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

Posted on 16. May, 2012 by Jay Michaelson

http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/05/16/through-the-door-of-life-a-jewish-journey-between-genders-by-joy-ladin/

Joy Ladin's lyrical and thoughtful new memoir, Through the Door of Life, adds another before-and-after metaphor to the mix, and yet its searing narrative undercuts any such simplifications. For Ladin, life didn't get better when she began her gender transition in 2007. In many ways, it got worse: her wife and children rejected her, her suicidal ideation intensified, and for a time she lost everything.

And yet, even without the redemptive last chapter which gives the book its title, one can still say that even if life got harder when she transitioned, it also, at least, began. Ladin vividly describes forty years of gender dysphoria, of feeling disembodied, detached, dehumanized. She was, in a way that brings the cliché new meaning, a shell of a man. Yes, after her transition, "all of the things that constituted progress – family, love, career success, financial security – had receded beyond any foreseeable horizon." Often (perhaps even too often) she mourns these losses. But nowhere does she regret taking them on.