The transgender movement and transgender medical-industrial complex have always been thoroughly jewish.
Magnus Hirschfeld (14 May 1868 – 14 May 1935) was a German physician, sexologist and LGBTQ advocate, whose German citizenship was later revoked by the Nazi government.[1] Hirschfeld was educated in philosophy, philology and medicine. An outspoken advocate for sexual minorities, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and World League for Sexual Reform. He based his practice in Berlin-Charlottenburg during the Weimar period. Performance Studies and Rhetoric Professor Dustin Goltz characterized the committee as having carried out “the first advocacy for homosexual and transgender rights”.[2]
Hirschfeld is regarded as one of the most influential sexologists of the 20th century.[3] He was targeted by early fascists and later the Nazis for being Jewish and gay. He was beaten by völkisch activists in 1920, and in 1933 his Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was looted and had its books burned by Nazis. Hirschfeld was forced into exile in France, where he died in 1935.[4][5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Hirschfeld
The Small Town Jew Who Pioneered Sex-Change Surgery
By Zachary Solomon
Stanley Biber’s dream was to become a rabbi, so he moved from his birthplace of Des Moines to Chicago, and enrolled in a yeshiva. But then World War II began, derailing his plans. Following the war, Biber lost the clerical urge, went to medical school, became a surgeon, and, before long, turned into a pioneer in the world of gender reassignment surgery. A classic tale.
Biber settled in the small, very Catholic town of Trinidad, Colorado, where he was the only surgeon. In 1969, everything changed. A friend and colleague asked if he would perform surgery on her. Biber, admitting that he had never heard of such a thing, consulted how-to diagrams. After a successful surgery and many subsequent tweaks, he found his passion.
Over 30 years, and an estimated 4,000 sex change operations later, Biber had become an important figure in increasing national recognition of transgender identity and, as the medical establishment calls it, gender dysphoria. He worked tirelessly from his office in tiny Trinidad, and, in the small moments between surgeries, found time to serve as county commissioner and have seven children and seven stepchildren.
https://www.jta.org/jewniverse/2016/the-small-town-jew-who-pioneered-sex-change-surgery
Boston doctor finds treating transgender youth a transforming experience
Norman Spack, a pediatric endocrinologist in Boston, is the co-founder of the country’s first clinic devoted to treating children with gender disorders.
By Penny Schwartz January 19, 2012 8:48 pm
BOSTON (JTA) — In a family of prominent Jewish educators, Norman Spack could be called the rebel. He became a doctor.
“I’m the only one who didn’t go into Jewish education,” quips Spack, a senior associate in the endocrine division at Boston’s Children’s Hospital, where he has worked for 39 years.
Spack’s father, Abraham, was a nationally acclaimed Jewish educator in Boston, and his brother, Eliot, is a recognized Jewish educational leader. But now the 68-year-old physician and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School in his own fashion has joined the family business.
As the co-founder of the country’s first clinic devoted to treating children with gender disorders, and as a leading authority on transgender youth, Spack has found himself at the forefront of efforts to educate the public about a widely misunderstood condition and to help transgender people secure their fundamental rights.
Q&A: A gender expert who stands up for nonbinary youth
by Robert Nagler Miller June 10, 2019
Developmental and clinical psychologist Diane Ehrensaft is an associate professor of pediatrics at UC San Francisco and director of mental health at the UCSF Child and Adolescent Gender Center, which provides comprehensive services to gender-nonconforming and transgender youth and their families. She is the author of several books, most recently “The Gender Creative Child: Pathways for Nurturing and Supporting Children Who Live Outside Gender Boxes.” Ehrensaft, 72, is a mother of two, grandmother of one, and daughter of a 99-year-old mother; her father recently passed away at 101. She lives in Oakland with her husband, Jim Hawley, “a nice Jewish boy,” she says.
J.: How did a straight, cisgender woman become one of the leading advocates for nonbinary and transgender people?
Diane Ehrensaft: This goes back to the mid- and late-1960s. When I arrived at the University of Michigan as an undergraduate in 1964, Ann Arbor was a sleepy college town. But by 1968, things had changed. There was a cultural revolution going on then. I stayed on at the university for my doctorate. My dissertation, “Sex Role Socialization in a Preschool Setting,” looked at whether preschool teachers treated boys and girls differently. No surprise — they did. So that’s how it began. As a second-wave feminist, I was interested in these issues.
(…)
J.: You reference your Jewish Midwestern background as key to your own success.
DE: I grew up in a very left-liberal Jewish household in Chicago. We understood what it was to be part of a minority, and we were very focused on social justice. I was part of very progressive Jewish youth groups, and I went to a progressive Jewish camp. My father, in particular, always said to me, “Girls can do anything. You can do anything your brothers do.”
https://jweekly.com/2019/06/10/qa-a-gender-expert-who-stands-up-for-nonbinary-youth/
The Orthodox Jew who became a gender-reassignment surgeon
By Yonah Krakowsky | April 30, 2018
I attended an all-boys, Orthodox Jewish high school in Toronto, where sex ed largely consisted of our rabbi telling us how God would punish us for our sexual sins. Masturbation, we were told, was a crime so terrible that those of us who did it would spend eternity suffering in a vat of boiling semen. The image was enough to turn me into an abstainer throughout high school and during my years at an Israeli yeshiva. In my early 20s, I went to my rabbi to get permission to provide a sperm sample for a medical test. “Yonah,” he said, “go crazy.”
So maybe it’s ironic—or maybe not—that I’m now a urologist, practising in the areas of erectile dysfunction, sexual dysfunction and trans bottom surgery. I found my niche in 2012, when I met my mentor, Ethan Grober, a doctor who’d been working with trans patients for years. He was able to connect with patients, talking to them casually about their most intimate details. He made me realize I wanted to do gender-reassignment surgery. I love helping patients feel more comfortable in their own skin. I also love that most urological problems can be fixed quickly: if I get called in because there’s a kidney stone, I insert a tube to unblock it. If somebody’s testicles are twisted, I go in and untwist them.
I work out of Women’s College Hospital, where I perform orchiectomies, or the removal of the testicles, for trans women who want to stop using testosterone blockers. If a patient thinks she might want a vaginoplasty—the surgical creation of a vagina—I leave the skin of the scrotum to construct labia later. For trans guys, we do testicular implants. We’re the second program in Canada to perform bottom surgery, after a private clinic in Montreal. Our goal is to be able to offer the first vaginoplasties in Toronto by the end of 2018, with phalloplasties to follow later on.
I’m still an Orthodox Jew. I have faith. I keep kosher, I wear a kippah to work, and I pray every morning. I put on phylacteries, because that’s what my father does and what my grandfather did when he was hiding out in an attic during the Holocaust. I’m at synagogue on Saturdays, but if my pager goes off, I drive in to the hospital, because saving a life supersedes the Sabbath. Many people I meet believe that my faith is at odds with my career. But my work allows me to practise the medicine that interests me while helping a marginalized community. I deal with patients who, by and large, have had negative experiences with hospitals and the health care system, and I give them the care they deserve. That is very much in line with my religious practice.
https://torontolife.com/life/orthodox-jew-became-gender-reassignment-surgeon/
Q&A: A pediatrician who helps trans kids and moonlights playing klezmer
by Alix Wall March 23, 2020
Dr. Ilana Sherer, 38, has a general pediatrics practice in Dublin at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation/Sutter Health with a specialty in caring for gender-nonconforming and transgender youth. She’s also a violinist with Saul Goodman’s Klezmer Band. She lives with her wife and two children in Oakland.
J.: You like to say you’re the best klezmer violin-playing pediatrician in the Bay Area. How did that come to happen?
Ilana Sherer: Classical violin was a huge part of my life from age 5 through high school. At a Hillel event in college, I sat next to someone in a klezmer band. There was a deep learning curve, but I played through college and then in medical school. I’ve played quite a bit here but it’s more limited now because of my kids. I grew up in a pretty mainstream Jewish community and klezmer helped me see there were other ways to connect to Judaism. Once I entered the klezmer/Yiddish world, I thought about how this is what my grandparents spoke, and how Yiddish culture has these really strong leftist roots.
(…)
There are a lot of Jews working in this field, true?
Once, at the center, we were trying to schedule our next meeting and realized that everyone in the room but one person was Jewish. I see it as part of the social justice terrain and my personal responsibility as a queer person and a Jew. These are the kids who need us to support and advocate for them in the way the generation before advocated for me.
Ilana Sherer. “Trust me, goyim.”
Fighting for Their Lives: Jewish Pediatrician in middle of Alabama Transgender Battles
May 4, 2022
By Richard Friedman
Passover, celebrated last month, challenges Jews not only to remember the story of the Exodus from Egypt but also to interpret and integrate it into their own lives. Few have done that more intensely and publicly than Birmingham Jewish community member Dr. Morissa Ladinsky.
Ladinsky is associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and co-leader of UAB’s Youth Multidisciplinary Gender Health Team. She has emerged as a high-profile plaintiff in a recent lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a new Alabama law.
That recently-enacted measure makes it a crime for physicians such as Ladinsky to provide certain gender-related medical care to anyone under age 19 who is transitioning from the gender assigned them at birth to a new gender identity.
Thus far, two other states have passed similar laws, though Alabama is the first one to impose criminal penalties.
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For younger teens, puberty blockers are prescribed if the team thinks they are necessary. “These medications, introduced in early puberty, provide a short term pause button on further pubertal changes and are instrumental in preserving the mental health of younger teens who are beginning to struggle with gender dysphoria,” Ladinsky explained.
As the teen patient gets older, hormone therapy becomes an option.
In cases of females transitioning to male, hormone injections can stimulate the growth of body hair, deepen the voice and create a more masculine appearance. For males transitioning to female, treatments can lead to breasts, softer skin, rounder hips and other changes.
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This pediatrician knows the transgender issue is emotionally charged in heavily conservative Alabama. It’s also one that she believes politicians are using to score points with voters. She remains determined as she fights for those she calls “my kids,” driven in large part by her Jewish faith.
(…)
Inherent in her family’s Judaism was a commitment to social action and a belief that Jews, because of their difficult history, are obliged to stand up for those who are oppressed — such as the transgender community.
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Being at the forefront of the transgender issue and practicing gender pediatrics, especially in Alabama, reflects Ladinsky’s commitment to Tikkun Olam, the Jewish concept of repairing the world.
Woke pediatrician is accused of ‘glorifying’ suicide of transgender girl, 16, at American Academy of Pediatrics conference by twice hailing how ‘BOLDLY’ victim killed herself by stepping in front of truck
By VANESSA SERNA FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
Published: 16:32 BST, 13 October 2022 | Updated: 17:42 BST, 13 October 2022
An Alabama pediatrician has been accused of glorifying the suicide of a tormented transgender teenager by telling a top conference the 16 year-old’s decision to end her life was ‘bold.’
Dr. Morissa Ladinsky twice used the word while describing the 2014 death of Leelah Alcorn, who stepped in front of a tractor-trailer in Ohio while battling mental health issues she says were linked to her transition from male to female.
Speaking at the American Academy of Pediatrics conference at Anaheim on October 11, she said: ‘And in the final days of 2014… a local 16-year-old lady, Leelah Alcorn, of trans experience, stepped boldly in front of a tractor-trailer, ending her life.
Morissa Ladinsky. “Trust me, goyim.”
Missouri Jewish leaders advocate for trans rights at state legislature
Activists protest laws that would limit options for transgender children and censor discussion in schools, citing biblical adage that all humans are created in God’s image
By Jackie Hajdenberg
10 February 2023, 2:09 am
(…) Dan — a transgender boy whose parents asked that his last name not be used — was the youngest person to testify at the Missouri State House last week in opposition to eight bills heard in the chamber that would restrict trans children from participating in sports that align with their gender identity and limit their access to specialized medical care.
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He was also part of a delegation of Missouri’s Jewish community members, alongside a few Christian clergy, that has been consistently appearing at the state Capitol to advocate for trans rights in response to a slew of bills that activists say violate their religious freedoms and cause significant harm to the LGBTQ community.
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“I’m just so proud of our Jewish community, the way we have shown up around this issue here in Missouri,” Bogard said, remarking on the decades-long history of Jewish-led LGBTQ advocacy in the state.
(The statewide LGBTQ advocacy group PROMO, which is not itself a Jewish group, was founded by Rabbi Susan Talve, one of the founding members of Bogard’s synagogue. Shira Berkowitz, a Jewish summer camp friend of Bogard’s, is the senior director of public policy and advocacy at the organization, and last year, Bogard and Berkowitz launched a summer camp for trans kids.)
The new principal of the Saul Mirowitz Jewish Community School, Raquel Scharf-Anderson, made the two-hour drive early on January 24 to testify on behalf of her students.
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