User:Chocolatte/Rina Natan

Rina Natan (born September 8, 1923 as Gershon Natan) was an Israeli who became famous as the first Israeli transsexual woman.

Rina was born as a male named Gershon on September 8 1923, in the town of Siegen in Germany, to a wealthy Jewish family. As a child she excelled in music and art. Beginning as a child, she used to wear womens' clothing. In her adult years she described herself as someone feeling "a spiritual necessity to wear womens' clothes and behave as a woman for all intents and purposes."

During World War II, she stayed for a period of time in France, where she learned agriculture. She moved to Israel in 1946. In Israel she moved between the Kibbutzes Ma'agan Michael, Ashdot Ya'akov, and Na'an. Her feminine mannerism was frowned upon in the Kibbutz community, despite Natan being a hard-working community member. Due to her behavior she was refused housing in both the mens' and womens' residences, and she was expelled from one Kibbutz to the next until she forsake life in the Kibbutz, and moved to Gedera, a town in the south of Israel. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli war she served in the army as a paramedic, but after her release she struggled to find a job, and therefore rejoined the army. She faced struggles due to her identity in the military as well. She was given a room of her own, but eventually was discharged from army service for reasons of incompatibility. She failed to find work as an agricultural teacher and guide, because educational instituions would not accept her.

In the beginning of 1953, Natan's name made headlines after she was arrested by the police, under suspicions that she was wearing womens' clothing for criminal intent. Natan explained to the police officers, as reported by the newspaper Haaretz: "I am a woman in my soul and in my emotions, and only for a physiological error I was born a man". In the years following she returned to the headlines for another arrest by the police, a hunger strike which she did in an endeavor to recieve a permit for a gender-reassignment surgery, and after being beaten on a beach in Tel Aviv.

Natan claimed initially that she was born with both male and female sexual organs - meaning, she was intersex. Surgeries have already been performed on intersex people in Israel, although in fall 1954 Natan was checked by a committee of doctors who said that she was not intersex.

In her efforts to be permitted to undergo gender reassignment surgery, she began harming herself. A doctor committee on behalf of the ministry of health recommended to comply with her request and allow her to undergo surgery "for reasons of spiritual hygiene", although the Attorney General of Israel at the time, Haim Cohen, refused the recommendation towards the end of 1954, on the grounds of the criminal law forbidding castration, which causes severe physical damage. In the wake of her recurring self harm, she was reluctantly forced to recieve testosterone injections. She resumed her battle, and in May 25 1956 she arrived to a hospital bleeding and squirming in pain, after she cut her penis. The "Herut" newspaper reported she smiled at the horrified doctors, and said:

""Nothing will be of help this time, and you will have to perform surgery on me, take away the unnecessary organs, and make me a woman.""

Given the danger to her life, the doctors performed the surgery, and Natan became the first transsexual woman in Israel - undergoing sex reassignment surgery out of her own will.

Following the surgery Natan recieved a new ID, in which her name was changed to Rina and her sex was changed to female, although in her passport the sex remained male. In November 1958 she left Israel to Zürich in Switzerland, and her tracks disappeared. Any further details about her life are unknown.

Throughout her battle the press referred to Natan in terms such as "man-woman" and "Madmoiselle Rina", as well as the terms "transsexual", "transgender" and "intersex" - which were unaccepted and unfamiliar at the time.