Professor Joy Ladin brings her memoir of transition to DCJCC

[Shana A]

Professor Joy Ladin brings her memoir of transition to DCJCC

By Will O'Bryan
Published on October 11, 2012, 7:15am

http://www.metroweekly.com/arts_entertainment/events/?ak=7811

Professors are supposed to be smart. That's why they're professors. Certainly, Joy Ladin is no dummy. The literature professor waited until she'd secured tenure before advising her dean at New York's Jewish Yeshiva University that she would be transitioning, fully expressing her female identity. No more Professor Jay.

She wasn't expecting the fallout, mild as it was. Everything would be just fine – as long as she didn't set foot on campus. ''The university wanted me to go away for a while,'' Ladin recalls. ''All I had to do was not do my job. It's a situation many academics would kill for.''

But for Ladin, it was too much to ask.

''I'd never experienced discrimination before. I was completely unprepared for it. It just hurt. There were a couple blocks on planet Earth where I wasn't allowed to go, two blocks where I was considered too horrible to be seen,'' she says, adding that while her gender is an integral part of her, it's still only part. ''My identity as a teacher is a very important part, too.''