Twist of Faith: or, What a nice Jewish boy is doing in a place like this
/My profile of gender reassignment surgeon — and Orthodox Jew — Dr. Yonah Krakowsky, in Toronto Life Magazine
Hey! I’m excited to let you know that my profile of gender- reassignment surgeon Dr. Yonah Krakowsky has been published in the current issue of Toronto Life Magazine.
I’ve known Yonah’s mom for years, first as a client and now as a friend, and she’s one of my favourite people in the world. I’m always struck by her warmth, openness, and curiosity, and the way the she lives out her faith as an Orthodox Jewish woman with an immense spirit of generosity, integrity and acceptance. When she told me what Yonah, who is also observant, was up to these days, I knew I wanted to tell this story.
I attended an all-boys, Orthodox Jewish high school in Toronto, where sex ed largely consisted of our rabbi telling us how God would punish us for our sexual sins. Masturbation, we were told, was a crime so terrible that those of us who did it would spend eternity suffering in a vat of boiling semen. The image was enough to turn me into an abstainer throughout high school and during my years at an Israeli yeshiva. In my early 20s, I went to my rabbi to get permission to provide a sperm sample for a medical test. “Yonah,” he said, “go crazy.”
So maybe it’s ironic—or maybe not—that I’m now a urologist, practising in the areas of erectile dysfunction, sexual dysfunction and trans bottom surgery. […]
Such a mensch.
