Modesty: Serving Lewks, Keeping Boundaries

[September 2026]

I am a non-Orthodox Jewish convert, and I do not practice modesty according to Orthodox standards. I am not interested in pretending that I do, nor am I interested in turning modesty into a universal set of rules that everyone else is required to follow. My Judaism is my Judaism, and my relationship with G-d is something I take seriously without needing to adopt every practice of every Jewish community.

That said, I have two rules for myself when I leave the house: I cover my head, and I dress modestly. I will wear short sleeves in the summer, because I am not trying to die of heatstroke for the sake of looking pious, but otherwise I generally keep my body covered.

For me, modesty is not about shame. It is not about believing the human body is dirty, sinful, or inherently sexual. It is not about controlling other people's bodies, and it is certainly not about believing that women have some special responsibility to prevent men from having impure thoughts. I have no interest in that bullshit.

My modesty is something I choose. It is spiritual, practical, aesthetic, and deeply personal. It is also, in its own way, an act of rebellion against a culture that increasingly tells us that visibility is the same thing as value.

_____

The first part of my personal practice is covering my head whenever I leave the house.

There are several reasons for this, and one of them is simply that I want to be visibly Jewish.

That matters to me enormously right now. Antisemitism has not disappeared. If anything, the past few years have made it painfully obvious how quickly old hatreds can become socially acceptable again. I also live in a rural area where I am very often the only Jew in a public space. There are a lot of bigots around here. I know that. I am not naive about it. I've gotten antisemitic remarks to my face.

And you know what? I am fucking proud of being Jewish, and I am not going to hide that because somebody else might dislike Jews.

There is something important to me about being visibly Jewish in a place where Jewishness is unusual. I am not interested in pretending that I am just like everybody else so that nobody has to think about the existence of Jews. I would rather walk into the doctor's office, the grocery store, the post office, or wherever else I need to go with my Jewishness plainly visible.

It is a small act of courage, but it is still courage.

My head covering also serves another purpose. It reminds me that G-d is watching.

That does not mean I imagine G-d sitting in the sky waiting to catch me doing something wrong. It means that when I put something on my head before I leave the house, I am consciously reminding myself that my behavior matters. Someone is watching, even when nobody else is.

That changes how I conduct myself.

If I am exhausted, irritated, overwhelmed, or having one of those days when my patience is approximately three molecules thick, the reminder helps. I try to be more patient. I try to be kinder. I try to remember that the person behind the counter is another human being and does not deserve to become the target of whatever bullshit is happening in my head that day.

It is a physical reminder of an ethical obligation.

And then there is the somewhat unexpected part: I am a trans man, and my preferred head covering is a tichel.

Yes, a tichel, traditionally associated with married Jewish women.

For me, a tichel is just an accessory that can be worn by anyone of any gender. It is fashion. It is an opportunity to coordinate colors, textures, patterns, and fabrics with whatever the hell else I am wearing. It jazzes up an outfit. It is flamboyant. It is fun.

In other words, it is extremely me.

There is something almost delightfully queer about taking an object traditionally associated with one particular form of Jewish womanhood and making it part of my own expression as a gay Jewish man. I am not wearing it because I am pretending to be someone I am not. I am wearing it precisely because I know who I am.

The head covering reminds me that G-d is watching me.

The artistic headwrap reminds me that G-d sees me.

Those are two different things.

G-d sees me as I actually am. A trans man. A gay man. A flamboyant man. A complicated human being. A person with a big personality and a big mouth and strong opinions and an occasionally ridiculous sense of style.

And G-d loves me anyway.

More importantly, G-d does not love some sanitized imaginary version of me. The whole point, for me, is that divine acceptance does not require me to become less myself.

There is also a more "woo woo" dimension to the head covering, although I want to be very clear about something: I am a skeptic, and I despise pseudoscience. I am not going to start claiming that tichels emit scientifically measurable spiritual frequencies or that I have discovered a secret Jewish quantum-energy technology.

But subjective experience is still experience.

Autistic people are often stereotyped as lacking empathy, which I have found to be profoundly inaccurate. Many autistic people, myself included, are extremely sensitive to the emotional atmosphere around us. We may not always be good at reading facial expressions, body language, or eye contact ourselves, but that does not mean we fail to notice what other people are feeling. Sometimes quite the opposite.

I tend to absorb the atmosphere of a room.

Before I began covering my head when I went out to appointments, I would often come home feeling completely drained. Medical environments are particularly intense. Clinics and hospitals are full of anxiety, pain, fear, exhaustion, grief, and uncertainty. People are waiting for diagnoses. People are waiting for test results. People are worrying about money. People are hurting.

I still get drained at appointments. Covering my head has not magically turned me into an impenetrable psychic fortress.

But it feels like a kind of energetic shielding.

That matters to me, even if I cannot prove that there is literally some measurable energy being blocked by a piece of fabric. Sometimes a ritual has value because of what it does to your experience of the world. My tichel gives me a sense of boundary. It says, in effect, "This is me. That is everything else."

And sometimes that little boundary is exactly what I need.

_____

My relationship with clothing is more complicated.

I was raised by a fundamentalist Christian who had an absolutely spectacular set of double standards about AFAB bodies. When I was a teenager, it was apparently acceptable for her to go to bars and bring random men home, but if I wore a tank top and shorts during a ninety-degree summer in a house without air conditioning, I was a "slut."

Even if I was just wearing them around the house.

When I was eighteen, I was date-r*ped. When I told my mother what had happened, she insisted that I must have been wearing something "slutty" and that I had been "asking for it."

That experience did not make me trans. I want to be extremely fucking clear about that because there are people who will happily construct that story for me if given half a chance. My gender is not a trauma response. I would still be a man if I had been raised by the world's most enlightened feminist mother in the world's most gender-affirming household. I was a man then. I am a man now.

But that upbringing absolutely affected my relationship with clothing.

For years, I continued to dress modestly long after I became an adult. Some of that was dysphoria. Some parts of my body have never been things I wanted to emphasize, and covering them allowed me to move through the world without constantly thinking about them.

But nowadays, modesty is no longer something imposed on me by someone else's sexual hang-ups.

It is something I choose.

And that distinction is enormous.

I am not dressing modestly because somebody told me my body is shameful. I am dressing modestly because I have decided that I do not need to make my body the main event every time I walk out the front door.

I am also not interested in pretending that all clothing choices are morally equivalent simply because people have the right to make them.

I am not the Taliban. I am not a Hasidic modesty patrol in Israel. I do not believe everyone needs to be covered from neck to ankle because exposed skin is inherently immoral. I am not interested in policing strangers' clothing, and I certainly do not believe the state should be enforcing religious dress codes.

But I also have eyes.

When I go to the supermarket or the dentist or some other ordinary public place and somebody is wearing extremely short shorts with their tiddies hanging out, I do not particularly enjoy looking at it. It makes me viscerally fucking uncomfortable.

There is a difference between acknowledging that someone has a right to dress however they want and being required to pretend that every public presentation is equally tasteful.

Wear shorts when it is ninety-five degrees. I have absolutely no objection to that. I object to the idea that the only possible summer wardrobe consists of Daisy Dukes and your tiddies hanging out.

There is a time and place for sexual expression.

A supermarket is not a strip club.

And I do not consent to having somebody else's sexual display imposed on me while I am trying to buy fucking groceries.

Children are part of this conversation too. I do not believe in raising children with a hysterical, repressed attitude toward bodies. That kind of prudishness can do enormous damage.

But sexualization is equally bad. I don't want people growing up believing that their worth depends upon being sexually desirable. I don't want young girls in particular to absorb the message that they need to display their bodies to be beautiful, interesting, desirable, or socially relevant.

And that brings me to why modesty matters to me beyond my own personal spirituality.

We live in an era in which visibility has become currency.

Social media encourages people to turn themselves into products. Young women are bombarded with images of supposedly perfect bodies and pressured to compete with impossible standards. Eating disorders remain rampant. The beauty industry makes billions of dollars convincing people that their natural bodies are inadequate. Entire online economies revolve around being sexually appealing to strangers.

This pressure is not confined to women, either. Gay male culture feels like a meat market and is brutally looks-focused. A lot of gay men struggle with eating disorders, obsessive dieting, and/or body dysmorphia, and some turn to anabolic steroids to achieve the muscular physique they believe will make them desirable. Grindr is a concentrated demonstration of this phenomenon, where profiles routinely announce "no fats, no fems" as though human beings were items being filtered out of a search engine. There are certainly gay men who reject that culture, and there are communities where different bodies are celebrated, but the larger message can still be viciously clear: be thin, be muscular, be young, be masculine, be conventionally attractive, or expect to be treated as disposable.

And then there are those of us who do not fit neatly into any of the available categories. Fat gay men can sometimes find a community in the bear world, where larger bodies are explicitly embraced, but even that comes with its own aesthetic expectations, particularly around being hairy and traditionally masculine. I am not hairy or macho enough to fit the classic bear mold, and I am not interested in starving myself into being thin or chemically engineering myself into being muscular just so I can qualify for somebody else's idea of desirable. So where does that leave someone like me? 

Against all of that, I find something quietly radical in saying:

Maybe nobody needs to be that visible.

Maybe your body does not have to be your advertisement.

Maybe you can walk outside without treating every sidewalk, store, restaurant, or doctor's office like a stage.

Maybe clothing can be about looking good rather than showing everything.

Maybe dignity can be fashionable.

_____

There is something punk as fuck about choosing modesty in a culture that increasingly treats exhibitionism as liberation. 

But it should not be rebellious. It should not be controversial. It should be normalized. We can't solve these problems by legislating everyone's clothing. The cure for cultural excess is not an authoritarian regime telling people what they are allowed to wear. That would create an entirely different and much worse problem.

So instead, I ask for a cultural shift. I would like us to remember that there are other ways to be attractive. There are other ways to be confident. There are other ways to be expressive. You can be stylish, sexy, flamboyant, masculine, feminine, queer, glamorous, weird, elegant, punk, goth, or completely fucking fabulous without putting every inch of your body on public display.

For me, modesty is ultimately about boundaries.

My body belongs to me.

My Jewish identity belongs to me.

My relationship with G-d belongs to me.

And the way I move through public space is my choice.

Covering my head reminds me that G-d is watching, and that I have an obligation to treat other people with kindness and respect.

Covering my body reminds me that I do not owe the world visual access to every part of me.

And wearing a fabulous tichel reminds me that modesty does not require me to be boring. I can be modest and still serve lewks.

I can cover myself and still be flamboyant.

I can carry myself with dignity without being ashamed of my body.

I can reject sexual repression without embracing public exhibitionism.

And I can choose modesty not because somebody else demanded it of me, but because I have decided that it is one of the ways I want to live.

That, to me, is the difference between modesty as control and modesty as freedom.

Nobody gets to tell me what I have to wear. I choose. 

And that is empowering.