[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
In the first chapter of the Bible, we are told that “male and female He created them.” (Genesis 1:27) What would have been assumed to be an obvious and unnecessary statement throughout 99% of human history suddenly became a revolutionary statement of common sense.
Woke activists who insist that there are dozens of genders, have now taken to falsely claiming that there are 6, 7 or even 8 genders in Judaism. (The very fact that they can’t decide how many there are supposed to be is a giveaway that their claims are utter nonsense.)
There are two sexes in Judaism. Male and female. The Torah specifically forbids crossdressing (Deuteronomy 22:5), bans castrating even animals (Leviticus 22:24) and treats the castration of human beings as an evil pagan practice and shuns anyone who participates in it (Deuteronomy 23:2.) As opposed to those eunuchs who were mutilated against their will (Isaiah 56:4) whom G-d will comfort and give them fulfillment and hope despite the crime committed against them.
Transgender and woke activists however have turned to Judaism to prop up their false claims that multiple sexes exist and that, more absurdly still, a man can choose to become a woman. This is an idea firmly rejected by Judaism and was instead associated with pagan cults like those of Ishtar and Atargatis, whose priests wore women’s clothing, or the worshipers of Cybele who publicly castrated themselves in the streets and then dressed in women’s clothing.
Greater exposure to these cults led Judaism to impose even more stringent measures against any form of crossdressing. Talmudic era and later religious rulings even banned men from plucking eyebrows and using mirrors for beautification to avoid feminine behaviors and barred women from wearing armor and carrying weapons to avoid any masculine behaviors associated with the opposite sex that would dilute the differences between them. (In contemporary times, women may carry guns when they need to for security. This was an issue of visual perception.)
As Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, the vigorous 19th century proponent of Orthodox Judaism in Germany wrote, one interpretation of the Torah’s command banning crossdressing is that “each sex [Geschlecht: meaning biological reality] is forbidden that which is more specifically suited to the nature of the other.”
Nevertheless, woke activists have taken to misinterpreting categories within Jewish law, including the Talmud, which seek to deal with situations in which people have been castrated or mutilated resulting in an eunuch and birth defects in which children are born with physical abnormalities. A New York Times op-ed first helped popularize the idea that “Ancient Judaism Recognized a Range of Genders. It’s Time We Did, Too.” No, it absolutely did not.
There was no range of ‘genders’. There were people with physical defects who could not properly fit into their natural roles as men or women. The law did not treat them as members of a third, fourth or sixth (or in modern times, 76th gender), but as defective in various ways.
The most obvious example is the “saris” is a eunuch or an officer. (The similar term used in the ancient world likely reflected the practice of using eunuchs in positions of power because not having any family ties, they were seen as more trustworthy.)
Unlike pagan religions, Judaism violently rejected the practice of creating eunuchs and viewed it as an abomination. Any form of sterilization, even chemical, was banned in Jewish practice. Today, vasectomies are generally forbidden and necessary medical procedures that result in sterility require a consultation with a rabbinic authority.
The “saris” was not a gender recognized by Judaism: it was a tragedy or a crime.
The ‘Aylonit’, another medical condition wrongly cited as a ‘gender’ is today known as Turner Syndrome. Turner Syndrome is a genetic disorder that prevents physical development due to a girl being born with only one ‘X’ chromosome. This is not proof that gender is fluid, but that people can and tragically do experience genetic problems which prevent normal function.
The existence of Turner Syndrome no more proves that gender is fluid than children being born without an arm proves that there is a ‘spectrum of arms’ that people can add to or subtract at will.
The Talmud listed the genetic problem because of the need to classify people born with this condition, not because it viewed such people as representing a separate sex. They were women and girls, but also could not take on a full role as a woman due to their disabilities.
Similarly the Tumtum, someone born with a mass of tissue in place of normal genitals, or a person born with parts of both and is androgynous, posed problems of classification before genetic testing was available. Talmudic law tried its best to determine what elements of male or female roles such a person could be allowed to engage in. Rather than seeing him or her as a separate sex, they were always seen as an incomplete version of a man or a woman.
Not only is their existence not an argument for transgender ideology, but Jewish law opposed the popularized use of sex change operations as practiced in the 1960s to force a boy born with damaged genitals into a female role. This too fell under the biblical prohibition of castration.
It certainly opposes ‘feelings’ based transgender surgeries of the kind practiced today.
Sex may at times be difficult to determine due to physical abnormalities, but is not mutable.
Jewish law contended that even in cases where sex was difficult to determine for medical reasons, it could not be ‘forced’ because men and women were fundamentally different.
The people trying to find support for the transgender agenda in Judaism don’t actually care what it says. Their essays make it clear that they already made up their minds and are just looking for any sources of support, no matter how much they are taken out of context, to prop up their agenda. Distorting what Judaism says allows them to introduce doubt where there was once certainty and that is their real purpose. The Left only creates by destroying, argues by undermining and whatever it cites, is only done for the purpose of tearing down.
And yet some people are fooled by it.
By telling the lie about “X number of genders” in the Talmud often enough, people not familiar with the original sources come to believe or at least to believe that there is something to it.
And that is how the ‘big lies’ work. But the truth was there at the start of creation for us to read and remember: “male and female He created them.” This was not just an animalistic creation, but a creation in the “Image of G-d”. The two sexes are not just a biological fact, but a moral truth. That is why the 12th century scholar Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra of Spain wrote on crossdressing in Deuteronomy 22:5 that “G-d abominates the one who changes the works of the Lord.”
In a world of lies, that is the truth.
