Through the door of life. My Jewish journey through the genres

Text by Joy Ladin* Extract from his bookThrough The Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Beteween Genders(Through the door of life: a Jewish journey between genres), University of Wisconsin Press (United States), 2012, pp.7-9. Freely translated by the volunteers of the Gionata project

"If they are not for myself, who will I be for me? If they are only for myself, what are they? And if not now, when? " (Rabbi Hillel, Pirkei Avot 1:14)

September 2008. It was a splendid September day in New York, sunny, warm but not sultry, with such a blue sky as to make fun of the ruthless realism of the skyscrapers that raised themselves towards it.

As I walked south from Grand Central to start the autumn semester of 2008 at the Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University, I smiled at every face I met, eager to share the fact that miracles can happen. I was a miracle, my journey was a miracle, and even the most skeptical of the inhabitants of this skeptical city should have admitted that the work I was heading was a certified miracle.

I hadn't smiled much since I started my transition, going to live like a man to live like a woman, a process that had shaken and shattered almost every aspect of my life. Even if I had always heard that my kind was wrong, I had grown like a more or less normal boy in New York state, I graduated soon and I had chosen the Sarah Lawrence College in search of people obsessed with poetry and intellectual conversation as much as I was me.

During the orientation for the freshmen, I met the woman with whom I spent the following quarter of the following century. After graduation, and a few weeks spent in economics in Europe, we moved to San Francisco, we got married and shared a decade of poor and anguished apartments from young writers, while I was working for the California lawyer order.

In the end I went back to studying to try to build a career as a poet. My master in creative writing led to a doctorate in American literature and the nomadic life of the academic: I teached in Princeton, at the University of Tel Aviv (thanks to a Fulbright bag), the Reed College and the University of Massachusetts in Amherst , before finally obtaining an indefinite place at Stern College, which allowed me to combine my love for writing and literature with the my love for Judaism.

While I was trying to write and publish enough to complete my qualifications, get stable employment and conquer the chair, my wife and I had three children: one male and two females. Our third daughter was born just before I started commuting between Massachusetts and my new job in Stern, in August 2003.

My first book of poems, alternatives to history, came out that autumn; The second, The Book of Anna, was published three years later, in 2006, and added enough weight to my curriculum to allow me to apply for the early chair.

Getting the chair in advance had been my goal from the beginning of the doctorate: it was the only way in which I could imagine keeping a growing family and citing university debts that resembled a mortgage. But when Anna was published, the anxiety for growing debt was blurred by a fear of a completely different type.

The transsexuality that I had tried to hide since childhood was slowly making my life impossible. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't think of anything but my kind. I knew it was just a matter of time before I could no longer live like a man.

If I had not obtained the chair - and with it the protection of a job for life - before my transsexuality became evident, I would have remained without work and my homeless family.

Stern is the female college of Yeshiva University, the main academic institution of modern Orthodox Judaism, and Orthodox Judaism, like most traditional religions, considers the things that we trans do to adapt our bodies to our souls sins.

In my case, these sins included wearing female clothes and taking hormones that had made my irreversibly compromised fertility. I was also violating gender customs and conceptions which, although not prescribed by Jewish law, are supported with religious conviction by many Orthodox Jews - me who, I was sure, would have made it impossible for Yeshiva University to continue to use me.

The chair arrived just in time, in June 2007, after a semester in which I had fought to get to the bottom of the lessons without collapsing in tears or losing the senses.

Even if obtaining the chair was the crowning of fifteen years of struggle to establish myself in the academic world, I did not make me happy. My gender identity crisis had destroyed my marriage, broken my family and made me an unwanted stranger in my own house. Within a few weeks, I found myself living in the first of a series of rooms for rent.

My children were struggling, angry and disoriented by the double blow: the end of their happy family and the inexplicable transformation of the father they loved.

A couple of weeks after getting the chair, I wrote to the principal to inform him of my transition. Stern's response was Chiara: while keeping me on the payroll, the university prohibited me to set foot on the campus.

My "involuntary research leave", as they called it, was the most courteous and well financed form of discrimination that could be imagined. But it was still discrimination.

Cut out of the students I loved, expelled from the vocation I had worked so hard to master, I felt wounded in a difficult way to explain; I could not shake off the feeling that it was my fault, that I was too repugnant to be seen on the campus.

Like many other trans people, I was paying a very high price - home, family, friends, work - for the dream come true that I am finally myself.

But just when I started accepting my exile as Stern as definitive, a miracle happened.

When my lawyers asked that I was allowed to return to teaching the autumn semester of 2008 - a request they thought would be rejected - the university replied yes.

We passed the summer to negotiate the conditions, including the use of the bathrooms (I was allowed to access only the unisex ones and to a single location for the disabled).

In the end, September came. And with it, my first happy day after a long time.

After years of hiding places and fictions, I finally was about to be in front of my students and colleagues like the person - the woman - whom I knew I was.

And, even more important, after centuries of intolerance, an institution representing Orthodox Judaism was about to openly welcome a transgender teacher.

* Joy Ladin He is an American poet and essayist, known for having been the first openly transgender teacher in an Orthodox Jewish institution. He has published twelve books, including the autobiography "Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Beteween Genders" (2012) and "The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from Acturender Perspective" (2018). His works explore issues related to gender identity and spirituality, offering a unique perspective that combines personal experience and literary analysis.

Original text:A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Stern College