Through the Door of Life
A Jewish Journey between Genders
Joy Ladin

http://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/5021.htm

Professor Jay Ladin made headlines around the world when, after years of teaching literature at Yeshiva University, he returned to the Orthodox Jewish campus as a woman—Joy Ladin. In Through the Door of Life, Joy Ladin takes readers inside her transition as she changed genders and, in the process, created a new self.

With unsparing honesty and surprising humor, Ladin wrestles with both the practical problems of gender transition and the larger moral, spiritual, and philosophical questions that arise. Ladin recounts her struggle to reconcile the pain of her experience living as the "wrong" gender with the pain of her children in losing the father they love. We eavesdrop on her lifelong conversations with the God whom she sees both as the source of her agony and as her hope for transcending it. We look over her shoulder as she learns to walk and talk as a woman after forty-plus years of walking and talking as a man. We stare with her into the mirror as she asks herself how the new self she is creating will ever become real.

Leora Tanenbaum
Author, "Taking Back God: American Women Rising Up for Religious Equality"

Jewish and Transgender: Follow the Words of Hillel
Posted: 02/25/2012 7:12 am

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leora-tanenbaum/jewish-and-transgender-follow-hillel_b_1280589.html

On the face of it, "Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders" (just out from University of Wisconsin Press) is the story of how Jay Ladin, the author and an English professor at Yeshiva University in New York City, transitioned into living as Joy Ladin. But it's Ladin's relationship with Judaism that anchors this book and makes it stand out.

What do you do when you're drawn to religion despite the fact that your religion wants to reform you, erase you, abhor you? Ladin, who is not strictly observant but nevertheless remains strongly rooted to Jewish tradition, could have taken the easy way out: She could have walked away from Judaism. Instead, she argues with God. We get to listen in on her side of the conversation.