'Put This In a Museum': Israeli Trans Woman Conflicted About Hormones, Palestine Liberation

Every once in a while, something comes along that is just so perfect, it's almost ethereal. This is one of those moments.

Ita Segev is a 'transfeminine anti-Zionist Israeli interdisciplinary performance artist, writer, and advocate based in Brooklyn' and a piece they wrote back in 2018 is making the rounds in the wake of the war in Israel and Gaza.

And it's spectacular.

Put this one in a museum pic.twitter.com/pYtrHFMIuA
— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) October 16, 2023

Wow.

And before you think it's parody, it's not.

Yes folks — it’s real https://t.co/7iBh8UJagO
— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) October 16, 2023

Here's just a snippet of the article:

I am an Israeli trans woman who desperately needs Palestine to be free. I need this because I refuse to accept that the massacre of peaceful protesters in Gaza is something that my people keep doing. I need this because I understand that trans liberation and Palestinian liberation are linked.
About 10 months ago, I figured out that I wanted to start hormone replacement therapy and in that way medically transition. There were many reasons for this decision, but one of them was the realization that growing up Israeli and trans in Jerusalem while being expected to become a Zionist man left an aftermath in my body. I needed help to heal, and sensed that growing a rounder, more tender body would help me connect with the justice-loving feminine child inside of me, and that having such a body would help me grow from that soft place.
I was already grounded in my anti-Zionist Israeli identity. After I moved to New York, I was thrilled to find how the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement allowed me to work in a non-violent and tangible way under Palestinian leadership to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Yet I still secretly wished for a moment that would alleviate me from the difficulties of my past. And I decided the moment of starting hormones would be it.

And so I waited until the Jewish new year to go to my pharmacy, and start that phase in my transition. I imagined the little ritual I would do while taking that first teal colored pill — new year, new Jew, new me. But when the pharmacy handed me the bottles with my medication, I looked at the label that read “produced by Teva Pharmaceuticals” and my heart stopped.
Teva, a word meaning “nature” in Hebrew, is an Israeli-owned pharmaceutical company that I have vaguely heard about as a participant in the economy of the occupation. This must be a mistake, I thought.