Gender and Identity
BINARY GENDER?
So, God created the human [ha-adam] in His own image, in the image of God He created it; male [zachar] and female [n’keivah],
He created them. (B’reishit – Genesis 1:27).
Then the Eternal God formed the human [ha-adam], dust from the ground [ha-adamah], and breathed into its nostrils the breath of life [nishmat chayyim], and the human became a living being [nefesh chayyah] (B’reishit – Genesis 2:7).
Hebrew Terms for Gender
Zachar: ‘Male’ – Root: Zayin Kaf Reish – From assumed original sense, to be ‘sharp’ (like a sword) – referring to the penis (Genesis 1:27).
N’keivah: ‘Female’ – Root: Nun Kuf Beit – to ‘pierce’ or ‘bore’ (creating a ‘hole’) – referring to the vagina (Genesis 1:27).
Androgynos: A person who has both ‘male’ and ‘female’ sexual characteristics. 149 references
in Mishnah and Talmud (1st-6th Centuries CE); 350 in classical midrash and Jewish law codes (2nd -16th Centuries CE).*
Tumtum: A person whose sexual characteristics are indeterminate or obscured. 181 references
in Mishnah and Talmud; 335 in classical midrash and Jewish law codes.*
Ay’lonit: A person who is identified as ‘female’ at birth but develops ‘male’ characteristics
at puberty and is infertile. 80 references in Mishnah and Talmud; 40 in classical midrash and
Jewish law codes.*
Saris: A person who is identified as ‘male” at birth but develops ‘female’ characteristics as
puberty and/or is lacking a penis. A saris can be as such by nature (saris hamah), or become
one through human intervention (saris adam). 156 references in Mishnah and Talmud; 379 in
classical midrash and Jewish law codes.*
*See: Rabbi Elliot Kukla, 2006, ‘Terms for Gender Diversity on Classical Jewish Texts’ http://www.transtorah.org/PDFs/Classical_Jewish_Terms_for_Gender_Diversity.pdf
Example of rabbinic teaching concerning the Androgynos and Tumtum:
Rabbi Yose says: ‘An androgynos is “bri’a b’ifnei atzmah (a created being of its own).’ The Sages could not decide if the androgynos is a man or a woman. But this is not true of a tumtum, who is sometimes a man and sometimes a woman (Mishnah Bikkurim, 4:5).
Not created in the image of God
“Of course, no one, not even God, gets the last word in Judaism. The Talmudic sages doubled
Genesis’ gender binary, adding tumtum and androgynos to “male” and “female.” Centuries
later, Kabbalistic mystics read the phrase “male and female God created them” as implying
that the first human, Adam Kadmon, was a hermaphrodite, embodying, like God, both sides
of the gender binary. But I’m not a hermaphrodite; no matter how expansively I read the
tradition, transsexuality seemed to fall outside the Jewish definition of humanity, to mark me
as something that wasn’t created in the image of God.”
Professor Joy Ladin, ‘Torah In Transition’: http://www.transtorah.org/PDFs/Torah-In-Transition.pdf