Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey between Genders

1. Introduction: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Stern College - September 2008

September 2008 If I am not for myself, who is for me? If I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, when? Rabbi Hillel, Pirkei Avot 1:14 It was a beautiful New York September day, sunny, warm but not hot, with a sky so blue it seemed to laugh at the hardnosed realism of the skyscrapers thrusting into it. As I walked south from Grand Central to begin the fall 2008 semester at Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University, I smiled into every face I could, eager to share the fact that miracles can happen. I was a miracle, my walk was a miracle, and even the most dubious citizen of this most skeptical of cities would have to admit that the job toward which I was walking was a certifiable miracle. I hadn’t done much smiling since I began my transition from living as a man to living as a woman, a process that had shaken and shattered nearly every aspect of my life. Though my gender had felt wrong as long as I can remember, I had grown up as a more or less normal boy in upstate New York, graduated early from high school, and went to Sarah Lawrence College in search of people who were as obsessed with poetry and intellectual conversation as I was. During freshman orientation, I met the woman with whom I would spend the next quarter of a century. 7 1 Introduction A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Stern College After graduation and a few weeks on the cheap in Europe, we moved to San Francisco, got married, and shared a decade of bad apartments and young-writer angst while I worked at The State Bar of California. Eventually, I went back to school in search of a career as a poet. My MFA in creative writing led to a PhD in American literature and to the life of a wandering academic. I taught at Princeton, Tel Aviv University (on a Fulbright scholarship), Reed College, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst before I finally landed a tenure-track job at Stern that enabled me to combine my love of writing and literature with my love of Judaism. As I struggled to write and publish enough to complete degrees, get jobs, and earn tenure, my wife and I had three children, a son and two daughters. Our third was born right before I started commuting from our home in Massachusetts to my new job at Stern in August 2003. My first book of poetry, Alternatives to History, appeared that fall; my second, The Book of Anna, came out three years later, in 2006, and added enough weight to my CV to enable me to apply for early tenure. Early tenure had been my goal since I started my PhD; it was the only way I could imagine supporting a growing family and mortgage-size student loans. But by the time Anna was published, my anxiety about mounting debt was eclipsed by a different kind of fear. The transsexuality I had fought to hide since I was a child was slowly making life unlivable. Unable to eat, unable to sleep, unable to think about anything but gender, I knew that it was only a matter of time before I could no longer live as a man. If I didn’t receive tenure—and the protection of lifetime employment— before my transsexuality became apparent, I would be out of a job and my family would be out on the street. Stern is the women’s college of Yeshiva University, modern Orthodox Judaism’s premier institution of higher learning, and Orthodox Judaism, like most traditional forms of religion, considers the things transsexuals do to fit our bodies to our souls to be sins. In my case, those sins included wearing women’s clothing and taking hormones that destroyed my fertility. I was also violating customs and conceptions of gender that, while not mandated by Jewish law, are held to with religious conviction by many Orthodox Introduction 8 Jews—and that, I was sure, would make it impossible for Yeshiva University to continue to employ me. Tenure came just in time, in June 2007, after a semester during which I struggled to get through classes without either sobbing or passing out. Although tenure was the triumphant culmination of my fifteen-year fight to establish...