From Two Worlds

There are some closed religious communities that don’t want anything from the outside world but what happens when someone leaves the community.

What happens when that person is trans and has children with someone in the community?

Transgender Jewish woman wins review of child contact case
UK appeal court says ruling that woman should not see her children did not address issues of human rights and discrimination
The Guardian
By Harriet Sherwood
December 20, 2017

An ultra-Orthodox Jew who left her community to start a new life as a woman has won the right to have her case reviewed in the high court after an earlier ruling that she should have no direct contact with her five children.

The court of appeal has decided to refer back the case of the woman, known in court as J, who has not seen her children since leaving the tight-knit Haredi community in Manchester in 2015.

After it became known that J was living as a woman, the community threatened to ostracise the family if they had any contact with her.

J told the high court in November 2016 she believed she was the first transgender person to have left a Haredi community in the UK. She said she understood the community’s rejection of her: “They have to get rid of me – I have sympathy with that.”

However, in an attempt to see her children, then aged between five and 12, she said she would accept any contact conditions, including reverting as far as possible to her previous male appearance in the early stages.

The Haredi community  had threaten to expel the family so the judge who heard the case originally said that granting joint custody would cause irrevocable harm to the child so the judge sided with the mother. Now the appeals court has agreed send her case back to the lower court.

The appeal court described the case as “stark, deeply saddening and extremely disturbing”. It said that many people would find the earlier judgment “both surprising and disturbing, thinking to themselves, and we can understand why, how can this be so, how can this be right?”

The judges upheld a number of complaints J made about Jackson’s decisions. They said it was “unfortunate that the judge did not address head-on the human rights issues and issues of discrimination which arose”.

In all the time since she was forced out of the cult, what has the cult done to her children to indoctrinate them against her?

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The play was good… but it will never make it to Broadway.

The play was a twist on Dickens’ Christmas Carol and it was set in Connecticut, there were a number of Connecticut references such as Sage Allen, G. Fox, Hartford, and Haddam and was set in the 1920’s. The ghosts were Harriet Beecher Stowe (ghost of Christmas past), Mark Twain (ghost of Christmas present), and P.T. Barnum (ghost of Christmas future).

One of the actresses wore a gorgeous flapper dress and hat, but then it was probably a size 8 and I don’t think a size 22W wouldn’t look as good.

The couple I was with went out to dinner afterward but I didn’t join them because four o’clock was too early to for dinner. Also in the evening I went with some friends to see Silver Lights at Hubble Park in Meriden.