Abby Chava Stein: Becoming Eve

M y j o u r n e y f r o m u l t r a-o r t h o d o x r a b bi t o t r a n s g e n d e r w om an

SEAL £16.50 Reviewed by Jane Liddell-King “Tati,” I said, looking him in the eye. “Tati, I am a girl”. I am a girl, I’d said it.

At the end of this memorable book, Abby Stein’s father faces the fact that his firstborn son has suffered from a lifelong experience of dysphoria and is in the process of changing his body to accommodate his psyche. “I don’t get it” he asserts, “Men have a higher place in society. Men have better roles in the world. Why would you do that?” Rabbi David (Abby’s new rabbi and mentor) said, “Your child is coming to you and telling you who she truly is. She wants you to see her for who her soul is”. Sadly and shockingly, Abby’s father responds by declaring that his daughter’s decision probably means an end to contact between them. He refuses to allow her to speak to her mother, the family’s house phone being the only means of communication. And 10 of her 12 siblings have stopped speaking to her. What lies behind such uncompromising rejection? The sixth child and firstborn son of a Hasidic family, at the brit Abby Chava Stein was named Yisroel Avrom Ben Menachem Mendel. A direct descendant of the Baal Shem Tov, he was repeatedly told that he was “a holy boy”. With courage and painful accuracy, Abby Stein’s book maps the journey from the earliest experience of dysphoria as an agonised and mystified 3 year old to her renaming 21 years later. Then, after a profound struggle to adapt, which included marriage and fathering an adored son, she stands in a synagogue her father could

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not recognise as kosher and becomes known as Avigail Chava bat Menachem Mendel V’Chaya Sheindel. In writing her coming-of-age story, Abby Stein never underestimates the positive aspects of her childhood: “the feelings of safety, belonging, and love that growing up in a religious, even cultish, community can offer.” She is hugely intelligent, a precocious and voracious reader: “At age five, I learned to read Hebrew and Yiddish without the vowels”. Newspapers inform her of transplants and she prays for a full body transplant. Throughout her schooling, she searches texts for meaning and provokes clashes with rabbis. Eventually in her teenage years, her father secures her a place at an out of town Yeshiva. She tells Reb Yitzhak Moshe Erlanger, an authoritative rabbi, that she feels untethered from Judaism. This brings a transformative response: “Dive into Kabbalistic studies. It will help you”. Rabbi Chaim Vital’s The Door of Reincarnation is a revelation. She reads “At times, a male will reincarnate in the body of a female, and a female will be in a male body….” And observes “For the first time after sixteen years, I had found a text that justified my existence. Maybe I wasn’t crazy after all!” Tragically enough, the community cannot accept the reality of dysphoria and Chava had no choice to leave, albeit uneasily. As she herself says, her story is to be continued. For us, this book and its brave beginning must raise questions of identity, response and responsibility, separation and integration, education and indoctrination, law and compassion. Questions which, in today’s world, we must surely face and answer.

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