Ancient Hebrew v. Trans Children
Biblical Hebrew Words Are Not A Good Basis For the Pro-Trans Children Argument
There is a meme going around proclaiming that in the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, there are words referencing eight genders. It is supposed to be a round-about commentary in favor of one side of the trans debate, i.e. that children know their gender and should have access to irreversible surgeries, hormone blockers, and hormones.
The ancient Hebrew words included are: zachar, nekevah, androgynos, tumtum, aylonit hamah, aylonit adam, saris hamah, and saris adam.
You’ll want to see this meme. Here you go:
Nothing in the meme, accurate though the word translations may be, accounts for the leap, within the texts, from descriptions of human beings to any commentary on “gender” within the texts. The words themselves indicate there are two sexes: zachar and nekevah. Including the word “adam” should be a clue: adam means “human being.” It is closely related, according to my google search, to the word for “earth.”
The meme is making an argument leaping from an ancient language few of us reads or understands to a current social issue. For example, the word “androgynous” today indicates, to some extent, an esthetic: David Bowie was androgynous. Grace Jones is androgynous.
I once wrote an article, published in the “Faith Forward” channel on Patheos, arguing that the then trending issue of “biblical marriage” was based on imposing today’s understandings about marriage on ancient texts. The most important point I tried to make is that few of us would be comfortable with marriage as it existed in the ancient Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic-speaking worlds. For example, if my husband were to die, I would have no thought that his surviving brother was obligated to marry me. I’m pretty sure his brother would strenuously object.
Ancient Hebrew words should have no bearing on the central trans issues today. One is whether children are fundamentally incapable, in modern understanding of both childhood and consent, of consenting to surgeries or hormones. Another is whether such surgeries and hormones are reversible. Is Doctor Johanna Olsen-Kennedy right or wrong when she states that if an adolescent girl has a double mastectomy to try to resemble being a boy and later on decides she actually wants breasts, she can then “go and get them.” A third issue is whether doctors and nurses are behaving ethically in providing these interventions even when the child says he wants it. Even when the parent says he wants it.
My sense of things is that, one, there is male and female. Male and female are determined by gametes over which none of us has control. I put together a short video called “Concerning the Origin of Sex, explaining how this works. You can watch it here.
Two, children actually exist. They are not just small adults, as Early Americans once thought, but are humans who have not developed, among other things, good reasoning skills. Three, doctors and nurses should do no harm. Four, trafficking children or labor or anyone else is morally repugnant.
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