A random collection of over 1910 books and audiobooks authored by or about my transgender, intersex sisters, and gender-nonconforming persons all over the world. I read some of them, and I was inspired by some of them. I met some of the authors and heroines, some of them are my best friends, and I had the pleasure and honor of interviewing some of them. If you know of any transgender biography that I have not covered yet, please let me know.
Full title: "The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective" by Joy Ladin.
"Reading some of the best-known Torah stories through the lens of transgender experience, Joy Ladin explores fundamental questions about how religious texts, traditions, and the understanding of God can be enriched by transgender perspectives, and how the Torah and trans lives can illuminate one another.
Drawing on her own experience and lifelong reading practice, Ladin shows how the Torah, a collection of ancient texts that assume human beings are either male or female, speaks both to practical transgender concerns, such as marginalization, and to the challenges of living without a body or social role that renders one intelligible to others―challenges that can help us understand a God who defies all human categories. These creative, evocative readings transform our understanding of the Torah’s portrayals of God, humanity, and relationships between them."
2018,
English,
Joy Ladin,
Full title: "Sex Changes: A Memoir of Marriage, Gender, and Moving On" by Christine Benvenuto.
"Christine Benvenuto and her husband (Joy Ladin) had been married for more than twenty years and were raising their three young children in a beautiful New England town. One night in bed he turned to her and said, "I'm thinking constantly about my gender," adding that he was unhappy in his body and wanted to become a woman.
Part memoir, part voyeur's glimpse into a relationship, Sex Changes is a journey through the end of a marriage and out the other side. Christine, desperate to save her family and shelter her children, discovers a well of strength and resilience she never knew she had."
2012,
Christine Benvenuto,
English,
Joy Ladin,
Full title: "Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey between Genders" by Joy Ladin.
"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."
2012,
English,
Joy Ladin,
