Studying this material is subversive, but for Strassfeld, these are not trans-affirming Jewish texts. Strassfeld points out that despite often being treated as a footnote or parenthetical conversation in discussions of gender/sex in the rabbinic period, this listing of identities that describe people with experiences of sex and gender beyond-the-binary are mentioned in rabbinic literature more than one hundred times. Strassfeld carefully brings contemporary trans and intersex experiences-along with the creative application of queer, trans, and disability theory-into conversation with rabbinic notions of gender and sex in a way that resists anachronism and keeps each unique experience intact. Strassfeld is clear throughout Trans Talmud that this translation work is difficult, both in translating language, and in translating experiences across time and space. The book dedicates quite a bit of attention to the existence of these categories, deemed “androgynes” and “eunuchs,” who “carve nonbinary space into the tradition.” Each category includes more specific terms that address particular experiences. For Strassfeld, it’s fittingly neither…and both. But where some queer and trans folks see this statement and the list that follows as an invitation to locate ourselves in rabbinic history, others view it as an example of troubling rabbinic regulation of bodies. As one text reads, “ androgyne, there are ways in which they are like men, there are ways in which they are like women, there are which they are like both men and women, and there are ways in which they are not like men or women” (Tosefta Bikkurim 2:3, translation by Strassfeld). This text offers a list of bodies that are neither unequivocally “male” nor unequivocally “female,” and categorizes them into a rabbinic system of legal obligations. And it’s much more than that.Ī brief discussion of sex and gender beyond binary categories of “male” and “female” in the Mishnah, an early rabbinic text from the second century (Mishnah Bikkurim 4:1), has been held up as evidence of an older wisdom and understanding of gender. Strassfeld’s Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature, published this April by University of California Press, is an essential contribution to this unfolding project. Reclaiming those more expansive ways of thinking has become an important mission: seeking to build a more liberated future by revealing the past. Many queer and trans scholars and activists argue it’s Christian dominance and colonialism that have erased long-held ideas that sex and gender contain expressions beyond the binary. What does this have to do with Talmud and Jewish law? “A lot,” trans scholar of rabbinics Dr. So far in 2022, there have been over 132 anti-trans bills introduced in over 30 U.S.
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