Aylonit

The category is defined by absence and it is assigned late. Androgynos and Tumtum are settled by what is visible from the start; the aylonit and her counterpart the saris are settled by what fails to appear at puberty, which makes them the two rabbinic categories a person is moved into rather than born into. Everything the law then does with the aylonit follows from a presumption that she will not bear children.

Why the aylonit is named after a ram

The etymology is stated inside the Talmud, which is unusual; philologists did not have to reconstruct it. At Ketubot 11a the word is explained through the Aramaic dikhra, which renders the Hebrew ayil, a ram, and the explanation is that such a woman is like a ram in being unable to give birth. The Hebrew lexicon entry reproduced in the study sheets keeps the same sense and adds the older English rendering: the man-like, barren, wombless, incapable of conception, citing Ketubot 11a and the fifth chapter of Niddah.

Two things follow from that. The word is a comparison, and the comparison is to a male animal, not to a man, which is the sort of detail that gets lost when the seven or eight rabbinic categories are listed as a set of genders in modern English.

Which signs make somebody an aylonit

The threshold sign is the absence of one. Mishnah Niddah 5:9, at 47b, sets it out: a woman of twenty who has not grown two pubic hairs, and who brings proof that she is twenty, has the status of an aylonit from that point.

The other signs are cross-sex, and they come from Yevamot 80b, codified afterwards by Maimonides in the Mishneh Torah at Hilchot Ishut 2:6. The list runs to four: she has not developed breasts, she has difficulty during intercourse, the lower abdomen is not shaped as in other women, and her voice is deep enough that it cannot be told from a man's. Only the first of those is an absence. The rest describe somebody crossing from one side of the law's two classes to the other, which is exactly the fact the modern argument about this category turns on.

When the law decides somebody is an aylonit

The age is disputed, and the dispute is one of the standard ones. Beit Hillel set the age at twenty for both a man and a woman; Beit Shammai set it at eighteen for both. Rabbi Eliezer split the difference by sex, following Hillel for the male and Shammai for the female, on the reasoning that a woman reaches maturity faster than a man does, so that failure to develop by eighteen is already conclusive in her case.

Rabbi Abbahu's rule is procedural and it covers all of them: no action is taken in regard to a sexually underdeveloped man, a sexually underdeveloped woman, or a child born in the eighth month of pregnancy, until they are twenty. Until then the status is held open.

What happens at the threshold is retroactive in both directions. If the signs of maturity arrive before twenty, the person is treated as having been a minor up to that moment and an adult from it. If they have not arrived by twenty, the status reaches backwards: the person is considered to have been an aylonit or a saris from the age of twelve or thirteen, whatever happens afterwards.

What the status of aylonit changed in law

Two consequences carry most of the discussion, and both come from the presumption of infertility.

The first is levirate marriage. Under Mishnah Niddah 5:9 an aylonit may marry, but if her husband dies childless she neither performs ḥalitzah nor enters into levirate marriage with his brother, so the obligation that would ordinarily fall on him does not arise. The parallel ruling for the sexually underdeveloped man works the same way from the other side.

The second is harsher and is stated flatly at Ketubot 36a: there is no fine for the rape or seduction of an aylonit. The reasoning is technical. The fine belongs to the stage of young womanhood between twelve and twelve and a half, and Abaye's answer to the objection is that the aylonit passes directly from minority into full adulthood without going through that intermediate stage at all, so there is no period during which the fine could attach. Rav Yosef raised the problem precisely because the retroactive rule seemed to make her an adult after the fact.

Why Sarra Lev traces the signs to the eunuch

The list of signs has a puzzle in it, and Sarra Lev, of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, set it out in the AJS Review in 2007. The aggregate signs of the aylonit are chosen for their sex-crossing quality, and they match no known modern condition and no ancient one either. Yet in the legal material the rabbis do not treat the aylonit as somebody who crosses between the classes; they treat her as a woman who will not bear children. The signs, on Lev's account, seem to come from nowhere.

Her answer is that they come from the mirror. The description of the saris ḥammah, the congenital eunuch, parallels the aylonit's in many respects and presents him as a sex-crosser with as little support in the legal literature. The difference is that his attributes match the Roman eunuch directly, and the Roman eunuch appears as a sex-crosser throughout the Christian and Roman writing of the same period. The saris takes his sex from the eunuch of the surrounding culture, and the aylonit takes hers from the saris.

Against that sits a straightforward retrodiagnosis. Because the Talmud lists signs beyond infertility, the argument runs, the cause can be narrowed, and the condition described is what has been called Turner syndrome since Henry Turner published on seven patients in 1938. The two readings are incompatible on the point that matters: one holds that the signs describe an identifiable condition, the other that they were assembled for a literary and legal purpose and describe nothing that has ever been diagnosed. Neither has displaced the other.

How later readers have counted the categories

The count of rabbinic gender-sex categories is not fixed, and where it moves, it moves around this one. My Jewish Learning gives seven, with the aylonit as the fifth and the two saris categories, natural and induced, as the sixth and seventh. The intersex advocacy organisation interACT, in a guide written from an intersex Jewish perspective, gives eight instead, splitting the aylonit the same way the saris is already split: aylonit hamah, where the development happens of itself, and aylonit adam.

Both counts describe the same texts. My Jewish Learning's own note is that the rabbis recognised that sexual characteristics can change at puberty either naturally or through intervention, and it is that observation the eighth category makes explicit. The same article is careful about the modern use of the whole set: the rabbis were not using gender in the current sense of something separable from the body, and their categories are marked out by physical facts. The rereading of these categories as a space for nonbinary and Intersex Jews in the tradition is a project of recent decades, undertaken on material that was doing something else, and the source that describes the project says so in the same breath.