My favorite thing about the talmudic discussion of the several sex phenotypes is that one of those terms, "androginos", is very visibly not Hebrew but Greek.
And the reason that's my favorite thing is what it implies: that the rabbis of the Talmud didn't say "well, there's no word for this in the holy language, clearly that means it isn't a real thing but some kind of aberration that we can safely ignore" but rather "well, this is observably a real thing, we don't have a word for it but the Greeks do, let's use theirs."
I feel very strongly that this is an approach we should consistently use: look at the world as well as the book, look at knowledge that comes from other sources, don't discount something as unreal or unimportant just because we aren't already familiar and comfortable with it. That's a principle that surely applies to a lot of things (if not literally everything), but maybe especially to our growing understanding of the needs of trans people and how best to honor and protect them.
Use the right name, even if it's not a name you already know.
Thank you for this informative text that also affirms me in my choice to explore Judaism as a trans queer person. I have found nothing but disdain in my past life for years, and just seeing that inclusivity is right *there* within my reach, is giving me all the vibes I need.
I loved this. Also, Daniel Lavery has a hilarious chapter in his book Something That May Shock and Discredit You, where he imagines Jacob's relatives feeling "uncomfortable" when he comes home and tells them he's called Israel now. The trans subtext is *strong* there, and I wasn't at all surprised you tapped into that same spirit with Abraham and Sarah.
As the father of a transgender child, I can't tell you how much I appreciate the strong teachings from you and many rabbis on transgender issues. Thank you!
As a cishet man who has many trans people in my life, I am very glad to see this post.
I have a picky question of Torah interpretation: why (in the book of Genesis), after Jacob gets the new name Israel, does he continue to be referred to as Jacob, not once but many times?
I really appreciate your observation here. What I would add is that there is a long tradition of a name change being an outward sign of a spiritual change. In my experience accompanying quite a few students through the process of legal gender transition, it seems clear to me that the change they experience is not only social but profoundly spiritual. It seems to me that the spiritual task in front of all of us is to grow into our true selves, into the kind of people envisioned in creation — which is precisely what my students were discovering. Celebration would be the order of the day, then, not deadnaming.
Names are important. Choosing to deadname is a choice and a deliberate cruelty. I changed my name almost 25 years ago when I married. It was important to me then, and although I sometimes wish I'd kept my maiden name, I've been this name longer than I had the original.
I spent grad school as a commuter student. During the MA, that meant a 60 mile drive up a US highway that was only 4 lanes for about 20 miles of the distance. I was frequently trying to make up time on one end or the other of things and nearly lost my license to speeding tickets over the first year. One day, I'm zipping up the last bit of the northbound trip and get caught blatantly over the limit. I knew I was going to get ticketed as I handed over my license and insurance info but admitted nothing.
The highway patrolman looks at the cards and says "Ma'am, did you get married recently?"
"No, it's been a few years." At this point I'm moving from frustration at the delay to genuine puzzlement and consternation. Not only did I redo my license when we got married, I did so again a year and a half later when I turned 21.
"You really need to get your license updated then. It still says <Lastname> and your insurance card says Kinstler."
"Umm... Red Kinstler is my *insurance agent.* <Lastname> is my married name." (Red retired a few years ago, so I'm not worried about using his name here doxxing me - you'd have a rough time retracing my coverage from him.)
I did not get a ticket that day.
If that highway patrolman can understand the importance of using the correct name, so can everyone else.
The High Holy Days are a time of the Jewish year when we are especially mindful of the sins committed against other people. For those of us who have ever deadnamed someone, it is a time to recommit to no longer doing so. In order to repent (teshuvah), we need to apologize to those we have deadnamed, in cases where that is possible. Make sure you do some research first if deadnaming is a new term to you. Unconsidered “apologies” made to people you have alienated are not examples of repentance, and can do more harm than good.
Genderqueer person here who is just dropping by to say I really appreciated this post, especially as it is partially about Biblical Sarah which happens to be my given name.
This was a very nice post, thank you, while as a genderfluid person I don't feel the need for a new name, I will admit this feels nice to know, and it feels like a solid case, I wanted to ask however, if someone was to argue that the case you were talking about was specifically about Abraham and Sarah because they were commands from God specifically, and as such doesn't apply to Trans people, while it already feels like a stretch, may I ask what your argument against that would be?
Very belated for this post, but I just encountered this and thought you should see it: "And His Name Shall Be Called Something Hard to Remember", by Daniel Lavery (extract from Something That May Shock and Discredit You). https://cooltastrophe.tumblr.com/post/668424713033383936
So if we refer to Abraham earlier in life, do we refer to him by Abraham or by the name he used at the time? Lech lecha refers to Abram and Sarai, but the impression I get from the above is that we should still call them Abraham and Sarah, even in the context of that parsha.
Surprise! I have opinions. First up: my Hebrew is basically phonetic at best, and so I ask: are Abraham and Sarah explicitly referred to at any point as tumtum or aylonit? If not, I am guarded about the connotations being drawn here that atypical genders can, let alone should or are good (rather than neutral) to be changed.
> Our mother Sarah was initially an aylonit ( as it is stated: “And Sarah was barren; she had no child” (Genesis 11:30)
I take issue with this interpretation, as it seems to apply that fertility alone makes the gender of a woman more than "male sex characteristics" (which, traditionally, tends to be interpreted as a phallus, lack of breasts, and certain patterns of hair, but could be extended to include gender/sex presentation and/or human interventions). It carries a haunting implication that the aylonit can be "cured" by either a womb or a proof of ability to conceive (such as, for example, 'corrective' rape - which already happens overwhelmingly to trans men and gender nonconforming AFABs whom 'need' to be 'put in their place').
My chevruta and I were trying to follow up and read around the textual references here (we've been doing that quite a bit, which is super-helpful at least to me as a Hebrew learner), and we had trouble with the Yerushalmi Sanhedrin 2:6 reference. We gathered that the citation format for Yerushalmi is different from Bavli, but we couldn't square this with at least how it's presented on Sefaria: if I look at something like https://www.sefaria.org/Jerusalem_Talmud_Sanhedrin.2a.1?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en, it's just presented by page and apparently has one "verse" per page, so it's hard to find individual halakhot within that (especially without much fluency in Palestinian Aramaic). Does anyone have any tips for turning the Yerushalmi citation format into manageable chunks of text?
The thing I struggle with in this (as Dennis also noted) is how we get around the sin of referring to biblical figures by their previous names when we do so every year, not just with Israel/Jacob (who, I should note, is also referred to as not Israel in the Amidah) but also with Abram/Abraham.
What I'm trying to ask is: how do we square the commandment not to use their previous names, when we re-read the part of the Torah from before they were renamed as part of every cycle?
To map this onto the present day, isn't using the previous name in the retelling akin to deadnaming someone when talking about a pre-transition phase of their life?
Of course, I recognize in the Torah, the transformation and understanding it is a crucial part of the story, but if the name thing is so key, isn't there another way to refer to those figures than just the old name?
Hold up: that is a long bit of information to put in parentheses, the list of sex categories. I recognize saris adam as what gets translated as “eunuch”. I’d like to know more about how the other categories arise in the Torah - or is it in the discussions of Torah? (Non-Jew here.) I’ve been thinking a bit about names because of some children who have declared new gender identities from how they were assigned at birth. So far, they have retained their birth names, and I’ve pondered the idea that our understanding of the expected gender of names may shift over time. - I really, really like the point that using an old name is a double violation. Thank you.
My favorite thing about the talmudic discussion of the several sex phenotypes is that one of those terms, "androginos", is very visibly not Hebrew but Greek.
And the reason that's my favorite thing is what it implies: that the rabbis of the Talmud didn't say "well, there's no word for this in the holy language, clearly that means it isn't a real thing but some kind of aberration that we can safely ignore" but rather "well, this is observably a real thing, we don't have a word for it but the Greeks do, let's use theirs."
I feel very strongly that this is an approach we should consistently use: look at the world as well as the book, look at knowledge that comes from other sources, don't discount something as unreal or unimportant just because we aren't already familiar and comfortable with it. That's a principle that surely applies to a lot of things (if not literally everything), but maybe especially to our growing understanding of the needs of trans people and how best to honor and protect them.
Use the right name, even if it's not a name you already know.
Thank you for this informative text that also affirms me in my choice to explore Judaism as a trans queer person. I have found nothing but disdain in my past life for years, and just seeing that inclusivity is right *there* within my reach, is giving me all the vibes I need.
I loved this. Also, Daniel Lavery has a hilarious chapter in his book Something That May Shock and Discredit You, where he imagines Jacob's relatives feeling "uncomfortable" when he comes home and tells them he's called Israel now. The trans subtext is *strong* there, and I wasn't at all surprised you tapped into that same spirit with Abraham and Sarah.
As the father of a transgender child, I can't tell you how much I appreciate the strong teachings from you and many rabbis on transgender issues. Thank you!
As a cishet man who has many trans people in my life, I am very glad to see this post.
I have a picky question of Torah interpretation: why (in the book of Genesis), after Jacob gets the new name Israel, does he continue to be referred to as Jacob, not once but many times?
I really appreciate your observation here. What I would add is that there is a long tradition of a name change being an outward sign of a spiritual change. In my experience accompanying quite a few students through the process of legal gender transition, it seems clear to me that the change they experience is not only social but profoundly spiritual. It seems to me that the spiritual task in front of all of us is to grow into our true selves, into the kind of people envisioned in creation — which is precisely what my students were discovering. Celebration would be the order of the day, then, not deadnaming.
Names are important. Choosing to deadname is a choice and a deliberate cruelty. I changed my name almost 25 years ago when I married. It was important to me then, and although I sometimes wish I'd kept my maiden name, I've been this name longer than I had the original.
I spent grad school as a commuter student. During the MA, that meant a 60 mile drive up a US highway that was only 4 lanes for about 20 miles of the distance. I was frequently trying to make up time on one end or the other of things and nearly lost my license to speeding tickets over the first year. One day, I'm zipping up the last bit of the northbound trip and get caught blatantly over the limit. I knew I was going to get ticketed as I handed over my license and insurance info but admitted nothing.
The highway patrolman looks at the cards and says "Ma'am, did you get married recently?"
"No, it's been a few years." At this point I'm moving from frustration at the delay to genuine puzzlement and consternation. Not only did I redo my license when we got married, I did so again a year and a half later when I turned 21.
"You really need to get your license updated then. It still says <Lastname> and your insurance card says Kinstler."
"Umm... Red Kinstler is my *insurance agent.* <Lastname> is my married name." (Red retired a few years ago, so I'm not worried about using his name here doxxing me - you'd have a rough time retracing my coverage from him.)
I did not get a ticket that day.
If that highway patrolman can understand the importance of using the correct name, so can everyone else.
The High Holy Days are a time of the Jewish year when we are especially mindful of the sins committed against other people. For those of us who have ever deadnamed someone, it is a time to recommit to no longer doing so. In order to repent (teshuvah), we need to apologize to those we have deadnamed, in cases where that is possible. Make sure you do some research first if deadnaming is a new term to you. Unconsidered “apologies” made to people you have alienated are not examples of repentance, and can do more harm than good.
Genderqueer person here who is just dropping by to say I really appreciated this post, especially as it is partially about Biblical Sarah which happens to be my given name.
This was a very nice post, thank you, while as a genderfluid person I don't feel the need for a new name, I will admit this feels nice to know, and it feels like a solid case, I wanted to ask however, if someone was to argue that the case you were talking about was specifically about Abraham and Sarah because they were commands from God specifically, and as such doesn't apply to Trans people, while it already feels like a stretch, may I ask what your argument against that would be?
Very belated for this post, but I just encountered this and thought you should see it: "And His Name Shall Be Called Something Hard to Remember", by Daniel Lavery (extract from Something That May Shock and Discredit You). https://cooltastrophe.tumblr.com/post/668424713033383936
So if we refer to Abraham earlier in life, do we refer to him by Abraham or by the name he used at the time? Lech lecha refers to Abram and Sarai, but the impression I get from the above is that we should still call them Abraham and Sarah, even in the context of that parsha.
Thank you for the links.
Surprise! I have opinions. First up: my Hebrew is basically phonetic at best, and so I ask: are Abraham and Sarah explicitly referred to at any point as tumtum or aylonit? If not, I am guarded about the connotations being drawn here that atypical genders can, let alone should or are good (rather than neutral) to be changed.
> Our mother Sarah was initially an aylonit ( as it is stated: “And Sarah was barren; she had no child” (Genesis 11:30)
I take issue with this interpretation, as it seems to apply that fertility alone makes the gender of a woman more than "male sex characteristics" (which, traditionally, tends to be interpreted as a phallus, lack of breasts, and certain patterns of hair, but could be extended to include gender/sex presentation and/or human interventions). It carries a haunting implication that the aylonit can be "cured" by either a womb or a proof of ability to conceive (such as, for example, 'corrective' rape - which already happens overwhelmingly to trans men and gender nonconforming AFABs whom 'need' to be 'put in their place').
My chevruta and I were trying to follow up and read around the textual references here (we've been doing that quite a bit, which is super-helpful at least to me as a Hebrew learner), and we had trouble with the Yerushalmi Sanhedrin 2:6 reference. We gathered that the citation format for Yerushalmi is different from Bavli, but we couldn't square this with at least how it's presented on Sefaria: if I look at something like https://www.sefaria.org/Jerusalem_Talmud_Sanhedrin.2a.1?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en, it's just presented by page and apparently has one "verse" per page, so it's hard to find individual halakhot within that (especially without much fluency in Palestinian Aramaic). Does anyone have any tips for turning the Yerushalmi citation format into manageable chunks of text?
The thing I struggle with in this (as Dennis also noted) is how we get around the sin of referring to biblical figures by their previous names when we do so every year, not just with Israel/Jacob (who, I should note, is also referred to as not Israel in the Amidah) but also with Abram/Abraham.
What I'm trying to ask is: how do we square the commandment not to use their previous names, when we re-read the part of the Torah from before they were renamed as part of every cycle?
To map this onto the present day, isn't using the previous name in the retelling akin to deadnaming someone when talking about a pre-transition phase of their life?
Of course, I recognize in the Torah, the transformation and understanding it is a crucial part of the story, but if the name thing is so key, isn't there another way to refer to those figures than just the old name?
Hold up: that is a long bit of information to put in parentheses, the list of sex categories. I recognize saris adam as what gets translated as “eunuch”. I’d like to know more about how the other categories arise in the Torah - or is it in the discussions of Torah? (Non-Jew here.) I’ve been thinking a bit about names because of some children who have declared new gender identities from how they were assigned at birth. So far, they have retained their birth names, and I’ve pondered the idea that our understanding of the expected gender of names may shift over time. - I really, really like the point that using an old name is a double violation. Thank you.