Gender

The Mishnah mandates that people beyond the gender binary must be protected from all forms of harm. This so much more comprehensive than anything we have today to shield us from attacks.

I have always seen Joseph in the text, winking across the ages, inviting me to explore more fully the shared elements of our experience.

I have been in relationship with Joseph for years — wondering, puzzling, collecting the many hints in Torah that point to some queerness, some difference in Joseph’s gender.

Finding the strength to read Bilhah and Zilpah as possessing power and autonomy helps me do that for myself.

Can we tell stories that return the female to equal footing with the male?

As time goes on, more and more I think of non-binary people as emissaries from the future.

By telling and re-telling difficult, even ethically repugnant, stories in the Torah, we may move from silence to healing and from narrowness to expanse.

Transgender people, in expressing their true gender identity, do so to be more authentic to themselves and, in many ways, to be closer to the image of the Creator in which they were made.