Nonbinary genders beyond ‘male’ and ‘female’ would have been no surprise to ancient rabbis, who acknowledged tumtums, androgynos and aylonot

“Genderqueer” and “nonbinary” are contemporary terms for people who don’t fit neatly into male or female categories. But acknowledging that not everyone fits neatly into those two groups has a much longer history than you might suspect.

...Rabbinic literature, the body of texts written by Jewish leaders in antiquity, includes several other categories. In these texts, a person with both sets of external genitalia is called an “androgynos,” a term borrowed from Greek. A person with neither is called a “tumtum,” and a person who loses his male sexual organs is called a “saris.” There is also a term for someone whose sex assigned at birth is female but does not develop to female sexual maturity – in some cases, because they develop “male” traits: an “aylonit.”

For example, Genesis Rabbah, a collection of creative Biblical interpretation from late antiquity, records an interpretation of a creation story in the biblical book of Genesis in which God forms the first humans. Genesis 1 includes the phrase, “Male and female He created them,” which many readers interpret to mean that God created a man and a woman.

But some of the rabbis quoted in Genesis Rabbah believed that God had made an androgynos.