How do I prevent zsh from opening pipes and read redirections in text mode?

["Hudec, Jan" <jan dot hudec at siemens dot com>]

Hello Folks,

I have a program (actually a cygwin program -- git-fast-import) that reads commands from standard input and absolutely needs the stream to be binary (byte counts to be read are included in some commands). However, zsh forces it's input to text mode both when I run:
 git-fast-import < file
and
 cat file | git-fast-import
despite me having all the mounts set to binary and CYGWIN=binary. How do I explain to zsh, that pipes and read redirections to commands must be binary?

Note, that zsh used not to do this and bash is not doing it either.

-- 
Jan Hudec