Joy Ladin, Ph.D., a poet and literary scholar, academic, and nationally recognized speaker, has the distinction of being the first openly transgender professor at Yeshiva University, an Orthodox Jewish institution where she taught at the Stern School for Women. Ladin earned a Ph.D. in American Literature from Princeton University (2000), a M.F.A. in Creative Writing-Poetry from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (1995), and a B.A. in Creative Writing-Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College (1982).
She was born as Jay Ladin in 1961 to Lola and Irving Ladin in Rochester, New York. Her mother, who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family in the ghetto in Montreal, had a strong cultural sense of her Judaism. Her father grew up in a non-observant, working-class Jewish family, to parents who were union shop stewards. As adults, Ladin’s mother was a non-observant Jew who nevertheless encouraged her children to attend both Hebrew school and synagogue, and her father was an atheist.
Ladin’s Jewish identity has been important to her since childhood. Even as a child, she felt Judaism connected her to people in Israel and all around the world, to a rich past and culture, and to a future. Growing up in a non-Jewish area, Ladin gained experience being a minority that often was not understood. As a child, she was aware of another identity difference, this one relating to gender. Born in a body that outwardly identified her as a male, as far back as she could remember she inwardly identified as a female. While this did not make sense to her as a child, she struggled to figure out exactly who and what she was. Despite the male body she had been born with, and even though everyone saw her as a boy, she was convinced that was not who she was. She knew that she was female.
On her first day of preschool, she realized something was misaligned. When she showed up, she was excited to play with the other children, and ran directly to the children she saw as her peer group – girls – but they jumped up and ran away. It was clear that the girls did not see her like themselves, but as something different. Neither did she fit comfortably with boys as peers, as she never felt she understood them or identified with them.
By the time she was in first grade, she knew that she had to hide the secret of her authentic identity, because she feared that if others learned about it, they would not love her. During the 1960s, the options for transgender children were not good. Some became the subject of experiments by psychiatrists; some were institutionalized; still others were rejected and thrown out of their homes to be homeless. So, she kept her identity as a female secret, to protect both herself and her family.
Unlike her Jewish identity, which connected her people in a way that was sustaining, this other identity made her feel like she did not have anything in common with any other person. As a child, she often felt that she should not even be alive.
Because her family was not religious, Ladin had the opportunity to imagine Judaism in her own way. She read the Torah without adult supervision and was convinced that it had been written just for someone like her: someone who was invisible, unseen and misunderstood by others. As someone who often felt forgotten, she connected with God’s anger that the Israelites kept forgetting about God. When she read stories in the Torah about conflicts between God and Israel that stemmed from Israel forgetting about God, Ladin found herself siding with God.
While she did not have the language to say it as a child, she thought of God as an ”out and proud queer person” who did not fit into categories defined by people. Conversely, throughout her childhood, Ladin was too fearful of the potential consequences to confide in any other person about her authentic identity. But that would change when she went to college. Ladin met a young woman during first-year student orientation at Sarah Lawrence. They fell in love. Ladin confessed her gender identity to the young woman during their college years. She accepted Ladin’s feelings – as long as they were not outwardly expressed. After college, the two, by that time a married couple, moved to San Francisco, where Ladin worked a clerical job, writing poetry on the side. Later, when Ladin decided to pursue a master’s degree, they moved back east where she enrolled in University of Massachusetts to study creative writing with a focus in poetry.
Ladin and her wife had three children – one son and two daughters. Despite being married to a woman she loved and having three children she loved, Ladin’s struggle to suppress who she really was became increasingly difficult. Eventually the pain of denying her true self became unbearable. The breaking point came at the beginning of a school semester. One day as she walked down the hall, as a female student walked toward her, Ladin thought to herself that the young woman was probably not thinking about gender. And then she thought to herself that no one in the building, no one on the block, perhaps no one in the entire neighborhood was thinking about gender. But she thought about gender all the time. In fact, she could not stop thinking about it. And she realized just how consuming it had been, struggling to maintain a male persona her entire life, and how much effort and how much of her attention that it had taken to do so.
Ladin felt that her psyche and her soma were breaking apart. As a result, she was sick all the time and could not sleep. She had spent her entire life dissociated from a body that did not match who she knew she was. And she knew that she co uld not bear to continue that way. She decided she would kill herself rather than put her wife and children through the pain of watching her transform from male to female. She bought a life insurance policy on herself. But the policy included a clause with a two-year waiting period for suicide.
During this time, even as she counted down the days to the two-year mark, she began talking about her authentic identity to people close to her. Ladin talked to a friend in Israel who convinced her that her suicide was not in her family’s best interest and urged her to talk to a therapist. She did. And eventually, Ladin chose life. As a child, she had read about Moses, as an old man near death, imploring Israel to choose life. She related to the fact that sometimes when people have a choice between life and death, it is not always easy to choose life. It had certainly been a struggle for her.
She also talked to her wife. In college, her wife had told her that she could accept the feelings Ladin had about her gender identity – as long as she did not act on them. Now married, with three children, Ladin’s wife was still not able to be supportive of her decision to transition and live her life fully as a female. And as a heterosexual woman, she refused to remain married to Ladin if she transitioned and lived openly and publicly as a woman.
But Ladin, after considerable anguish about how the decision would impact her family, while knowing that she could no longer bear to live as a man, denying her authentic identity, made the choice to honor who she really was and to live fully into her identity. As a result, Ladin’s marriage ended. Everyone in the family suffered, and Ladin’s relationship to her children is still complicated.
Her transition also threatened her position at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women. When Ladin wrote to the Dean about her transition, she was placed on paid leave and barred from being on campus. In Ladin’s memoir, she called this “the best-funded and most courteous form of discrimination imaginable.” The exile was short-lived, however: Ladin returned to the classroom just months later thanks to the efforts of her legal counsel. However, her return to campus was not universally welcomed. One of her colleagues, a professor of biology at Yeshiva University, asserted that Ladin was not a woman, but “a male with enlarged breasts.” Ladin also acknowledges that some students avoided her, and enrollment in her courses at Stern was half what it was prior to her coming out.
Ladin is an acclaimed writer. Her memoir, Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey between Genders, was a 2012 finalist for the National Jewish Book Award for Biography, Autobiography, or Memoir. Ladin’s book of trans theology, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective, was a finalist for the 2018 Lambda Literary Award. She has also authored twelve books of poetry, including The Book of Anna, which won the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, and Impersonation, a 2015 Lambda Literary Award Finalist. Her poem “Letter to My Body” became a poetry film through a collaboration with filmmaker Elyse Kelly. In addition, she has published one book-length literary study, Soldering the Abyss: Emily Dickinson and Modern American Poetry, and numerous literary essays.
Ladin has given more than 120 talks and interviews on trans theology; trans and Jewish identity; and poetry and trans poetics at seminaries, conferences, and on radio and podcasts. Ladin left her position at the Stern College for Women in 2021, because of myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome, which prohibited her from continuing to teach.
Joy Ladin now lives with her wife, Elizabeth Denlinger, a curator at the New York Public Library, in New York City.
Through her memoir, her other writings, and sharing her story widely, Ladin has become a source of inspiration and affirmation to transgender people – and particularly transgender Jews – as they seek congruity and harmony between their faith and their gender identities.
(This biographical statement was written by Shelly Rae Adams for a Queer & Trans Theologies class at the United Theological Seminary in the Twin Cities in the fall of 2023. Information for this profile taken from Joy Ladin’s memoir, Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey between Genders, and her interview with Rabbi Eliot Cosgrove of Park Avenue Synagogue: Containing Multitudes: Gender, Identity, and Judaism on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21fCZjrH1Pk)
Biography Date: September 2024
“Dr. Joy Ladin | Profile”, LGBTQ Religious Archives Network, accessed October 14, 2024, https://lgbtqreligiousarchives.org/profiles/joy-ladin.