Tumtum

The word is absent from Scripture and abundant everywhere after it. The Encyclopedia of Jewish Medical Ethics states the absence flatly in its definition of the term. The Reform rabbi Elliot Kukla counts it seventeen times in the Mishnah, twenty-three in the Tosefta, one hundred and nineteen in the Babylonian Talmud, twenty-two in the Jerusalem Talmud, and hundreds of times across midrash, commentary and halakhah. Those are counts of a word in a corpus, not counts of people.

What the classical description says

The standard account gives a tumtum a membrane of skin covering genitals that may be male or female. One variant has exposed testicles with the penis unexposed, and that variant does work in the legal texts: David Kraemer's reading of one baraita turns on Abbaye resolving an apparent redundancy by taking the first of two mentions of the tumtum in the specific sense of testicles evident from the outside. While the skin remains, the person can be neither circumcised nor have sexual relations, and is a doubtful man and a doubtful woman at once.

The status is not necessarily permanent. The Talmud records an adult tumtum from the town of Bairi whose covering skin was cut away, after which he was reclassified as a man and went on to father seven children. A person reclassified that way still carried rights and duties unlike those of other men and women, and whether the surgery is obligatory in the first place is a point the rabbis differ on.

The description corresponds to no intersex condition recognised in medicine today, which is the first reason Intersex is a poor translation for it. A halakhic category built on what an examiner can see is asking a different question from a clinical taxonomy built on chromosomes, gonads and hormones, and the answers do not line up. The disambiguation page on the English Wikipedia still glosses the term as a Talmudic gender concept for certain intersex people, which is the reading the article it points at declines to make.

How the law treats a tumtum

Doubt, in this system, produces stringency rather than exemption. Because a tumtum might genuinely be a man or might genuinely be a woman, the laws binding on neither may be broken, so the strictest gender-dependent obligations apply. Positive commandments from which women are exempt are treated as binding. Tractate Zavim states that the tumtum and the androgynos carry the khumrot of both: where the law is harsher towards men they are treated as men, and where it is harsher towards women they are treated as women.

That stringency sits alongside exclusion. The opening mishnah of Chagigah lists those not obligated to appear at the Temple for the three pilgrimage festivals, and the tumtum appears in it with the androgynos, women, unemancipated slaves, minors, the deaf, the lame, the blind, the sick, the old, and anyone unable to make the journey to Jerusalem on foot. Only free adult men in good health carried the obligation, and the tumtum's place on that list is a statement about legal capacity.

Smaller rulings show the same reasoning working at close range. A 1949 printing of The Code of Maimonides holds that where a man dies leaving a son and a tumtum, the son inherits everything, because the tumtum's heirship is doubtful. Ruth Sandberg's Development and Discontinuity in Jewish Law reports the rule that a tumtum should not dress as a woman and equally should not cut the hair of the head as a man does. Doubt closes both options rather than opening a third.

Where tumtum sits among the designations

The rabbinic gender vocabulary is usually presented as a list, and the lists do not agree on their own length. Kukla counts six categories; My Jewish Learning counts seven. The whole of the difference is whether the saris is one designation or two.

The rabbis did not use gender as the word is now used, for a cultural construct held apart from biological sex. All seven designations are drawn by physical and biological facts. What makes them consequential is that Jewish law attaches rights and responsibilities to them, so a physical description becomes a position in a community. The saris is sometimes rendered as Eunuch in English, and what matters most about both the saris and the aylonit to the rabbis is a presumption of infertility and the legal complications that follow from it.

How tumtum differs from androgynos

The two are constantly grouped together and their halakhic consequences are not the same. An androgynos has both sets of genitals and is visible to the law; a tumtum has genitals the law cannot see. That difference in evidence, not in anatomy, drives them apart in the Babylonian Talmud's treatment.

The Mishnah is explicit that the androgynos is neither male nor female, holding in Bikkurim that such a person is in some ways like men, in other ways like women, in others like both and in others like neither. The same chapter records Rabbi Yose calling the androgynos a unique creature about whom the sages could not decide, and in the same passage he holds that the tumtum was far easier to work out.

The habit of reasoning about in-between things was not confined to people. The rabbis discuss the koi, an animal somewhere between wild and domesticated, and the etrog, the citron used at Sukkot, as something between a fruit and a vegetable, both in the same tractate. Categories that fit nothing neatly required special halakhic consideration, and the underlying view was that most categories describe the world imperfectly.

Outside the legal material the word carries a different weight again. In tractate Yevamot, Rabbi Ammi holds that Abraham and Sarah were originally tumtumim and infertile, and were remade as a fertile husband and wife in old age, reading the passage in Isaiah about the rock from which they were hewn and the pit from which they were dug as a description of genitals being uncovered.

Why scholars disagree about tumtum as gender

The Mishnah records Rabbi Meir holding that a tumtum is not a distinct gender at all but a state of doubt between the two: sometimes a man, sometimes a woman. That is the position traditional Judaism has taken, and the Chabad presentation of the material follows it. Against it, Kukla, who is transgender, presents the tumtum as one of six genders in classical Judaism alongside male, female, androgynos, aylonit and saris, and argues that the set demonstrates the Western binary is not universal.

The argument is not settled and both readings appear in current writing. What can be said in favour of the category reading is that the physical definition generates a stable set of social duties, prohibitions and roles, and a bundle of duties attached to a defined class is close to what a gender role is. What can be said against it is that the rabbis themselves reasoned from the doubt outward, and that Rabbi Yose, who found the androgynos genuinely hard to place, regarded the tumtum as the easier of the two.

The rereading has a date and a constituency. In recent decades queer Jews and others have taken the rabbinic gender categories as a resource for a place in the tradition, which My Jewish Learning describes as a reclamation, and states its own starting point for it: that the Talmud understands gender to operate largely on a binary axis, and that the rabbis clearly understood not everyone fits the two categories. Neither the reclamation nor Rabbi Meir's ruling has displaced the other, and Third gender describes the modern reading, not the halakhic one.

Where the word has travelled since

The legal literature carried the term into modern print in the ordinary way, and Wiktionary's citations trace the route: the 1949 Maimonides on doubtful inheritance, David Kraemer's Reading the Rabbis in 1996, Sandberg's study in 2001, and the Encyclopedia of Jewish Medical Ethics in 2003. Wiktionary's gloss for that sense collects everything the term has been made to carry in English, from a person whose gender cannot be determined by physical examination through to intersex, which records the confusion without resolving it.

English also has entirely unrelated tumtums, and they crowd the search results. Wiktionary gives three further etymologies: a toombah, a small drum used in the traditional music of Antigua and Barbuda; a colloquial word for the stomach, cited from 1906 onwards; and a light carriage in colonial India, cited from 1911 onwards, which Merriam-Webster glosses as a dogcart. Merriam-Webster's main entry is for a different word again, a reiterated strumming sound, with tum-ti-tum as a variant. Chinook Jargon has tumtum for heart or heartbeat, and as a verb for feeling, knowing, thinking and intending; Tausug has it for remembering. The English Wikipedia's disambiguation page adds the Tumtum language of Kordofan, the Tumtum tree in Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, Emily Bearn's children's books, a Bahamian basketball player born in 1994, a Canadian steamship, a boy ninja, and four places in North America.