A Transsexual at Yeshiva University
Joy Ladin Traces Her Jewish Journey From Male to Female
By Naomi Alderman
Published March 19, 2012, issue of March 23, 2012.
Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders
By Joy Ladin
University of Wisconsin Press, 270 pages, $26.95
http://forward.com/articles/153010/a-transsexual-at-yeshiva-university/Probably one of the best-known Jewish stories in the world is a transgender tale. A young educator realizes that they really belong with the opposite gender. And, although it overturns social convention and throws families into disarray, this young person is driven to make that gender change, eventually living full time as a member of the sex opposite to that of their birth identity. It's a heart-warming story that has been made into a play and a musical movie. This story is, of course, "Yentl."
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A new memoir from Joy Ladin, "Through the Door of Life" — in which she describes in sometimes heart-wrenching detail her transition from Jay, the male English literature professor at Yeshiva University's Stern College for Women, to Joy, the first ever openly transgender person to teach at an Orthodox Jewish institution — brought home to me repeatedly how much horrifying pressure is still put on men to perform a very narrow and limiting kind of masculinity. And the book reveals the tremendous psychological pain of having to play that role when you have a deep internal sense that you are actually a woman. Ladin managed to keep up that facade for many years (during which she married a woman and fathered three children) until she was in her 40s. That was when, after increasingly deep and violent depressive crises, she began the transition. "Through the Door of Life" details the breakdown of her marriage following this decision, the psychological battles and career problems it caused, and her tentative steps toward a still-evolving female identity.
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Through The Door Of Life
by Steven Bergman
EDGE Contributor
Monday Mar 19, 2012
http://www.edgeboston.com/entertainment/books/biography/130244/through_the_door_of_lifeWhat determines our gender, our bodies or our brains? Dr. Joy Ladin gives us a firsthand account of a transwoman trying to come to terms with this issue in her debut book of prose, "Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders."
Born "Jay" Ladin, she is the first openly transgender employee at Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University, an Orthodox Jewish institution. The battles that Dr. Ladin has faced have been on many fronts, from her conflicted childhood with a passive mother and a loveless father, through her twenty-five year heterosexual marriage to a woman that brought three children into the world, to the internal struggle to "feel alive" while trapped in the body of a male.
