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Choosing Life

2014; Duke University Press; Volume: 1; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/23289252-2815156

2328-9260

Maxine L. Grossman,

Ethics and Legal Issues in Pediatric Healthcare

Midway through a memoir of transition that is at once rueful, humorous, profound, and a touch evasive, Joy Ladin reflects on a notable experience from her childhood. She is seven years old and has gone berry picking with her family. Surrounded by buzzing bees and “a maze of bushes bursting with blueberries,” she understands that God is “there for the taking. … It was all so clear,” she writes, “but no one seemed to know it. It was a secret, and it was my job to tell it, to tell the truth about the world we were living in, the God we were living with” (170). The responsibility is too much for a small child to bear, and the moment passes into her memory as a failure of nerve. “God was there, beyond a doubt,” she writes, “but I was missing in action” (171).In Through the Door of Life, Ladin repeatedly revisits questions of absence and presence, life and death. A poet and a professor of English and creative writing, Ladin is the only out trans faculty member at Yeshiva University, an institution that identifies itself as exemplifying Torah Umadda (“Torah and secular knowledge”), “melding the ancient traditions of Jewish law and life with the heritage of Western civilization” (Yeshiva University 2014). She came out to her university's administration shortly after receiving early tenure in spring 2007. Her memoir opens in the fall of 2008, with her return to teaching after a year-long involuntary paid leave, and then pivots back to tell the story of her decision to come out, the breakup of her marriage and family, and the beginning of a new period in which she chose to accept the responsibility of presence over absence—in the words of the biblical book of Deuteronomy, to “choose life” over its opposite.For Ladin, such a choice was neither easy nor obvious. Her memories of childhood include a series of moments that all contributed to her self-understanding as a girl who presented as a boy and who had to learn to wear “the façade of maleness and betray what he was within” (25). A consequence of this tension was the pattern she developed, of neglecting and punishing the masculine physical body in which she was trapped. “Hurting himself felt good,” she writes of that little boy's experience. “It was a kind of revenge on the body that was always hurting him, and a kind of freedom, a way of showing how little he and his body meant to each other” (25). Thoughts of suicide and practices of self-harm continued for Ladin into early adulthood, as cycles of repeated “gender breakdowns” were followed by periods of self-punishment: “After one breakdown, I ended a fifteen-cup-a-day coffee habit overnight; after another, I resolved to eat only when someone else offered me food. Being a man became a gulag of neurotic compulsions. I was the only guard, the only prisoner, the frozen ground and the barbed wire fence. Give up, I told myself. There is no escape” (39).As someone who had first heard of Ladin in the context of her role as “the first openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution” (as her book bio frames it), I was especially curious to understand her relationship to a particular type of American Jewish community. Films like Trembling Before G-d and Keep Not Silent have created a public space in which “Orthodox” and “LGBT” identity can mix—for perhaps the first time in explicit, public Jewish discourse—and I expected to see Ladin addressing a specific set of Jewish ritual concerns: would she continue to count within a minyan (religious prayer quorum) after transitioning or would she continue to put on tefillin (phylacteries) during daily prayer? But Ladin's questions stand mostly outside the realm of halakhah, Jewish law and the gendered practices it entails. Instead, Ladin's spiritual autobiography—revealed directly and indirectly through the course of her memoir—reflects a postdenominational diversity of American Jewish experiences: participation in Friday night Shabbat services at the Greenwich Village Temple; travel to Jerusalem and visits to the Wailing Wall (as she calls it) with her wife and children; and a religious background provided by a rationalist atheist Jewish father, a mother who participated in Jewish tradition but “was noncommittal about why,” and a childhood of Sabbath synagogue services spent in the company of her community's “old, heavily accented, reflexively Orthodox men” (83).Ladin's engagement with Jewish tradition is richly textured and, in the best possible sense, challenging. She opens her memoir, wonderfully without apology, by rethinking the meaning and practice of the Jewish Shehekheyanu (“that you have preserved my life”) blessing. Traditionally reserved for periodic special occasions (like the eating of the first fruit of a new season), the prayer thanks God for allowing the person to have survived to participate once more in an infrequent ritual. Ladin changes both the functionality and the periodicity of the blessing, by reciting it each morning while taking her daily doses of estrogen and progesterone. The recitation thus serves two purposes, both marking the sanctity of her posttransition body and also recognizing—each day, and not merely occasionally—the miracle of her life as a woman. She does similar spiritual work with the traditional morning blessings that require men to thank God for making them men, while requiring women to thank God “for making me according to your will.” These blessings have long been a thorn in the side of religiously observant Jewish feminists, who note the ugly superiority of the first blessing and the dismissiveness of the second, which assumes that women must live with their subordinate status because that's simply how God made them. For Ladin, of course, the first blessing formed a kind of repeated abuse—that she should thank God each morning for causing her to appear to be the gender she knew herself not to be; her embrace of the second blessing in its place, in contrast, serves as celebratory confirmation of the God-given origins of her correct gender identity.Two themes in particular make this an explicitly Jewish memoir. The first is Ladin's engagement with what is perhaps the most famous ethical observation within the Jewish tradition, Hillel's tripartite query: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” (15–18). The answers to these questions are found, she asserts, “not through one magic ‘Yes!’ but through innumerable, sometimes agonizing decisions, choices, commitments” (17). The greatest of those decisions, the one that provides the other primary theme of this volume, is the decision to “choose life.” She writes with passion of her childhood encounter with this choice, in the old Hertz edition of the Torah (Pentateuch) that was found in so many twentieth-century American synagogues. The book of Deuteronomy—traditionally Moses's last speech to the people of Israel, before his death and their entry into the land—includes his challenge to them, at Deut. 30:19:I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day:I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse.Therefore choose life, that you and your seed may live. (83)For Ladin—who had known herself to be “different” from her preschool years, and transsexual from the age of eight (when she encountered the term in a magazine of her mother's)(26)—these words were transformative. The text, after all, does not expect people to simply live life or to accept life but, rather, to choose it, and for that choice to be a hard one. As Ladin puts it,Ladin's reading of Deuteronomy, and her treatment of Moses as its traditional author/speaker, is a delight. Both he and God come alive as characters with personalities—and not always nice ones—in Ladin's poetic imagination and spiritual journey. “No wonder God almost killed him on the road to Egypt,” she continues a page later. “Not only because of the gall of a shepherd cold-shouldering an offer from God—but because Moses wouldn't willingly choose life unless the only alternative was death” (84).Ladin, too, and in her own words, displays a problematic unwillingness to choose life over death, and her confusion of the two makes for lively, tense reading through the course of her memoir. Suicide is an ever-present option for her, from earliest childhood until the very moments when she begins her transition. The purchase in 2005 of a life-insurance policy with a two-year “no suicide” clause provides a time-stamp for that decision. “If I killed myself too soon, my family wouldn't get a cent,” she writes. “I started counting down the weeks.” Ultimately, though, she experiences a shift in perspective, from “turning death into a way of life” (85) to allowing the death of her earlier existence to make room for the life that would follow: “You can kill Jay,” a “voice of self-preservation” tells her at last, “but you can't hurt Joy” (88).The person of “Jay,” and the prison in which he is trapped for more than forty years, is bounded on all sides by foundational relationships: a loving marriage of nearly a quarter-century's duration; three articulate and intensely adored children; a successful career; and a commitment to community and the community's shared values. Ladin's treatment of these relationships makes for potent and sometimes painful reading.Ladin describes her relationship with her children in the frankest of tones. The kids come across as almost preternaturally articulate, especially her elder daughter: “ ‘Now you'll tell me you love me,’ she would say, her seven-year-old voice dripping with the sarcasm of a bitter fifty-year-old. ‘Now you'll say whatever I feel is okay.’ She would stop, smile horribly, and laugh. ‘But then, everything you say is a lie’ ” (90). The problem of love is one that Ladin addresses head-on, ultimately realizing that what matters is not whether her children love her (which she cannot, in any case, control) but whether she can continue to love them in spite of all that she is putting them through. So she plays outdoor war games with her son and allows him to bully her and “train” her for battle, in ways that eventually gain his grudging respect. She commits herself to the family relationship in whatever form it might take, reciting episodes of Smallville during rides in the car, offering them food and love, and living with their rejection of all she has to offer. It's impossible to read this book and not wonder where those children are now—Ladin's son turned twenty this past spring; her daughters are fourteen and ten (31)—and where they stand in relation to this parental love.Ladin's treatment of her now ex-wife manages to strike a fine balance between the tolerance and understanding borne of guilt and a frankness that appears to stem from long-brewing frustration. While acknowledging the profound lie at the heart of their twenty-five year relationship, Ladin insists that she made her gender identity clear from early in the relationship. In return, she writes,Ladin seems to recognize her ex-wife's experience of suffering, misery, and loss. Accounts of their conversations, though, portray her in a rather unattractive light: “ ‘I hope you'll be happy,’ she says. ‘I hope you'll be happy, knowing that you've destroyed four lives to walk around in a dress' ” (37). External to this memoir there is a larger story, one in which Ladin's ex-wife has written a memoir of her own (Sex Changes: A Memoir of Marriage, Gender, and Moving On [2012]) and maintains a blog of the same title (Benvenuto 2014), and in which accusations of harassment and hostility have played out both online and in person (apparently police had to be called after an altercation at a reading). Especially in situations as fraught as this, memoiristic representations of other people can be partial and even unfair. But a cursory read of the blog Sex Changes suggests at minimum that Ladin has captured her ex's tone and perspective with convincing verisimilitude.This is not to say that Ladin always comes across as fair, realistic, or even ethical in this book. Her relationship with Annie, a graduate student in her twenties who becomes her first female friend and a kind of one-woman support network early in Ladin's transition (and while Ladin is still married and living at home) seems dangerously close to an emotional affair, and it is most certainly an example of leaning too hard on someone with too-limited resources (“She emailed me multiple times a day; spoke to me daily on the phone, drove herself to the edge of nervous breakdown in an effort to keep me going” [32]). Similarly curious is the reference to her midtransition experience of “being thrown, for no reason I could understand, out of a house I'd been invited to live in” (189). But for the most part, Ladin owns up to her choices, even the more horrifying ones, such as when she knowingly betrays her son's trust in an effort to win points in an argument with his mother: “without regard for his safety, without respect for the risk he had taken in speaking of what was so difficult for him” (139). She is thoughtful, too, in recalling an interaction with her daughter's doctor that leads her wife to “hiss, … ‘But I guess I shouldn't be surprised. No matter what's going on, it's always about you’ ” (137).A memoir is indeed always about its author, but another set of primary relationships hovers just beneath the surface of the story, and Ladin addresses it directly in chapter 12, “The Day My Father Died.” Ladin's father serves as something of an invisible unmoved mover in the book. Like God, he never justifies his actions, and like God, his actions are treated as sometimes incomprehensible: “by the time I was twenty-two, my father had disowned me completely—he never told anyone why” (104). One wonders how much of their tension was related to ordinary parent-child conflicts and how much to unspoken tensions with regard to gender identity. “Once he told me that, if I couldn't be honest with him, I couldn't be his son and that, since he didn't need any more friends, he had nothing more to say to me” (117). Ladin tells the story of traveling home as a young adult to try to force a confrontation, only to send this panicked father fleeing to his car in bathrobe, pajamas, and slippers. Tinges of humor color the pathos of the story, but without reducing its traumatic effect. Ladin's relationship with God is equally fraught but ultimately more satisfying, if only because the silence that meets her attempts to communicate is at least an articulate silence and not a blank turning away. As Ladin remarks, if God by and large responds to her pleas with silence, it's at least the case that “God's silence comes in many varieties” (166).Ladin's career is another wall of the prison that must be broken down in order to set her free, and the results of this rupture are treated in surprisingly irenic terms. Yes, Yeshiva does suspend her from teaching after she comes out as trans, and yes, it takes a lawsuit to get her back on the faculty. Yes, too, the New York Post is able to locate a colleague to say nasty things about her gender identity and to assert (against the classical rabbinic evidence, I would argue) that “there is just no leeway in Jewish law for a transsexual” (14). But Ladin also writes glowingly of her dean's behavior toward her at their first meeting after her announcement: “The dean's face, as always, was frank and focused. She rose, smiling, and offered me her hand. ‘You look lovely,’ she said. ‘I wasn't sure what to expect’ ” (218). On her return to campus a year later, Ladin writes, it is the ordinariness of it all that strikes her as most amazing, the sight of her office and her desk, “heaped with the same stacks of papers, … but the name beside the door said, ‘Dr. Joy Ladin.’ It was a miracle. I—the real me—was here, in plain sight.” And again, “Here, in the heart of the Orthodox Jewish world, a transwoman was neither a curiosity nor a monstrosity; I was just another middle-aged woman going about her business” (10).Teaching at an all-women's Orthodox Jewish university is one thing for a male-presenting Jewish professor, whatever his gender identity, and something else entirely for a professor who presents as a woman. Ladin writes with surprise and appreciation of her students' responses to her, both during her suspension and after her return to full-time teaching. Midway through her year away, she writes, a group of students asked to meet with her off-campus. “None of us knew the etiquette for this kind of encounter, and none of us was prepared for how quickly we relaxed with one another” (220). However, “because I didn't look transgender, they responded to me as they responded to other women.” Ladin then continues, “There was something they just had to ask me they said, when we were all settled around the table. One young woman looked hesitantly at another, and finally one of them said it: ‘Are men really as bad as they seem on dates?’ ” (221). The return to teaching poetry in the classroom is similarly sweet, and Ladin writes movingly of the student she calls “Rachel,” who comes alive in poetic discussions and accepts Ladin's transition as a fait accompli.In reading this book, I initially found it remarkable that Ladin could be a successful poet while chaining off so many aspects of her consciousness and self-identity. But as she demonstrates, a feel for words and imagery can be potent even—or perhaps especially—in settings where some strong feelings are off-limits. At the time of her transition, Ladin writes, “My solitude was like an emotional echo chamber. It reverberated with griefs and longings, anguish and excitement I couldn't share. I was stunned by the intensity of all this emotion. Did people, real people, feel all the time? Feelings had always come to me singly, over great distances, arriving like dusty messengers exhausted by the effort of reaching the remote country in which I lived” (110). Ladin's poetic vision can be searing, even shocking, in its rawness, as in chapter 7, “Choosing Life,” but she can also show a remarkably light touch, as in chapter 6, “Truth,” which bubbles with laughter, both nervous and light-hearted. On answering an acquaintance's questions on a lunch date that was also a test-drive of her new gender status: “Not only did I not go to an all-girl school; I only recently started to use all-girl bathrooms” (75). And concerning a thrift-shopping adventure that finds her unable to escape the clutches of a lovely lemon-yellow dress, which she very much wants to buy even though it is several sizes too small: “There are some battles a transsexual has to fight alone. … I was trapped in a femininity I could neither fit nor escape. In a way, the dress was me, after all” (101).Ultimately, the great contribution of Ladin's memoir is to awaken readers at the level of imagination and vision—not only at the level of political consciousness or empathetic awareness. Life, Ladin argues, is snarled up in death in ways that bring the choice of one painfully close to the experience of the other. Thus, she writes, in describing her separation from her wife and her departure from their shared home: “I'm leaving my children, I said. And therefore choose life. I'm abandoning my family. And therefore choose life. I don't really exist. And therefore choose life. … I can't stand the pain. And therefore choose life. I need to die. And therefore choose life …” (95). The choice is not an easy one to make, but neither is it a mere option. “Transition isn't progress,” Ladin asserts. “It's necessity. I didn't choose transition because I thought it would make me happy; I did it because I had to” (189). Readers will find much to enjoy, to laugh over, and yes, to question, in this poignant, challenging, and evocative example of the choice of life over death and struggle over passive acceptance.