In/verse. Joy Ladin talks about her trans identity, the bible and poetry

In the webinar “IN/VERSE on trans identity, judaism and poetry“, the poet, theologian and pioneer of Jewish queer thought Joy Ladin spoke about how her life as a trans and Jewish woman has transformed her way of reading the Bible. Not as an academic exercise, but as an act of survival.

It all comes from the Book of Jonah: the prophet's escape becomes for her the metaphor of the long resistance to being herself, the desire to die rather than face her own truth. Like Jonah in the belly of the fish, Ladin discovers a God who does not free from suffering but who "preserves it in the depths", to the point of making it capable of being reborn. His reflection intertwines story, theology and poetry: he asks whether biblical texts can still speak to those who live forms of humanity that the Bible did not foresee, to those who do not fit into the binaries of male and female.

The answer is yes, but only if we read Scripture not as a code of norms, but rather as a Story of Transformations. where God calls abraham to become something he never was, or Jonah to live what he fears, space also opens up for transgender lives: lives that change, that learn to listen to a divine voice that often contradicts the wisdom of the world.

The speech goes through experiences of loneliness, dissociation, temptations of death, and shows how poetry - together with faith - becomes the place where language can still contain pain and restore it as meaning. writing, For ladin, Is a form of grace: a way to stay alive when every other word fails. judaism, From a normative tradition, is thus transformed into a grammar of becoming, a language that can still learn new words for God and for humanity.

To read and discover other texts by Joy Ladin click on gionata.org/tag/joy-ladin

Video interview created by Alessandro Previti as part of the Cornerstone Project, coordinated by La Tenda di Gionata and co-financed by the Otto Per Mille fund of the Waldensian Church (OPM/2024/47240). An initiative that aims to collect testimonies and reflections on the inclusion of LGBT+ believing people and their families in Catholic and evangelical communities, so that "The stone that the builders rejected" becomes the "cornerstone" (Luke 20:17-18). More info at https://www.gionata.org/cornerstone/