From The Forward: https://forward.com/opinion/412749/for-centuries-jewish-tradition-has-recognized-trans-people/
Elliot Kukla
October 26, 2018
The idea that there are two and only two sexes is relatively new.
This week, in a memo leaked to the New York Times, the Trump administration stated its goal to institute a federal definition of sex as “unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with.” Furthermore, “any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing.”
Trump would like us to believe that this strictly binary view of sex is natural, scientific, traditional, and universal throughout history.
He is wrong.
Thousands of babies are born with ambiguous genitals every year. Still others have hormonal and chromosomal difference that lead to non-binary sexual development. Gender expression that is different from the sex one is assigned at birth exists in every human civilization, and in many parts of the animal world.
Jewish tradition is well aware of all of this natural variation.
As a transgender rabbi, I am frequently called upon to speak about the diversity in our sacred texts. There are at least six sexes in traditional Jewish sources: the “zakhar” (male) and the “nekevah” (female); the “androgynos” (a person with both male and female sexual characteristics) and the “tumtum” (an individual with ambiguous sex); the “saris” (a eunuch, either born or created); and the “aylonit” (born female, but later develops male traits).
The first time I encountered these figures, I was a 20-year-old queer gender misfit, studying in Orthodox Yeshiva, the last place I expected to find a gender role model.
In the secular world, I was used to being told I don’t exist. I am gender non-conforming, and I don’t pass as male or female. When I go to the DMV, check into the hospital, cross a border, drop my kid off at daycare, or need to pee, I usually need to try to fit into one of two and only two limited options for being a person — male or female — in order to have the basic rights of being a citizen.
In the past few decades, due to the work of countless activists, it has become a little easier to live. But now for the first time, Trump’s proposal would turn into policy the denial of our existence.
Trump would like us to believe this is a return to a mythical universal traditional past, but in fact, it is a denial of Judaism and many other sacred traditions.
In the Babylonian Talmud, we learn the story of a tumtum who becomes a parent of seven children (Babylonian Talmud, Yevamot 83b). In the same tractate, the radical claim is made that the first ancestors of the Jewish people — Abraham and Sarah — were actually originally tumtumim. According to this text, they only later transitioned genders to become male and female. (BT Yevamot 64a) According to a midrash, the first human being, Adam, was originally an androgynos. (Midrash Rabbah 8:1).
Continue reading at: https://forward.com/opinion/412749/for-centuries-jewish-tradition-has-recognized-trans-people/
Women Born Transsexual 