What is 'Queer' Torah?
What does it do?
Who can make 'Queer Torah'? Why?
Why should we care?
The Soul of the Stranger
Joy Ladin
The Torah doesn’t portray transgender people—it doesn’t describe anyone as being other than male or female, or as moving, as I have moved, from one side of the gender binary to the other. But the Torah does show Abraham, Sarah, and Jacob abandoning or violating their assigned gender roles (the gender roles they are expected to perform), and it associates these experiences, which I call “trans experiences,” with their relationships to God.
Few people identify as transgender, but most people have trans experiences: experiences, however brief, of acting in ways that don’t fit our usual gender roles. Unlike transgender identities, most trans experiences don’t disrupt or challenge the gender binary distinction between male and female. People continue to be seen, and to see themselves, as male or female before, during, and after trans experiences that displace us from our assigned gender roles; we remain men or women, even if we feel like, or become, different kinds of men and women.
For many of us, our most intense trans experiences occur during adolescence, a time when we seem to be neither and both the boys or girls we were and the men or women we are growing into, a time when our bodies, our sense of who we are, and our manner of presenting ourselves, keep changing in ways that often baffle those around us.
(כג) וַיֹּ֨אמֶר יְהֹוָ֜ה לָ֗הּ שְׁנֵ֤י (גיים) [גוֹיִם֙] בְּבִטְנֵ֔ךְ...וְרַ֖ב יַעֲבֹ֥ד צָעִֽיר׃
(23) and the LORD answered her, “Two nations are in your womb...And the older shall serve the younger.”
The Soul of the Stranger
Joy Ladin
If God were committed to the gender binary idea that people are unchangeably defined by the gender roles we are assigned at birth, then either Esau would have been destined to inherit Isaac’s relationship with God, or Jacob would have been born first. But as God reveals to Rebekah before the twins are born, God intends for the younger brother to usurp the elder, prenatally linking God’s blessing to trans experience.
(24) When [Rebecca's] time to give birth was at hand, there were twins in her womb. (25) The first one emerged red, like a hairy mantle all over; so they named him Esau. (26) Then his brother emerged, holding on to the heel of Esau; so they named him Jacob. Isaac was sixty years old when they were born. (27) When the boys grew up, Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the outdoors; but Jacob was a mild man who dwelt in tents.
- What kind of man is Jacob? Esau?
- Why do you think Jacob wanted the birthright, something he was not allowed to have by right, so badly?
The Soul of the Stranger
Joy Ladin
But even after touching Jacob’s goat-skin-covered hands, Isaac knows that something is wrong: “The voice is the voice of Jacob,” he says, “yet the hands are the hands of Esau” (Gen. 27:22). The combination of Jacob’s way of talking with Esau’s hairiness gives Isaac a fleeting taste of a form of trans experience we now call “gender dysphoria”: the sometimes extreme discomfort people feel when we cannot make sense of ourselves or others in terms of gender.
The Soul of the Stranger
Joy Ladin
[T]he misrecognition in this scene represents more than Isaac’s personal failure, and more, even, than the danger of relying on the external signs of gender to identify other people: it represents the triumph of God’s will over human gender. Ever since Esau emerged from Rebekah’s womb, Isaac has been waiting to give him this blessing; ever since he was old enough to know what being firstborn meant, Esau has waited to receive it. God’s will, announced to Rebekah before the twins were born, demands that Esau be cheated out of the blessings that primogeniture has promised him, and that Jacob embrace the trans experience of presenting himself as a kind of man he isn’t in order to become the person God meant him to be: the younger who would rule the older, the third of the founding fathers of the Jewish people, the one who gives the name he later acquires, Israel, to the people who descend from him. No matter how strongly we sympathize with Isaac’s and Esau’s betrayal and disappointment, disapprove of Jacob’s fraud, or believe that when it comes to gender, biology is and should be destiny, if we identify ourselves with any of the religions and cultures that grew out of the Torah, then we have to root for Jacob to succeed in impersonating his brother and becoming the kind of man he was not born to be.