No, the Jewish Tradition Does Not Support Transgenderism

N ot content to enlist their twisted understandings of traditional Jewish texts to fight state laws protecting unborn children, progressive activists now have taken to claiming that Judaism’s “most sacred texts reflect a multiplicity of gender,” though such a finding had been “obscured by the modern binary world until very recently.” So contends Elliot Kukla, a self-described “transgender and nonbinary” rabbi of Reform Judaism, in a shockingly shoddy New York Times guest essay.

Kukla (for whom I will use masculine pronouns out of respect) reaches into the Talmud — the massive corpus of ancient Jewish law and wisdom that still forms the basis of Orthodox Jewish life today — and pulls out what he thinks is a “gotcha” concept that would show all those who devote their lives to Talmudic scholarship that they got Judaism’s teachings on gender all wrong. In doing so, he picks up a behavior popularized by Jew-haters of removing Talmudic teachings from any context to show that Judaism stands for something it very clearly does not. He also engages in a kind of appropriation that progressives would despise in other contexts: He draws on a tradition he does not consider binding (Reform Judaism rejects the applicability of Jewish law) and uses it to shout over those who do — observant Orthodox Jews, who for millennia have known well of Kukla’s “evidence” of Jewish gender ideology and have treated it in an entirely different manner.

Like an amateur archaeologist who mistakes a bottle cap for a shard of ancient pottery, Kukla has “discovered” that the Talmud does not categorize all people as typically male or female. “There are four genders beyond male or female,” he writes, “that appear in ancient Jewish holy texts hundreds of times.” These are tumtum (one whose genitals are obscured), androgynos (intersex), aylonit (an atypically developed female), and saris (eunuch). The Talmud, rigidly legalistic as it tends to be, is frequently interested in how to categorize these rare individuals within ancient Judaism’s highly gendered structures of Temple service, ritual purity, and much more. (By reifying categories that are relevant only in a highly binary and gender-role-driven society, Kukla thus inadvertently makes the opposite point from what he intended.)

None of these is a separate biological sex, as they do not involve production of gametes other than sperm or egg. And none is a “gender” as the term is used today, to connote a feeling or internal sense that one’s “true” identity conforms to a set of traditionally gendered stereotypes or self-perception. They represent biological abnormalities and, in the case of the saris, a castrated man. Nowhere does self-perception or “identity” enter the picture. Kukla admits this with understatement: “There is not an exact equivalence between these ancient categories and modern gender identities.” Nonetheless, “they show us that people who are more than binary have always been recognized by my religion. We are not a fad.”

The whole argument thus rests on a shell game, the author playing with levels of abstraction to accept the Talmud’s framework at a certain level while rejecting its plain meaning. Unable to show that ancient Judaism actually recognizes multiple genders, Kukla summarizes the “evidence” with a vague statement about Judaism rejecting binaries. Even this is wrong: Three of the four listed categories are either male or female, and the androgynos is intersex — a category that can exist only in the context of a sex binary.

Yet Kukla stops short of being so abstract as to allow for the claim that there are infinite genders. That would raise some questions we ought to ask anyway: If, for the sake of argument, the Talmud really recognized six total genders, shouldn’t Kukla, relying on the Talmud as authority, have to argue to his left that there are only six genders? Kukla’s abstraction gambit, that this proves a rejection of the binary, gets him only so far in evading that question. At what point does the Talmud’s framework allow people to jump from one category to another? The question is unanswerable because the Talmud’s categories do not reject the sex binary, and because today’s “gender” ideology has nothing to do with any of that anyway.

In fact what Kukla is pushing in his essay is a craven, cheap, and pernicious farce. It is not about bringing Judaism’s wisdom to bear on the world in a remotely honest way, or even sharing a closely held view to help others understand Judaism better. Instead, an activist has gone to the New York Times with a weapon he acquired on the cheap, without having to believe the Talmud is authoritative, without even having to believe the full extent of the implications of what he has cited. If that weapon will not work against skeptics of gender ideology, at least it will pull undereducated, non-observant Jews closer to the already-dominant conception of their religion — as a social-justice program served on a bagel, or the Democratic Party at prayer. Meanwhile, Orthodox Jews are left to fend off these bizarre appropriations of their cherished code, and Jew-haters already quick to see Talmudic influence in all kinds of behaviors they find degenerate can hoard one more round of baseless ammunition.

But anyone can recognize a simple problem with these increasingly common attempts to turn the sages of yore into progressive icons. There is something fundamentally ridiculous about trying to ground progressive ideas in deeply traditionalist sources. Progressivism tends to distrust inherited texts and ideas and the structures they create. Yet here (as well as in other contexts, such as recent abortion arguments), progressives try to argue that their replacement structures were central to the tradition all along. But if Judaism has long “recognized” progressive ideas about gender, and transgenderism has always existed (but is only now being set free in the West, like left-handedness, which appeared more frequently once the taboo against it vanished), why do we have thousands of years of Jewish history, liturgy, commentaries, and rabbinic responsa that fail to mention this? The Talmud has a law for everything; where is the law of the male who thinks he is a woman? Where were the transgender peasants of the Polish shtetls and the nonbinary prodigies of the Lithuanian yeshivas? Why do the most pious, traditional, Talmud-steeped Jews today overwhelmingly reject (if not mock) the notion that a woman can be a man, and consider it forbidden to act as if it were so?

To ask the question one final way: When did the Jewish tradition begin to embrace today’s notion of the “nonbinary,” and why is it news to the most devout Jews?

Kukla’s provocation is not a serious attempt to understand and represent honestly what ancient Judaism or the Jewish tradition stands for. It is a shallow effort to “queer” Judaism, to take a venerable old tradition, the religion toward which Americans today have the warmest feelings, and appropriate it as a weapon for yet another trendy, progressive cause. That effort cheapens Judaism, a result satisfying only to those progressives for whom Judaism presents just one more set of ideas to plunder for their own ends.