Published: 5 March 2018
Last updated: 4 March 2024
The family was already planning for Esther’s bat mitzvah, but with the new revelation, Miriam wondered how her child could be comfortable taking part in a Jewish ceremony whose very name — bar mitzvah for boys and bat mitzvah for girls — is gendered.
“I was quite concerned because if something is important in your coming of age, it should reflect who you are in a person and not squeeze you into the traditional two genders that we happen to have just because of history,” Miriam, who lives with her husband, Martyn, and seven children in the village of Otterburn, in northeast England, told JTA.
FULL STORY Non-binary teen celebrates UK’s first gender-neutral ‘b’nei mitzvah’ (Times of Israel)
Photo: Esther Thorpe, left, who identifies as non-binary, had a gender-neutral b’nei mitzvah ceremony (Miriam Taylor Thorpe)
