I’ll never forget the first roll call in fourth grade at the St. Fabian School.
“Levey, Hilary? [Pause] Really?!”
Yes, really. My father, who gifted me his last name, is clearly a Member of the Tribe (Levite, natch). But my parents decided to baptize and raise me as a Roman Catholic, like my mother.
I was a child interested in rituals and I loved weekly school mass when the priest wouldn’t just speak at us during his homily, but ask us questions. My hand was frequently up and I cherished the days when I was called on to answer a question. So it was no surprise that later, in my fourth grade year when the teacher asked who would like to help the priest by being an “altar boy,” my hand shot up.
“But, you’re a girl, you can’t do that,” said the same teacher who had already made me feel like I didn’t belong.
As I looked at the boys sitting around me–roughhousing, picking their noses, cheating off of my schoolwork–I wondered precisely how they were better suited to the task by virtue of having a Y chromosome (girls were welcomed as altar servers a few years later, in the early 90’s, but too late for me). I couldn’t figure out how or why an institution, let alone a religious one, could decide to exclude whole categories of people without knowing anything about them as individuals.
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