An Interview with Joy Ladin
Annie Kantar
http://ilanot.wordpress.com/an-interview-with-joy-ladin/Annie Kantar: You've chosen to be very public about your transition—writing a memoir, giving talks, etc. When you returned to Stern College as a woman, it would have been much easier, wouldn't it, to have quickly moved out of the spotlight? Did that seem a possibility to you?
Joy Ladin: In some ways, it would have been easier to try to be as little in the public eye as possible after transition. But I didn't really feel that that choice was mine to make. As you know, I felt awful about the suffering my gender transition had caused my family. When my transition was still private, I often prayed that some good could come of it, something other than suffering for those around me. The opportunities to speak, teach and write about gender identity issues that came my way seemed to be answers, albeit personally difficult answers, to those prayers. I was also acutely conscious of the uniqueness of the position from which I could speak to these issues. As the first openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution that had just welcomed me back to teaching, the spotlight caught me at the corner of gender identity and Judaism, and gender identity and traditional religious worldviews. Most trans people who find themselves there either find it difficult to be public about their experiences (there are many trans Jews living in hiding in the Orthodox world) or flee toward the somewhat more accepting secular world. Few can tell their stories, and fewer still have hopeful stories to tell about acceptance of transgender people in traditional religious institutions. Because I've never been Orthodox, I didn't suffer much from the harsher criticisms my transition received in those quarters, and because I had tenure, my life literally depended on my staying at Yeshiva University. Given all those circumstances, it seemed imperative that I accept the role I had been given, the role of representing hope for transgender Orthodox Jews and other traditionally religious trans people.
