Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey between Genders

by Joy Ladin

Overview

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.
    Ladin’s poignant memoir takes us from the death of living as the man she knew she wasn’t, to the shattering of family and career that accompanied her transition, to the new self, relationships, and love she finds when she opens the door of life.


2012 Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award for Biography, Autobiography, or Memoir

“Wrenching—and liberating. . . .[it] opens up new ways of looking at gender and the place of LGBT Jews in community.”—Greater Phoenix Jewish News
“Given her high-profile academic position, Ladin’s transition was a major news story in Israel and even internationally. But behind the public story was a private struggle and learning experience, and Ladin pulls no punches in telling that story. She offers a peek into how daunting it was to learn, with little support from others, how to dress as a middle-aged woman, to mu on make-up, to walk and talk like a female. She provides a front-row seat for observing how one person confronted a seemingly impossible situation and how she triumphed, however shakingly, over the many adversities, both societal and psychological, that stood in the way.”—The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299287337
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	03/15/2012
Series:	Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Autobiography Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	270
Sales rank:	912,729
File size:	416 KB

About the Author

Joy Ladin, David and Ruth Gottesman Professor of English at Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University, is the first openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution. She is the author of five books of poetry, including, most recently, Psalms and Coming to Life.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

A Blessing (Spring 2007)

Introduction: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Stern College (September 2008)

Part One: Who Will Be

1 Things Fall Apart (Summer 2005)

2 Being a Man (Fall 2006)

3 Girl in a Bag (Winter 2007)

4 In the Image (Spring 2007)

5 Suicide (Spring 2007)

6 Truth (Spring 2007)

7 Choosing Life (June 26, 2007)

Part Two: Adolescence

8 Adolescence (Summer 2007)

9 Mothering (Summer 2007)

10 Like a Natural Woman (July 2007)

11 Anger (Summer 2007)

Part Three: The Door of Life

12 The Day My Father Died (October 2, 2007)

13 The God Thing (Fall 2007)

14 The Voice of the Future (Summer 2008)

15 Two Trips to the Wailing Wall (March 2002 and October 2008)

16 Teaching Naked (Spring 2010)

17 The Door of Life (March 2010)

18 Try (May 2010)

Editorial Reviews

In this eloquent, bittersweet memoir, professor and poet Ladin (Psalms) leavens with literary artistry the often incredibly painful story of her gender transition from male to female. She describes her wife forced “to witness the slow erasure of the man she loved,” her children’s fury and bewilderment at the decision that broke apart their family, and the practice of love. In addition, she shares her navigations through and between gender, and her awkward, exhilarating “second adolescence” as she experiments with walking, dressing, and speaking as a woman; her conversations with God, messages from angels, and the surprising consideration and ultimate acceptance from Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women, where she still teaches. Transgender readers will appreciate Ladin’s nuanced, wide-ranging musings on gender and the longings, terrors, successes, and searing losses arising from her struggle to find life worthwhile and to live authentically. The book also offers family and friends of transitioning people insight into the complexity of their loved ones’ motivations and struggles. Readers will be rewarded not only with an expanded understanding of a complicated choice but also a compelling and moving story of a person transitioning, not only from male to female but from a numb, suicidal “nonexistence” to opening the “door of life.” Agent: Kent D. Wolf, Global Literary Management. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"This is an emotionally intense, deeply personal memoir of self-discovery."--PFLAG


"In painstakingly and painfully constructing her new self, Ladin is fully aware of the societal conventions and privileges of which she makes use. . . . But there seems to be a poignancy, of which Ladin is exquisitely aware, that precisely because what Ladin wants is so normal, her efforts to obtain it are so fraught with pain."--Lambda Literary Review

"Joy Ladin's book succeeds so well because it is anything but a trans tract; it is a fierce story of regular old human life: hideous choices, endless repercussions, occasional glory, frequent humiliation, abiding difficulty. It could have happened to us. She makes us believe it."--Kay Ryan, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

"Not only a memoir of transgender experience, this is also a story of family heartbreak and family love; of growth as a teacher and writer; and, not least, of a self deeply connected to God and Judaism throughout a life lived across genders."--Rabbi Jill Hammer, director of spiritual education at the Academy for Jewish Religion

"On the face of it, Through the Door of Life 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. . . . Orthodox Jewish leaders should thank Ladin for refusing to hide out, for reminding us how human beings should relate to one another."--The Huffington Post

"Readers will be rewarded not only with an expanded understanding of a complicated choice but also a compelling and moving story of a person transitioning, not only from male to female but from a numb, suicidal 'nonexistence' to opening the 'door of life.'"--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From the Publisher

This is a cri de coeur from someone who felt he was born into the wrong gender and, after half a lifetime of misery, decided to do something about it. Jay Ladin, a well-regarded academic, father, husband, and Orthodox Jew, became Joy Ladin, who made news when she was allowed to stay on as an English professor at Stern College of Yeshiva University after she transitioned. Although her academic status was assured, the reactions of Ladin's wife, children, other family members, as well as other Orthodox Jews, was trickier. Portions of Ladin's text, e.g., her professed state of mind—wishing to be dead, yet unable to commit suicide—before the transition, may stretch credulity. Her hyperbolic perception of the change ("my transition from death to life") may seem over the top and indicative of her tendency to see things in black and white. Some humor would have helped (it is not clear whether, when Ladin writes that her "body was a no-man's land" before the change, she intends a pun; one suspects not). VERDICT Still, this account will no doubt be a source of comfort and inspiration to others suffering from gender dysphoria. Researchers and clinicians stand to learn a lot from it.—Ellen Gilbert, Princeton, N.J.

Library Journal