Joy Ladin (born March 24, 1961) is an American poet and the former David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at Stern College for Women at Yeshiva University.
[4] Ladin has described intuiting her girlhood at a young age, viewing her assigned male identity as "false" as a child.
Ten years later, Ladin decided she wanted to pursue poetry full time, and attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst for her MFA.
"[10] This work emerged when Ladin gave herself a "writing assignment" to creatively engage with the "how-to" rhetoric of mainstream femininity.
[12] For this collection, she wrote A Bridge on Account of Sex: A Trans Woman Speaks to Susan B. Anthony on the 100th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment.
[14] In the book, she asserts that she is "old-fashioned – a garden-variety transsexual, rather than a post-modernist shape-shifter,” a claim which led critics to contrast her memoir with Kate Bornstein's.
[15] Her memoir describes her family life, her transition, and her religious faith, including her perception that her "gender identity crisis had destroyed [her] marriage."
[17] In 2018, Ladin published her first full-length academic monograph, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective (Brandeis University Press).