On Monday, April 21st, members of Harvard College and the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies gathered in the historic Plimpton Room of the Barker Center to listen to a special guest lecture by Professor Iris Rachimimov, a specialist in Israeli LGBTQ+ history at Tel Aviv University, about the history of the transgender movement in Israel. Throughout the lecture, Rachimimov weaved anecdotal threads into a tapestry that reminds us to be open-minded, tolerant, and empathetic towards others’ perspectives and lived experiences.

Rachimimov began with a disclaimer about transgender history: though trans people have always existed, the modern sense of the term did not appear until the 1950s. However, Rachimimov explained that we can identify the first transgender Israeli citizen in the modern sense: Rina Natan. After a series of public protests and self-harming demonstrations, Natan successfully lobbied for her gender-reassignment surgery. Afterwards, she was issued a new government ID with her chosen name and sex.

Unfortunately though, progress stagnated there, and even began to regress. Government policies ostracized trans people and condemned them to live in ‘The Strich,’ a notorious commercial sex neighborhood of Tel Aviv. In the 1970s, when the Israeli Gay and Lesbian communities organized, they excluded the trans community for being “too combative.” In the 1980s, the government started to highly regulate gender reassignment surgeries, denying more than 90% of applicants. New transgender slurs entered the vernacular. Israel was becoming more capitalist, more consumerist, and more masculine following the Yom Kippur War.

Rachimimov concluded her lecture with a captivating discussion with attendees on the material she presented. She reminded attendees that – in the same way we should not discount this history – we should not romanticize it as well. Transgender people are just that: people, all of whom have their own personal passions, successes, trials, and tribulations. There is far more intellectual nuance to the field than many give it credit for; it is up to us as academics to maintain a mindset open enough to appreciate it.