Summary Of The Stranger By Joy Ladin

Judaism, whose main scripture is the Torah, is the oldest of the three Abrahamic religions and was crucial in establishing the gender binary seen in the world today, as well providing the foundation to understanding gender in today’s world. Joy Ladin, an Orthodox Jewish and transgender woman, explores this interpretation of the Torah in her book, “The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective.” Through this excerpt, Ladin explores the creation story in Genesis and how it laid out the foundations for the gender binary human society experiences today. She begins with her own definition of gender, naming it as something more than the physiological differences in male and female bodies, saying it is, “this [different]

This relationship explains the dichotomy of male and female that traditional Jews hold true, as men are never seen as women and women are never seen as men, but as Ladin later explains, this definition excludes a lot of complexities. Like the intricacies and differences in gender and the human experience, light and darkness have complicated electromagnetic definitions that overlap one another, so distinguishing genders by physical traits, oversimplifies what humans experience. Ladin explains that this simplification of gender is appealing because it provides a catch-all term that makes people feel included, using herself as an example by sharing, “however poorly binary gender categories may fit me (and when I was a male, I knew I wasn’t, they fit me very poorly indeed), being seen as male or female is better than being alone,” showcasing how even when the label clearly did not apply, it was easier, and safer, than being ostracized by her community. To her, the Torah does not lay out the definitions for the gender binary, it is the key in understanding why transgender people need to label themselves as