Finding the Way Out of Egypt With Gender as Her Guide
March 25, 2010
Joy Ladin
http://www.jewishexponent.com/article/20844/For most of my life, when Pesach arrived, I would try, as the Hagaddah instructs, to think of myself as someone who had personally gone out of Egypt -- and fail. My problem wasn't that I was a comfortable, middle-class American Jew rather than the beaten, starving, abject heir of 400 years of enslavement. No, the problem was that I was still in Egypt, my personal Egypt, a form of bondage as all-encompassing as it was invisible. My Egypt had no pyramids, no hieroglyphs, no Nile River. It was an Egypt made of skin -- my skin -- and within that miserable empire, I played both slave and Pharaoh.
To be fair, I wasn't solely responsible for my enslavement. It wasn't my fault that when my body was growing in my mother's womb, the sex of my body -- male -- diverged from the gender of my brain. It wasn't my fault that that mixed-up infant was born into a world in which gender is so important that the first words that echo above newborn ears are "It's a boy" or "It's a girl." It wasn't my fault that few people in the 1960s and 1970s, when I was growing up, realized that gender identity -- our private sense of maleness or femaleness -- could be at odds with the sex of our bodies.
