Mick Hartley

An interesting piece in the JC from Maia - a woman who emigrated to Israel from California, where she'd convinced herself that she was a man born in the wrong body. Then she had an epiphany. As told to Nicole Lampert:

On October 7, when the sirens started going off in Jerusalem, I was in a panic. It was clear that something was seriously wrong but, also, I knew I wouldn’t have time to get my breast binder on.

Even as I was under this existential threat, I was worried about people realising I was a woman. But I had to run to get to a bomb shelter and I had to put the other fear aside.

And as I ran, for the first time in my adult life I felt my body move naturally. It was at that moment that I realised everything I thought I believed about myself, that I was a man born in the wrong body, one who was waiting to get my breasts removed and to start taking testosterone, and then everything would be normal, was wrong.

Today, as I try to cope with the trauma of losing friends to terrorism, I am also slowly recovering from the trauma of what I did to myself, from the repercussions of binding my breasts for seven years. I realise that I need to speak out, to stop other women like me – butch lesbians – from making the same mistake….

So I went to study in Israel and I really lived my best life there. I already spoke Russian and English, I’d learnt Arabic at school (sponsored by Qatar) and now I was learning Hebrew too. Outside of my studies I got very involved in the peace movement, and was friends with both Jews and Arabs who thought I was as a guy. I earned money as a cleaner and caretaker, wearing a kippah and tzitzit while I worked in strictly Orthodox homes. I became intent on becoming an Israeli citizen. After that, I would start my medical transition.

I did sometimes wonder if I was just a lesbian, but when I tried to join the lesbian scene, I found the only people identifying as lesbians were heterosexual males. All the actual lesbians either called themselves non-binary or were starting medical transitions.

Ha!

What first sowed the seed of doubt was the Israel-Hamas conflict in 2021. Living through that, feeling the ground shake, seeing the rockets fly above my head, was an utterly terrifying experience and because I didn’t want to be stuck without my binder, and my real identity could have been exposed in a shelter, I didn’t shower for 11 days.

Going online I could see that my lefty American friends were justifying what was happening to Israelis, claiming it was for the liberation of Palestine. I understood because I too would have thought like that once –  I too was totally indoctrinated by that culture.  As these were friends of mine from a debating society I thought I just need to discuss it all with them; explain that Hamas was a terrorist group that were hellbent on destroying the Jews but which also made the lives of Palestinians hell. I thought they would assimilate my arguments, after a thorough evaluation within their own logical calculus, and come to a more informed conclusion. Instead, they started slinging insults at me, calling me a coloniser.

That resulted in two things. First, it made me really disillusioned with the Western left. Second, because I’d been looking for material to share on Hamas terrorism, algorithms started sending me material on the “right-wing” side of the culture wars including the gender critical movement. A lot of this content showed me how ridiculous it was to have men in women’s sport and I also started to see videos from detransitioners.

I suppose there's nothing quite like living in a state of fear, under constant threat – away from west coast social contagions – to inject some reality into your life. 

This ideology is so pernicious; you base your entire sense of self on a series of lies.

I realised in that moment that my healthy female body was all I needed to get to a bomb shelter. I realised that I didn’t want to be existing in a state of pathology that could only be remedied with experimental and dangerous medical interventions. Once you start to take testosterone and have your reproductive system removed, you are reliant upon pharmaceutical industries for the rest of your life. While catastrophic, this is somewhat doable if you live in a country that isn’t prone to wars. But if you don’t know whether you will be able to make it to the doctor’s office, it makes no sense at all.

"Doable" is one way of putting it, but it's still catastrophic.