[Avodah] Transgendering and Halachah

[T613K at aol.com]

From: Micha Berger _micha at aishdas.org_ (mailto:micha at aishdas.org) 

>> Someone  posted on Areivim a reference to a transgendered person who
was living within  the chareidi community....
The TE discusses the case of an agunah whose  husband decided to become a
woman. It's pretty clear the she'eilah was  hypothetical. He answers that
no get is necessary, because there is no  concept of qiddushin between
two women. 

....So apparently REWaldenberg holds that the surgery does change  halachic
gender. Assur, but has a chalos. And even WRT the issur, he  mentions
the case of a risk of suicide, and piquach nefesh  docheh.

Micha  Berger              



>>>>
 
People who suffer from the delusion that they are "really" the  opposite 
sex are at no more risk of suicide than mentally ill people laboring  under 
any other delusion.  Any surgeon who plays along with this form of  mental 
illness by surgically altering a perfectly healthy person is committing a  
horrendous crime and, in a more just world, would lose his license to practice  
medicine.
 
The only case in which gender-assignment surgery is ethical and justified  
is the case where a baby is born with ambiguous organs and/or the external  
organs and the baby's chromosomes are at odds. 
 
If you had a friend who thought he was a chicken who had lost his  
feathers, and you glued feathers on him, any normal person would consider  you to be 
as mental as your friend -- unless you were charging your friend  a hefty 
fee to glue back his lost feathers, in which case any normal person  would 
consider you a gonif who was taking advantage of a vulnerable  person.
 
The TE was working with the best medical and psychological information  
(really, misinformation) he had, but the information he was given was wrong and 
 therefore, acting on false information, he came up with a mistaken psak.   
The false information was that men who think they are "really" women are 
prone  to suicide, and that gender-reassignment surgery that matches their  
external organs to their delusions helps prevent suicide.  In reality,  such 
men are at only slightly higher risk of suicide than anyone else, and after  
surgery, their suicide rate goes up, not down -- because surgery can't 
really  cure deep-seated psychological problems, and when they find this out, 
that's  when despair really sets in.
 
 
 
--Toby Katz
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