How many genders in Judaism? It’s complicated

The claim that non-binary genders do not exist has become politically fashionable.

The day after he was inaugurated as US President Donald Trump removed legal protections and federal funding for transgender individuals in an executive order that also attempted to officially enshrine binary frameworks of sex and gender. In Australia, Clive Palmer’s Trumpet of the Patriots is running the same line with political advertisements claiming “there are only two genders”. 

There are myriad reasons to condemn this worldview from how, in excluding and marginalising trans people, it actively endangers their lives, to the problem that technically, it risks defining everyone as female. 

One indication of the limited thinking underlying the denial of trans experience, is that imposing binary frameworks of gender violently erases the rich diversity of gender concepts in traditional cultures, such as Two-Spirit people from American Indigenous nations.

A specifically Jewish variety of this last objection has received recent attention in online debates. Advocates of trans rights claim that Jewish civilisation has long recognised more than two genders, pointing to as many as seven alleged genders found in classical rabbinic literature like the Talmud. Opponents have harshly criticised the claim as a distortion of Jewish law.

Non-binary Rabbi Elliot Kukla wrote in a  New York Times guest essay that “people who are more than binary have always been recognised by my religion”. Heritage Foundation research fellow Jason Bedrick tweeted in response “Judaism recognises two genders. Period.”

So what are these ancient rabbinic categories at the heart of the controversy? And are they actually genders? As usual with Talmud, it’s complicated.

The categories found in rabbinic literature include:

Are these gender categories? Not really, or at least not in the sense we use ‘gender’ today, to denote a socially constructed identity or complex of social roles distinct from biology. These categories are clearly concerned with matters of biology and anatomy. In many ways, these categories take us closer to “intersex” than to “transgender” or “non-binary”.

Are they sex categories then? That is, do they denote certain kinds of bodies, independent of norms about permissible behaviour? Also not really. Even as the rabbis anchor them firmly in certain anatomical traits, these categories are inextricably connected to behaviour. For example, an androgynos is like a man in that he cuts his hair and marries a woman, but she is like a woman in that she is ineligible to provide certain forms of testimony (Tosefta Bikkurim 2:2-4). The link between behaviour and categorisation is pervasive in halacha (Jewish law), from dietary laws to priesthood to sex/gender.

As my teacher Rabbi Dr Sarra Lev has pointed out, both “sex” and “gender” are anachronistic terms in the context of classical rabbinic literature. The rabbis’ discussions presuppose that anatomical kind and permissible behaviour are necessarily linked.

To further complicate matters, the rabbis often do have an underlying binary view around sex/gender. Much of the time discussions of sex/gender categories occur in the context of trying to fit variant bodies into halachic binaries. To that end, the saris adam is essentially a ‘defective’ male, and the saris hamma and aylonit are analysed as an infertile (but not ‘defective’) male and female respectively. Even the tumtum is believed to ultimately have a binary sex/gender, though since it cannot be known, the tumtum is often treated analogously to the androgynos.

At this point, the rabbinic perspective might be starting to sound concerningly similar to the anti-trans ideology: no clear distinction between sex and gender, an underlying male/female binary, and frequent efforts to filter ‘problem cases’ through that binary.

Not so fast.

To use a distinctly Australian analogy, the rabbis approach these sex/gender categories like European zoologists attempting to categorise Australian fauna. They bring a lot of assumptions and frameworks with them. Sometimes they impose them upon others in unjust or destructive ways. At times their existing categories can expand to include what they encounter as a variant form, as with the kangaroo or the saris hamma. Other times, the anomalies present a greater challenge to their categories, as with the platypus or the androgynos.

Sometimes the zoologists and the rabbis are interested in understanding the bodies they are discussing. Other times these bodies are discussed as a means to understand the conceptual categories for which they serve as boundary cases.

We should not lionise the ancient rabbis nor can we honestly project contemporary frameworks of sex and gender onto them. But classical rabbinic literature at the very least recognises that the contours of sex and gender are far more complicated than just “two sexes, period”.

How many genders are there in the Talmud? Enough to cause problems for Trump and the Trumpeters.