Androgynos and Tumtum: Reifying or Rejecting Gender Binary?

Rabbi Benay Lappe, An Unrecognizable Jewish Future: A Queer Talmudic Take (ELI Talk)

Today, for the first time in history, Queer Jews are learning Talmud as Queer Jews and seeing in it things that our teachers never taught us.

Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: an Introduction (1996), pg. 3

"While there is no critical concensus on the definitional limits of queer--indeterminacy being one of its widely promoted charms--its general outlines are frequently sketched and debated. Broadly speaking, queer describes those gestures or analytical models which dramatise incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex, gender and desire . . . Demonstrating the impossibility of any 'natural' sexuality, it calls into question even such apparently unproblematic terms as 'man' and 'woman'.

Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, Gender Identity In Halakhic Discourse, Jewish Women's Archive

As a figure of thought the halakhic androgynos may appear to be the result of adding or subtracting the laws applying to men and women, based on his or her dual sex. However, the rabbinic texts do indicate the relative weight of both sexes. In the end, the combination of both primary sexual organs in one body does not allow for either hybridity or choice. Indeed, in the project of integrating the doubly-sexed body into the binary halakhic system, the presence of the male organ has greater signifying force than the female organ. Thus, the androgynos must dress like a man (Tosefta Bikkurim 2:5, Mishnah Bikkurim 2:2) but, most significantly, he may take a wife, but cannot be taken as a wife (Mishnah Yevamot 8:6, Tosefta Bikkurim 2:4/Mishnah Bikkurim4:2; Levinson, 127), just as he is subject to the laws of levirate marriage as a man but not as a woman. A minority opinion in the Mishnah to the effect that sexual relations between a man and an androgynos should be punished by stoning is glossed in the Tosefta by restricting it to a sexual act in “the way of masculinity” (derekh zakhrut, see section 1.1). While this discussion indicates that the presence of a male organ is not necessarily entirely determinative of the maleness of the androgynos, since vaginal intercourse with him can be considered to be permissible, it also reveals the anxiety driving the halakhic consideration of marriage or sexual relations with an androgynos as being about potential male penetration (Satlow, 18; Boyarin 1995, 347) . . .

In sum, even though the rabbinic semiotics of the body open the gate towards a remarkable self-consciousness about the potential ambiguity of its signs, the same system manages to maintain its fundamental gender binarism in Jewish law.

Noach Dzmura, An Ancient Strategy for Managing Gender Ambiguity, From, "Balancing on the Mechitza: Transgender in Jewish community"

1) Ambiguity or indeterminacy can serve as a valid category of recognition, a "third space," in the context of a binary norm...all possible positions within a common set are equally likely, equally true. Rather than certainty, this category of recognition is characterized by doubt. In other words, like Schroedinger's cat, which is both dead and alive until such time as an observation is made, the Mishnaic hermaphrodite is single sexed and double sexed and neither sexed all at the same time---at least until the law requires a movement towards one state or another.

2) The category of third space embraces each pole of the normative binary and recognizes a space beyond it. A common set of options coexist within this third space, from which situational or relative truths may be extracted. These situationally applied truths do not invalidate the third spaces overarching ambiguity. Rather, the situation-specific truths (certainties, like "male," "female," "both," or "neither") exist for a brief time in a longer term container of indeterminacy (an uncertainty that contains "male," "female," "both," and "neither").

3) In order to collectively recognize an ambiguous or indeterminate third space alongside a recognized binary requires training (in the form of a statement of identity followed by reinforcement by another member of the community and renegotiation of terms between community members) about two simultaneous realities: A situational truth plus the recognition of third space as an overarching category. When such reinforcement occurs in Mishnah Androgynos, the Rabbis seem uncharacteristically to be showing us that social role is not the sole determinant of gender; rather, the community participates in constructing the hermaphrodites non-binary gender identity.

Rabbi Elliot Rose Kukla, A Created Being of Its Own: Toward a Jewish Liberation Theology for Men, Women and Everyone Else, Transtorah.org

The first time I met the tumtum I was twenty years old and studying in an orthodox yeshiva . . . As soon as I read this perplexing text I called over my teacher and excitedly asked her: “Who is this tumtum?” “Oh,” she answered, “The tumtum is a mythical beast that is neither male nor female – kind of like a unicorn – that our Sages invented in order to explore the limits of the law.” Even though I knew next to nothing about Jewish texts and traditions, I had a feeling that my learned teacher might be wrong. I instantly identifi ed with the tumtum. I had spent a lifetime feeling homeless and adrift between the modern categories of “male” and “female.” When I met the tumtum I finally came home . . . I still recognize the tumtum whenever we meet in the text and I am still surrounded by voices that deny that the tumtum and I really exist . . .

Judaism speaks in a different voice. Although Jewish Sages often tried to sort the world into binaries, they also acknowledged that not all parts of God’s creation can be contained in orderly boxes. Distinctions between Jews and non-Jews; Shabbat and the days of the week; purity and impurity, are crucial to Jewish tradition. However, it was the parts of the universe that defied binaries that interested the rabbis of the Mishna and the Talmud the most. Pages and pages of sacred texts are occupied with the minute details of the moment between fruit and bud, wildness and domestication, innocence and maturity, the twilight hour between day and night. We read in the Babylonian Talmud: “Our sages taught: As to twilight, it is doubtful whether it is part day and part night, or whether all of it is day or all of it is night.… Rabbi Yosi said: Twilight is like the twinkling of an eye as night enters and the day departs, and it is impossible to determine its length.” (Shabbat 34b)

Reuben Zellman, a transgender activist and rabbinical student writes: “Twilight cannot be defined; it can only be sanctified and appreciated. People can’t always be defined; they can only be seen and respected, and their lives made holy. This Jewish approach allows for genders beyond male and female. It opens space in society. And it protects those who live in the places in between.”

Additional Resources:

• Balancing on the Mechitza: Transgender in the Jewish Community, edited by Noach Dzumra

• http://transtorah.org/

• http://archive.qzap.org/index.php/Detail/Object/Show/object_id/408

• Max Strassfeld, publishing "Transing the Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature" soon

• Noam Sienna, publishing LGBTQ+ Jewish anthology soon