A Best Known Jewish Tale Is A Transgender Tale

Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders

By Joy Ladin

Probably one of the best-known Jewish stories in the world is a transgender tale. A young educator realizes that they really belong with the opposite gender. And, although it overturns social convention and throws families into disarray, this young person is driven to make that gender change, eventually living full time as a member of the sex opposite to that of their birth identity. It’s a heart-warming story that has been made into a play and a musical movie. This story is, of course, “Yentl.”

The fact that you might not remember “Yentl” as a tale of a transgender young woman speaks volumes about the changes in the world over the past 100 years. In the Barbra Streisand movie, Yentl is just a girl who wants to study, so she disguises herself as a boy. She always knows she’s really a girl. But in the original short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Yentl knows she wants to study, so she thinks she therefore must be a boy. The original Yentl never goes back to being a girl. It’s an important distinction: Feminism has opened up space in women’s lives to do “boy things” but remain female. No similar movement has yet operated for men. Sadly. I can walk into a party in a trouser suit and be “so Annie Hall.” A man walking into a party in a dress is a transvestite. Women’s range of acceptable gender expression is now much wider than men’s.

A new memoir from Joy Ladin, “Through the Door of Life” — in which she describes in sometimes heart-wrenching detail her transition from Jay, the male English literature professor at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women, to Joy, the first ever openly transgender person to teach at an Orthodox Jewish institution — brought home to me repeatedly how much horrifying pressure is still put on men to perform a very narrow and limiting kind of masculinity. And the book reveals the tremendous psychological pain of having to play that role when you have a deep internal sense that you are actually a woman. Ladin managed to keep up that facade for many years (during which she married a woman and fathered three children) until she was in her 40s. That was when, after increasingly deep and violent depressive crises, she began the transition. “Through the Door of Life” details the breakdown of her marriage following this decision, the psychological battles and career problems it caused, and her tentative steps toward a still-evolving female identity.

Ladin is a lyrical writer, and there are some beautiful and moving passages in the book. She is achingly honest about her children’s difficulties in accepting that their father is now their “parent,” so honest that I sometimes wondered whether the children would be glad that this part of their life was being discussed so openly. She writes extremely well about her relationship with God — a fantastically difficult subject — evoking the numinous in rich prose, as on a summer trip with her parents in the 1960s: “… a maze of bushes bursting with blueberries… God was there for the taking, a damp cluster dangling in dimness, a thudding abundance.”

Read more about Joy Ladin and her book.

Eonism

Definition:

n. the adoption by a male of a female role, or vice versa... Eonism is named for Charles Eon de Beaumont, a French political adventurer who died in 1810 after posing as a woman for many years.

This is part of our history that most of us already know. However, it never gets old that such a promenade person had the courage to live a true life and do it with such audacity.  Where is the movie?  Thanks Ron for sending this along. 

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The extraordinary gender non-conforming 18th century spy whose royal power play made her a sensation

PinkNews - EMMA POWYS MAURICE  - JUNE 26, 2021 

Gender non-conforming people have existed for as long as humans have, but there are few whose stories can rival that of the Chevalier d’Eon.

The Chevalier d’Eon was an 18th century French diplomat, soldier, spy and intellectual who was celebrated both as a man and as a woman throughout her long and eventful life.

 Chevalier d'Eon 

Her gender expression became such a focus of fascination that the government offered a formal declaration on the matter, and at one point she couldn’t even leave her home without armed guards to stop people ripping her clothes off.

She lived a life clouded by speculation and rumors that continue to confound scholars to this day; it’s why, nearly 300 years later, she remains one of history’s most compelling figures.

Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée d’Éon de Beaumont was born in 1728 to a poor but aristocratic family in Burgundy, France.

There are many conflicting accounts surrounding her biological sex, both historical and contemporary, but it seems certain that she was assigned male at birth and raised as a boy.

Bright and articulate, she excelled in school and later secured a place in the French civil service. She steadily climbed the ranks until she became secretary to the French ambassador to Russia.

Or at least, that was the official story. Unofficially d’Eon was tapped for another royal service – a clandestine network of spies known as le Secret du Roi, or “King’s Secret”.

The Chevalier d’Eon was charged with fostering good relations with the Russian court of the Empress Elizabeth, and to covertly undermine Hapsburg power in the area.

Caricature of d’Éon
dressed half in women’s clothes,
 half in men’s clothes 

Once in Russia she got a taste of gender non-conformity at the Empress’s grand “metamorphosis balls”, where such expression was common and celebrated. By all accounts d’Eon “dazzled” in her post, but unfortunately, it didn’t last

The Chevalier d’Eon was fired for importing too much wine – but got her own back on the king in the most spectacular way.

Read the whole fascinating article...

When the French Revolution began in 1789 she lost her pension, and in 1810 she died aged 80 in poverty. She had lived as a woman for 33 years.  

Yet the Chevalier d’Eon continued to confound people even in death. Doctors who examined d’Éon’s body discovered “male organs in every respect perfectly formed”, but also feminine characteristics.