Ladin vividly describes forty years of gender dysphoria, of feeling disembodied, detached, dehumanized. 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. ‘Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey between Genders’ by Joy Ladin
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |