Transing History: Examining the Use of Androgynos in Ancient and Modern Jewish Texts

The so-called ‘Judeo-Christian’ gender binary that is so widespread today is rooted in a Hellenistic preoccupation with power and bodily control that characterizes people that break these norms as sexually deviant and untrustworthy. The ancient Jewish gender category of androgynos seems to defy the Jewish gender binary, appearing to our 21st-century eyes as a sort of third gender, but this was conceptualized through Rabbinic midrash (5th c. CE) in a much different way. Through tying the Midrash Androgynos to Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality and Plato’s Symposium, I explain how this problematization of subverting expectations of the gender binary developed and that the Rabbis’ ability to think about people who fall outside the binary is an early (though unintentional) example of transing, a skill that is critical to expand our knowledge of the past beyond cisheteronormative ideas, particularly with the recent rise of transphobia and fascism. Using Max Strassfeld’s Trans Talmud and Noam Sienna’s A Rainbow Thread, I demonstrate how queer and trans Jews today use ancient Rabbinic midrash on androgynos to imagine a historical and religious precursor to modern gender conceptions in order to envision what it looks like for communities to contribute to the creation of a nonbinary gender and imagine what modern queer and trans Jewish traditions might look like.