Another is that the first human was actually intersex, and Genesis 1 talks about creating that person, and Genesis 2 talks about splitting that person into 2 genders, playing with the fact that tzela, rib, also gets used to mean "side" in eg Ex 26:20 https://www.sefaria.org/Bereishit_Rabbah.8.1?lang=bi

So it would read "So the LORD God cast a deep sleep upon the human; and, while they slept, God took one of their sides and closed up the flesh at that spot." Thus splitting the person into two sides, two different people with different genders.

So in this midrash, the first human being--created in God's image, mind you--is intersex.

Back to the Lilith midrash bc it deserves a tweet: you caught that she refused to be on the bottom during sex bc “The two of us are equal, since we are both from the earth.”? Then "Since Lilith saw [how it was], she uttered God's ineffable name and flew away into the air."

She saw how it was.

And then she turned into a demon who gives babies SIDS. It's quite a midrash.

OK, since this thread is already impossibly long and winding and contains all sorts of things, I'll just indulge myself here. Ever since I wrote it I've been annoyed at myself that I didn't share more on Mishnah Bikkurim (Ch 4).

I didn't bc I still feel that to do this justice I need to go in and retranslate, which I'm not gonna do, so fine, here. The whole series of mishnayot better shows you how the Rabbis are thinking of this. Sorry for less optimal translation here, I'd try to do more respectfully.

Context is that lots of aspects of Jewish law in the Rabbinic world are gendered. So again, an androginos, an intersex person, is sometimes obligated to Jewish law as men are, sometimes as women are, sometimes as both, sometimes as neither. So, male legal obligations:

The androginos' "female" legal obligations/way they are treated as female in Jewish law:

Ways the androginos is treated in the law that would apply to both men and women:

Ways in which the androginos' legal status is unique viz cisgender folks. And note the end, Rabbi Yose says: the androginos is a unique creature, and the sages could not decide about him.

They also mention that the timtum is a person whose gender status and identity appears to be shape-shifty. "But this is not so with a tumtum (one of doubtful sex), for sometimes they are a man and sometimes they are a woman."

The bottom line is this: Intersex folks in the Mishnah and etc. are not outcasts, not scary or threatening--but they are a challenge for Rabbis who think in very binary ways (male/female, kosher/not-kosher, Shabbat/mundane time etc).

But obviously these Jews are also Jews, and so the challenge is to figure out not whether, but how they will fit into this binary framework. Because of course they will perform mitzvot and marry and be part of the justice system and etc.

Rabbi Reuben Zellman has a beautiful piece comparing folks who don't fall into clean binary gender categories to twilight--also a complicated time for the Rabbis, neither fully day nor fully night. In-between times.
http://transtorah.org/PDFs/Holiness_of_Twilight.pdf

Should we add some prayers and rituals around gender transition? There's this one (name of book where it came from in-thread): https://twitter.com/remembrancermx/status/1020484873520156673

There's this one, from the good Rabbi Elliot Kukla: http://transtorah.org/PDFs/Blessing_for_Transitioning_Genders.pdf

There's a whole big pile of different rituals and prayers over at @Ritualwell: https://www.ritualwell.org/gender-transitioning

There are lots of things out there. I should probably dig up the ritual for gender transition I wrote in rabbinical school (riffing off the ritual for conversion, which also effects an ontological change) & publish it somewhere, huh? But I feel like so many people have got this.

Anywhichway, I think the mikveh, the ritual bath, is a pretty great place to ritualize transition. https://forward.com/articles/181849/marking-gender-transition-in-the-mikveh/

Here's another mikveh/ritual bath one, from the great folks at @MayyimHayyim: https://www.mayyimhayyim.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Ceremony-GenderTransition.pdf

Here's a thread on non-binary gender and the very gendered language of Modern Hebrew: https://twitter.com/TheRaDR/status/1024564197575806978

https://twitter.com/TheRaDR/status/1027233260471025666