Becoming Eve: My Journey from Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi to Transgender Woman

Trans activist Stein, a former member of the Ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn, plainly recalls her strict childhood and struggle to come out as transgender in an uneven debut that’s more focused on religion than identity. Stein, born in 1991, was her parents’ first “boy,” though she always secretly believed she was a girl. For Hasidic boys, “every minute spent on anything other than Jewish studies is wasted time,” Stein writes, focusing her narrative on her study of the Torah and Talmudic laws. One of the most captivating sections concerns her first sexual experiences, as a teenager with a male classmate. Her recollections of their clandestine encounters have more depth than later chapters, which feel oddly rushed as they recall life-altering moments (her marriage to a woman named Fraidy, the birth of their son when Stein was 20, her exit, in the last chapter, from the Hasidic community). It is only in the epilogue, set in 2015, that Stein comes out as transgender to her father, who rejects her, and mentions that she has started hormone replacement therapy. This is a valuable story but a frustratingly structured one; readers who wish to learn about Stein’s life as a transgender woman won’t find a wealth of detail here. (Nov.)