For Jewish transsexual teaching at Yeshiva University, no easy path to being a daughter
By Joy Ladin · April 30, 2012
http://www.jta.org/news/article/2012/04/30/3094061/finding-the-biblical-rebekah-in-my-own-motherFIRST PERSON
NEW YORK (JTA) -- If your mother has never seen your face -- if you have never had a face to be seen -- if, in a sense, you have never been born -- do you have a mother? If your mother has always called you "son," can you ever really become her daughter?
For most of my life, I couldn't begin to ask such questions. My sister, three years my junior, was the only daughter in our family. And though I hated being a boy, I could be messy, dirty, ruthlessly self-centered, indifferent to my appearance, careless of others to the point of rudeness -- behaviors my sister could never have gotten away with. I hated myself for deceiving my family, and it broke my heart that they were so easy to deceive. I felt utterly alone, and as so often when I was child, my estrangement from the world around me drove me to the Torah. There, I found someone I recognized as the direct ancestor of my own unbearable tangle of love and lies. In a passage I read over and over, Jacob serves his blind, aged father Isaac his favorite dinner as a prelude to receiving his blessing. There's only one problem with this scene of filial devotion: Jacob is impersonating his twin brother Esau, who older by a moment, is his father's heir. Esau, a vigorous, hairy, hyper-masculine hunter, is his father's favorite.
