“A woman must not put on man’s apparel, nor shall a man wear woman’s clothing; for whoever does these things is abhorrent to your God” – Deuteronomy 22:5
There is a lot to find problematic, even abhorrent, in this week’s Torah reading. In choosing to focus on the prohibition and condemnation of “cross dressing” in this dvar Torah, I have given myself a reprieve from examining some of the more gut wrenching texts. It’s too early in the academic year for me to talk about the (lack of) ethics around how the Torah feels female captives in a time of war should be treated. Spoiler alert: it’s not good. I just don’t have the stomach for it.
So I’m choosing something slightly less challenging, if no less relevant to today’s world. The prohibition found in Deuteronomy 22:5 that states that wearing clothes belonging to the opposite sex is abhorrent to God: indeed it is a toevah. Now, many things in Torah are described as toevah – it’s not exclusively used for acts that are transgressions in some way of gendered norms and expectations. But it would be negligent to ignore the fact that for many people, the description of wearing the “wrong” clothing sits in tidy parallel with the description of Leviticus 18:22 – a man should not lie with another man as he lies with a woman for this, too, is toevah. But we don’t hold this to be true, in the reform tradition, and so how else can we understand these verses.
Before we can fully understand them, it is important to grapple with them. No, we don’t hold that wearing clothes traditionally understood as being for the opposite sex is abominable, any more than we hold that being gay is abominable, but we do hold that these texts have eternal meaning and teachings for us to understand. So what, therefore, should we take from this?
Rashi, when commenting on this verse, says that the reason that wearing others’ clothing styles is prohibited is because the only reason a person would conceivably do such a thing would be to disguise themselves in a crowd of the opposite sex for the purpose of prostitution or adultery. Therefore, the prohibition exists (according to Rashi) because the only reason someone would do such an unthinkable thing would be to achieve an end goal that was abhorrent to God. Now, the threat of people donning the garb of the opposite sex in order to gain access to places that would be otherwise off limits to them, for nefarious purposes, is an idea that remains within the zeitgeist. However, as horrifying as this is, the numbers of such crimes are limited and therefore it is not that useful to dwell upon in this context. But what else might be an issue with gender bending clothing?
I just returned from a summer in Israel, where gendered norms in clothing and appearance seemed to me to be far more alive and well than they are in the UK. I am a butch lesbian with a propensity to grow the kind of facial hair usually seen on boys entering adolescence (usually removed during term time, but in the holidays I get lazy!). Aside from these two things, I tend to think that other elements of my physicality clearly indicate that I am female. In Israel, however, that was not the case– when I visited in early 2020, I was asked multiple times if I had had my bar-mitzvah; where I was learning in yeshiva; had I put on tefillin today? This summer, I lost track of the number of people who casually referred to me on the street as “adoni” (“sir”) or “gever” (“mister”) when trying to attract my attention. There is clearly something about a woman who presents in a non-traditional way that confounds a certain demographic of a society where the entire language is gendered in binary terms. Also, clearly the last 5 years have aged me significantly!
Perhaps linguistics are the root of the issue, then? The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that the structure of a person’s language influences how they perceive the world. In a world where language is explicitly gendered, either masculine or feminine, someone who subverts the categorical norms is difficult to understand other than as being wholly transgressive and possibly dangerous. This is possibly true in a way that is difficult, if not impossible, for people whose first language is English (or any other language that uses gender minimally or not at all) to comprehend. If language creates perception, maybe we have lost the incomprehensible nature of a man doing a woman thing, or a woman doing a man thing. This can be articulated in English without linguistic difficulty, we don’t need there to be gendered agreement across the sentence.
If the basis of the issue can be understood to be linguistic, with a secondary issue being that people don’t like to be confused, then what is the teaching we can extrapolate in today’s world? For me, I think it is about being willing to confront and correct inaccurate assumptions that are made about us, and being comfortable helping people with their confusion. Being a butch has meant facing other people’s confusion and assumptions with confidence and a smile, and not taking offense at people who make genuine mistakes. Whilst I will object to people assuming that my presentation makes me less a woman than any other woman (an assumption rooted in misogynistic ideas of how a woman ‘should’ look and present herself), I have never been upset by a genuine misreading or error. But I will use this opportunity to clarify one common misconception: I’m not wearing men’s clothes. They’re mine!
Emily Carp, LBC rabbinical student
The views expressed in this D’var Torah do not necessarily reflect the position of Leo Baeck College.