In many ways, it got worse: her wife and children rejected her, her suicidal ideation intensified, and for a time she lost everything.Īnd yet, even without the redemptive last chapter which gives the book its title, one can still say that even if life got harder when she transitioned, it also, at least, began. For Ladin, life didn’t get better when she began her gender transition in 2007. Joy Ladin’s lyrical and thoughtful new memoir, Through the Door of Life, adds another before-and-after metaphor to the mix, and yet its searing narrative undercuts any such simplifications. And yet, like our other metaphors – Coming Out, Transitioning – It Gets Better suggests a linearity that is at odds with LGBTQ experience, even as it also, helpfully, offers hope. We queers know this we know that sometimes it gets worse before it gets better, and that sometimes, it gets worse again, and that other times, some days you just have to get through one at a time. “It Gets Better” is an oversimplification.

Ladin's poignant memoir takes us from the death of living as the man she knew she wasn't, to the shattering of family and career that accompanied her transition, to the new self, relationships, and love she finds when she opens the door of life.‘Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey between Genders’ by Joy Ladin We stare with her into the mirror as she asks herself how the new self she is creating will ever become real. We look over her shoulder as she learns to walk and talk as a woman after 40-plus years of walking and talking as a man. 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. Ladin recounts her struggle to reconcile the pain of her experience living as the 'wrong' gender with the pain of her children in losing the father they love.

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. In Through the Door of Life, Joy Ladin takes listeners inside her transition as she changed genders and, in the process, created a new self. 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.

Through the Door of Life by Joy Ladin