My preferred pronouns are “I” and “Thou.” Martin Buber’s philosophy posits that the purest form of a relationship occurs when the connection between parties can be fully experienced in the moment rather than reducing the experience to a cognitive assessment of the interaction or of the other party. When speaking with another person for example, the ideal relationship would be to fully engage with “Thou,” the other person as a human being rather than “It,” the other person as a product of sex, gender, skin color, religion, social or economic status, etc.
The same theory applies to a relationship with the Divine. Experiencing awe, perhaps even experiencing connection with G-d, is something that can happen, but when reduced to an attempt to understand the experience through analysis, the connection is lost.
Buber uses just three pronouns to describe relationships, with the most ideal expressed using an archaic form that is purposefully part of uncommon speech. This use of only three pronouns is an acknowledgment that pronouns are reductionist inhibitions of intimacy. If “I” and “Thou” are in relationship as one human being to another, experiencing the relationship becomes possible. By reducing the other to any other pronoun, that person becomes an “It” and “I” am only characterizing the other and no longer relating.
In language, pronouns serve only to replace proper nouns in a context where the proper noun is already clearly established for the purpose of making language a little less cumbersome. Except for this function, pronouns could be said to have no purpose at all. A dialogue could be conducted solely by using names and other proper nouns to refer to people, places and things. Doing so might sound a bit odd at first, but is there a reason why an odd-sounding use of nouns should be a source of angst or revulsion?
What makes “he” a “him” and “she” a “her” anyway? One of the stranger things in human experience is the notion that being born with a certain set of sex organs predetermines the manner in which a person is expected to behave for every day after birth. Gender roles and the character of masculinity and femininity vary from culture to culture and change over time, making any expectation that there must be certain immutable masculine and feminine traits inconsistent with reality. Moreover, by grafting one person’s expectation of what another person “should” be based on expectations of sex and gender roles makes an “I-Thou” relationship impossible.
Accepting the humanity of another person without preconditions is a prerequisite to experiencing “Thou” in a relationship. In Jewish terms, relating to “Thou” requires acknowledging that all people are created in the Divine image, which in turn requires remembering that G-d is transgender.
“Trans” is a prefix from Latin meaning “beyond,” implying that in its most fundamental sense, “transgender” is to be “beyond gender.” “Trans” is also used in a more colloquial sense to mean a person who has assumed a gender different from the one assigned at birth, but can also refer more generally both to people who made this kind of transition as well as those who identify as gender nonbinary in the same way that G-d is.
Although G-d is conventionally referred to using masculine pronouns, such pronouns are merely a byproduct of the gendered character of the Hebrew language, not of G-d. To the extent that G-d is conceptualized as having sex or gender in Jewish thought, the male and female aspects of G-d are never separated from one another. Instead, male and female are combined in a single, unitary deity, not G-d in multiple parts, but a single G-d possessing of both male and female traits.
Not only is G-d transgender, so too was the first human being. G-d created Adam in the Book of Genesis as neither male nor female until G-d made the decision that Adam needed companionship to be fulfilled. Thereupon G-d creates a woman by drawing out part of Adam, meaning that both Adam and the woman are created from the same material.
Notably, even after the text opines that the man and the woman are to become husband and wife (Genesis 2:24), the text notes that both the man and the woman were naked, but did not feel shame (Genesis 2:25).
In other words, neither the man nor the woman was conscious of reasons why their differences in sexuality made any difference to their humanity.
Such a concept only enters into the minds of the human beings later when, in defiance of G-d’s command, the humans eat from the forbidden tree.
For some contemporary thinkers, particularly in the realm of abusive political discourse, strict adherence to artificially imposed gender roles is somehow a requirement even when adherence to such a notion requires rejecting the religious foundation on which those ideas are supposedly built. Asserting that all men must be one way and all women must be another is false. Further, asserting that a person must be trapped in a certain sexual form because that is how a person was born denies that G-d created male and female through surgical reassignment (Genesis 2:21).
What must a person be to be allowed to be a person? Justification of entitlement to equal rights of all people should be unnecessary, regardless of physical form. At the most fundamental level, freedom is about choosing one’s own destiny while tyranny is the external imposition of destiny upon others. Is G-d’s will to deny freedom to some or to deny the humanity of others so that tyrants can reign freely?
There is simply no moral basis for denying freedom to certain human beings because of the identity of those human beings. There is no moral basis for denying health care services or for excising the presence of certain human beings because of outward sexual appearance, a choice to wear clothes common to another gender, or mannerisms that do not conform with an artificial definition of masculine or feminine.
To clarify, while Deuteronomy 22:5 instructs men and women not to wear clothes of the other sex, a person whose gender identity differs from the one assigned at birth is not wearing clothes of the opposite gender.
Further, the principle of the Biblical verse as it is used in texts including the Talmud (Shabbat 94b), suggests that the principle is misunderstood. The Talmudic discussion uses the Biblical verse as a prohibition of vanity rather than a condemnation of cross-dressing or drag.
There is, however, a moral basis for doing exactly the opposite by following the paradigm that was established in the Garden of Eden. Relating to others solely as human beings without interference from differences in sex or gender is the model for achieving the purpose G-d established for human relationships: companionship, not dominion, because humans being alone is not good. This Biblical principle is reflected in Martin Buber’s ideal for relating to others without pretense, without reductive cognition, without pronouns, save for “I” and “Thou.”
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