Tumtum

The word is absent from Scripture and abundant everywhere after it. 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, and the distinction runs through everything that can be said about the term.

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. While the skin remains, the person can be neither circumcised nor have sexual relations, and stands as 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. Whether such surgery is obligatory is a point the rabbis differ on.

The description does not correspond to any 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.

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 and the old. Only free adult men in good health carried the obligation, and the tumtum's place on that list is a statement about legal capacity rather than about worth.

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 a category rather than a doubt 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.

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 rather than in anatomy is what drives them apart in the Babylonian Talmud's treatment. The rabbis also recognised change over a lifetime, in the aylonit, assigned female at birth and developing no secondary sexual characteristics, and in the saris, assigned male and developing none, whether through nature or through castration.

Outside the legal material the word carries a different weight. 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.

Where the word has travelled since

The legal literature carried the term into modern print in the ordinary way. Wiktionary's earliest quotation is from a 1949 printing of the Code of Maimonides, on the doubtful inheritance rights of a tumtum, and later citations include David Kraemer's Reading the Rabbis in 1996, Ruth Sandberg's Development and Discontinuity in Jewish Law in 2001, and the Encyclopedia of Jewish Medical Ethics in 2003, which states flatly that the term is not found in Scripture. In recent decades queer Jews and others have reread the rabbinic gender categories as a resource, which My Jewish Learning describes as a reclamation project rather than as the plain sense of the sources. English also has entirely unrelated tumtums: a drum from Antigua and Barbuda, a colloquial word for the stomach, a light carriage in colonial India, and the Tumtum tree in Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky.