Inhalt: | Introduction: birth of an empire -- Birth of a child -- A dollhouse -- A haircut -- According to His will -- On the playground -- At the edge of manhood -- Seeing demons -- Signs and signals -- Holy obligations -- Teachings of our fathers -- A new school -- Heavenly bodies -- Welcome to the Catskill Mountains -- Matchmaking -- Tingling feelings -- Audience with the rebbe -- High on mysticism -- Engaged -- Graphic studies -- A wedding in a blizzard -- Another child -- The done thing -- Wireless connections. "Abby Stein was raised in a Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn, profoundly isolated in a culture that lives according to the laws and practices of an eighteenth-century Eastern European enclave, speaking only Yiddish and Hebrew and shunning modern life. Stein was born as the first son in a rabbinical dynastic family, poised to become a leader of the next generation of Hasidic Jews. But Stein felt certain at a young age that she was a girl. Without access to TV or the internet, and never taught English, she suppressed her desire for a new body while looking for answers wherever she could find them, from forbidden religious texts to smuggled secular examinations of faith. Finally, she orchestrated a personal exodus from ultra-Orthodox manhood into mainstream femininity--a radical choice that forced her to leave her home, her family, and her way of life"-- |
