This week, the Supreme Court dealt transgender Americans another devastating blow, upholding state bans on transgender athletes’ participation in girls' and women's sports. The decision represents the latest in a long series of attacks on trans lives, as we remain in the crosshairs of a manufactured culture war. The architects of these attacks usually wrap their bigotry in a familiar defense: “religious freedom.” They claim their faith compels them to legislate a strict, inflexible gender binary, and that any deviation from it is a threat to their religious liberty.

But as a trans Jew, and a leader of a major national Jewish organization, I have a question for them: What about my religious freedom? What about the freedom to live our Judaism?

My grandmother was born at home on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, spoke Yiddish as her first language, and was raised by immigrants who worked 12 hour physical jobs six days a week. She would not have known the phrase “gender identity” if her life depended on it. And yet, when I transitioned two decades ago, she did not hesitate. She took a deep breath, took a long look at me, decided it was still me she was seeing, and accepted me completely from that moment on.

When politicians attempt to ban gender-affirming care, bar trans kids from playing sports, and legally erase trans people, they are not protecting religious freedom. They are imposing Christian nationalism. Real religious freedom—the principle this country was founded on—only counts if it applies to all of us. Christian nationalists advocating against the rights of LGBTQ people are actively suppressing Judaism and other religions that don't neatly align with their theology.

We cannot let that vocal and well-funded Christian nationalist minority implement laws that endanger transgender people like me.

For years, the far-right has successfully monopolized the concept of religious liberty in this country, weaponizing it as a license to discriminate. But our past does not have to be our future. The theology they are attempting to encode into law is not a universal truth. In fact, it runs in direct opposition to my own religious tradition.

Judaism is a deeply........

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