Breaking the Gender Covenant | On Being.

and

Gender and the Syntax of Being: Identity and Transition (a podcast)

Can I just…say…wow.

Joy Ladin has shared some incredibly important and significant ideas at the link above.  I have read her book

Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey between Genders

It is incredibly moving, deafeningly poetic and lyrical, and it captured my life as very few accounts have been able to.

In the article I am linking to, I can assure you that she gets it right, and while I never was forced to break the gender covenant with my wife, it has happened to me in other areas to the extent that I can verify her words as true in my own life too.

So…Constance:  it goes without saying that it is the right thing to be kind to transgender people, to be kind to everyone…but there is a deeper reason that I post this.  Are you able to read this article, synthesize out of it the core issues of becoming, and then find a way to apply them into your own life and experience?

There are ways that you too are “transgender”.  Oh no, I am not talking here about biology and the mind-body dichotomy.  Rather, I am talking about you the spirit inside you the body, and ways that this is often just not a good fit…you yearn for something more, something beyond.

I am talking about you the entity in this world, as if you the entity is your “internal sense of gender” and the world is “your exterior genitalia”…there are times when the fit is so wrong and so alien that you feel as if you would explode.

That is the place that is of greatest interest to me, Constance…because it is in that place that you and me and all of us are on the same sojourn to congruence and wholeness.