Prepare for a tempest in a teapot everyone – The NY Post is reporting that YU has hired a transgendered professor. Well, not exactly ‘hired’. Two years ago English professor Jay Ladin (biologically a male), announced he was getting a sex change to become a woman. YU placed him on leave, although ultimately YU allowed prof Ladin’s return for “legally motivated” reasons. This semester Joy Ladin returned to YU to continue teaching.

As can be expected, this has gotten a lot of people very worked up. (YU is even worried about alumni donations dropping). What I can’t understand is why. Why are we (20th century American Orthodox Jews) so incapable of discussing these issues? Every time I’ve seen an American Orthodox rabbi asked a serious question about this they usually try to simply dismiss the issue as either irrelevant or in impossible confrontation with Judaism, and therefore not even worth discussing. The talmud clearly has no problem discussing issues related to non-standard sex and gender. There are countless discussions of people of non-standard sex/gender, anal sex, and even technique. (See nedarim 20 for a small sample). On the other side of the pond, none other than the Tzitz Eliezer himself has ruled that a sex change is halakhically valid since it’s the external organs which determine sex from a halakhic perspective. On this side of the pond we get categorical dismissal of the entire situation by simply saying that Prof. Ladin is “a woman with enlarged breasts”. Trying to dismiss or ignore the issue may work in the short term, but in the long term it just doesn’t work.

As a side note, Reform Jews have a prayer for getting a sex change.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 7:45 am by Ari and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.