The Limits of Inclusion

Liberal Jewish institutions have embraced gender non-conforming kids. Have they gone too far?

It’s mid-July. Across the country, Jewish kids are swimming, crafting, singing, and finding themselves in nature, free from their parents for weeks or months in what has become a quintessential American Jewish institution: summer camp.

Camp has always come with its challenges, from mosquito bites to homesickness. In recent years, a new challenge has emerged. Individuals who identify as a gender other than their biological sex are on a steep rise, with young adults and children leading the growth. Most liberal Jewish organizations have embraced this emergent community as a continuation of their leadership on marriage equality and gay and lesbian rights.

Jewish camps have been quietly figuring out how to handle this. And quietly is how Camp Solomon Schechter, in Tumwater, put out its statement of inclusivity for transgender and gender non-conforming campers. That is, until Fox News picked it up.

“Jewish summer camp declares it will hide from parents the news of any kid who ‘transitions at camp,’” the July 11 headline screams.

Indeed, the statement on Schechter’s website informed parents that changes in gender identity will be accepted and may not be communicated to the parents.

Another part of the statement outlines the policy on pronouns and “deadnaming.”

Camp Solomon Schechter director Zach Duitch declined to comment, citing privacy concerns. He did not respond to a followup question asking about the policy from a high level. On July 17, as quietly as the statement went up, it quietly disappeared.

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Rates of LGBTQ+ youth have shot up in recent years. According to a Gallup poll published in 2022, the rate of those identifying as LGBT has doubled since 2012, with significant jumps in younger generations. Twenty-one percent of Gen Z (people born 1997-2003) identify as LGBT—double the rate of millennials (those born 1981-1996). A large number of individuals under the flag of LGBTQ+ identify as non-binary, meaning they don’t consider themselves male or female and may opt for third-person plural pronouns. According to a recent survey, three-quarters of people identifying as non-binary are under the age of 30.

The rate of transgender-identified youth has also skyrocketed. A study published by Reuters using data compiled by insurance reporting found that at least 42,000 children were diagnosed with gender dysphoria in 2021—triple the amount in 2017.

Gender dysphoria is the condition in which a person feels he/she is not in the right body; normally this starts young and is treated as a serious mental health condition. In recent years, more kids have been coming out without medical histories or symptoms—sometimes even in groups. Either way, the accepted medical practice is affirmative; that is, doctors and therapists recognize the legitimacy of the feeling and help patients manifest their true selves via social transition (changing names and pronouns), hormonal therapy (puberty blockers and/or estrogen or testosterone), and/or surgeries to alter genitalia. The most common surgeries are mastectomies (called “top surgery”) and “bottom surgeries,” like orchidectomies, the removal of the testicles. Phalloplasties and the creation of a “neovagina” are less common and more complicated and expensive. There are hundreds if not thousands of fundraising campaigns for gender-affirming surgeries on GoFundMe.

What started as celebratory gay/lesbian coming out stories (remember Ellen?) has become a pantheon of new sexual preferences and gender identities that must be taken seriously and respected as fact. Liberal Jewish institutions are embracing the rapid change under an ever-expanding tent of inclusion.

Already in 2016, the Conservative movement, with which Schechter is affiliated, issued a proclamation affirming and including transgender and non-conforming individuals, including in camps and schools:

Be it further resolved that the Rabbinical Assembly encourage all programs affiliated with the Conservative Movement, including seminaries, schools, synagogues, camps, and communal and professional organizations to educate themselves and their employees about the needs of transgender and gender non-conforming people, so as to create fully inclusive settings…

Recently, the movement adjusted the language used to call people up to the Torah to include a gender neutral option.

Many people are on board with more gender diversity in religious spaces, but the question of how to handle children is raising the hackles of parents across the country. The affirmation model of care does not allow much room for parents to question their children’s claims. Because of this, parents may be kept in the dark about the new identity with the help of adults in the child’s life.

“Social transition is not a benign act. It’s a profound psycho-social intervention,” says Gigi, a woman from California who raised her children in a liberal Jewish tradition. Gigi’s not her real name, and she won’t disclose what happened in her family to make her an activist. But she’s one of myriad parents in a global network who has been activated to challenge the normalization of transgenderism in children’s spaces for fear it undermines parents, causes social contagion, and leads kids down a path of lifelong medical treatment. She volunteers for Our Duty, an advocacy, education, and parental support organization that believes there is a line between being gay and transgender.

“Gay and lesbian is so different from trans,” she says. “They’re now telling gay and lesbian people, if you’re a masculine woman you’re a man. It’s regressive.”

Parents like Gigi are concerned about what happens when a child or teen is told by a non-parent that their pubescent feelings of confusion and discomfort mean they are something other than what they biologically are. A growing body of parent testimonies conjure a common theme: a perfectly average child suddenly comes out as trans, the child’s educators and doctors tell the parents that this is who they truly are and warn that questioning or delaying social or medical transition will lead to harm. Suicide looms large in these conversations. “Better to have a live son than a dead daughter” is a refrain.

To avoid enabling such catastrophic ends, a rising number of children as young as 6 are starting off-label puberty blockers—drugs developed to slow precocious puberty, treat prostate cancer, prepare women for IVF and also to chemically castrate sex offenders—to ostensibly pause development while kids work out their identities. Many of them go on to hormone therapy to change secondary sex characteristics before puberty can take effect, in spite of the fact that the drugs may cause side effects that include infertility, bone loss, and the inability to experience orgasm. As an experiment, Gigi contacted a list of gender-affirming doctors asking for a letter of recommendation for surgery and hormones for her 16-year-old. Of the 45 or so doctors she contacted, 23 wrote back promising a recommendation for surgery without any therapy or in-person meetings.

The suicide conversation stopper can be traced to The Trevor Project, an LGBTQ suicide-prevention organization with assets of nearly $59 million that helps set the national agenda around trans youth. According to their 2022 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health, suicidality is on the rise. While LGBTQ kids do face higher rates of suicidal ideation, The Trevor Project’s methodology and data points are riddled with problems, and their central claim that gender-affirming spaces lower the trans suicide rate is weak. The rate of suicide attempts among trans youth with non-affirming homes is only six percent higher than those in affirming homes. In schools the difference is less, at only three percent.

The Trevor Project

The study does not control for comorbidities or external factors (like internet use and social media), does not consider the possibility of contagion, and it doesn’t mention that the youth suicide rate rose significantly in the last decade overall, with suicide now the leading cause of death among 13-14 year olds.

“I can tell you it’s not true, because Tavistock, with the backlog of kids, there weren’t any more suicides,” Gigi says, in reference to the UK’s largest gender clinic that was shut down due to an independent review that found, among other things, the clinic was treating young people recklessly. “Maybe if we weren’t telling them constantly that they’ll kill themselves. Any trained psychologist would say, you treat the suicidal ideation, not give them what they want.”

Nonetheless, parents who don’t immediately affirm their child’s identity may be considered unsafe; in Washington, the recent passage of SB 5599 allows homeless shelters to hide the location of a trans-identified child from the parents if the child’s gender-affirming healthcare isn’t supported in the home. It’s one of the only reasons a shelter can hide the location of a homeless minor from parents. At a time when Scandinavian countries and the UK are pumping the brakes on gender-affirming practices, liberal US states are hitting the gas.

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Gigi recalls a decade ago when she started seeing changes in her Jewish community. Mother’s Day and Father’s Day became Parents’ Day. Bar and bat mitzvahs became “b mitzvahs.” The Sunday School program brought in a man in a dress to talk about toxic masculinity. The rabbis added pronouns to their bios. When Gigi asked about the new approach to gender at the temple, she says, “the rabbi I spoke with basically reinterpreted the Talmud.”

That Jewish spaces are following a practice of aiding social transition and withholding information about gender identity from parents as well as bunkmates is unconscionable to Juliet Barenti, a member of Conservative congregation Temple Beth Shalom in Spokane. Her kids went to Schechter and Camp Ramah. “The part of it about keeping secrets from parents, assuming parents are unsafe, and keeping secrets from the campers, it doesn’t come from any Jewish tradition I know,” she says.

That is not how Keshet sees it. The Boston-based national Jewish LGBTQ advocacy organization trains Jewish organizations on LGBTQ inclusion. Their 90-minute camp training helps staff understand how to respect pronouns, handle kids who come out, and how to deal with microaggressions so LGBTQ kids can feel at home at camp. (Jewish summer camps are also notorious for heterosexual hookup culture, which is another whole story.)

“Many LGBTQ people need that explicit indicator that their kids will be treated with dignity,” says Rabbi Eliana Kayelle of Keshet. “We should be explicit. We want to make sure people know that when people enter our space, this is a space where you belong.”

Kayelle emphasizes that elevating the safety of LGBTQ campers elevates everyone’s safety. “Let’s say we’re talking about bath houses or restrooms or a bunk,” Kayelle says. “Adding a popup changing station so anyone who needs that level of privacy, that will help any camper who needs that level of privacy.”

It’s not clear if Keshet trained Schechter’s staff (they have not responded to this question),* but on the resources list under the inclusivity statement, Schechter listed Keshet as well as The Trevor Project. According to its 2022 annual report, Keshet trained 7,819 leaders and staff from “212 day schools, camps, synagogues, service organizations, JCCs, and other Jewish institutions, which collectively serve over 4.5 million people.” The organization’s largest donors are the Jim Joseph Foundation and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, which each granted at least $360,000 last year.

In light of recent legislation (around 500 bills, Kayelle notes) across the country targeting issues around gender transition, Keshet is doubling down with a new coalition called Thrive: The Jewish Coalition to Defend Trans and LGBQ+ Youth. The legislative issues Thrive seeks to combat are the types of policies people like Gigi and Barenti find the most harmful.

For instance, Thrive opposes disclosure requirements, which “require public school officials to notify parents if a student speaks to an adult at school about questioning their gender or sexuality,” as well as bans on healthcare for minors, which “prevent youth under the age of majority from being able to access puberty blockers, hormones, or other medical care that alleviates gender dysphoria and allows them to present as the gender they know themselves to be.” They also stand opposed to sports bans, a concern for many female athletes, which “prevent trans student athletes at public schools and universities from playing on the sports teams that align with their gender identity, and almost always focus on barring trans girls and women from teams.” To summarize: Thrive supports schools’ right to withhold information from parents, supports medical interventions for minors, and supports natal males in girls’ sports, as well as other hot-button issues. Thrive has a robust list of Jewish organizational partners, including the ADL Pacific Northwest and the Seattle Jewish Community School.

Kayelle cites safety as the reason for camps to protect the privacy of trans or gender non-conforming kids, even in a place like Washington, where no safety risks exist on a legal level. “Even in a state like Washington where there wouldn’t be legislation passed necessarily, it still could be a safety risk elsewhere. It goes back to autonomy: they know their situation best. It’s just an extension of that level of care.”

“You have to ask [parents] if [kids] can have an Advil,” Gigi says. “The ACLU has argued that social transition is part of a larger medical protocol. If that’s true, those counselors are performing a medical intervention without a license. That is grounds to say ‘you can’t do this.’ Most people don’t know that it’s priming a kid for a life of medical transition.”

Lest you think this is Jewish camp issue, note that Keshet is aligned with major institutions that follow the affirmative care model. According to the American Camp Association:

The possibility exists that a camper will arrive at camp and inform the camp staff that they have a trans identity and would like to be housed with other campers whose sex is consistent with the trans camper’s affirmed gender. The assertion of their gender identity may be accompanied by a request from the camper that their parents not be informed, as the camper would face harsh consequences (e.g., abuse) if their parents found out. One of the challenges, aside from the logistics of placing another camper in a sleeping area, is whether and how to address this request.

Options do exist for the inclusion of trans-identified campers. Camp Tawonga in California has an all-gender cabin. Schechter already has an all-gender bathroom. Camps can work harder to regulate rampant adolescent sexual behavior of all persuasions.

For parents who have questions, Kayelle says they should speak with the camp to understand its policies (which, it so happens, may have been guided by Keshet). “Camps should have a clear policy and encourage staff and admins to be super familiar with their camp’s inclusivity policy,” Kayelle says. “If and when a parent comes in, [camp staff] can be direct and clear with the language that they’re using and creating spaces of belonging.”

But it’s unlikely the affirmative care model and its sanctioned secrecy align with what the majority of parents want, let alone expect, when they send their kids to summer camp—or Sunday school or a Shabbaton. “There is a manipulative component,” Gigi says. “Judaism is about questioning, and I’m like, you’re not asking enough questions, guys.”

Both Kayelle and Barenti think a way out of this is to be more open from the get-go.

“Have the hard conversations,” says Kayelle. “Parents will have questions. Engage in dialogue. Maybe that looks like a community session, maybe that looks like sharing resources. And then rooting into the values of belonging, because it’s powerful to say we’re going to welcome LGBTQ+ youth and engage, but this is where we stand.”

“Be honest, have a community forum,” Barenti says. “How might we adjust this to make sure everyone’s concerns are addressed? It’s sort of doing this under the table that I find most concerning. If you think this is right, be honest and inclusive. When people won’t discuss it, it says to me that they know it’s problematic. If you’re confident you’re doing the right thing, why not bring it into the sunshine?”

*Update: After publication, Keshet responded that Schechter took part in their year-long Shivyon training, which helps organizations create action plans to be more inclusive of LGBTQ+ individuals.

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