I was in shock. How could this be? I texted all my medicalized trans sisters on my way home and asked a simple question: “Who makes your hormones?” Many of them didn’t know offhand. It takes a great deal of struggle and an intense amount of questioning for many trans folks to get their hands on this life-saving medication, and once we do, we want to start immediately and experience an end to questions regarding the validity of our identity and our choices. But my sisters heard the urgency in my call and checked in. As the responses came, every single one was either Teva, or a company that a quick Google search listed as linked to Teva.
How did this one Israeli company play such a large role in the cross-gender hormone market? How did my body once again find itself as a battleground, a settlement, an ongoing pawn in this Zionist game?
I later got in touch with a Jewish, anti-Zionist trans student at Mills College, Daryn Copland, who reached out to me online. He told me that he had been dedicating the past year of his research to understanding the connections between cross-gender hormone production in the U.S. and in Israel. He told me that he too found out his testosterone was made by Teva and wanted to understand what we should do about it as trans folks who support the BDS movement.
This was no longer just about me feeling free in my body. A large part of the trans community in the U.S. is being forced to choose between our life-affirming transitions and our Palestinian siblings’ demand for freedom.
After the necessary heartbreak of coming to terms with once again being complicit with the regime I so desperately want to dismantle, I found the power in having a platform to do something about it.
This is why Daryn and I are trying to start an open online resource that lists companies that are affiliated with Teva. We are hoping to find alternative manufacturers for our trans siblings while never neglecting the low price, high-demand needs of our community. Most importantly, I hope that all the trans, GNC, and queer folks reading this will help us make the message loud and clear — Zionism has tried to tie trans liberation to Palestinian oppression, but we refuse to accept this as our reality.
Ita Segev is a transfeminine anti-Zionist Israeli interdisciplinary performance artist, writer, and advocate based in Brooklyn. She is currently working on her first evening-length live performance titled Knot in My Name (It's hard to transition when you're escaping something) and is a proud artist council member of Jewish Voice for Peace.