In a seminal work, Standing Again at Sinai, Judith Plaskow argues for a reading of Torah and an understanding of Jewish life to explicitly include women. Commenting on Moses’s preparation of the people for receiving the Torah (Exodus 19:15), she notes that Moses addresses the gathered community only as men. Women, she argues, were invisible at the moment of entry into the covenant, “in both grammar and substance,” and this invisibility is perpetuated through our tradition.

Plaskow’s work was to reclaim woman as a part of our text. While trans bodies are largely absent from classical Jewish texts, trans experience is not. Drawing on feminist models of midrashic reclamation, i find myself as a trans* Jew situated in our text not through anachronistic claims about identity, but through a rabbinic concept for a phenomenon that resists classification.

Plaskow wrote, “The Jewish community today is a community of women and men, and it has never been otherwise,” yet this must be modernized. The Jewish community today is a community of women and men and people of every gender and every sex, and it has never been otherwise. Trans* people have always existed, although the experience of trans* bodies is not recorded. It cannot possibly be, though, that trans* people cannot find themselves in Jewish texts at all. Transness is present across our canon through midrashic construction of rabbinic categorization.

Some trans* scholars have used terms like androginos and tumtum to speak of trans* experience but this erases the experience of intersex individuals, which is the way the terms were meant. Trans scholar, Max Strassfeld contends that they are not the only trans or intersex Jew drawn to texts relating to the experience of androginos as a source for visibility. Strassfeld is correct in the necessity of the intelligibility of trans* identities, yet coopting intersex identities in favor of trans*, genderqueer, and gender expansive individuals undermines the argument. Trans* bodies, and maybe especially nonbinary or gender queer bodies, are simply not in our classical texts. Intersex identities remain as unseen as trans identities in our current society and there cannot be erasure........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)