An open letter to frum jews: Hi! I am a transsexual goyishe stranger that one of your OTDs found on the internet and ran off with. Can we talk about your collective sexual trauma for a moment?

It’s become a bit of a running joke among the other transsexuals and assorted deviants who make up my core social circle: I am the chasid-lover, who spends a good chunk of my time and energy talking to DL orthodox jews, or openly queer, off the derech ones. But they don’t get that despite my extremely untraditional lifestyle, I am quite old school in one specific regard: I believe that when you marry someone and commit yourself to them for life, you must also commit to their people, and love them too.

And while I never anticipated that I would be married to another trans man who happens to be from your world, sometimes a closeted chassidish girl you met online shows up at your apartment, collapses into your arms, and tells you that the streets are preferable to shidduchim. When this happens, you sort of just have to decide right then and there if this is going to be your life now. I must say that despite the steep learning curve for an outsider to properly comprehend you (one day I hope to be truly fluent in yinglish, and not have to constantly google things mid-conversation) and the (understandable, I suppose) frosty reception from some of you, I’m glad I chose this. I have met a lot of truly interesting people on the “woke” social outskirts of your world over the last four years or so, standing next to my OTD lubavitcher life partner with a big, dumb irish grin on my face and hand outstretched.

I want to talk to you about that, by the way: your kin, who I’m meeting on these social outskirts of your communities. The ones that are half in/half out living double lives, or have become largely estranged from you. Now, while I *do* understand that I sort of have the energy of a gaudy clown car bursting through your living room wall kool-aid-man style and interrupting your shabbos meal — I’m worried about all of you in an urgent, pikuach nefesh sort of way, so please forgive my intrusion.

I’m hearing and seeing a lot of really fucked up shit hanging around OTD jews, and talking to ones who are still “in” the community outwardly, but are eyeing the nearest exit. I’m seeing a lot of raw pain, and severe psychological distress. Some people are very suicidal. Quite a few are addicted to hard drugs, and even more are engaging in unsafe, impulsive sex with anonymous strangers, some of whom could be very dangerous. I have met a handful of OTD youths who have stories that keep me up at night — frum teenagers who ran away and had the misfortune of stumbling into the arms of a predatory pimp instead of finding someone like me, or are chronically homeless, or living in isolated squalor.

The reasons why frum jews go off the derech seem to vary quite a bit. This is certainly not a monolithic group, and some people are doing much better than others. But I’ve found, in my experience so far, that the ones suffering the most are the very sexually traumatized ones who have been shunned and silenced. Your communities are experiencing a spiritual cancer that I am unfortunately very familiar with.

I was raised in a conservative, blue-collar catholic home. My community of origin has suffered immensely from the impacts of systemic childhood sexual abuse. It wasn’t just at the hands of the priests, nuns, and catholic brothers either. There was a lot of incestuous abuse as well, which was even less okay to talk about freely. Clergy sexual abuse and incestuous abuse are, in my opinion, highly related. In shame-based religious communities where being emotionally vulnerable and open about sex is highly taboo, and there are tight restrictions on what “morally permissible” sexual conduct is, you will see the silent normalization of child sexual abuse as an emotional release valve for sexually dysfunctional adults in the community.

There is this really widespread idea that all child sexual abuse is carried out by actual pedophiles — as in, people with a pathological attraction to prepubescent children. Many experts who work closely on this issue would tell you that this assumption is false. Child sexual abuse is a systemic issue, fueled by social environments that create opportunities for abuse to happen, and cultural norms that prevent child victims and adult survivors from talking about it. True pedophilic sexual pathology in individuals plays a much smaller role. I think a lot of people like to pretend that it’s all pathology because that requires less work from everyone else, and it means that nothing has to fundamentally change. When a specific abusive situation becomes impossible to ignore, you can resolve the issue by castigating and punishing one singular predator, and then just call it a day.

It is much more stressful to acknowledge that if you create an environment where people are routinely punished for even just talking about sex — let alone openly engaging in any behavior that defies the community’s religious standards — then you will create an environment of extreme sexual fear and paranoia. Everyone, now preoccupied with shame about their own “bad” sexual desires (whatever that may mean, for any given person) and experiencing high levels of sexual frustration, will be much less likely to notice any odd behaviors and boundary issues exhibited by others around them. No one wants to point an accusatory finger at anyone else when everyone is doing things that they’re technically not supposed to be doing — at least according to community standards.

The children living in these environments become perfect targets for the releasing of all sorts of repressed sexual urges. They don’t understand what’s happening to them at all, and are taught to treat the adults in the community with a great deal of respect. They are also taught that it is very bad to ever question the authority of the adults around them — especially if that adult is someone like a rabbi, teacher, or doctor. If we’re talking about an offender who is directly related to the child they’re molesting, the risk of getting caught decreases even more. Why wouldn’t you trust your loving uncle, or favorite big cousin? Chas v’shalom we’re talking about totty, or even mommy. Those are the sexually abused children who are the hardest to reach, I believe. You will often find children acting out sexually with other children in communities with these problems, as well. This can be very traumatizing for both parties — not just the child who didn’t initiate. This is not talked about as much, but it is endemic. In my experience talking to incest survivors from all walks of life, one of the most common things I hear is: “It was my sibling.”

The vast majority of sexual violence happens in very intimate contexts, child sexual abuse included. I certainly can’t think of a more intimate context for sexual violence than incest. When incest truly comes to light in a family, and the offenses are emotionally acknowledged by all, the revelations are nuclear. It very necessarily alters the family’s dynamic, drastically. The veil of normalcy gets pulled away entirely, and then a torrent of other painful secrets suddenly come rushing out. Many people experience identity crises as a result of this, and that’s why this so rarely happens. It’s too radical and terrifying for everyone else, so they sacrifice the victim, like a lamb. If this scapegoat can’t handle the burden of bearing the family’s secrets anymore, they’ll disappear one day. Everyone else will delude themselves as to why they did that, which is easy to do when the victim isn’t there anymore to tell them the truth. Or maybe they’ll stay, and descend into madness instead. Then, the family can lock them away somewhere in shame, or pretend they have some sort of inexplicable emotional issue. They are the problem. It’s just something bad inside of them — this has nothing to do with us.

Orthodox jews are far from being the only group of people with a CSA crisis on their hands. Virtually every community and nation on this earth struggles with this, to varying degrees. But what I find so particularly explosive about the jewish people’s CSA crisis is that you guys really are like one, massive extended family. It’s not *just* a matter of culture. My husband pointed this out to me one day, which drastically changed the way I see it as an outside observer. He said to me: “When you are a jewish child and you are sexually abused by someone in your community, it almost doesn’t matter if the offender is directly related to you or not. The bonds between us are so close that it will emotionally feel like incest, regardless.”

And that’s when it hit me; why things like lashon hara and prohibitions on embarrassing others are so often plainly and cynically weaponized against frum survivors of sexual violence, even if those arguments sound (I’m sorry if this is rude, but I have to be honest) completely fucking absurd to anyone who didn’t grow up listening to this stuff. Listen: I am far from someone who knows what they are talking about when it comes to jewish law, and even I was able to deduce pretty quickly that revealing sexual abuse is a very obvious matter of pikuach nefesh, to anyone who knows anything about how sexual trauma works. This is supposed to trump every other concern, no? This should certainly be obvious to any Torah scholar thinking critically.

But I understand where these mental gymnastics come from now. This is genuinely panicked behavior. I imagine on some level — whether this is conscious knowledge or subconscious — that your rabbanim who enforce these norms know that if orthodox jews collectively acknowledged the actual emotional, rock-bottom truth of this crisis, something huge and terrifying would happen. Families and entire communities would begin to fall apart at their seams. Yiddishkeit, as everyone knows it now, would not be able to sustain itself.

Very radical social upheaval would occur at a rapid, chaotic pace. Institutions would fall, and many people who have a great deal of power over others right now would suddenly lose that authority. Aspects of halacha viewed largely as unquestionable would suddenly have to be put under a microscope and rethought about in ways that I’m sure would feel terrifying for a lot of especially machmir jews. A total transformation of your cultural norms regarding frank, open, and scientifically-informed discussions about sex would have to occur. It would force all of you to emotionally disarm around one another in a way that I think would feel very alien to the vast majority of you, and it would dredge up a lot of very painful repressed trauma to the surface. It would, essentially, set off a bomb inside the heart of every orthodox jew. Many of you would come out the other side of this unrecognizable from the people you were before. A very powerful, collective teshuvah would take place.

I have been told (time and time again) by a small handful of frum jews in my life who are on the same page as me, that this is a hard truth that the vast majority of you are incapable of accepting. I am told that jews are ontologically stubborn, and that progress is happening in dribs and drabs. I have also been told that your communities being as decentralized and socially splintered as they are poses additional issues for the speed of progress, and that one specific community having a mass reckoning would mean little to nothing to the others. I know these things are also true, I’m not delusional.

And, I know that some of you really are having very meaningful conversations behind closed doors, away from the more reactionary types in your communities who are trying (futilely, by the way) to prevent this inevitable change and new awareness from occurring at all. I also see the generational divide, the way that young orthodox jews are pushing for much more change than their parents or grandparents could have managed.

I am also not so socially inept as to think that the majority orthodox jews would ever care to hear any of this “woke” shit, full stop. They don’t want to hear it even from other frum people, let alone someone like me. I also am aware of the open contempt that many orthodox jews have for the kinds of OTD jews that I am begging all of you to care much more about. They are very easy to ignore; far gone from the frum world. Out of sight, out of mind. Perhaps at most, if one is pressed to think about them, you might acknowledge that you should pray for them. That Hashem should heal whatever is wrong with their neshamahs, and that they come back and rejoin their communities of origin with apologies, for their failures to be a good jew. Again, the bad stuff is all on them, never on you — no need to ever look in a mirror. But beyond that, what can you do, right?

I am aware that my natural, organic tone of voice is one that many frum ears find obnoxious and grating. The tone of this letter is not at all a performance — I am sincerely like this. I can’t really help it; I am white trash, and I am also far too gay for comfort. Double-whammy. For the last four years my husband has been tutoring me in decoding frum ashkenazi passive-aggressive communication, and on how to express the things I’d like to say back to you in the same way, so you’ll all be more receptive to me. I hate having to code switch like that but I do it anyway, most of the time. But I don’t want to do that about this specific topic anymore, because I don’t think you should be passive aggressive about life-and-death matters. This is an emergency. Some of your children are very close to death today, and growing numbers of them are going to get sucked into that same abyss, real soon. I’m watching it happen.

You may wonder if I am being dramatic, or over exaggerating. I’m sure many of you are very skeptical of me. But ask yourself, use your sechel: What ulterior motive could I possibly have here? What do I, a goy who had fuck all to do with any of this prior to meeting my husband, have to gain by concerning myself with the relationships that you have with your estranged and alienated relatives? The only thing that I have ever gotten out of any conversation with one of you about this in the last four years has been a headache.

But I keep pressing the issue anyway, repeating myself constantly. That’s why I decided to write this. Probably just best to get everything out in one nice, neat little letter, so I can just repost it easily every time I have a new, distressing interaction with yet another one of the many problematic children that your communities have fully abandoned and left to die. I don’t know what else to do about the horrible, sinking feeling I get whenever that happens, knowing that there’s not much I can personally do about it.

I think I care for your particularly troubled OTD kids as much as I do because they remind me so much of many of my own childhood friends, from that community of origin I mentioned earlier. A lot of those people are dead now. Mostly opioid overdoses, and suicides. I deleted my facebook account that I’ve had since high school a while ago, because eventually my wall started to feel like an obituaries column. I do not want this for any of you. I do not want it for any of your children.

Despite my outward appearance, and what you may assume about individuals like myself, I happen to believe in and love Hashem very deeply. He saved my life when I was at my lowest and in a very dark, frightening place. I talk to him all the time throughout my days, just to keep myself grounded. I try my best to pay attention to the curious things he’s always placing in front of me.

One day, for some reason, he placed an OTD chassidic jew with nowhere else to go on my doorstep. I don’t know why, your guess would be just as good as mine. But sure, why the hell not. And ever since then, I just keep stumbling across new ones, many of whom are very eager to pour their hearts out and show me the emotional scars that your families and rabbanim gave them. Holy shit, there’s so many! A truly endless conga line of people with aggressively yiddish names, and a need for someone to develop a less christian and superior alternative to the 12 step program, among many other needs.

If you managed to get all the way to the bottom of this letter without closing the browser tab, thank you for your undivided attention on this lovely erev shabbos right here in the heart of brooklyn. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to my fetish forums and gay hookup apps, so me and some of your fellow yidden on there — sex-worker-soliciting, anonymous-gay-cruising yidden — can get back to our discussion of PrEP and HIV. I think we should talk about monkeypox as well. There’s a vaccine for it, and today might be the day that I win the battle with someone’s brainworms about vaccines. Talking to some of you about the prevalence of STDs and the purpose of condoms is also a matter of pikuach nefesh, okay?

[the way old litvish guys mumble it] Gudshabbos gudshabbos,

ajc