Q&A: Conceptual-Gender Analysis
Conceptual-Gender Analysis
Question
Hello Rabbi Michi!
It’s been a long time since I asked anything (I’m trying to get through algebra).
Following an interview by Yaron Weisberg with Dr. Tal Kreutero about trans people and gender (and I read both of your columns on the subject),
I tried to get down to a deeper question:
Who determines gender? (Or more precisely: what determines who is male and who is female?)
One of her claims in the interview is that if a boy likes to wear dresses, or play with dolls, that doesn’t make him a girl, but rather a boy who likes to wear dresses; and boys can also wear dresses, and that’s okay.
As I understood it, she doesn’t really draw a boundary on the issue, and therefore boys can do everything girls do and still be boys.
And according to her, until a fairly late age (over 20+), a person does not have a proper grasp of gender and sex, and so he will probably be confused.
To me, that sounds like emptying the concepts of boy and girl of any content.
The question is: what does determine who is a boy and who is a girl?
Physiological markers determine your sex.
Does a more “feminine” or more “masculine” appearance determine gender? What about behavior? Speech? The way one walks?
Answer
I don’t know how to answer that, but I think that wearing women’s clothing is definitely one of the indications, even if it is not exclusive. As I wrote in the above-mentioned columns, most psychological and psychiatric phenomena are defined through meeting several characteristics out of a larger group, and it is not correct to hang everything on one characteristic. On the other hand, that does not mean there are no characteristics, or that no characteristic is relevant.
Discussion on Answer
Apparently in Tantric circles there is a serious problem with reading comprehension.
Hahaha, what I mean is that once sex is determined by physiological markers, everything else comes as a package deal, regardless of the dosage—unless you want to get tangled up in Kabbalistic concepts such as Isaac having had a female soul descend into him, or get tangled up with sex-change surgery, God have mercy.
I didn’t understand the question at all. There is an essential physical difference between him and her: a man has, in the language of the Sages in Ecclesiastes, “the caper berry,” or in Kabbalistic language, “the one who bestows,” or in Indian Tantric language, “the staff of light,” and in the academic language in which you spent your winter years, “the penis,” and in the language of the street and the press, the male organ, and in crude secular street language, the letter after vav—and not for nothing is it before the letter chet, in both senses of the phrase—and a female has, in Indian Tantric language, “the red rose,” and in medical language, the vagina, and in the other languages there is no name for it because of the exclusion of women