It is so cool how all of my classes seem to be overlapping this semester and I am really looking forward to the body of work that it is going to produce for me as a reflection on my last semester as a college student.
Here is the assignment I have written and submitted about Dr. Joy Ladin:
She’s
the Man
“My kids call me daddy”, Dr. Joy Ladin said,
talking about her young children since she made the transition from man to
woman in 2007. After feeling trapped in the wrong body for decades, Ladin changed
everything. “I was a good man”, she said. Though, to her, that meant being a
bad person. On October Second, Ladin, English Professor at Yeshiva University
and author of seven books, spoke to USF students about her relationship with
herself, her God, and the world, reading excerpts from her autobiography and
creating a dialogue with the audience, as well.
Growing up as a Reformed
Jew, Ladin said she was drawn to Orthodox Judaism and felt a special
relationship with her version of God and the Jewish scriptures of the Torah. She
is the first openly transgender person to be employed by an Orthodox Jewish
institution. To many, her transgendered-ness and Judaism are mutually
exclusive, yet Ladin read and continues to read the Torah, her way. While the
Talmud, Torah and Judaism itself, alienated her, it also comforted her a great
deal. She said that a lot of trans children feel a closeness to God because God
has no physical body, so the sense of being created in the image of God really
resonated with her. Also, she believes that since God made her, she is
therefore accepted for who she is and especially who she is not.
Ladin
said: “after being a persona, I wanted to become a person”. She understands her
transition in terms of learning and becoming fluent in a new language. That
language is gender, the way people understand who they are in relationship to
themselves and the world. She quoted the Talmud, saying: “If I am not for
myself, then who will be for me?” This helped her realize that she could never
actually be in a state of being until she was for herself and truly became the
woman she always knew herself to be.
The transition
that she eventually made after marrying and fathering two children, was far
from resolving the “problem” of finding a self-identity. “I had to remake
myself in the eyes of others”, she said, explaining how difficult this can be. Gender
is indeed, a performance with many parts. For instance, becoming the woman she
always knew herself to be, meant changing the clothing that she wore everyday,
shaving her facial hair and speaking with a different tone of voice.
When a student
asked her if she had changed her genitals to fully become a woman. Ladin
responded: “It’s important for me to not answer”. She acknowledged that it was
a good question and a typical one, but not natural or fair. She explained that
when she made her transition, she felt as though it was a trade for her right
to having a private self.
It
has not exactly been easy for her family, either. Ladin’s nine year-old does
not want ‘daddy’ to come to her school because she does not want to have to
explain why daddy identifies and dresses like a woman, to her friends. Ladin
does not regret or wish that she were born a woman in the first place. “If it
had been any other way, they wouldn’t exist”, she said of her children.
Her autobiography,
Through the Door of Life: A Jewish
Journey between Genders, explains that if identity is a combination of
being and becoming. While others spend a lot of time being and very little,
becoming, she said she is “always going to be a process of becoming with a
little bit of being mixed in”.
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