Transitions and Timing - Owning Trans identity while volunteering for the Israeli Trans community

This blog post was writen by Cecilia Bachana, a 2025/26 Fellow in Haifa.

In November 2025, I attended a ceremony in Haifa for the Transgender Day of Remembrance, an annual commemoration of trans people lost to violence and bigotry. Unfortunately, each year, the list of names grows longer, a reminder of the continuing struggle to protect trans people, fight for trans thriving, and honor those we have lost along the way. The event I attended was co-hosted by Project Gila,

an organization I volunteer with in Israel as part of the Yahel fellowship. Ahead of the ceremony, I couldn't stop thinking about a poem I wrote when I was thirteen.

In eighth grade, I wrote a mediocre – but passionate – spoken word poem honoring Leelah Alcorn, a seventeen-year-old trans girl. I performed it in front of my class, then in front of the entire 8th grade, for our Poetry Slam. I didn't yet know that I was trans, or even that I was queer at all. I was just beginning to shed some of the naïveté that had previously characterized the way I moved through the world. Still, something about Leelah's story connected with me and activated a deep sense of injustice. I felt the need to write about it, tell her story to my classmates, and attach myself thereafter to the cause of trans rights.

In the following years, I learned a great deal about myself and the trans community. After years of waffling, trying to be cisgender, and fearing to misappropriate a term that carries so much weight, in June 2025 I began to embrace myself as trans for the first time.

Four months later, I flew to Israel to spend nine months with the Yahel Social Change Fellowship. Just as I was beginning to figure out what being trans meant to me at all, I carried that into Haifa, a city that I had previously only visited for a week at a time. Even amidst my great excitement, my most prominent source of apprehension was: How will I be trans in Israel? Will it be worth it to effectively “come out” to every new person, hoping for some consistency between external perception and inner experience? How important is it to me? 

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I am still struggling with these questions, to which the answers remain fuzzy and contextual. In some places, I am fully “out”. In other places, I bend to the relative ease of acceptance and allow the world to impose its assumptions on me. I become “mitnadevet”, “morah”, “yekarah”. I am still not sure whether to change this, or if I even want to. Only this past week, I “came out” for the first time at another of my placements, after much deliberation.

However, this ostensibly crazy timing – grappling with my own trans identity and spending nine months in Israel – may turn out to be just what I needed.

Here in Israel, I volunteer with the aforementioned Project Gila (or, the Gila Project for Trans Empowerment), established in 2010. The Gila Project is a non-profit that promotes trans community and personal empowerment, rights, resources, healthcare, and opportunities. Its many activities include guidance for trans women through medical transition; training sessions for professionals, and an initiative to make the latest research available in Hebrew. So far I have created follow-up surveys and community needs assessments, and I have researched trans employment programs and transfeminine surgery protocols worldwide to inform their development in Israel.

I feel simultaneously gratified and bewildered in this space. 

On one hand, the moment I first visited the Gila Project – on my birthday, no less – I felt it was where I needed to be. I am thrilled to contribute to work that is so important to me, for the first time as part of the community, in a space where I can be completely myself. It is also a relief that my affiliation with Israel does not alienate me from the space, as it often would in the US.

On the other hand, what do I know? I'm 23. I just started calling myself trans last summer. I still feel a little bit like an imposter, with my seeming inability to achieve androgyny and my confusing mix of dysphoria, euphoria, apathy, and lingering attachment to the girlhood I grew up in. I can't even claim to understand the trans experience in the United States, much less in Israel. So what can I offer?

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The more I think about this question, the more I realize that maybe I don’t have to overthink it. Maybe the simple fact of my community orientation, my commitment to contribute while remaining curious and open, is enough. Through my work with Project Gila, I have already learned so much about what is possible in the world of fighting for trans rights, healthcare, and inclusion. I have learned about Trans pioneers in Israel and listened to community members’ stories of grief and of triumph. Working here so far has made me a better, more informed trans activist, as I channel my internal experience into passion for the work and vice versa. I am reminded of the response the Haifa fellows received back in October when we asked one of our potential placements what would make a good volunteer: someone who is passionate about the work. That passion is the foundation; the specific contributions will stem from it. Focus on what lights a fire in you, what you really care about, and build from there.

The thirteen-year-old who wrote “Leelah With an L-E-E” would be astonished, and maybe a little overwhelmed, to learn what I am doing now. She might be shocked to learn how queer I am; or, perhaps, she might be relieved to learn that there was an explanation for it all. I could not have predicted the last ten years of my life, the transition (if you will) from straight, cisgender Ally to queer, trans Zionist. I could not have predicted this blog post, which even now provokes that familiar anxiety. One certainty, however, is that ultimately, it is all happening at exactly the right time. There is some serendipity in the fact that I waved the trans flag at Pride for the first time only a few months before my transition to the Yahel fellowship, and even now I choose this specific time to write about it all. This past year has been my proof that what seems ill-timed at first glance may become precisely what you need – and I look forward to discovering new serendipities in the six months that remain of the fellowship.

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Appendix:

1) Definitions of relevant terms (e.g. trans, cis, etc): https://glaad.org/reference/trans-terms/ 

2) Project Gila website: https://www.gilaproject.org/ 

3) Leelah Alcorn’s story:  https://edition.cnn.com/2014/12/31/us/ohio-transgender-teen-suicide 

4) Ceci’s Substack for more writing: https://ceciliabakhana.substack.com/

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