He administers and works at the Bay Area Jewish Healing Center This source was put together by Rabbi Elliot Kukla who was the first openly transgender person to be ordained by the Reform Movement's Hebrew Union College. In many ways these terms, with their focus on the body are difficult for us to accept toady but they are interesting to us because these terms indicate that even classical Judaism wasn't stifled by the gender binary We aren't proposing that we revive these terms, or that they are more authentic than modern gender identities. We are now going to read an explanation of terms used in classical Jewish texts to refer to gender.

As in other midrashim, the rabbies here show their comfort in applying their observations on the variations in sex and gender to our biblical ancestors' The aylonit is someone assigned female at birth, but who does not show signs of (female) sexual development, and who is unable to bear children. While the androginous has both male and female sexual characteristics, the tumtum is not clearly identifiable as either male or female.

The tumtum and the aylonit, like the androginos, are Talmudic categories of sex that have no exact equivalent in English. Rav Ammi suggests, drawing on a pair of verses from Isaish 51, that Avraham and Sarah were in fact tumtumim, and Rabbi Nachman further imagines that Sarah was an aylonit. In this except from Tractate Yevamot (from the Babylonian Talmud), the rabbis present one midrashic understanding of why Avraham and Sarah were childless for so long, as part of a larger discussion of the barrenness of the matriarchs and patriarchs. Avraham and Sarah were Tumtumim: A Midrash (Babylonia, 6th -8th Centuries CE)

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