A cisgender man recently approached me and asked me how I am able to achieve the “deep rumbling” of my singing voice. I shared with him my secret to hitting such vocal tones: testosterone, which I take regularly as part of my medical transition.
He thanked me and noted that he would look into it, as he has always wanted a deeper voice. I have no doubt that if he wants to try it, he will be successful in acquiring testosterone with ease. And if he uses it to deepen his voice, that will be a gender-affirming intervention.
And yet, all of the trans people I know have spent months stockpiling hormones and medication, anticipating diminishing access to our essential healthcare as the trans-antagonistic Trump administration came into power.
We were right to be afraid.
These weeks have revealed new levels of disdain for trans people at the highest levels of American government and the lowest levels of our society. In addition to naming the promotion of “transgenderism” and “gender ideology” as sufficient criteria for revoking an organization’s federal funding, the presidential office has so far issued four executive orders directly targeting trans people and the act of transition itself: “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,” “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” and “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.”
With these actions, the government says it aims to “protect” young people from the very same life-giving scars that adorn my chest, from the “irreversible damage” that taking hormones has brought upon my body.
These antagonistic approaches that see trans bodies as “damaged,” “mutilated,” and “synthetic” use a narrow definition of what bodies should be. By its logic, this definition isn’t only transphobic. It also uses ableist, ageist, racist, and sexist concepts of “natural” bodies, because it sees sickness as something fated or morally earned, and gender as a biological, chromosomal binary constraint from which we can never escape. Proponents of this approach understand trans people—by changing our bodies and rejecting fixed and stable categories of human bodies—as acting contrary to this broader divine, natural order.
While that worldview parallels Nazi science, you can find modern Jewish expressions of this idea, too. The famed 20th century halakhic decisor in the field of medical ethics, Rabbi Eliezer Waldenberg vehemently forbids any elective surgery or body modification of any kind, declaring, “One should recognize and believe that there is no artisan like our God and He, His name shall be Blessed, created each and every one of His creations in His image and in an appropriate form, which we must not add to it nor take away from it” (Tzitz Eliezer 11:41).
This branch of thought sees our bodies—as they are, with all that befalls and blesses them—as a reflection of the Divine image and order, and renders adapting, changing, and transforming the body as an act of subversion.
But the fuller Jewish picture of this is far more complex.
What makes trans usage of body modification more “mutilated” than other instances of medical cutting, injecting, bleeding, and stitching? The degree to which the same intervention is healing or mutilating is rhetorical: transphobia concludes that changing our bodies is permitted or forbidden depending on whose body is being changed. For instance, when I had top surgery, I noticed that almost everyone else on the floor was a trans man or butch person also waiting for the same procedure.
So I asked one of the nurses if this was typical. She replied that it was, but “only on Thursdays,” and shared that the same surgery–breast tissue reduction or removal–was performed every day, but Thursday was deemed “top surgery day” as the day that all trans patients were booked.
The transformations of medical transition are at once entirely and not-so unique to trans individuals. All people pursue gender-affirming experiences, up to and including surgery; to intervene and adapt, shift, and change our bodies is a particularly dynamic and creative part of the human project.
Jewish tradition prohibits what it defines as “self-mutilation,” but this prohibition is understood by later interpreters not as a rejection of body modification itself, but as preventing individuals from actively attempting to express malice towards oneself “in strife” or “in degradation” as Maimonides teaches, (Hilkhot Chovel U’Mazik 5:1).
For purposes of adornment, beauty, or relief from suffering, changing one’s body is almost unequivocally permitted. In fact, the twentieth century Orthodox legal giant Rav Moshe Feinstein, ruled that one could utilize elective cosmetic surgery that involved significant medical intervention and anesthesia in order “to beautify oneself,” despite the fact that it “actions that can be considered harmful, since it is not for the sake of suffering or denigration. Rather it is the opposite—for her goodness” (Iggros Moshe Choshen Mishpat 2:66). The actions themselves are “mutilating” actions, but when done for the sake of beauty, goodness, or adornment, they are no longer viewed as such.
We do not fear cutting, scarring, and bruising, but recognize it as a part of the sacred project of co-creating our bodies with the Divine. Consider circumcision—though contentious in its own right—one of the Torah’s first mitzvot, which involves an early medical intervention enacted upon the body, removing a part of it, after which the body is permanently altered. Transforming one’s body through medical intervention is one of the first Jewish experiences many of our people have. By removing this body part that is deemed extraneous, according to the thirteenth century legal guide the Sefer HaChinuch, the body is “completed” and “made whole.”
The acceptance of—and commandment to pursue—healing through medicine itself is in some part, at least, a rejection of the idea that our bodies as most holy when unchanged.
By normalizing the pursuit of medicine and healing—which necessarily are or enact bodily changes—Jewish tradition accepts and uplifts a standard in which bodies are indeed modified, legitimated through a claimed higher purpose of healing. Maimonides, himself famously a physician, sees this healing, too, as an act of collaboration between human and Divine power, writing: “Just as when I eat, I thank God that He created something to remove my hunger and to keep me alive and well, thus we should also thank Him for creating a cure that cures my illness when I need it” (Perush Ha-Mishnah Pesachim 4:1).
Jewish tradition ultimately rejects the superiority of a “natural,” unchanged body; our bodily transformations are acts of completion that make us more whole. As legislative assaults on trans bodies continue, we should remain steadfast and clear: whether the changes we make to our bodies are out of obligation, for healing, or for beauty, our modifications are adornments that greatly honor the Artist in whose image we are created.
Laynie Soloman serves on the faculty of SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva, where they co-founded the Trans Halakha Project.
ART: RACHEL LEVIT (from Lilith’s 2022 issue, “Our Bodies Under Attack”)
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