"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 she experienced 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."
Human bodies are prone to all sorts of conditions, illnesses, and disabilities that make it hard for people to live full lives and to be seen and accepted by others. I have met many younger trans people who have grown up in families that accept them and love them as they are; for many of them, the acceptance and love they have known seem to ease the pain that I and many other trans people experience. This leads me to suspect that much of the pain of being transgender is social, that the mercilessness we need to focus on is that of human beings rather than God.
But I have more personal reasons for not feeling that God is merciless toward transgender people. I know many non-trans people who feel estranged from their lives and bodies – people who envy me that I actually have been able to become and live as myself. They have helped me see that becoming myself is a miracle – and throughout the transition, I kept experiencing God's mercy in helping me through overwhelming hardship and pain."
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