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.
Maia at the Western Wall. Everyone in Israel knew her as a man[Missing Credit]
I suppose you could say I was never a typical child. A Jewish girl growing up on the West Coast of the USA, I was one who would get pretty obsessed by things and then spend all my energy researching it. When I was eight or nine, I was obsessed by the world’s tallest people. I knew everything about the topic, from their birthdates to their heights. They all suffered from a rare pituitary tumour and I became obsessed with trying to figure out if there was a way to excise that without harming the surrounding functions of the brain.
I never understood fiction. I couldn’t watch films because I found them complicated because you have to infer meaning in characters and tensions. I spent my time reading medical books and parenting manuals as they helped me understand people. I was born very premature and have ADHD. I also know I have a number of autism traits, although I’ve never been tested or diagnosed.
Everything changed for me when I was 12 years old and a girl passed me a worksheet in class and our hands briefly brushed. I suddenly felt a bunch of odd sensations in my body; my heart rate skyrocketed. I got dizzy, sweaty and felt all this heat. When I opened my mouth to apologise to the girl, nothing came out.
I was unfamiliar with the idea of a crush and so I immediately started doing medical research and decided that I must have a neurodegenerative condition, even though the doctors said I was fine. The feelings I got kept happening – until I realised that they didn’t appear if I hung around with boys. So that’s what I did. Then, I started to want to dress like the boys too. Girls can be pretty brutal and I got the message that it was unacceptable to dress in that way. I developed a lot of shame around that. I wasn’t comfortable with who I was; there was no one who appeared like me.
When I was 12, my parents got me an iPad. And one of the first things I did was ask on Google, ‘Is it possible for a girl to change sex and become a boy?’ The answer was there: yes, I could. And so, I told my parents I knew what was wrong with me: I wanted to become a boy. I told them I fulfilled all the diagnostic criteria,
They didn’t agree and put spyware on my iPad. But that, of course, did not stop me from obsessively researching the trans topic. I got my hands on everything. I just didn’t talk about it with my parents. By the time I was 18 and went to college I was wearing a breast binder. My parents figured out what was going on and were still determined to end it. They suggested I study abroad in a non-Western country that didn’t support all this gender stuff. I’d visited Israel before and had even found myself being taken for a man there, so I realised that while my parents wanted to send me to a non-Western country to stop me transitioning, I had actually found the perfect non-Western country in which to transition.
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.
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.
In the meantime, on a holiday to Ireland, I went to a Genspect Conference where I met detransitioners for the first time. Among them were a couple of masculine lesbians and I related to them so much. It was there that I was exposed to the idea that the category of woman – adult human female – was open to someone like me.
So, by the time October 7 happened I had already given up the belief that I should have been born a man. But everyone knew me as a guy and I didn’t know how to turn things around. I was meant to be going to the Nova festival but quite late on, the person who was meant to be our driver bailed out and so I ended up at a peace event with Jewish and Bedouin children. It was a really optimistic event and on October 6 I made a bunch of social media posts about peace and how it could happen.
I returned to Jerusalem where I was staying at the time. When I got woken up by a siren on October 7, I was sweaty because I was so nervous. It meant it would have been even harder to put my breast binder on so I just decided to leave it, even though I knew that everyone in the neighbourhood knew me as a man and might now see my breasts and realise I was a woman.
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.
My parents flew me home to America and for a long time I felt very depressed about everything, but I didn’t put the binder back on. I have since discovered that a binder is not a reversible middle ground. It has ruined the skin on my chest which is not elastic any more. I still have a lot of pain in my chest if I take a deep breath, something you can’t do at all if you wear a binder. My breast tissue is sore, and I have back, rib and shoulder pain.
I am still ambivalent about the fact I have a female body but I have accepted that trying to run away from this fact will only cause lifelong health consequences and I will still be female. Since I came home, I’ve been talking to some of the detransitioners I met in Ireland and have realised that more young women have to see people like me. Their activism has pulled me out of a dark place that I was in. I hope that even if just one butch lesbian sees my story and doesn’t put their body through an irreversible procedure as a result, it will be worth it.
As told to Nicole Lampert
You can see more from Maia on X @thepeacepoet99 and on YouTube @MaiaPoet
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