Lgbt People

"To some extent, leaving the community was even harder than transitioning. I had no idea what I was getting into. I didn't know anyone, couldn't speak the language, and didn't have an education. I didn't know how to dress. I didn't know how to talk. I remember the first time walking into a Starbucks, I was like, 'OK, what's happening here?' The culture shock is just in every level, every way. ... It's like being an immigrant in your own country."

"“People exotic-ise you [trans individuals) in a weird way. They conflate sexuality and gender, which have nothing to do with each other. If you date women, it’s like, ‘Oh, you like women, so you wanted to become one’. If you like guys, it’s ‘Oh, you’re gay, but you didn’t want to be, so you transitioned’.”"

"It’s past talking time. The time to say: ‘We’ll pray, and we’ll be fine’ is long over."

"[Talking about Abby's Jewish Week 36 Under 36 award] We celebrate our first-ever 36er of transgender experience — a thinker, blogger and activist."

"People use religion, dogma, community as an excuse to justify their own intolerance, or their own phobia from something that doesn't fit into their conceived notions of gender and of identity."

"“Some religions might have at least a facade of a very anti-LGBT or very non-progressive culture so to speak -- or like you can’t be religious and be whatever. I’m telling you from experience that yes you can,” ... “You might have to make it work but thankfully we live in a place and in a time when there’s a lot of communities with a lot of places that you can find support.”"

"The most effective path to resistance is when the persecuted, in whichever way it is, gather to fight back, together."

"When and if, all the Jews, Muslims, LGBTQIA, People of Color, People of less privileged socio-economic status, and so on, with the help of allies, gather to cry out loud: “WE RESIST” there is nothing we cannot accomplish!"

"I say to a lot of people who struggle [with coming out] — they're always afraid how it's going to affect their family — and to me it's always family is really important, but there has to be a 'you' that can be part of a family. If there's no 'you,' [you can't] be part of the family."

"There are few people I was more excited to interview than Abby Stein. ... Stein bravely chronicles her struggles and triumphs on her blog and Twitter, largely focusing on the aftermath of her transition, leaving the Hasidic community she was raised in, reinventing her identity, and being a parent to her son. Currently, she’s a student at Columbia University, where she is pursuing genders studies in hopes of doing policy work relating to LGBT issues."

"I wanted to show that if you claim being trans is unacceptable in traditional Judaism, well, here is a community that is not just okay with accepting me as I am, but is celebrating with me, rejoicing with me. What I’m hoping is that by sharing my story, others in the same situation will realize that you can have your name changed in a synagogue. There are so many synagogues where you can’t, but there are also those where you can — the Jewish Reform movement, the Conservative movement. Within Orthodoxy, there’s still a long way to go. Every time something like this is done, it’s one step closer to acceptance for everyone."

"“I have mood swings, but I can deal with that by watching Netflix and eating pickles.”"

"Society expects trans women to be perfect the way they expect all women to be perfect."

"[Blogging] helps me to get out my feelings, get out my emotions. [When I started] I was mainly writing for my own sake. It really helped me articulate what I think, to get my thoughts out. I like to get feedback sometimes—although there’s a lot of hate, there’s always good advice. I found it really helpful for myself. Writing always helps."

"There is no straight way to not being straight. We (Queer individuals) all have different stories."

"Personally I also identify as a Jewish Atheist, which is that from a philosophical perspective I think that there is no reason to claim that the world has a divine creator, or divine providence. However in ways of relating to something more than surface human level, I connect to an idea of deeper understanding, a connection between all of humanity, and a universal connection with everything in existence. In my experience, the Jewish Tradition as well as the Hasidic Tradition (a mystical Jewish movement founded by my ancestor the Baal Shem Tov in the 18th century) via the Neo-Hasidic teachings, offers a lot of insight."

"Being trans in some ways is very similar to being an atheist, in that some people don’t grasp it. People that come from different backgrounds just [say], “What do you mean you don’t believe in God?” They don’t get you. To them [religion] is just so obvious, and I feel like I keep on having that with gender, also. Some people just have in their mind very firm ideas of gender, and they just can’t get it into their head."

"I loved the way Judaism does life cycle events. I loved the idea of having one day of the week off. (Even though, if I don’t believe, there’s no reason why it would be Saturday and not Tuesday). I related to Jewish music, to the food, and even the spirituality part, I’ll admit it."

"[Talking about gender transition) I want to say here, in clear and bold words to all humans out there who are going through similer experiences, and especially these of Ultra-Orthodox background: "You can Do It!!! It is not going to be easy, but it is way easier than not transitioning. When you start to see the changes, and feel more comfortable with your body, you wouldn't stop loving yourself.""

"I always say: I believe in Judaism more than I believe in god. [Interviewer: What do you mean by that?] Belief is maybe a very strong word. I’d say I relate to Judaism more."

"You’re saying God is all made up, but okay, who cares? People say, “I can’t pray because I feel like I’m talking to myself.” The rabbi would say, “Pray! That’s so good. Go talk to yourself.”"

"Leaving (the Hasidic community) is anything but simple or straightforward, but through the work and advocacy of people like Stein, it has become more commonplace in recent years. When she left almost five years ago, Stein said most people in her position were shunned by their families. While leaving still causes a rift, it less frequently results in total ostracism."

"As the only Hasid in America to come out publicly as transgender, she is in great demand as a speaker from Limmud Jewish education organization, to college and LGBTQ groups. She also runs an online support group for Hasidic trans people."

"[Writing a story about Stein] In the depressing and dreary state of our political world in the Age of Trump, this is touching and lovely story about the power of transformation and self-creation is life affirming."

"Always an excellent student, Stein got her high school diploma and in 2014, enrolled in her dream school, Columbia University."

"So many of us have different identities. Each one is unique and each one needs to be figured out and focused on. Abby is such an inspiration [for] being yourself and finding who you are. It’s a journey, it’s a process."

"Thus feminism is more than contesting the discursive positioning of women; feminism involves peaceable households and cooperative child care, and so on. The labour movement tries to create more democratic workplaces; anti-colonial movements build structures of self-government. All of these movements create new cultural forms and circulate new knowledge."

"In gender terms, fascism was a naked reassertion of male supremacy in societies that had been moving towards equality for women. To accomplish this, fascism promoted new images of hegemonic masculinity, glorifying irrationality (the 'triumph of the will', thinking with 'the blood') and the unrestrained violence of the frontline soldier. Its dynamics soon led to a new and even more devastating global war."

"The novels of James Fenimore Cooper and the Wild West show of Buffalo Bill Cody were earl steps in a course that led eventually to the Western as a film genre and its self-conscious cult of inarticulate masculine heroism. The historian John MacKenzie has called attention to the similar cult of the hunter in the late nineteenth-century British empire. Wilderness, hunting and bushcraft were welded into a distinct ideology of manhood by figures such as Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the scouting movement for boys, and Theodore Roosevelt in the United States."

"The scouting movement celebrated the frontier, but it was actually a movement for boys in the metropole. Here it took its place in a long series of attempts to foster particular forms of masculinity among boys. Other moments in this history include the nineteenth-century reform of the British elite public school, in the period after Dr Arnold; the Church of England Boys' Brigade directed at working-class youth; the German youth movement at the turn of the century; the Hitler Youth, turned into a mass institution when the Nazis came to power in Germany; and widespread attempts at military training of secondary school boys through army cadet corps, still operating in Australia when I was in high school in 1960."

"A familiar theme in patriarchal ideology is that men are rational while women are emotional. This is a deep-seated assumption in European philosophy. It is one of the leading ideas in sex role theory, in the form of the instrumental/expressive dichotomy, and it is widespread in popular culture too. Science and technology, seen by dominant ideology as the motors of progress, are culturally defined as a masculine realm. Hegemonic masculinity establishes its hegemony partly by its claim to embody the power of reason, and thus represent the interests of the whole society; it is a mistake to identify hegemonic masculinity purely with physical aggression."

"It is a cliche that the gun is a penis-symbol as well as a weapon. Gun organizations are conventionally masculine in cultural style; hunting and gun magazines dress their models in check shirts and boots to emphasize their masculinity. The gun lobby hardly has to labour the inference that politicians trying to take away our guns are emasculating us. At both symbolic and practical levels, the defense of gun ownership is a defence of hegemonic masculinity."

"Gender is a way in which social practice is ordered. In gender processes, the everyday conduct of life is organized in relation to a reproductive arena, defined by the bodily structures and processes of human reproduction. This arena includes sexual arousal and intercourse, childbirth and infant care, bodily sex difference and similarity."

"Recognizing multiple masculinities, especially in an individualist culture such as the United States, risks taking thm for alternative lifestyles, a matter of consumer choice. A relational approach makes it easier to recognize the hard compulsions under which gender configurations are formed, the bitterness as well as the pleasure in gendered experience."

"Hegemonic masculinity can be defined as the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women."

"Arguments that masculinity should change often come to grief, not on counter-against reform, but on the belief that men cannot change, so it is futile or even dangerous to try. Mass culture generally assumes there is a fixed, true masculinity beneath the ebb and flow of daily life. We hereof 'real men' 'natural man', the 'deep masculine'. This idea is now shared across an impressive spectrum including the mythopoetic men's movement, Jungian psychoanalysts, Christian fundamentalists, sociobiologists and the essentialist school of feminism."

"IN the established gender order, relations of cathexis are organized mainly through the heterosexual couple."

"Masculinity is necessarily in question in the lives of men whose sexual interest is in other men. Men in gay and bisexual networks will be dealing with issues about gender quite as serious as environmentalists', though differently structured."

"Rather than attempting to define masculinity as an object ( a natural character type, a behavioral average, a norm), we need to focus on the processes and relationships through which men and women conduct gendered lives. 'Masculinity', to the extent the term can be briefly defined at all, is simultaneously a place in gender relations, the practices through which men and women engage that place in gender, and the effects of these practices in bodily experience, personality and culture."

"Crisis tendencies in power relations threaten hegemonic masculinity directly. These tendencies are highlighted in the lives of men who live and work with feminists in setting where gender hierarchy has lost all legitimacy. The radical environmental movement is such a setting. Men in this movement must be dealing, in one way or another, with demands for the reconstruction of masculinity."

"Gender terms are contested because the right to account for gender is claimed by conflicting discourses and systems of knowledge. We can see this in everyday situations as well as in high theory."

"The sociology of knowledge showed, two generations ago, how major world-views are based on the interests and experiences of major social groups. Research on the sociology of science, giving fascinating glimpses of laboratory life and prestige hierarchies among scientists, has revealed the social relations underpinning knowledge in the natural sciences. The point is reinforced by Michel Foucault's celebrated researches on 'power-knowlege', the intimate interweaving of new sciences (such as medicine, criminology, and sexology) with new institutions and forms of social control (clinics, prisons, factories, psychotherapy)."

"The dominance of science in discussions of masculinity thus reflects the position of masculinity (or specific masculinities) in the social relations of gender."

"Research is something that everyone can do, and everyone ought to do. It is simply collecting information and thinking systematically about it. The word ‘research’ carries overtones of abstruse statistics and complex methods, white coats and computers. Some social research is highly specialised but most is not; much of the best research is logically very straightforward. Useful research on many problems can be done with small resources, and should be a regular part of the life of any thoughtful person involved in social action."

"Jeff was a true pioneer who made the world a much better place."

"No other local activist for LGBTQ rights and sexual freedom from the past twenty-five years has had the potent impact on our history as Jeffrey Montgomery."

"His unflagging devotion to queer justice and social justice will be a model for generations to come."

"He did so much for human rights in Michigan. So sad."

"I met Jeff when I was coming into the LGBT equality movement as a young activist. I was impressed with his passion and dedication. He introduced me to so many folks who I continue to work with and call friends. Jeff will be missed. The movement lost a champion who helped lay the foundation on which many of our achievements are now built."

"I'm so sorry to hear of Jeff's passing. He laid the groundwork in so many ways for the LGBTQ advocacy taking place across Michigan still today. He will be missed by many, though his legacy will live on through those he inspired throughout his life."