St. Louis Rabbi Daniel Bogard has gone to the Missouri State Capitol twenty times in the last few years to advocate against bills targeting LGBTQ+ people. Rabbi Bogard says his son’s identity as a trans child is what motivates him to testify. KBIA’s Meghan Lee sat down with Rabbi Bogard to talk about trans rights, their connection to the Jewish faith and the consequences of the proposed bills.
Here’s an excerpt from their conversation:
Meghan Lee: How does Judaism and Jewish conceptions of gender and bodily autonomy… How do those like relate, I guess?
Daniel Bogard: If we go back in time, 1,800 years, the mission of the core of Rabbinic Judaism today described 6,7, 8 different genders, different sexes, the ancient rabbis looked out, and they knew that this was more complicated than just a binary of male and female. We have 1,500-year-old Midrashim that take as the normative understanding of Ada, the first being, that this was a non-binary intersex creature created with all of the genitals, and that when Adam and Eve are split, it’s not that she was a rib, but that they were split in half, that this being was cut in half, and to create the binary there, between the two of them — with all of the unknowns and all of the questions and all of the spectrum still there between them.
We have texts, we have letters to the editor from The Jewish Daily Forward in Yiddish, talking about trans men being accepted and embraced in the shtetl in Ukraine in the 1800’s. For as long as there have been Jews, there have been queer Jews, because being queer being trans, it’s just another beautiful way of being a human being.
Meghan Lee: Very plainly, what is happening with trans legislation in Missouri?
Daniel Bogard: Yeah, I think folks don’t realize the extent to which our legislature has become obsessed with issues relating to trans people and in particular, trans kids. There are laws that ban best practice gender affirming care. There are laws that would limit where children and adults can go to the bathroom. And then you add in the laws against so-called drag queens, which have to be understood as a part of this, because if you don’t give trans people access to hormones, and if you don’t allow trans folk to transition, then all of a sudden, these people are being classified as being in drag, and, and their bodies are being sexualized.
Meghan Lee: What are the stakes for this issue?
Daniel Bogard: The stakes in a very personal way, are about my family being able to stay. Missouri is my home. St. Louis is my home. I live in the house that my grandpa built that my dad grew up in, I grew up in. My son sleeps in my childhood bedroom. And really, that’s what we are fighting for is we are fighting to be able to stay in our home. And we live in fear that that’s not going to be able to happen. We live in fear that what’s happening in Texas and in Florida, where the Department of Family Services is being weaponized against the families of loving and affirming trans kids is going to come here and that we are going to have to flee.
