Joy Ladin

A home in oneself That’s a really great question. I want to back up to it because when I — most of my life, even though I didn’t fit in the “you’re either a man or woman” system, that was still the only system that I had access to. So when I thought about gender transition, I did articulate that to myself as becoming a woman, but through a lot of kind of agonizing reflection and experience and really crucially through discussions with my now ex-wife while we were still married. She pointed out things that are very true, which is that you can’t have a male body and live for 40-plus years as a man and be socialized male and ever become a woman in the sense that somebody who’s born and socialized and lives as a woman, as a female, is. And that’s just — that may sadden me. Whatever, it doesn’t matter how I feel about it; it really is true. And when I started publishing about this, some of the comments — I know we’re never supposed to read comments online — but some of the really hurtful comments also really taught me a lot. They taught me women across the political spectrum, from deeply conservative to kind of radical feminists, were saying the same thing.