When Joy Ladin returned to Yeshiva University as the first openly transgender professor at an Orthodox Jewish institution, she didn’t just make headlines, she opened a profound dialogue on gender, faith, and authenticity. Her memoir, Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders, charts her intimate, intellectual, and spiritual journey toward living as the woman she always knew herself to be. The book is not just about gender transition; it is about living honestly in the face of fear, navigating personal truth within religious tradition, and facing the cost of transformation with courage and hope.
Born in Rochester, New York, Joy Ladin, then known as Jay, was raised in a non-observant Jewish family. Her parents, Lola and Irving Ladin, supported cultural Jewish identity, and her mother especially encouraged synagogue and Hebrew school attendance. Though her upbringing wasn’t strictly religious, these early spiritual experiences left an imprint. From childhood, Ladin intuited that her assigned male identity was false. She called herself a pacifist at eight to avoid the masculine behaviors expected of her, already resisting the social roles that felt alien to her being.
After earning her B.A. at Sarah Lawrence College in 1982, she moved to San Francisco with her wife, working as a legal clerk before pursuing her MFA in creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. It was during this time that she discovered a love for teaching. She continued her academic journey at Princeton University, earning a PhD in English literature in 2000. In 2007, she received tenure at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women. That same year, Ladin announced her transition, a decision that resulted in her being placed on paid leave for 18 months. With support from Lambda Legal, she returned to teaching in 2008, breaking unprecedented ground as an openly trans woman in an Orthodox setting. In Through the Door of Life, Ladin brings readers into the raw, vulnerable space of her transition, not only the physical and social changes, but the metaphysical questioning it provoked. Her memoir is as much about theology as it is about gender. She recounts lifelong, complicated conversations with God, a divine presence she sees as both the source of her suffering and the reason she survived it. Her writing does not flinch. She describes the emotional death she felt living as a man, the shattering of her marriage, the fear of losing her children, and the pain of confronting herself in the mirror every day. Yet amid this pain, there is also surprising humor, grace, and a search for transcendence.
Ladin's writing voice is poetic and clear, grounded in the reflective style she has developed over decades of working as both a poet and academic. As of 2018, she had published nine poetry collections, many of which explore identity, embodiment, and the sacred. Her lyricism carries over into her memoir, adding texture and resonance to scenes of isolation, healing, and revelation. Whether she's describing the sensation of applying lipstick for the first time or the alienation of sitting alone in a women’s bathroom, Ladin infuses her prose with layers of symbolic and spiritual significance. Ladin once described herself as “old-fashioned, a garden-variety transsexual” rather than a postmodern gender shapeshifter, a statement that situates her memoir in contrast with more radical queer theory discourses. This grounding in traditional narratives of selfhood and transformation may be precisely why her memoir resonates so deeply with readers of all backgrounds, religious and secular, trans and cis alike. It is a deeply human story. Ladin doesn’t write to dazzle with theory; she writes to survive and to bear witness.
Through the lens of Jewish tradition, Ladin invites us to reimagine God’s relationship to gender. She would later expand on this in her academic work The Soul of the Stranger, arguing that Torah, when read from a trans perspective, suggests a divine being who is far less invested in gender binaries than traditional interpretations claim. Even in Through the Door of Life, we see the seeds of this argument. Her Judaism is not static or dogmatic, it is lived, questioned, wrestled with, and ultimately embraced. In her 2014 interview, Ladin reflects on her purpose as a writer: “When I speak publicly, I’m not telling my story because it’s exceptional. I’m telling it because it’s human.” This is the ethos of Through the Door of Life. It is a testimony to the difficulty of becoming oneself, and to the beauty of it, too. Joy Ladin does not claim perfection or clarity. She simply walks through the door of life, offering her hand to those who are also trying to find their way.
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