On breakups, anger, trans-phobia and publishing

Posted on December 5, 2012 by snarly

On Monday, the Jewish parenting blog Kveller published a piece by writer Christine Benvenuto about the strain of living in the same town as her ex. (You may be able to see it in Google’s cache, which is sort of a spoiler alert about where this is going.)

The piece opens with an anecdote about the ex and Benvenuto attending a pediatrician’s appointment for one of the former couple’s two children. The doctor (“laughing and nodding,” Benvenuto says, in seeming indication of her own embarrassment) assumes they’re a lesbian couple. They’re not. The ex is transgender, in the process of transitioning from male to female.

The piece acknowledges that the ex “decided to live the rest of his life as a woman,” but then consistently and repeatedly refers to her with male pronouns. When her ex began living as female, Benvenuto wanted to leave town: “I felt crushed by a sense that the reason for my marriage’s demise said something so terrible about me it would be intolerable to remain in a place in which it was public knowledge,” she writes. But marriages end every day. How is it a woman’s fault that her ex came to terms with an identity that research shows seems to have a strong genetic component? “Exactly what it said, I wasn’t sure,” Benvenuto writes. (Oh.) “Maybe that was part of what made it so awful.” (Ah.)

Benvenuto writes about how despite her desire to leave, her children loved the town and wanted to stay. She felt caught. “Finally someone offered the most profound insight into my situation I have heard to date, uttering the words that set me free from this stalemate: ‘You aren’t the first woman to marry a jerk, and you won’t be the last.’” She goes on: “When a guy dumps a wife and young children for another woman, people–the wife in question, certainly–are more likely to think, ‘What a jerk!’ than, ‘What a hero!’ Why should it be any different just because the other woman is the guy?” Well, because the ex didn’t leave her for someone else; she left because she couldn’t go on living a lie, in a body and gender identity she felt wasn’t hers. (In comments on the piece, the ex herself, Joy Ladin, a prominent academic and author, says she told Benvenuto she was transgender when the two got together as college sophomores, and Benvenuto accepted this as long as Ladin was willing to dress as a man; Ladin presented as male to their children for as long as she could, longer than she did to anyone else, out of deference to Benvenuto’s feelings, before she felt she had to be fully honest with herself. But since this is Benvenuto’s story, not Ladin’s, let’s only judge the story as written, not its backstory or she-said-she-saids.)

The piece offers no evidence at all that the ex is a jerk except that he became a she. The ex is an involved enough parent that she shows up at a pediatrician’s appointment, and it seems likely that the children’s desire to stay in their hometown has something to do with the other parent being there. The rest of the piece discusses Benvenuto’s disgust at hearing her ex’s “odd, grown-male-straining-for-the-uppermost-register-of-his-voice voice” on the radio being interviewed at Christmastime, and relays a friend’s wish that “if he gets any money out of it he hopes he will give some of it to his family.” (I promise from personal experience that being interviewed on the radio about being Jewish does not pay.) The story concludes: “So yes, my ex recurs like Christmas carols. But I don’t have to let him drown out the rest of my life. I knew the holidays would soon be over, and the echoes of his voice along with them.”

People are more than entitled to bitter feelings after breakups. But that doesn’t mean those feelings are worthy of publication. As I said in Kveller’s comment section and on Facebook, “I’m confused as to why separated or divorced parents should not be entitled to live in the same town as their children, and this post doesn’t tell me. I’d welcome a nuanced piece with a Jewish perspective on how to parent when one partner has come out as LGBT, when the non-LGBT parent feels hurt and furious while also wanting to do right by the kids. This is not that piece.” (Full disclosure: Kveller reprinted a story of mine when it launched, and has kindly linked to or tweeted about my stories for Tablet magazine many times since then.)

Most of the dozens of comments about the piece — including those from prominent LGBT advocates Idit Klein and Jay Michaelson – were negative, parsing the story’s trans-phobia. Fellow academics defended Ladin (the first openly transgender professor at an Orthodox Jewish school) by name. Other commenters referred to the piece as lashon hara (literally “bad language,” the kind of gossip prohibited in Jewish texts) and Ladin, as mentioned, shared her side of the story. A sprinkling of comments defended Benvenuto as a woman wronged and criticized other commenters political correctness.

Two days after the piece went live, Kveller took it down. The publication ran an apology:

Kveller has always prided itself on being a place where people can discuss the most challenging parts of life and parenting—infertility, death, and yes, divorce.

We have seen how much support, encouragement, and affirmation people feel when their voices are heard and their deepest disappointments and difficulties are shared and discussed.

The honesty and courage of our writers are what have made Kveller such a compelling and valuable website.

At the same time, the social utility of our articles is something we take seriously. We want Kveller to help people feel more confident, more secure, more understood. Unfortunately, our decision to publish “Staying in the Same Town as My Ex” in the form that it was in has undermined that effort, and thus we have decided to remove it from the website.

When it comes to issues that impact a historically (and currently) persecuted community it is our responsibility as editors to be extra sensitive to the exact language being used. Kveller and its parent organization MyJewishLearning are committed to honoring the identities and life experience of all people, including transgender people. We do not believe that this article was meant to be transphobic, but we do believe that our failures in the editing process created an article that could be read that way, which is not good for the writer, Kveller, and most importantly, the LGBT community, which Kveller and MyJewishLearning are dedicated to supporting and working with to create a more inclusive Jewish community.

A friend of mine, Rabbi Sue Fendrick, responded that this was a good apology, but not a great one. She commented: “Does anyone ever intend to be transphobic (homophobic, anti-semitic, racist..)?” She continued: “No amount of editing of language here and there would have made this an appropriate piece to publish; as an editor myself, I can imagine editing it into a version that I’d be willing to publish, but it would be a very different piece in the end.” Me, I’m more inclined to give Kveller the benefit of the doubt. There is a thoughtful piece to be run on this topic, and I think it’s a kindness to say to a furious, grieving, hurting writer that the fault was in the editing, not the piece itself. I thought it was gentle and menschy to take the heat rather than to blame the writer. (I blame the New York Post for publishing a picture of a subway death rather than the photographer for shooting it, too.) I think Kveller’s apology does what an apology is supposed to do: It acknowledged a mistake, discussed the hurt it caused, made amends (by taking down the piece) and showed a determination not to repeat the error.

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On breakups, anger, trans-phobia and publishing

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