Transgender Jews are finding a safe haven in an unexpected place: the farm
Shoshana Mackay lives on a Jewish farm in North Carolina. (Courtesy of Mackay)
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(JTA) — Alex Kohanski began using the gender-neutral they-them pronouns on their first day of the Jewish farming fellowship Adamah in the fall of 2019.
Though they were assigned a male identity at birth, Kohanski had never felt fully at home in their body. As a child, they once looked at their naked body in a mirror and thought God had made a mistake.
But over the course of the three-month program that has graduated scores of Jewish farmers, Kohanski grew more comfortable — both with their choice to pursue farming as a profession and with their transgender identity, even wearing a dress in public for the first time. In one particularly poignant moment, Kohanski was invited by the women in their cohort to join them for a pre-Shabbat mikveh dip in the lake.