Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey between Genders

16. Teaching Naked - Spring 2010

Spring 2010 Iwish I could ask Rachel, the young woman sitting two feet away from me, passionately explicating a poem: “Do you know that I used to be a man?” Rachel’s eyes are glowing, kindled, as they always are, by the friction of sound and meaning. Her eyes bounce between the poem and my face, her smile—she is one of the few people I’ve met who can speak at breakneck speed while smiling—intimating her delight that she and I are on the same page, excited by the same words, scenting the same insights in the thickets of thought. This is the intimacy that first drew me to teaching, the rub of mind against mind that seemed to moot the question of gender. Reading texts with students was a kind of ecstasy, though one I paid for before and after, when I had to shrink back into the man they saw, the mask of masculinity that belied the truth we sought and made together. But now, three semesters after the end of my “involuntary research leave,” the mask is off. Rachel and my other Stern students see me as I am—or do they? In September 2008, the New York Post turned me into America’s most famous publicly Jewish, publicly transsexual professor. But my students don’t seem aware of the talks I’ve given or the essays I’ve published. The convoys of hushed undergraduates that used 214 16 Teaching Naked to hover in sight of my open office door have ceased, the students who knew me as a man have graduated, and, unlike former students, the current students don’t ask me respectful questions about transition . (The hardest question my old students asked me after my return to Stern: “Has living as a woman changed the way you read?”) My class registration has been down—my composition class only has five students this semester—but that could be the result of my reputation as a tough grader. In any case, I no longer know what my students know about me. I’m teaching naked, projecting femininity into a void, without denial or confirmation: my male mask is gone, but I can’t tell whether my students see me as a woman, a man, or something stranger. Rachel’s reading of the poem is branching, as her study of poetry always does, into reflections on God and Judaism. For her, secular studies illuminate rather than undermine her faith. Poetry always leads us to God—for both of us, it’s a natural progression— and, as our focus shifts, so do our roles. Now she is the teacher, connecting the poem to passages of Talmud, biblical commentaries, and books of Jewish theology she knows (I’m quick to admit it) I haven’t read. She shifts fluently among Hebrew, Aramaic, and English, talking so fast that it often seems as though she, like a page of Talmud, were giving text, commentary, and translation simultaneously . Both as teacher and as student, my job is to slow her down, interrupt her flood of words so that she can reflect on her stream of thought and the mind and soul mirrored in it. As my children know, I’m good at breaking the natural flow. During the summer 2008 negotiations that preceded my return to teaching, Yeshiva’s attorneys said that I would be expected to abide by the school policy that prohibits teachers from talking about their lives to students. That was absurd, as I told my lawyers: teacherstudent relationships are so intimate at Stern that, when professors are sick, students often include us in daily prayers for healing. Though discussion ended when my attorneys asked for written evidence that there was such a policy, I now find myself bound by the same concerns that prompted Yeshiva to try to limit me to academic intercourse: the fear that my students will be harmed if I speak about my life, that sharing what I’ve learned about gender Teaching Naked 215 and identity (constant subjects in our literary discussions) will distract, distress, or alienate them. When I was a man, I made a point of relating my readings of literature to my life. I wasn’t trying to be confessional; I wanted to shatter the margins around the texts, to show students that, for all the wonky academic discourse that seems to elevate...