We Have Always Been Here…Just Not in the Way You Might Think

As a kid, I never thought I would be a grown-up, because I never saw anyone that looked like me. I never saw an adult who wore their gender the way I did (or, wanted to), or who moved through the world in a way that I could recognize. I wasn’t sure exactly what would happen, but I simply could not imagine myself growing older and aging beyond being a child. How could I? As children’s rights activist Marian Wright Edelman says, “You can’t be what you can’t see.”

All the more so when the hidden glimmers of representation you work relentlessly to discover are actively erased, attacked, and targeted by government officials at the highest level, as we saw this week. As trans lives continue to serve as the battleground for the far right’s culture war, gender itself, in Judith Butler’s language, “has become a phantasm with destructive powers, one way of collecting and escalating multitudes of modern panics.” If the inauguration is any indication, this modern panic will, indeed, continue to escalate and continue to attack trans people and trans-ness itself, both rhetorically and materially, claiming that we are unnatural, newfangled beings, or declaring that we simply do not exist.

Attempting to counter these attacks, many have used the existence of the multiple categories of sex/gender found in early rabbinic literature (what Charlotte Fonrobert deems “Seder Androgynus”) to demonstrate that trans-ness, or, at least, life beyond the binary, is profoundly precedented, evidenced by the canonization of these categories. (Some of my favorite examples of these are offered by my comrades and teachers Max Strassfeld and R’ Elliot Kukla.) The act of recovering these texts, however dysphoric they may be, demonstrates that trans people have, indeed, existed, and attempts to uncover “trancestors” in our texts have helped many of us find images of ourselves in the tradition that speak back to us, reminding us and the world that we’ve always been here. 

In their recent essay, “De-naturing Cisness,” historian Beans Velocci challenges the cisnormative assumptions that locating trans histories in this way can sometimes inadvertently present: by identifying particular individuals or halakhic categories as trans (or perhaps, the more nuanced “trancestors”), all other characters and frameworks are “naturalized” as cisgender. In other words, if the androgynus or tumtum are trans, everyone and everything else in all of halakhic history is taken to be cis.

As Gwynn Kessler taught us at Shaping Tradition, we need not be “convinced that Abraham was cis or male or straight, for that matter, nor Sarah, because thousands of years of interpretation have made him so. But if we start the next thousands of years of interpretation where we don’t grant those rules legitimacy, then we don’t know what Abraham and Sarah or any other biblical character or rabbinic figure can be. And was.”

Demonstrating that “we have always existed” is essential work in a society that contests trans being on the basis of being unprecedented. But as we find precedents that help us shape the language of halakha, we must be sure not to make cisness natural by turning our gaze only to the places in which we can claim our historical existence. Instead, we must create the ancestors—and halakhic precedents—that we need.

In the famous rabbinic tale that we return to over and over at SVARA, Moses finds himself thoroughly confused in Rabbi Akiva’s classroom. Having been the recipient of Torah itself, how could he understand so little? Immediately a student asks Rabbi Akiva for the source of his teaching, and he responds “It is halakha le’Moshe mi’Sinai, it was handed down from Moses from Sinai,” which puts Moshe at ease.

It comforts Moshe to be pulled into Rabbi Akiva’s world as Rabbi Akiva tethered his own new teachings to Moshe as his ancestor. In an incredible act of rabbinic self-awareness, this talmudic tale offers a vision of what it should look like to live halakha with fidelity to ourselves and the past: we bring the past with us by claiming even our most creative endeavors as having been there all along. This is not the same as reading our past for proof—in this story Rabbi Akiva creates the proof he needs with no concern for its historicity.

This kind of reading back into history and projecting oneself into the past is a most Jewish way to experience and relate to time and text.

Like Beans Velocci, I do not wish to concede that the evidence of transness is contained only in Seder Androgynus, because I don’t believe that the talmudic discourse most useful to me in reconstructing my past can be found where these characters appear. 

I find trans roots in the Talmud in its entirety. Inspired by R’ Reuben Zellman, I find myself in the twilight, in the gradients of halakhic times. I find myself in Rabbi Meir’s capacity to transform the tameh into the tahor, and in the infinite examples of rabbinic thinking that stretches binaries and polarities.

In authoring teshuvot related to my own trans experience, this prompt for precedents feels most salient. When seeking a blessing for HRT, the sources most resonant with and relevant to my pursuit were not those in which a historical or literary (though, to be sure, within halakhic discourse those genres are not distinct) trans person figured. I found analogies for my experience in traditional examples of “improvement” and “change” expressed by a blessing recently on my mind, ha’tov ve’ha’meitiv (“blessed is God who is good and does good”): the fresh relief of the first rain, the anticipation of finding a precious object, the experience of opening a new bottle of wine and appreciating its distinct aroma and flavor—these became precedents for my medical transition and the sanctity it carried. And as I precedented myself within these examples, they grew to hold me, and they, too, transitioned.

As we face attempts at our erasure—none of which are new and all of which will fade—I bless us with the courage to read ourselves into the world around us and imagine ourselves into the future. When we truly look, we can find ourselves everywhere.