How to Read the Torah from a Trans Perspective (Even If You Aren’t Transgender)
Close Read
Joy Ladin
Joy Ladin is the author of The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective; Through the Door of Life; Once Out of Nature, and 11 books of poetry. An expanded, academic version of this essay is forthcoming in Trans Biblical, edited by Joseph Marchal, Melissa Harl Sellew, and Katy Valentine.
Credit: Govert Flinck-Look and Learn; montage by Kurt Hoffman
I was sitting in a windowless room, winding up a talk to a small group of St. Louis Jewish educators about my recently published book, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective. The book is about trans theology and hermeneutics and how they can enrich existing Jewish tradition, but as I’d found with other talks, most of the questions were about more pressing issues: how to understand trans and nonbinary identities, what Judaism has to say about them, and how Jewish schools should respond to students who embrace them. When our hour was almost up, a rabbi who had just read the book said he was so struck by the insights that emerge from reading the Torah from a transgender perspective that, despite being what he called “a very straight male,” he wanted to learn to do it himself. How, he asked, can people who don’t identify as transgender or nonbinary learn to read the Torah from a transgender perspective?
The rabbi asked his question diffidently, clearly worried that with his suggestion, he was violating one of the foundational ideas in contemporary gender discourse: the trans/cis binary, which divides everyone into cisgender people (those who identify with the gender roles they are assigned on the basis of their physical sex), and trans and nonbinary people (those who don’t). Like gender and other binaries, the categories that make up the trans/cis binary are mutually exclusive. Those on one side are understood to be essentially different from those on the other. How could this rabbi, or anyone on the cis side, learn to read from a transgender perspective, when being “cis” or being “trans” leads to such different lives, experiences, and perspectives—and, by extension, ways of reading biblical texts?
But that wasn’t what bothered me about the rabbi’s question. What bothered me was that I thought my book had not only raised this question but answered it by demonstrating a way of reading the Torah that, even though it grew out of my experiences as a person who doesn’t fit binary gender categories, could be practiced by those who do.
When I got back to my hotel room, I flipped through every page of the book, looking for the explanation I was sure I’d included. Not only was it not there; when I tried to prepare an answer for the next day’s session, I realized that I’d never actually figured out how someone comfortably ensconced on one side of the trans/cis binary could learn to read from the perspective of someone living on the other side.
That's probably because for much of the time I spent writing The Soul of the Stranger, I was still trying to work out what “reading from a transgender perspective” means. When I started the book in 2016, I knew that there are many kinds of identities that don’t fit binary gender categories, and many terms for those identities, from catchall categories like “transgender,” “trans,” and “nonbinary,” to names for specific forms of gender and identity, such as the by-then-old-fashioned term for my form, “male-to-female transsexual.” Even to me, this felt like a confusing blizzard of terms, but the trans/cis binary made it easy for me to locate myself within it, assuring me that whether I identified myself as a transsexual, a transgender woman, or simply “trans,” the very gender difference that kept me from feeling at home on either side of the gender binary gave me a place, and a community, on the left-hand side of the trans/cis binary.
Genesis 2 portrays binary gender as being invented by Adam, in his first response to seeing the woman God created to relieve his loneliness, the loneliness of being the only one of his kind. The trans/cis binary was invented much more recently, in the early 1990s, as an alternative to the gender binary that defines human beings as either male or female and has no place for anyone who doesn’t fit those categories. But like the gender binary, the trans/cis binary drastically simplifies humanity by dividing it into two opposite categories, defining each of us as being either, and always, one or the other.
According to the trans/cis binary, when I started reading the Torah as a child, I was reading it from a transgender perspective, from the perspective of someone on the “trans” side of the divide. But as I started trying to articulate what “reading from a transgender perspective” meant, I found that the trans/cis binary raised more questions than it answered. Had I been reading from a “transgender perspective” even before I thought of myself as transgender—before I knew there are others who don’t fit binary categories? Did my identification with the binary category of “female” contribute to or interfere with my reading from a transgender perspective? How about the fact that I was raised and living as a male? Could I distinguish between my reading from a transgender perspective and reading with a Jewish, or white, or middle-class, or able-bodied, or American perspective?
Only one aspect of my individual experience of “being transgender” seemed sufficiently shared with others to define a general “transgender perspective”: the experience of not fitting the binary gender category to which I was assigned at birth, and thus not fitting within the traditional, essentializing system of binary gender. That’s how I ended up defining “reading Torah from a transgender perspective” in The Soul of the Stranger: reading from the perspective of not fitting binary gender.
This definition led me to do what most scholars who have worked on trans hermeneutics (trans approaches to reading biblical texts) have done: focus on parts of the Torah directly related to gender, particularly those that portray characters defying their assigned gender roles and identities.
For example, in the book, I spend a long time on the Genesis story in which Jacob, a smooth-skinned shepherd who is close to his mother, dresses up as his hairy, hyper-masculine hunter twin brother, Esau, in order to steal the paternal blessing to which Esau is entitled because he was born first. Reading this story from a transgender perspective meant showing how aspects of Jacob’s situation resembled and could be illuminated by my analogous transgender experiences. I’ve never personally experienced primogeniture, a gender system in which children born onto the male side of the gender binary are further divided according to a second binary that identifies all sons either as first-borns, destined to inherit their fathers’ possessions and social status as head of their families, or as later-borns, destined to be subject to their first-born brothers’ authority. But as I explained in the book, I knew what it was like to be born on the wrong side of a binary, as Jacob felt he was, assigned from birth to a life I neither desired nor identified with. Like Jacob, I know what it felt like to clothe myself in an ill-fitting form of masculinity in order to pass as a boy I wasn’t and to receive blessings my parents would never have given me if they knew who I really was.
By using my own transgender experiences to offer new ways of understanding Jacob’s situation, I was trying to demonstrate the value of reading the Torah in light of trans and nonbinary lives, to show both that our complicated relations to traditional forms of gender can offer insights into foundational religious stories, and that similar complications—like Jacob's refusal to accept the role he was assigned by primogeniture—have always been part of these stories, and thus part of the religions that have grown out of them. If I hadn't passed as a boy, I doubt I would have survived my childhood. If Jacob doesn’t pass as his brother, he won’t receive his father’s blessing and will never become the last of the patriarchs from whom the Jewish people will come. Read from a transgender perspective, this story makes it clear that Jacob’s violation of primogeniture by passing as a first-born and claiming the blessing that goes with being born into that category is not only part of and accepted in the Torah, but essential to God’s later relationship with the people of Israel and, through them, with humanity.
I hoped the insights that emerged as I explored the resonances between my experiences as a trans person and Jacob’s and other Torah would stories suggest how Jewish tradition can be enriched by inclusion of transgender voices. But I intended “reading the Torah from a transgender perspective” to mean more than interpreting the Torah’s portrayals of gender in light of transgender experiences. As I briefly explained in the introduction to my discussion of Jacob, I saw both my transgender experiences and the biblical situations to which I compared them as belonging to a broader family of what I call “trans experiences”: these include all experiences in which, regardless of how we identify in terms of gender, we understand ourselves or act in ways that don’t fit our culture’s identity-defining roles and categories. While relatively few people have transgender experiences, everyone has trans experiences of feeling or acting in ways that don’t fit the roles and categories we are born into— such as passing through adolescence—or experiences of knowing that we are other than the identities imposed by those around us. Jacob’s impersonation of Esau is not a transgender experience, because it doesn’t reflect a problem with fitting binary gender categories. Jacob only adopts a more masculine appearance in order to pass as Esau; otherwise, he shows no sign of discomfort with being male, just with being a second-born male—so his expressions of this discomfort, including dressing up as his brother to steal the first-born blessing, are trans, rather than transgender, experiences.
But as the rabbi’s question that day made clear, my brief explanation of trans versus transgender experiences in the book was insufficient to show how others could read the Torah in light of trans (rather than just transgender) experiences, and I made matters worse every time I described this process as “reading Torah from a transgender perspective.” Since 1994, when the word “cisgender” was invented to describe people who don’t identify as transgender, it has become common to see the use of either of these terms as invoking the trans/cis binary, just as it is common to see saying “male” or “female” as invoking binary gender. Every time I used the word “transgender” to describe my way of reading, I was inadvertently invoking this trans/cis binary, suggesting that this way of reading grows out of and reflects essential, inescapable differences between the perspectives of those, like me, who identify as transgender or nonbinary, and those, like the rabbi, who don’t.
It took me a long time to see how hard I had made it to understand that my approach to reading Torah is not exclusive to those who have transgender experiences, that it can be used by anyone who has trans experiences, because I never explicitly refer to the trans/cis binary in the book—I don’t even use the word “cisgender.” Long before writing the book, my public and private discussions about gender had made me uncomfortable with the trans/cis binary’s implication that there are essential differences between people who identify as trans or nonbinary, and people who don’t. I found that while few non-transgender people could relate on a personal level to my transgender experience of identifying as female despite being born male, many related deeply to my descriptions of trans experiences such as feeling too different to belong; being other than what people around me believed I was; hiding parts of myself I feared others wouldn’t accept or understand; or trying to pass as someone I knew I wasn’t. Many non-trans people who said they felt comfortable with their assigned genders described their own trans experiences of not fitting other identity-defining roles and categories—experiences that defy the trans/cis binary’s implication that the lives and perspectives of those we assign to one side of the binary are fundamentally different from those we assign to the other.
I came to see the difference between those on the trans side of the binary and those on the cis side as one of degree rather than essence. When people identify as transgender or nonbinary, it means that the mismatch between who we know we are and how we are defined by binary gender categories is so intense and persistent that our trans experiences of that mismatch are central to our identities. Though people who don’t identify as transgender or nonbinary also experience such mismatches, they tend to be less frequent, intense, and sustained, and are eventually forgotten or ignored rather than becoming self-defining. The same is true for other identifying roles and categories. It’s common to have fleeting or mild trans experiences of feeling we don’t fit one or another of the ways others identify us or that we are accustomed to identifying ourselves. That’s why I didn't use the word “cisgender” in my book. By the time I wrote it, I had stopped believing the trans/cis binary’s implication that there is an essential difference between people who do and people who don’t identify as transgender or nonbinary, or that anyone is cisgender, in the sense of never having trans experiences of not fitting identity-defining roles or expectations.
In short, by the time I started The Soul of the Stranger, I saw trans experiences as part of being human, because whether or not we identify with our assigned genders, there is always slippage between who we know ourselves to be at any given moment, and the roles and categories others use to identify us. This understanding gave me the confidence to write the book, because I was sure that trans experiences that are so common in human lives must also be common in the Torah—so common that it would be worthwhile to read in a way that prompts us to look for and recognize them.
That’s the kind of reading I had in mind when I talked about “reading the Torah from a transgender perspective”: not reading Torah from a transgender-specific perspective, a perspective available only to those on the left-hand side of the trans/cis binary, but reading from a trans perspective, reading in light of the trans experiences all human beings have of not always fitting identity-defining roles and categories. That’s how I would begin to answer the rabbi’s question, if he were asking me now: by explaining that people who don’t identify as transgender or nonbinary can learn to read Torah from a trans perspective, because all of us have trans experiences, even if they are about aspects of our identities other than gender.
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To read the Torah from a trans perspective, then, we have to shift from thinking of human beings as essentially defined by either the gender or the trans/cis binaries, and focus instead on our shared capacity for trans experiences, on the fact that however we identify, all of us are too changeable, complicated, and contradictory to completely fit the terms our families, communities, and cultures rely on to identify us.
Once we become accustomed to noticing our own trans experiences, we can read the Torah from a trans perspective, using those we encounter in our own and others’ lives to help us recognize and interpret moments in the Torah where trans experiences are portrayed, implied, or possible.
At the same time, even when we have a body of trans experiences to draw on, it can be hard to recognize trans experiences in biblical texts because those texts come to us encrusted in traditions and retellings that prompt us to assume that their characters, unless clearly portrayed otherwise, identify with and conform to the roles associated with them—man or woman, first-born or second-born, Israelite or non-Israelite, etc. Some traditional commentaries and midrashim notwithstanding, like those that suggest that Joseph was effeminate (Bereshit Rabbah 84:7) or that either Abraham or Sarah was born intersex (bYevamot 64b), much of Jewish tradition and education encourages us to read biblical characters normatively, as identifying themselves with the terms in which the text identifies them. Such normative reading habits can make it hard to recognize trans experiences in biblical narratives even when characters like Jacob act in ways that quite openly defy their assigned roles and identities.
Credit: Philips Galle, engraving after Maarten van Heemskerck
This difficulty is magnified by the fact that the Torah rarely says much about how characters see themselves or their relationships to their assigned roles and identities. In the absence of descriptions of characters’ thoughts or feelings, and with only minimal reports of what they say and do, we often have no choice but to read them in terms of our own, often normative, assumptions. But when we stop assuming normativity and read in light of what we know from our own lives about how common trans experiences are, we often find the possibility of trans experience in the Torah’s very silence about how characters see themselves—that is, the possibility that characters don’t fully identify with the roles and categories others use to identify them. For example, the Torah’s failure to say anything about how Abraham sees himself as a father when he is preparing to sacrifice his son, Isaac, invites us to recognize the possibility, even the likelihood, that during this episode, Abraham is having a trans experience of seeing himself as something other than what his son and his culture would consider “being a father.” Reading from a trans perspective means recognizing such possibilities and considering how each might affect our understanding of the text.
As Jewish interpretive tradition has long noted, it takes special attention to disentangle biblical texts from the assumptions and interpretations with which we habitually fill the gaps in its narratives. To read the Torah from a trans perspective, we need to focus on the “plain sense” of the text, a non-scholarly version of what scholars call the p’shat, paying attention only to the actual words on the page and reading them in the simplest, most direct ways we can. This enables us to notice not only the relatively rare portrayals of characters behaving, as Abraham and Jacob do, in ways that clearly contradict their identifying roles, but also more subtle hints, gaps, and silences that signal the possibility of trans experiences.
Some biblical texts are more conducive to reading from a trans perspective than others, so I’ve developed a method for identifying them. Because even the most scholarly translations are interpretations, they may reflect assumptions, such as cisnormativity, that make trans experiences harder to recognize even after we define a p’shat based upon them. But my method should nonetheless work with either a translation or the original Hebrew text.
First, choose a text that creates the potential for trans experiences by identifying characters with specific roles or categories of any kind, such as father or mother, ruler or priest. Excerpt the chosen text, isolating it from any context or commentaries that might distract you from the words themselves. Then, to help yourself recognize the assumptions and interpretations you might be bringing to the text without realizing it, prepare a short, literal summary of the excerpt, one as true to the plain sense of the text as possible. If reading the text with others, which is always the best way to read the Torah from any perspective, each person should create a summary, and the group should compare summaries with one another. Differences between summaries highlight the different assumptions each person brings to the text.
Next, compare your summary (and the summaries of the group, if reading with others) with the original text, noting the ways the summary deviates from, fills in, or otherwise changes it, and the pre-existing ideas those deviations reflect. It should now be possible to read the text and notice exactly what it does and doesn’t say, making way for the last step.
Finally, make a list of whatever the text explicitly says about identity-defining roles and categories and individuals’ relationships to them. This inventory focuses our attention on what the text says that is relevant to reading from a trans perspective, and also highlights what it doesn’t say—the gaps and silences that often are the only ways the Torah signifies the potential for trans experience. When this process is complete, you have a p’shat that is ready to read from a trans perspective.
How does the Torah look when we read it this way, as free as possible from normative assumptions, and attuned to the characters’ potential for trans experiences?
Here’s a brief example, using an excerpt from the second chapter of the Book of Esther. This book is a much more fully developed narrative than we usually find in the Tanakh, so some context is required to understand the plain sense of the excerpt. The story has already told us that Esther is the adopted child of her cousin, Mordechai; that both are Jews living in the royal Persian city of Shushan; and that Esther has been sequestered in the royal harem, as part of the king’s search for a new queen. After Esther has her audition with the king,
The king loved Esther more than all the other women, and she won his grace and favor more than all the virgins. So he set a royal diadem on her head and made her queen....
But Esther, as Mordecai had instructed her, still did not reveal her kindred or her people; for Esther obeyed Mordechai’s bidding, as she had done when she was under his tutelage. (Esther 2:17, 20)
Because this quote is so brief and straightforward (at least in this translation), I will skip the step of summarizing and jump to making an inventory of what the passage says about Esther’s relationship to the roles with which she is identified. The first sentence tells us that the king identified Esther as a woman and (now former) virgin, and that he judged her his favorite of the candidates. The second sentence tells us that, by crowning her with “a royal diadem,” the king has performatively changed her identity from harem member to queen. Neither sentence tells us how Esther feels about being identified in these ways, or about her assigned roles as harem member and queen.
Only the last verse says anything about how Esther herself identifies and chooses not to identify. By telling us that Esther didn’t reveal “her kindred” (her family) or “her people” (Jews), just “as Mordechai instructed her,” the text suggests that she strongly identified herself as part of her family and of the Jewish people, and she hid these identifications only at Mordechai’s insistence. The sentence emphasizes—three times—that even after her elevation to queen, Esther acted as though she were subject to Mordechai’s authority and instruction, but it doesn’t tell us how Esther felt about her submissive relationship to Mordechai, whether she experienced a conflict between her role as queen and her role as Mordechai’s adopted child, or how she saw herself.
This inventory helps us recognize that the text explicitly portrays Esther as having several trans experiences. Most obviously, Esther experiences an identity-transforming transition from a female role near the bottom of the social hierarchy (unchosen concubine) to queen, a role at the top. This inventory also makes it clear that Esther, like Jacob, had the trans experience of passing, of hiding who she knows herself to be (a Jew related to Mordechai) and presenting as someone she isn’t (a non-Jew and possibly a Persian). Passing entails another trans experience for Esther as well, that of maintaining internal surveillance to ensure that she doesn’t say or do anything that reveals her Jewish identity, just as Jacob had to be careful not to reveal to his father that he wasn’t his twin brother, Esau.
But the combination of specificity and silence in these verses also suggests that Esther might have had other trans experiences, possibilities that are worth noting because each one radically changes our understanding of Esther and her story.
The text’s silence regarding Esther’s feelings about her sudden elevation makes it possible to see her as enthusiastically embracing her place in the harem and feeling triumphant at having been chosen as queen—and if we read it that way, we can see her having the trans experiences of striving to become and then successfully becoming a Persian queen, a kind of woman far different from the young Jewish woman she was before entering the harem or the concubine she became within it.
And yet, by emphasizing that Esther continues to follow Mordechai's orders after her elevation, the text suggests that she may have experienced a form of the trans experience of queering, of seeing herself simultaneously in terms that contradict one another—identifying herself both as a submissive female child and as a powerful queen. Or, she may be internally rejecting her assigned roles as harem-member and queen and performing these identities involuntarily—that is, having the trans experiences of disidentification (seeing herself as other than) with the way others see her, and seeing the identities to which she has been assigned as distorting or erasing who she feels she is.
Later, the story highlights this contradictory combination of roles when Mordechai insists that Esther use her position as queen to save her people by coming out as a Jew to her husband, the king. This crisis, as it plays out, shows Esther inhabiting and navigating trans experiences in relation to other conflicting roles as well.
The text doesn’t confirm or rule out any of these possible trans experiences. But reading from a trans perspective helps us to recognize these possibilities and invites us to consider how each might change our understanding of Esther and her story. Each possibility offers a glimpse of the fullness of Esther’s humanity, which overflows the many roles and categories she is assigned—concubine, wife, and queen; submissive adopted daughter and outspoken advocate; assimilated Persian and unassimilated Jew—and stands beyond them, free to identify or not identify herself with them, even as she uses them to relate to others.
Beyond such specific insights, reading the Torah from a trans perspective complicates the idea that Jewish tradition sees conformity as sacred, by revealing how often the Torah’s narratives highlight characters who, like Jacob and Esther, not only can but—from the Torah’s perspective—should act in ways that complicate, confound, or flat-out contradict the roles and identities to which they are assigned. In addition, reading from a trans perspective attunes us to the numerous times the Torah allows for trans experience by remaining silent as to whether or not characters identify themselves with (see themselves as really being) the roles and identities, such as queen, with which others identify them. This liberates us from the assumptions of normativity that dominate interpretive and religious traditions and are often weaponized to claim that those who don’t fit gender or other norms are violating biblically inscribed divine decrees.
By drawing attention to the Torah’s portrayals and suggestions of trans experiences, such as passing, that are common among gender and sexual minorities, reading from a trans perspective can help transgender, nonbinary, and other LGBTQ+ people who feel hurt by or excluded from religious traditions relate to biblical texts that don’t explicitly represent people like us, and see our lives not as violations or contradictions of biblically based religious traditions, but as touchstones for achieving greater understanding of their foundational narratives and their visions of humanity.
Reading from a trans perspective also helps those who—like the rabbi from my talk—identify as heteronormative, cisgender men or women, to recognize and value their own trans experiences of being other than what is expected or required of them. This way of reading encourages all of us to see trans experiences as central to our own humanity, and reminds us of our individuality, of the fact that no matter what others think or say or insist we are, we are always more.
