AnuAnzu
Vegetable Gremlin ⍼👻consulting the talmud to loudly insist that historically there has only been eight genders
RamenCatholic 🐢🌈@vegetablegremlin [*how to pin someone else's post*]
slowtiger@vegetablegremlin This is great, do you have a linkable source for this?
Rachel Greenham@vegetablegremlin I like these very much. I'd heard about the eight genders thing but I'd never got around to looking up what they were.
@vegetablegremlin also wondering now (and yes I'm about to read the link down-thread) about the origins. Androgynos looks like a Greek loan word of course, which has led me to wonder if any of the others wandered in from other cultures and when/why...
ZZ Bottom
Wm.sonThank you for this. This is very interesting to me. It's useful knowledge, but I fear will not end any of the hatred currently swirling around gender.
I learn so much here at Mastodon, every single day.
Sean Bala@vegetablegremlin This is so fascinating. I am always struck by the fact that so many of the things that "have always been" are not so. If people clinging to tightly to the idea of only two genders (that act in an exact way) just looked outside the US or their own society, cultures, or histories, they would be uncomfortably surprised at the non-universality of their own opinion.
@seanbala i mean at the risk of sounding like a boring nerd it is a fundamental problem with taxonomy: we are trying to give shape to a chaotic reality, the best we can do is rough approximations
@vegetablegremlin Really fantastic point. The minute you try to name something. you already limit it.
Friday@vegetablegremlin (looking around) so we're not gonna mention how cute tumtum sounds?
Avram Grumer@vegetablegremlin
Makes me wonder about the Tumtum tree in “Jabberwocky.” (“He took his vorpal sword in hand; / Long time the manxome foe he sought— / So rested he by the Tumtum tree / And stood awhile in thought.”)
JamesTDG@vegetablegremlin intriguing.
John_SchindlerThanks for posting.
Blort™ 🐀Ⓥ🥋☣️@vegetablegremlin Wondering what's meant by "through human intervention" given that the Talmud was written before modern surgery / HRT...? 
@Blort there were pre-modern HRT solutions (such as horse piss)
@vegetablegremlin Wow... I have... learned something today. 🤔
Marc Trius@vegetablegremlin important to note that these are specifically intersex categories. While we might use them today to inform our thinking about gender in Judaism, when the Sages instituted these categories they were not thinking about anything we would recognize as gender discourse
@alter_kaker a: why is it important to note that
b: no they arent
@vegetablegremlin to me it's important to encounter the Sages on their own terms, rather than ahistorically retroject my own sensibilities on them. Aside from things like humility and integrity, it's also a matter of respect. We live in a rather different world and that's OK. We can still make the conclusions we need to.
@alter_kaker okay but they arent only descriptions of intersex. several specifically mention change through human intervention.
seems like meeting them with humility and integrity would involve reading the whole thing
@vegetablegremlin I agree. And I haven't read the whole oral and written Torah, and I rather suspect that you haven't either. But anyway, this level of sarcasm is boring
@alter_kaker i'm talking about reading the entire list of eight words in the post and im not being sarcastic
Cher Tailor
FrugalGamer@vegetablegremlin This is really interesting! I'm particularly surprised that there's a distinction between people who develop different sexual characteristics naturally vs. those who develop them via human intervention.
Most Resplendent Bat@vegetablegremlin my gender is TUMTUM? *squeals and claps hands*