Tom Sosnik
Image by Facebook
Thirteen-year old Tom Sosnik, one of the youngest people on this year’s Forward 50 list, made headlines in March when a video of him coming out to his class as transgender went viral.
Sosnik decided to make his brave speech after reading about Leelah Alcorn, a transgender teen who died by suicide in 2014 after her family and friends refused to accept her.
“Her story made me realize how lucky I was that I could be accepted by my family and my extended family in Israel,” Sosnik told the Forward.
In his coming out speech to his classmates at Tehiyah Day School, a pluralistic Jewish day school in El Cerrito, California, he said: “I am no longer Mia, I never really was and now I stand before you as my true gender identity, as Tom. I stand before you as a 13-year-old boy.”
After the moving speech, the school’s rabbi led a special naming ceremony for Tom, which she described as “a cross between a bar mitzvah and a brit.”
Sosnik first came out as transgender to his family in July 2014, after a long battle with his identity. “For a while I dismissed the fact that I hated my body… until at a certain point I broke,” he said in the coming out speech.
During what has been a tumultuous and important year for transgender rights, Sosnik shared with the world a very Jewish and very personal coming out story, one that could perhaps serve as a model for the Jewish community at large.
The Forward is free to read but not free to produce
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
