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.”