Transing the Talmud or Reading the Talmud "Badly"

Max K. Strassfeld. Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature. UC Press, 2023.

My book, Trans Talmud, explores categories of eunuchs and androgynes in rabbinic literature. Eunuchs and androgynes appear extensively in Jewish canonical sources that date to approximately the first six centuries of the common era. The rabbis from this period discuss these figures in a variety of different contexts: from levirate marriage to circumcision. Androgynes also appear in narrative or exegetical traditions, such as the texts that portray the first human (Adam) as an androgyne. Suffice to say, the sheer number of sources on the topic suggests that the rabbis of different generations and communities in late antiquity were interested in eunuchs and androgynes.[1]

While I translate these rabbinic categories in English as “eunuch” and “androgyne,” these terms do not fully encapsulate the complex rabbinic taxonomy, so I will briefly lay out the rabbinic concepts. I use the English term “eunuch” as a shorthand for three distinct rabbinic categories. For the rabbis, a person could either be born a eunuch or become a eunuch. This means that some men and women are born with bodily differences that make it so they will not be able to reproduce. For the rabbis, these inherently non-reproductive men and women were considered distinct types of eunuchs. The rabbis also understood men whose genitalia changed in such a way as to make them non-reproductive (through castration, for example), as a third kind of eunuch. This third category is what we tend to associate with the term eunuch today.

In addition to eunuchs, there are two rabbinic categories that I translate as “androgynes” in English. Early rabbinic sources describe one type of androgyne as having the capacity to menstruate and have seminal emissions. Scholars have concluded that the rabbis are describing someone who has two sets of genitalia. The second type of androgyne has an uncertain sex. Some sources describe this type of androgyne (called the tumtum) as having a flap of skin covering their genitalia. Whether due to a flap of skin or not, the sages were uncertain what sex to assign this type of androgyne. In a sense these two types of androgynes form a conceptual pair: the first androgyne has a surplus of sexed signs, while the second one has a dearth.

In the remainder of this article, I want to briefly recapitulate two arguments I make in the introduction to Trans Talmud. The first argument explores what it means to study sex and gender in the past. The second argument plays with what it might mean to employ a “bad” trans reading strategy. Together, these two arguments represent some of the central interventions of my book into the study of gender in rabbinic literature, and late antiquity more broadly.

I. What does it mean to study “gender” in the past?

I that contemporary trans and intersex identities do not translate easily to the rabbinic categories of eunuchs and androgynes. In contemporary times, we have a particular system of sex and gender that we have largely naturalized. In the U.S. we maintain that binary sex/gender is innate, even as we are currently passing legislation designed to enforce a binary. Which of course, begs a question: if sex/gender binaries are so natural, why then do we need to spend so much time regulating and enforcing them?

As we move throughout history, it becomes clearer how the contemporary sex/gender binary and the relationship we’ve construed between “sex” and “gender” are the product of a specific time and place. Scholars have demonstrated the ways that many sex/gender systems are situated within colonial, racialized, and ableist modes of knowledge production.[2] Even using the terms “sex” or “gender” can therefore obscure what it means to study eunuchs and androgynes. What does “gender” mean for the rabbis? Do the rabbis also create a distinction between “sex” and gender”? We cannot assume that these ways of organizing bodies are constant and ahistorical. And if we do assume that, we can miss the ways that rabbinic concepts of eunuchs and androgynes are formed within their own context of power and knowledge.

As Joseph Marchal points out, when contemporary trans and intersex activists identify with the eunuch, it can sometimes be fraught because of the important distinctions in the way sex/gender was understood in the past. For example, castration was sometimes practiced as a punishment in antiquity.[3] That is a very different context than the contemporary gender-affirming health care. Assuming that the rabbis have “sex” and “gender” therefore, and that we know what those terms mean in advance, can obscure the particular relations of power and knowledge that operate within the rabbinic context.

To explore what eunuchs and androgynes mean to the rabbis, then, requires us to grapple with the alterity of the past. If the person born with “variant” sexed attributes (whom we might today call intersex) and the person who changes their genitalia (whom we might today call trans) are both understood as different facets of the same phenomenon—a eunuch—than our taxonomies do not match rabbinic cultural understandings.[4] Reading “gender” in rabbinic literature means paying attention to what aspects of rabbinic culture are “gendered.” These would include, for example priestly status and purity laws, which are topics that we would be unlikely to include in contemporary definitions of gender.

II. Reading the Talmud badly

One of my interventions in the book is to use “transing” as my methodology for reading rabbinic sources. The word “transing” plays with the prefix trans (from the word transgender, for example), and uses that prefix as a verb. Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore argue that transing is: “… a practice that assembles gender into contingent structures of association with other attributes of bodily being, and that allows for reassembly…”[5] While these authors more fully explore the meaning of transing in their article, one of the most important aspects of this definition for my purposes is that it suggests that we can explore the mechanisms by which genders are formed (and can be reformulated) through their interaction with other characteristics of bodies. In this way gender is not a constant; it is historically and culturally contingent. This allows me to consider what aspects of bodily being the rabbis imbue with meaning and how that shapes their own taxonomies of embodiment. So one of the ways I trans the text is to think about gender as a historically contingent way to make meaning of aspects of bodies.

In the larger argument in the book, I explore how a “bad reading” strategy might function as one way to “trans” the text. I find the idea of bad readings helpful to account for the ways that power relations can structure what is a “good” interpretation of a historical text. For example, scholars have disputed the translation of certain words in the Hebrew Bible; specifically they contest whether the term saris literally meant eunuch or not. There are scholars who maintain that we should only translate the term as eunuch when there is no other possible translation. This assumes that ancient cultures would have reviled castration in all cases, and therefore that texts that seem to describe the saris positively cannot possibly be translated as eunuch. Thus eunuch-phobia can overdetermine what scholars find when they examine historical texts.[6]

I also pay attention to who has been accused of being a “bad” reader. I give an example from queer theory in the book, but I will give a personal example in this article. When I wanted to get top surgery, I had several friends and family members try to intervene. They argued that they had participated in feminist revolution in order to give us (the next generation) more freedom in how to live out our genders. Therefore, I did not need to change aspects of bodily being; I could simply “perform” the gender I wished without changing my body. My personal desire for top surgery became a “bad reading”— a too literal interpretation of the relationship between sex and gender. This is just one small example of the way that certain kinds of trans embodiment get critiqued for misunderstanding the relationship between sex, gender, and our bodies.[7] Of course, misogyny, racism, and transmisogynoir affect trans women and BIPOC trans people in ways that are different from how I am perceived as a white transmasculine (ish) person. There are multiple ways that trans bodies and trans desire can be made illegible.[8]

If trans people are sometimes accused of being bad readers, they are not the only ones. Jews are often portrayed in late antiquity as “bad and literal readers.” Perhaps I have encountered too many early Christian polemics against Jewish biblical exegesis. It seems as if late antique Jews are always being accused of reading the sources stubbornly, literally, and materially. For instance, Jews insist on literal circumcision instead of metaphorical circumcision. In other words, Jews are often accused of being bad (literal) readers of the body. In light of these criticisms leveled at trans people and Jews, I have begun to wonder what it might mean to embrace the label of being a “bad” trans/Jewish reader.[9] I pose this question in the book: might adopting the deliberately “bad” reading be a productive mechanism to rethink these questions?

In using the term transing, then, I pay particular attention to the politics of rendering certain (bodies, conceptual frames, lines of argumentation) outmoded or illegible. Transing also means paying attention to the forces of transmisogyny – the way that trans women specifically are subject to heightened scrutiny and gender policing. Transing addresses the attendant forces of racialization, and the ways that anti-Blackness and settler colonialism fundamentally shape conceptualizations of both gender and “progress.” Transing should track the material costs to those bodies that are “left behind.”

To read the Talmud transly, then, invites us to rethink our basic consensus on what it means to study sex and gender in the past. Transing means a commitment to resisting a cis-hermeneutics that assumes a certain correlation between sex and gender is universal and ahistorical. It also requires us to anatomize the way that power and politics shape our reading strategies, and to account for those forces in our own interpretations.

Finally, while the rabbis were certainly not gender revolutionaries, transing for me also means attending to the potential eunuchs and androgynes have to exceed their originally intended parameters.

 Beauchamp, Toby. Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

Fonrobert, Charlotte. “Regulating the Human Body: Rabbinic Legal Discourse and the Making of Jewish Gender.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, edited by Charlotte Fonrobert and Martin Jaffee, 270–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Gossett, Reina, Eric Stanley, and Johanna Burton. Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017.

Keegan, Cáel M. “In Praise of the Bad Transgender Object: Rocky Horror.” Flow: A Critical Forum on Media and Culture 26, no. 3 (2019). https://www.flowjournal.org/2019/11/in-praise-of-the-bad/#comments.

Kessler, Gwynn. “Bodies in Motion: Preliminary Notes on Queer Theory in Rabbinic Literature.” In Mapping Gender in Ancient Religious Discourses, edited by Caroline Vander Stichele and Todd Penner, 389–430. Leiden: Brill, 2007.

Krell, Elías Cosenza. “Is Transmisogyny Killing Trans Women of Color?: Black Trans Feminisms and the Exigencies of White Femininity.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 4, no. 2 (2017): 226–42. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3815033.

Lev, Sarra. “A Creation Sui Generis: The Evolution of a Concept.” In From Scrolls to Traditions: A Frestschrift Honoring Lawrence H. Schiffman, edited by Stuart S. Miller, Michael D. Swarz, Steven Fine, Naomi Grunhaus, and Alex P. Jassen, 325–49. Leiden: Brill, 2021.

Litman, Jane Rachel, and Jakob Hero-Shaw, eds. Liberating Gender for Jews and Allies :The Wisdom of Transkeit. 1st edition. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022.

Lugones, María. “Gender and Universality in Colonial Methodology.” Critical Philosophy of Race 8, no. 1 (2020): 25–47.

Meyerowitz, Joanne. “A New History of Gender.” In Trans/Forming Knowledge. University of Chicago, February, 2006.

Serano, Julia. Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2016.

Stone, Sandy. “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.” Camera Obscura 10, no. 2 (1992): 150–76.

Stryker, Susan, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore. “Introduction.” WSQ 36, no. 3–4 (Fall/Winter 2008): 11–22.

Tadmor, Hayim. Was the Biblical Saris a Eunuch? Edited by Greenfield Ziony Zevit, Seymour Gitin, and Michael Sokoloff. Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 1995.

[1] I am not the only scholar to work on androgynes and eunuchs. For some of the excellent scholarship on the topic, see: Fonrobert, “Regulating the Human Body”; Kessler, “Bodies in Motion”; Lev, “A Creation Sui Generis.” See also Kessler’s forthcoming book The Crooked and the Straight: Queer Theory and Rabbinic Literature, and Sarra Lev’s forthcoming book, And the Sages Did Not Know: Early Rabbinic Approaches to Intersex. Finally, there are community activists, rabbis, and advocates who write on this topic. See, for example Litman and Hero-Shaw, Liberating Gender for Jews and Allies.

[2] On the imbrication of gender with racialized capitalism, see, for example Lugones, “Gender and Universality in Colonial Methodology.”

[3] Marchal, Appalling Bodies, 16-29. In the Digest, the punishment for castrating others within Roman Empire was castration of the offender. It is unclear how often that might have been enforced, but given the rates of survival for castration at the time, this may have entailed a death sentence for some. See Horstmanshoff, “Who is the True Eunuch” 101-118.

[4] In the longer argument in the book I explain that I do also use the terms sex and gender, but advisedly, and only as I also explore the contours of what sex/gender might mean in the context of rabbinic sources.

[5] Stryker, Currah, and Moore, “Introduction,” 13. The first usage of the term transing should be credited to a talk by Joanne Meyerowitz: Meyerowitz, “A New History of Gender.”

[6] For a critique of these translation practices, see Tadmor, Was the Biblical Saris a Eunuch?

[7] My purpose is not to revalorize the term “transsexual” over “transgender”; nor am I assuming that the two are mutually exclusive. I am also not trying to cite the desire to change aspects of bodies as quintessentially trans. There are many trans folks that do not change aspects of their body for all sorts of reasons. I am simply noticing how that line of argumentation made certain desires of mine illegible to friends and family. For one of the foundational works on these questions, see Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back.”

[8] On questions of the hyper visibility of trans women and its effects, see Gossett, Stanley, and Burton, Trap Door. For the association between visibility and surveillance, also Beauchamp, Going Stealth.. For the origins of the term transmisogyny see Serano, Whipping Girl. For a critique of Serano’s work (and the more general critique of white saviorism implicated in the desire to ‘save’ trans women of color), see Krell, “Is Transmisogyny Killing Trans Women of Color?” 

[9] Trans Studies scholar Cáel Keegan has recently suggested that we might embrace the “bad transgender object”— films that are not governed by contemporary trans respectability politics. See Keegan, “In Praise of the Bad Transgender Object.”