[Avodah] Transgendering and Halachah

[T613K at aol.com]

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

: It isn't a matter  of "agreeing" or "disagreeing."    I am not  giving a 
:  halachic opinion with which he may agree or disagree.   He  gave  a psak 
based 
: on "facts" that turned out not to be factual.  It  turns  out that 
transgender 
: mutilation surgery does not in fact  prevent suicide.   The risk of 
suicide 
: in fact rises slightly  after surgery.[--TK]

But without supporting studies showing that the  metzi'us a rav would be
ruling on doesn't match that of his pesaq, it's  franlky just his assessment
of the facts vs yours. REWaldenberg was the rav  of Shaarei Tzedeq Medical
Center. Both his fame as a poseiq and his access to  medical knowledge make
me far more inclined to believe his  version.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

 
>>>>>
 
 
>From a little bit of noodling around the internet it seems that the TE's  
psak involved a case where the person's external organs were ambiguous -- a  
chromosomal male with external [mostly] female organs, where the question of 
 surgery was whether to make this unfortunate person externally completely  
female by removing an abnormal testicle.  This psak was in 1971.   At the 
time, he wrote (and it was true then) that such surgery was "of course"  
extremely rare and would only be done in exceptional circumstances.   
 
_http://www.starways.net/beth/tzitz.html_ 
(http://www.starways.net/beth/tzitz.html) 
 
Medicine has changed a lot, the culture has changed, a lot of things have  
changed.  He may have written halachic opinions more recently than that,  
I'd be interested to see more on that, but it seems 1971 was his last word on  
the subject.
 
One thing is certain, gender reassignment surgery has become big, big  
business and is performed far more often and more regularly than it ever used to 
 be -- far more often than you may imagine.  Today it is the first rather  
than the last course of "treatment" suggested to the vast majority of men 
who  come to a doctor saying "I think I'm really a woman."  
 
And based on what I've read it is being done to young children, or at least 
 the suggestion has been made that it should!  That is, some suggest that a 
 boy who thinks he's a girl should be given drugs to delay puberty so that  
he won't get all that hair and muscles that will later make it difficult to 
 surgically make him look like a woman.  I am not sure whether this is  
actually being done or has only been suggested by some in the field.
 
 
My reading also suggests that far more has been read into the TE's writing  
than he intended, in terms of making it OK to have mutilating surgery done, 
and  in terms of treating the newly created "woman" as fully female.  
Again, I'd  like to hear more from people who have actually read all of what the 
TE wrote on  the subject.
 
Being the rav of Sharei Tzedek would not, BTW, give a person any greater  
access to longitudinal studies of the outcome of gender mutilation surgery 
than  would being the possessor of a computer in any city on earth.  And R'  
Waldenberg passed away in 1906 at the age of 90.  I really don't think what  
he wrote nearly forty years before has much medical relevance today.
 
I believe that if he had known that his words written in 1971 would lead,  
half a century later, to the cavalier emasculation of dozens or hundreds of  
Jewish men, he would have been appalled and might well have written some  
additional words of warning against this -- but in his wildest imagination he 
 could not have foreseen the crazy things that now go on in our world.  He  
thought he was talking about very rare cases with very real physical 
reasons to  undergo surgery.  (In fact he also poskened that surgery undertaken 
for no  medical reason is assur!  He held that cosmetic surgery is assur.  In  
99% of cases, transgender surgery is just that -- cosmetic surgery for no 
real  medical reason.)
 
--Toby Katz
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