Transgender woman who left Hasidic community to speak at Yale
Abby Stein can’t remember a time when she didn’t feel that she was a girl, living in a sect where boys and girls weren’t even allowed to play together.
By ED STANNARD/NEW HAVEN REGISTERUpdated: NOVEMBER 12, 2017 17:14
NEW HAVEN (Tribune News Service) — Abby Stein grew up in the highly insular world of Hasidic Judaism in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York, and was ordained as a rabbi at 19.But, although she was born with a boy’s body, Stein can’t remember a time when she didn’t feel that she was a girl, living in a sect where boys and girls weren’t even allowed to play together and where “it’s almost impossible to be accepting, to be tolerant of gay or trans people.”But Stein never doubted her sexual identity.“To me, it was just something that was there always. I don’t remember a time that I didn’t feel like I was a girl,” she said.Stein, 26, now a nationally known speaker and activist, will tell her story of how she left the Hasidic sect by the time she was 21 and came out as a trans woman at 23 when she appears Wednesday at the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale.Stein was invited to speak at the Slifka Center by Marlee Goldshine, who is working at Slifka on a Springboard Fellowship in social justice, sponsored by Hillel International.“I want to validate the experience of all trans and gender queer folks at Yale,” Goldshine said. “It will draw LGBT people, which is important for Slifka to be inclusive of.”Stein was caught between the culture she grew up in and her feelings about her sexuality, knowing “at a very young age that is not something you can ever bring up. I didn’t know that gay people or transgender existed until I was 20 years old. That’s how sheltered a community it was.”She remembers at 7 looking up information on organ transplants, thinking “I’m going to do a full body transplant to a woman." At 9, saying her nighttime prayers, “I would just add a prayer to God that I just want to wake up as a girl. I joke that it took about 15 years but it finally came true.”Not feeling comfortable playing with boys, and forbidden from playing with girls, Stein spent a lot of time in her room reading and writing.