“Crises of Masculinity” and the Persecution of Trans People: Lessons from Israel in the 1970s and 1980s | Iris Rachamimov

The 1970s and 1980s saw profound changes in Israeli society. The assumption of power by the Likud party in 1977 signified the rising attraction of settler, Mizrahi and capitalist visions of the future, and the declining appeal of socialist frameworks. The shocking number of PTSD cases in the Yom Kippur War precipitated a broad discussion about a “crisis of masculinity” and leadership.  This study investigates the “crisis of masculinity” discourse as an indicator of profound transformations in the “gender order as a whole”. It argues that the nascent trans community experienced this transformation most violently. The police and the courts brutalized trans people, while the media and wider Israeli public denigrated “coccinellim” (transwomen) with particular venom. Even the emerging gay and lesbian movement ostracized trans people, and explicitly defined itself in opposition to them. This study is part of a broader project that examines the history of the Israeli trans community from the 1950s to the present day. It is based on archival and literary sources, as well as on extensive oral history and autoethnography.

Iris Rachamimov teaches modern central European history and queer history at Tel Aviv University. She has been the Director of the Cummings Center for Russian and East European Studies and the Chair of the General History Department. She recently published with Rotem Kowner the edited volume Out of Line, Out of Place: A Global and Local History of World War I Internments (Cornell University Press). Among her publications in queer history are “The Disruptive Comforts of Drag: (Trans)Gender Performances among Prisoners of War in Russia, 1914-1920,” which was published in the American Historical Review; “Crossing Borders and Demolishing Boundaries: The Connected History of the Israeli Transgender Community 1953–1986,” which was written with Gil Engelstein and published in Journal of Modern Jewish Studies; and “From Lesbian Radicalism to Trans-Masculine Innovation: The Queer Place of Jerusalem in Israeli LGBT Geographies (1979-2007),” which was published in the Geographic Research Forum (GRF). She is currently writing a history of the Israeli transgender community from the 1950s to the present.