ABSTRACT
This statement was made by Elisha (Shuki) Alexander, an Israeli transgender man and community activist who founded an activist discussion group called ‘Trans in the Centre’, which operated in the Tel Aviv Gay Centre,1 The group held ‘community meetings focusing on transgender, queer and feminist issues. The meetings [were] open to the public and [were] not limited to transgender people. They [took] place twice a month in the Gay Centre in order to encourage inter-communal discourse, raise awareness, and lead to a change’ (The Gay Centre Facebook Group, n.d.). These meetings revolved around transgenderhood, queerness and feminism, and addressed specific issues, including body image (for example, transgender bodies, disabilities and queerness, the role of bodies in protests, queer porn and intersexuality) or history, memory and politics (for example, local transgender history and memories, local political issues, such as the Israeli occupation, and queer maternities). Some meetings also revolved around identity categories (for example, queer Russian immigrants, queers and transgender people in the geographical periphery and queer ethnicities). The group first met in July 2009 and came to occupy a central position in the queer and transgender subcommunities within the larger LGBT community in Tel Aviv and in Israel in general.
