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For as far back as she can remember, Joy Layden says her body didn't match her soul.

Her story sheds unusual light on how gender shapes the lifelong work of being at home in ourselves.

In her mid-40s, Joy Layden transitioned from male to female identity.

She became the first openly transgender professor at an Orthodox Jewish institution.

Joy Layden unsparingly admits the pain this caused for people and institutions she loved.

And it was an incremental imperfect process.

Hormones transformed her appearance though not her midlife vocal cords.

Still, she knows what it is to move through the world with the assumed authority of a man and the assumed vulnerability of a woman.

We take in what she's learned about gender and the very syntax of being.

In a very literal sense, my deepest self was something that could only be manifested superficially in the most superficial way, literally putting on makeup.

I needed to see myself first of all, just to be visible at all. I had no idea what I looked like.

So the external was my gateway into a whole bunch of self-defining, things that normally we think of as proceeding from the inside and working their way out.

I'm Christa Tippett and this is on being.

I spoke with Joy Layden in 2013.

She's recently published a new book called The Soul of the Stranger, reading God and Torah from a transgender perspective.

She is the David and Ruth goddessman professor of English at Stern College for Women of Yashiva University.

She was born Jay Layden in upstate New York.

Jay married his college love, fathered three beloved children, and became a tenured professor.

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