As Leftists go about reshaping reality to suit themselves or deceiving themselves into thinking they’re doing so, they’re painfully aware that there are a few pockets of resistance here and there. There are still some people who believe that men can’t become women or women men. There are even some people so benighted as to think that drag queens aren’t suitable entertainment for toddlers. Since Leftists are totalitarians who can’t abide dissent, this drives them crazy. One way they deal with the cognitive dissonance is to try to convince people who are still sane that, lo and behold, their own cherished beliefs coincide with Leftist fads, it’s just that no one noticed before! The New York Times assaulted Judaism in this way on Saturday.
Rabbi Elliott Kukla, who calls himself “transgender and nonbinary,” says that he has “offered bereavement spiritual care for the past 17 years.” In a Times guest essay, he claims to have “accompanied mourners through the losses of many more very young trans people than in the past.” These were suicides, he says, and he warns that there will be more such cases if the delusions and fantasies from which young people are suffering (if they catch today’s fashionable social contagion) aren’t indulged by mutilating their bodies and making them dependent for life on pharmaceuticals, creating a psychological dislocation from their true selves that will dwarf any sense of alienation they felt before.
Kukla zeroes in on the brave dissidents who still dare to believe that men are men and women are women and that transgenders are mentally ill people who have been taken advantage of and butchered by profiteers. He asserts that the battle between the transgenders and their allies on one side and the sane on the other “is often framed as a battle between traditional religious values and modern ideas about gender.” But that’s all wrong, he argues, because voilá! Transgenders “have always existed, including within age-old religions.” You just never noticed, you bigoted fundamentalists! “In my own tradition, Judaism,” Kukla continues, “our most sacred texts reflect a multiplicity of gender.” How did the entire world, including virtually all Jews until Elliott Kukla, miss this? “This part of Judaism has mostly been obscured by the modern binary world until very recently.” Of course!
It turns out that “there are four genders beyond male or female that appear in ancient Jewish holy texts hundreds of times.” Thus transgenders in Judaism “were always hiding in plain sight.” Kukla claims that “when a child was born in the ancient Jewish world it could be designated as a boy, a girl, a ‘tumtum’ (who is neither clearly male nor female), or an ‘androgynos’ (who has both male and female characteristics) based on physical features. There are two more gender designations that form later in life. The ‘aylonit’ is considered female at birth, but develops in an atypical direction. The ‘saris’ is designated male at birth, but later becomes a eunuch.” Now, if you’re thinking, Wait a minute, none of that is anything like some middle-aged guy deciding he is going to become a female admiral, it’s only because you’re right.
Related: LGBTQ+++™ Totalitarians Pen Letter to NY Times Demanding Special Coverage
Kukla even concedes that “there is not an exact equivalence between these ancient categories and modern gender identities.” You can say that again. And so on Sunday, Heritage Foundation research fellow and “stiff-necked Jew” Jason Bedrick tweeted that “anyone who has a basic knowledge of Jewish law knows” that what Kukla wrote in the Times is “absolutely false.” He added: “Judaism recognizes two sexes, period. ‘And God created man in His image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.’ — Genesis 1:27 Jewish law also recognizes the existence of several aberrations. All relate to physical traits that are not chosen.” Bedrick went on to explain how each of the categories Kukla discussed in his articles referred to various anomalies, not consciously chosen identities. Bedrick concluded, “These all relate to physical conditions (not a feeling that one is in the wrong body) and are NOT separate ‘genders’ as understood today.”
So what was the New York Times trying to do by publishing this nonsense? Clearly the objective was to shake the faith of Jewish traditionalists and render them more welcoming of the whole transgender idea. “See?” the Times is saying. “You really agreed with us all along, you just didn’t know it.” This is the sort of deception that makes Leftists think they’re the enlightened ones while they’re being led around by the nose and manipulated into all manner of madness.