Sunday, August 3, 2008

The Olympics, Judaism, Transsexual Surgery and Testing for a Female Soul

[This week's Haveil Havalim is here.]

Jennifer Finney Boylan, in a New York Times Op-Ed entitled The XY Games (8-3-08), discusses the problem of determining whether someone is a man or a woman.

Apparently, Olympic judges need to know whether a competitor in a female event is, in fact, a female. So they’ve set up a laboratory, presumably to test gender on a chromosomal level – the old XX vs. XY.

The problem, as Ms. Boylan points out, is that gender is not nearly so simple to identify. What do you do with someone who is XXY (Klinefelter’s Syndrome)? Or, as Boylan notes, what do you do with a woman who actually has a Y chromosome, but due to androgen insensitivity never develops male sexual characteristics?

This reminded me of the difference between the way Judaism historically identified gender, and how Jews identify gender today.

Judging from Tanach, and certainly from the mishnah and gemara, Judaism defines gender based upon visible reproductive organs (whether they are fully functional or not is irrelevant) - cf many discussions about tumtum and androgynus, for example. The historical test, then, was based on appearance.

Today, though, many Jews do not identify gender based on appearance. Springing from an embrace of mysticism (from Zohar to the Ari z"l to Tanya) over the past millenium, many Jews have come to believe that men and women are different at the level of the soul.

This is very clear when we look at two arenas: Technology and Spirituality.


Technology

What happens when a surgeon forms body parts simulating the opposite sex, with hormone therapy subduing the elements of one’s birth sex? Since Judaism follows the visual, should we accept as legitimate the results of this surgery? (Granted that the surgery seems to violate various halachot; this is a separate point.)

In fact, Rav Eliezer Waldenberg z”l raised this possibility in his Tzitz Eliezer, but I have yet to see the writings of a halachic authority who would act on this – giving a transgendered male an aliyah, etc.

We seem to be uncomfortable with the idea that human intervention can change someone’s halachic status. I’m not sure this is entirely because of the morphological phenomena, either; I suspect the discomfort would persist even if gene therapy could modify a person’s chromosomes themselves. It seems that many Jews believe that there is something fundamentally different about men and women, on a level deeper than physiology.


Spirituality

The question is common: Why does the Torah differentiate between men and women, in terms of mitzvah obligations?

The answer, to my mind, is fairly straightforward: Two roles are needed, one for people who raise and nurture children, one for people who raise and nurture society. Women fit naturally into the former, because they are the only ones who can naturally gestate and birth and nurse children. That leaves the latter role for men.

However, over the past few centuries a body of apologetics has sprung up based on a mystical understanding of spirituality. Within this school, women’s souls are spiritually superior to men’s souls. Therefore, women are not obligated in the mitzvot which men need. (To my mind, this thinking is silly, and it runs counter to many classic sources, but many serious-minded people buy into it.) This is what generates different male and female mitzvah obligations.


What emerges, then, is that, like Ms. Boylan, many Jews today are not willing to identify “male” and “female” based on a chromosome (let alone an appearance). On the other hand, we don’t go by lifestyle, either. Perhaps the Maccabi Games should look into a soul-testing lab…



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10 comments:

  1. Someone i know once claimed that the contemporary apologetics claim that "women are more innately spiritual than men" is more sexist [against men] than all of the halakhic distinctions between men and women are [against women].

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  2. I think there is indeed a precedent in Torah literature, though, for not considering human intervention to change one's sexual status. (I'm sure that the following is cited somewhere in the halachic literature on the subject.)

    Ibn Ezra on Lev. 18:22 quotes a R' Chananel, who understood that the plural form there ("mishkevei," implying that there are two forbidden types of sexual acts between two males) includes the case of a man who has surgery to create an artificial vagina. Now if a person indeed has at birth the genitals of both sexes - why, then, that's the classic "androgynus" that you mentioned; one who has vaginal relations with him incurs "makkas mardus" (Rambam, Hil. Issurei Bi'ah 1:15). Whereas when the same organ was created by surgery, then according to this R' Chananel the same act would be prohibited Biblically and punishable by sekilah.

    So it seems to me that there's always been an understanding that what's important isn't the appearance of the genitals right now, but what they looked like at birth (or in the case of a tumtum, what was there - albeit undetectable - the whole time), and that indeed this is not changeable based on any further developments.

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  3. Steg - Agreed.

    Alex - I'm not sure that I'd agree with your take on Rabbeinu Chananel (although I don't think it would disturb my thesis if I did concur).
    It seems to me, as Ibn Ezra there notes, that Rabbeinu Chananel is trying to define mishkevei ishah based on penetration, and so he needs to develop a case for it with a man - but that is not the same as saying that the morphology would be identical with a vagina.

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  4. We seem to be uncomfortable with the idea that human intervention can change someone’s halachic status.

    Umm, huh?

    A bris changes a baby boy's halachic status, a wedding changes the couple's halachic status, a mikveh changes a woman's halachic status - all of these are human interventions.

    I think the issue of gender doesn't disturb because of "human intervention," but only because we have mentally classified the halachic status of man/woman (sex, not gender) as something "natural" or "immutable," as something essential to an individual, rather than relational (how that individual stands in relation to others).

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  5. Hi Tzipporah,
    Yes, that's what I meant - the person's halachic gender status.
    Thanks.

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  6. Someone pointed out to me that maybe the fact that, as you mentioned, "the surgery seems to violate various halachot" indeed makes the difference. We hold with Rava (Temurah 4b ff) that "anything that the Torah says not to do - if one does it anyway, it is ineffective." So maybe it's precisely because sex-change operations are halachically prohibited that halachah ignores the results.

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  7. Hi Alex,
    I believe the concept you cite (אי עביד לא מהני) is more about whether a mitzvah done through those means has an impact, or not. Illegal physical transformations certainly do have halachic validity - think of שינוי קונה, for example.

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  8. Well well i think its fair to say that discussing a transsexual womans halachic status can only be complete as long as you bear in mind that a transsexual prior to surgery suffers a serious case of sakunas nifushois which definitely cannot be taken lightly and has to be part of the consideration in the psak but the commenter that said oh its prohibited anyway well you dont know alot and while u pretend to know alot of yeshivishi toirah well hey thats fine as long as it doesnt pertain to a life and death situation but since we r dealing with a life and death situation your views r irrelevant and basicly am haratzus

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  9. And i must add that transsexual women who are frum are generaly not looking for an ease in halacha and therefore will continue to put on tfilin and davin 3 times a day although not with a minyan cuz thats dangerous but will davin 3 times a day and learn and keep all the male mitzvahs lichumru they r simply not looking for a way out of doing mitzvahs and most will even refrain from sexual relations with anybody if thats the psak all they r looking for is to survive and remain alive thats all is that not what all human beings deserve my goodnes who would choose to suffer gender dysphoria its painfull disruptive and expensive so please dont get carried away and also bare in mind the tzitz eliezers psak and u might not think its such a massive issur but mostly bare in mind that only for 3 aveirus r we michuyav to die for and sexchange is not one of them

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  10. And i must add that transsexual women who are frum are generaly not looking for an ease in halacha and therefore will continue to put on tfilin and davin 3 times a day although not with a minyan cuz thats dangerous but will davin 3 times a day and learn and keep all the male mitzvahs lichumru they r simply not looking for a way out of doing mitzvahs and most will even refrain from sexual relations with anybody if thats the psak all they r looking for is to survive and remain alive thats all is that not what all human beings deserve my goodnes who would choose to suffer gender dysphoria its painfull disruptive and expensive so please dont get carried away and also bare in mind the tzitz eliezers psak and u might not think its such a massive issur but mostly bare in mind that only for 3 aveirus r we michuyav to die for and sexchange is not one of them

    ReplyDelete