What do you do when you're drawn to religion despite the fact that your religion wants to reform you, ...We get to listen in on her side of the conversation.
.... Ladin's 13-year-old son finally seems ready to accept that his father is transgender,....
At the same time, this memoir is also a tale of actualization. Ladin shares details of feminizing her appearance -- shaving her beard, growing out her hair, learning through trial-and-error how to apply makeup, shopping for affordable women's clothes, training her voice. She reveals the awkwardness as well as the thrill of learning, as a middle-aged woman who had previously been a married heterosexual man, how to date women. Her children still call her "Daddy," but they come to accept her, and her son becomes a LGBT ally at his high school.
As Ladin points out, the rabbis have interpreted circumcision as a procedure that "perfects" the penis. God deliberately left a little extra skin so that Jewish men could remove it and thereby perform a ritual in which their genitals become a physical sign of their true identity. "From a trans perspective," she writes, "this is a radical teaching. If an operation to alter genitalia is necessary to bring the male Jewish body into conformity with the Jewish soul, then God long ago acknowledged that medical intervention may be necessary for human beings to achieve their true identities." article by Leora Tanenbaum
But what does GOD say- He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD. Deuteronomy 23:1 If God takes it that serious about mutilation of your gender...How much more serious to VOLUNTARILY do it?
