch, unpacking my vegetarian sandwich and salad, he offered me one hundred dollars to eat meat. I was making eighty-eight dollars a day.
I didn’t want to admit the toolbox was too heavy, so I staggered forward, thrusting my entire body to move it ahead, breathing hard, and stopping when he couldn’t see. The other men smiled and offered to do it for me. I put it down, picked it up, and lurched forth. Eventually, the box reached its appropriate shed.
Prep work went better. Sweeping, protecting the floors. Covering furniture and molding in plastic. I mixed grout and laid tile while he yelled on the phone.
On the next drive, through forested backroads, he talked about lesbians. It didn’t make any sense, two women together. No meat, no substance: foreplay. Like air. He asked me about my girlfriend. He said we should have a threeway with him. If I answered, he spoke louder, crushing whatever I said. Finally, with the two of us alone on the long country road, with no cars in sight, no buildings or even hikers, this man, at least twice my weight, with a powerfully sculpted body, in long shorts and a ball cap and half-day’s stubble, said, “I should pull the car over and ravish you until you like it.” He looked at me. “What would you say?”
These interactions happened so often it didn’t register as a threat. The hostility started when I was a teenager, as my chest developed, and became more pronounced as I edged into bastions of maleness—like construction—and favored men’s clothes. Sometimes, it came with a complicated inverted kindness: I missed the gendered hazings of boyhood, the agh inserted in men. If I passed the test—which I often didn’t—carried the heaviest objects, ignored the insults, they were proud. “This girl can drink any of your boys under the table.” “This girl jackhammered that whole front walkway herself.” In the truck, beside the contractor, I blanked my features, suppressing any natural emotional response, thinking: If I’m stoic enough it might shift.
But it didn’t. He didn’t think women—to him, I could only ever be a woman—belonged in the trades. I slogged through the rest of the trial, knowing he wouldn’t give me the job and that I didn’t want it, no matter how badly I needed money, because—fuck him. I’d spent the last years around butch working-class dykes whose dignity came from being tougher than men. They were proud of their size and strength; of picking fights, coaching sports, and working in trades, often with the same butch/femme rigidity that other people, like the contractor, brought to traditional gender roles. They wanted girlfriends in makeup and skintight dresses with stilettos, for the contrast to highlight and legitimize them. They weren’t impressed with my bookishness or clumsiness, my inability to catch or throw balls. I would have hated them as men, acting like that, but they weren’t and the stance seemed powerful; the only way to be respected, as a butch woman, was out-masculinizing the men. It meant taking labor jobs instead of customer service, doing the roughest segments without flagging or asking to rest. Instead of categories, manhood and butchness were goals.
Muscular Judaism, originally Muskeljudentum, dates to a speech by Max Nordau, at the Second Zionist Conference in 1898. A physician, Nordau diagnosed the nervousness, weakness, and passivity of Jews as the inevitable result of diasporic oppression: “In the narrow streets of the Jewish ghetto, our poor limbs forgot how to move freely; in the twilight of sunless houses, our eyes blinked nervously; in the constant fear of persecution, the power of our voices turned to frightened whispers, swelling only to a mighty shout when our martyrs cried the death prayer in the face of their executioners at the stake.”
He came from a German culture emphasizing strength, honor, and fraternity—courageous masculine traits expressed through dueling and war. Burgeoning racial theories placed Jews in opposition to Aryan virtues; Jewish blood precluded honor, they were intrinsically malformed. Jews were borderline hermaphroditic: their women too active, their men too passive, subject to homosexuality. Like gentile Victorian women, Jewish men suffered hysteria. Ideas of impurity and femininity were deeply rooted: physicians believed, as late as the seventeenth century, in the menstruation of Jewish men.
Nordau did not argue with the stereotyping of Jewish weakness—but faulted circumstance, instead of racial degeneracy. With physical training, Jews could resurrect the warriorship of ancient and biblical times. He looked to figures like Bar Kokhba, who led a bloody revolt against the Romans, and the similarly ferocious Maccabees, encouraging a return to “our oldest traditions; once more becoming deep-chested, tautly jointed, boldly gazing men.” He lauded the contemporary Bar Kokhba gymnastics club, proudly displaying both their Jewishness and physicality. Muscle Jews had “clear heads, solid stomachs, and hard muscles,” exemplifying both Hellenic and Germanic ideals.
The wandering Jews, the ghetto Jews, were emaciated, exhausted, fearful, grotesque. The new Jew would build a nation. The new Jew was strong.
I shouldn’t do manual labor. Ashkenazi Jews are at a higher risk for many genetic disorders than the general population. One of these, Ehlers-Danlos, effects connective tissue. My ligaments do not function. My right shoulder constantly slips from its socket. I cannot run or lift certain objects, several joints dislocate if you touch them, I cannot reach backward; I have chronic pain. High impact activities, like using a hammer, ruin my body for days. My wrists are fragile; even typing can be too much of a strain.
For a long time, the genetic disorder seemed like my only connection to Jewish history. My family did not attend synagogue or read Torah, did not speak Hebrew or observe holidays. We lived in an immigrant district, with a few Russians, where most people were Chinese. My elementary school ran an English immersion program, most of the teachers bilingual in Cantonese. Most of the Russians were Jewish, having fled Soviet persecution. This fact applied to half my family, but seemed completely abstract. Surrounded by kids from China, I felt white: generically American. My relatives spoke Russian, German, and Yiddish, but I was born in San Francisco and their cultures seemed distant, external to me. (Kafka: “What do I have in common with Jews? I hardly have anything in common with myself, and really ought to go stand myself perfectly still in a corner, grateful to be able to breathe.”)
Feeling male, I looked to generic ideals. I remember being four and five years old, insisting my parents call me Robin Hood, running around with a stick and shoelace bent to form a crude bow. The only woman I would be, for Halloween, was Joan of Arc, in chainmail. In middle school, I played sports—which I hated—despite incompetence and joint pain. In high school, I set on firefighting as a career.
At the same time, I loved books and hoped to write them. A vague thought floated of writing and firefighting. I heard firefighters had three days on and three off, meaning I could make a living and write when away. Nothing appealed to me about the actual job. I needed to earn an income and needed to earn my butch stars. I hadn’t met anyone transgender and—though I knew they existed—did not apply their condition to me. I identified as a woman, but suffered beneath the perception and expectation of femininity.
At twenty, I moved to a smaller radical college town. The university had famous professors in Feminist Studies—Angela Davis, Bettina Aptheker, Donna Haraway. Many of the queer people I met studied in that department. They wanted to dismantle gender and capitalism, the criminal justice system, and all other racist structures. Names and pronouns shifted regularly, many identifying as neither male nor female, but genderqueer or nonbinary. This is when I got used to referring to singular people as “they.” Some of the trans people (binary or not) pursued medical transition, showing changes wrought by scalpels and hormones. I rapidly chose a new name.
My brief career with the contractor happened at the same time. By then, I identified as transgender, though less as a man than not-a-woman, and thought I might stay, with male name and clothes and pronouns, in perpetual androgyny. I did not particularly relate to, or wish to simulate, men. When I thought of “men,” in the abstract, I imagined people like the contractor and the masculinity of those hardworking butches in my teens. When other people (outside the Feminist Studies department) heard about my name change, they said the same things. If I was taller, macho, athletic; if I preferred dogs to cats, or knew how to shoot a gun, or wanted to hold guns; if I was aggressive, or louder, or filled any number of masculine traits, they’d understand. As things stood, how could I live as a man?
I studied as if for ambassadorship to a country whose customs I needed to learn. History, sociological and psychology studies, fiction, textbooks, memoir. At fourteen, grasping attraction to women, I did a key search for lesbian and checked every book the library had. Now, I did this for transgender, masculinity, men—eventually stumbling into a piece on Jewish men, whose title I do not remember and have not been able to locate again.
The article said that in mainstream American culture, masculinity is expressed by stoicism, physicality, and the ability to provide for women. The ideals are expressed traditionally, in folklore, by Paul Bunyan—the lumberjack capable of extraordinary labor—and contemporarily by caped crusaders: impermeable supermen. Historically, Ashkenazi Jews have different cultural values, shown in folklore. The author recounted the Golem of Prague.
One version, briefly: In the sixteenth century, Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel went to the river and fashioned a creature of clay. This rabbi was a great mystic and scholar; drawing upon this knowledge, he animated the hulking figure. Mute, strong, and stupid, the golem labored for the ghetto, doing brute labor and protecting them from the violence of Christians outside. Eventually, the golem becomes a danger—desecrating the sabbath or turning against its creator—and the brilliant rabbi removes its access to life.
The golem is not the hero of our story. Boys do not look to it as an example of how to be men. The central figure, with all of his maleness and power, is Rabbi Loew.
Across Muskeljudentum sits Talmudjudentum, the notion of Jewish culture centering Talmudic learning, Muscular Judaism opposed. By Max Nordau’s time, Talmudic Judaism had a poor reputation for dis-corporeality leading to degeneracy and effeminacy, the weakening of physical and mental capacities leading to such psychological ailments as neurasthenia and the general nervousness of Jewish men.
The contemporary scholar Daniel Boyarin argues in his book, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man, that traits historically derided by Christian Europeans were the same ones valued within the community. Ranging from antiquity to nearly the present, Boyarin paints a picture in which the ideal, for men, is the rabbi: gentle, intelligent, modest, “sitting indoors and studying Torah, speaking only a Jewish language, and withdrawn from the world,” while women “were speaking, reading, and writing the vernacular, maintaining businesses large and small, and dealing with the wide world of tax collectors and irate customers,” acting as primary breadwinners so their husbands could devote themselves to religious study.
Jewish men defined themselves against Roman and European models, against “violent physical activity, such as hunting, dueling, or wars—all of which Jews traditionally despised.” Instead of becoming medieval knights or Roman soldiers, Jewish men (ideally) cultivated wisdom and sensitivity; pious submission to God. The same traits valued in desexualized Christian monastics were desired in Jewish husbands. Attractive men were pale and thin, delicate Talmudists with long side-curls and fine hands.
Boyarin points out that these values date back, at least, to Babylonian records—and I see them today. (Philip Roth: “Physical aggression, even camouflaged by athletic uniforms and official rules and intended to do no harm to Jews, was not a traditional source of pleasure in our community—advanced degrees were.”)
After four months of hormones, I looked like a thirteen-year-old boy, acne-ridden with the first sparse starts of a beard. In another year, I underwent a double mastectomy and passed 80 percent of the time. By twenty-eight, my hairline receded, my chest hair thickened, and bartenders stopped carding me. People started asking if I grew up in New York. It happened on the West Coast, where I lived, and in New York when I visited. By New York, they meant Brooklyn, and by Brooklyn, a Yiddish-inflected bagel-and-deli enclave. There are more Jews in the five boroughs of New York City than anywhere, outside of Israel, in the world.
It often seems that people are reduced to their most visible difference, that in the hierarchy of difference, something floats to the top. I think of friends who are black and Jewish, and how the world tends to define them solely as black. I used to be a butch woman; passing changed me into a small Jewish man.
The new perception is very convenient, justifying a number of standard masculine deficiencies. I refuse to lift many objects—but there are those Jewish genetic problems. I never learned to drive and probably never will—but Jews, as established, live in New York and take the subway. Clumsiness is, if not impressive, acceptable in weedy bookish neurotic American Jewish men. There is a basic assumption of intelligence (deserved or not) lacking before. I had excellent grades, from kindergarten to college, and people were often surprised. I remember being told, in a job interview, before transition, that I wasn’t nearly as dumb as I looked. Was it being a woman? A butch woman? The mountain of studs and ripped jeans? The jump in perceived competence, authority, knowledge was phenomenal.
When I became indistinguishable, to most people, from any man born with a penis, who spent his life with a comfortable legal-and-birth-certificate “M,” general perception, of the wisdom of my transition, pivoted. I didn’t need to be taller, athletic, aggressive. Most men are not Paul Bunyan or Superman. Gay, nerdy, quiet, pacifist, feminist, celibate, academic, monastic, disabled men exist in this world—and people remembered the diversity of these subtypes, instead of measuring me to ideals. I looked like a man, and so a man I must be.
This acceptance, sudden ease came from a fluke of hormones. I wanted hormones, had a body capable of undergoing the process, lived in a state willing to pay for the doctors and treatments, after the historic isolation and synthesization of testosterone. I started injections young enough that my body did not struggle to reshape. If I started a few years earlier, before my growth plates fused—or even earlier, as many trans people now do, in first adolescence—I might be as large as my brother (who is younger, six inches taller than me). My brother lacks my genetic disorder; he is bigger, more mechanically apt, and served in the military. He has, unquestionably, in terms of the larger culture, greater masculine credence—but I don’t remember that attitude surfacing, despite any difficulty with my transition, in our own family. They were concerned with our grades.
New York intellectual Jews were born, as a recognizable subtype, in the 1920s and ’30s, coalesced around New York’s heavily Jewish colleges. Ronnie Grinberg’s study says “Prior to World War II, a CCNY education was to the New York intellectuals what West Point had long been to blue-blooded white Protestants: not only an elite educational institution, but also a place and a process of ‘masculine’ socialization. […] Whereas elite Protestant constructions of masculinity stressed traits like strength and athleticism, Jewish masculinity emphasized intellect and combative debate—the mind over muscle.”
In contrast to Nordau’s muscular Zionism, they rebelled against perceived weakness and effeminacy of Jewish men, through intellectual means. Like secular versions of the Talmudic scholars, they wanted to know everything, moving toward academics and public comment—without the old emphasis on mildness or delicacy. “Their ideology of masculinity was not fully bound by traditional Jewish gender ideals or antisemitic stereotypes, nor did it seek merely to mimic American middle-class ideals of manliness. It was new—both uniquely American and uniquely Jewish.”
The early New York intellectuals were immigrants or children of immigrants. Their schools excelled at chess, not athletics. When CCNY acquired a football team and, eventually, had a winning season, the players were noted for strategy and deceit, lightness and speed over brute physical strength. Their cohort produced some of the prominent and influential American thinkers in their generation—acerbic, ironic, ambitious, and agitating. They grew up and trained others, leftists and neoconservatives arguing with each other—and everyone else—in print.
Jon Lasser and Michael Gottlieb stated, in their paper, Gender Role Socialization in Jewish Men:
Jewish boys are encouraged by parents to be gentle, kind, and emotional. Contrary to the dominant culture’s stereotype of masculinity, Jews’ construction of boyhood is one of respect for mother and father, emotional sensitivity and kindness toward others. […] Interaction with children at school who have been socialized by mainstream notions of masculinity may pose conflicts and create tension for Jewish boys. It is the Jewish boy who is likely to be targeted as sissy or girlish. Such teasing, which is viewed by majority children as a source of character building and a contribution to the development of coping strategies, may be experienced by Jewish boys as punitive and a dilemma from which they see no alternatives without violating cultural proscriptions. In order to compensate for perceived feelings of inadequacy, Jewish boys may actively involve themselves in fights or rough sports to demonstrate their masculinity.
They neglected to mention the simplest quickest form of defense—distancing women and the perceived feminine. The military, Talmudic study, and New York universities traditionally excluded women. Historic elevation of the gentle mensch didn’t eliminate sexism or domestic violence, and it is still too easy to express masculinity, in all realms, at the cost of women. One thinks of Norman Mailer drunkenly stabbing his wife and calling the knife a symbol of manhood, of Mailer’s summing up a screed against homosexuality, masturbation, and un-guilty sex, with the statement: “nobody was born a man; you earned manhood provided you were good enough, bold enough”—speaking later of his fear and distaste of being perceived as “the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn […] the softness of a man early accustomed to mother-love.” Boyarin notes, throughout Unheroic Conduct, that insecure rejections, among Jewish men, of the dominant culture’s charges of effeminacy, sparked some of their most toxic behaviors: from domestic violence to imperialism.
The queers I knew worried about this with trans men. Misinformation circled about testosterone, that it gave nice butches roid rage, turning them into terrible or boring men. I’ve known other trans men, with binary genders, for whom transition enabled hitherto buried feminine sides to unfurl, men who became drag queens or gender fuckers, wearing dresses beneath their new beards—and there was a period of strangely inverted pressure, in radical circles, that I should wear glitter, experiment as a femme. What they meant was: Don’t leave your queerness (/visibility/community/shared risks) behind.
I felt safe, for a long time, from accusations of machismo—but in recent years, considering Jewish men, I’m not sure. After working with the contractor, I told myself, not that he was a misogynist but that he was an idiot—which he wasn’t. He taught himself Spanish, to fluency, as an adult, and ran a thriving business. Yet, faced with the accusation that I could not hope to fulfill his expectations of manhood, I responded by saying he couldn’t fill mine.
At the time, this wasn’t conscious. I wanted, like my early butch friends, to beat him at his own game—beat him in terms that he and those dykes would recognize, even if those terms had nothing to do with my specific family culture or models, even if it meant contortions my body literally could not maintain. I did not let myself feel the joint pain, carrying his stupid toolbox, or the envy, hatred, and fear simmering under my surface—envy that had nothing do with a genital lump, and everything to do with how easily his aggression and insensitivity proved a certain masculinity.
I had, by now, read about Loew and the golem—recognizing in it something about the men I grew up with and my own desires, buried under what I thought I should want (that impossible firefighting career)—but did not see this specifically Jewish vision helping my claim, in the United States, of manhood. I could not impress the contractor with rabbinic or scholarly erudition and felt trapped defending myself on his terms. Inevitably, I failed and, in defense of my own dignity, retreated to the meanest corner of inherited culture: telling myself I was smarter (read: better) than him. What did I care for that goy, that man, that idiot’s opinions? What did I care for his threats?
Jews are, of course, as Nordau suspected and the Israeli military proves, as capable of physical and martial development as anyone else—just as other cultures produce intellectuals, and women, in modern Judaism, have proved as capable of Talmudic study as men. Boyarin asks, not if Jews are capable of embodying muscularity but why we should want to, seeing it as a most profound assimilation when “Jewish heroes, whether of the Bible or modernity, are all transformed into mimics of gentile heroes.” To him, the internalization is particularly disturbing when violent and hypermasculine postures led, in part, to the annihilation of a third of our population under the Nazi regime.
—And yet, I cannot help thinking of how often supposed passivity led to genuine threat. Jewish weakness, particularly male weakness, justified pogroms, attacks in turn-of-the-century American ghettos, and the Holocaust itself; it justified lack of aid or intervention—if Jews didn’t defend themselves, why should anyone else? It’s a worldview where victimization means weakness and weakness—no matter how unfortunately—deserves what it gets, that values the “passive” deaths of those who perished in gas chambers less than the “active” deaths of those Warsaw ghetto fighters in their hopeless revolt against SS exterminators. Martial power earns a respect that sometimes envelopes to safety. A New York Times article, following the 1903 Kishineff massacre, spoke admiringly of antipogromists’ defensive valor: “The strength and courage displayed by these people who are generally taunted for cowardice was something astonishing. Even women fought. Their physical agility and the correctness of their aim was not at all that of a race of cringing peddlers.”
I think of the story an older woman, an acquaintance, told me as a teenager. I was shyly/proudly/newly a lesbian, and this woman, in misguided affirmation, told me about her father, as a young man, going with his friends to bash queers. They got in the car and drove to bars and waited until a group (of gay men? Transgender women?) exited. To the father’s surprise and chagrin, after getting jumped, the queers beat the shit out of him. She told me the respect he had for fairies after—that he never tried bashing again.
I remember how disturbing I found it that this was an uplifting story for her—but also the pride in queers able to hold their own, similar to the pride of reading about the American Jewish boxers defending their neighborhoods in the 1930s, and Max Baer, the heavyweight champion who put a Star of David on his trunks for the fight against Hitler’s much-publicized symbolic favorite, Max Schmeling. Baer knocked the fascist out in front of 70,000 spectators in 1933.
Nearly a hundred years later, Baer’s victory gives me a thrill—the same thrill I wonder if Nordau felt reading about Bar Kokhba—of vindication. And yet the joy is tempered. Baer was 6-foot-4, 220 pounds, reputed to walk sideways through doors (for the width of his musculature), to toughen his skull with an iron pipe; an incontestably powerful man. His existence rebutted the lies of Jewish degeneracy, his triumph symbolized Jewish defeat of Nazism—but Schmeling’s defeat was not Hitler’s, the Holocaust did not end. I struggle with sports as a metaphor. Not only do athletics seesaw too easily (Schmeling went on to defeat African American Joe Louis—an Aryan victory—before Louis beat him in turn), but their use as a moral symbol disturbs. Black and Jewish (and queer) people have value whether or not they win fights; we shouldn’t judge the merits of Einstein or Rabbi Loew by another Jew’s boxing prowess. Schmeling, for his part, refused to join the Nazi party, kept an American Jewish manager, risked his life saving two Jewish children from the Holocaust, and befriended Louis; decades after their match, Schmeling—a philanthropist—helped pay, and acted as pallbearer, for Louis’ funeral. People transcend metaphor.
I’m face blind. It’s a minor neurological difference: I can’t always find my parents or brother or housemates in what, to me, is a blurred crowd. After transition, I started seeing a man in shop windows and mirrors, a man who startled me by being too near, and it took a moment for recognition, to realize we wore the same clothing, that the reflection was me.
This happened before transition, but accelerated after hormones, becoming constant—occurring, even, in my own bathroom, brushing my teeth—and never entirely left. The memory is too strong from the many years of living in a body that did not reflect my sense of self and the expectation of that gap—when the gap no longer exists—is like expecting a step, in the dark, that’s not there.
As with many transgender men, hormones made me appear much younger than my age. At twenty-three, newly on hormones, I looked twelve or thirteen. In my late twenties, when I started balding, when hair crept from my chest to my shoulders and out my shirt collar, when my chest barreled, that changed. Now, in my early thirties, I look at least my real age.
These vicissitudes left me with two seemingly contradictory theories, simultaneously true. The first, that appearance has no relation to the abstract sense of myself—to that voice, without gender or possibly even culture, that speaks in my head; the I transcending temporal corporeal worlds—and the second, that I am made of my body and context; that these create the substance of me. It is in this second category that we relate to other people, the category in which we are more than floating spirits communing with eternity; where we wish to be seen. There came a point where I needed, for any authenticity of relationship with myself or others, to live as a man. Only transitioning did I realize that this particular manhood was Jewish; that culture and history were not, in fact, external to me.