Really interesting! I was already aware that many ancient societies and religions were more open about the true diversity of human gender and sexuality, but I didn’t realise that ancient rabbis did as well. It seems likely that the concept of a strict gender binary is very much a modern invention, probably no older than 500 years and likely younger even than that. Many of the gender roles we’re told to think of as the “normal” human state are largely based on Victorian social attitudes, which were much stricter than what came before, which would make the strict gender binary maybe 150 years old. Not to say that societies before that were amazingly progressive and tolerant, because they often weren’t. But what they hadn’t done was write down a load of rules about how men and women were “supposed” to act, and so it was understood that there’d always be some people who didn’t fit into the binary, and that was just how it was.

So if anything, when one considers the entirety of human history and culture, the “modern” (Victorian) attitudes towards sex and gender are the unusual beliefs, and as society moves (far too slowly) into accepting people for who they are, that’s actually return to normality.

This was a great read and shows that in even ancient societies, people understood that there was more than just a binary.