In Solidarity With Aiden Katri, a Transgender Woman Currently Being Incarcerated by the Israeli Defense Force
the promotion of mainstream ‘gay rights’ by corporate or political entities as a veil to excuse or hide unethical practices, particularly where those practices ignore basic human and workers’ rights.
On Tuesday 29th of March 2016, Aiden Katri, a 19 year old Mizrahi trans woman was sent to an IDF men’s prison for refusing to serve in the occupational military.
My name is Aaliyah Zionov. I am a 19 year old Mizrahi trans woman and a member of No Pride In Prisons. Were it not for my family’s migration from Israel to Aotearoa, this could have been me.
The Israeli Defense Force is often cited as a clear example of an organisation which utilises pinkwashing – being increasingly accommodating of LGBT soldiers and needs not for the cause of queer liberation, but for strengthening and obscuring the true purpose of a violent occupational force. Presenting itself as a supposed bastion of queer rights, the IDF diffuses legitimate criticism and gains positive international attention as a progressive organisation whose genocidal practices are to be admired.
However, pinkwashing does not result in material improvement in queer conditions. In fact, it is often actively harmful. For example, in 2013, the IDF began to allow transgender women to openly serve on the front lines. Usually, transgender women are permitted to opt out or seek alternative forms of civil service; this change did not exist to advance transgender rights but rather served only to expand the pool from which people could be conscripted.
The IDF Spokesperson on Tuesday emphasized that Aiden Katri’s imprisonment has nothing to do with her being transgender, and claimed that the army was not even aware of her gender identification until Tuesday.
Katri’s current situation highlights some of the largest contradictions of pinkwashing. The fact that we as Israeli trans women now have the ‘privilege’ of serving in the IDF means that we now also have the accompanying ‘privilege’ of being imprisoned in men’s prisons if we conscientiously object. The IDF took care to emphasise that, as she did not disclose her status as a trans woman while objecting, Katri’s imprisonment was “nothing to do with her being transgender”; this is impossible.
Firstly, the fact that the IDF requires one to disclose one’s status as a member of a vulnerable or “deviant” class to the state in order to be treated with dignity, effectively “outs” them and puts them potentially in danger. This means that the “trans-friendly” status of the IDF is nothing more than a farce.
Secondly, in Katri’s words: “I struggle against my oppression – my gender oppression as a trans women and my ethnic oppression as a Mizrahi Jew, and if I turn a blind eye to an oppression of another people, this would be hypocrisy.” In other words: since her decision to conscientiously object was made as a trans woman, her imprisonment for said decision cannot be separated from her identity.
Thirdly, she was incarcerated in a men’s prison: there were immediate material consequences to her resistance as a trans woman.
The military is a patriarchal body that perpetuates for the youth the a-symmetry between men and women. [… ] I refuse to take part in an organization that makes “masculine” behaviors such as aggression and violence, an entry ticket to the social elite.
Aiden Katri recognises the importance of resisting colonisation and incarceration for queer and trans liberation; for her, the hypermasculinity of Israel’s military culture is an imperial force that is also directly violent against gender non-conforming persons. Allowing trans women to participate in this culture does not liberate them, rather pressuring them to conform to toxic constructions of gender. No group can achieve true liberation through the oppression of another group.
Decolonisation is integral to the achievement of queer and trans liberation. The modern gender binary was imposed by Western colonisation upon peoples and cultures across the world; in the Israeli state, we see not only a colonised understanding of gender that neglects traditional Jewish genders but an extension of this colonisation to Palestinian queers, through the occupation of their land. The ‘right’ of Israeli trans women to participate in the IDF directly erases the right of Palestinian trans women to self-determination and indeed to survival.
Similarly, the ‘right’ of New Zealand LGBT people to work at prisons or in the New Zealand Police directly erases the rights of whakawāhine and takatāpui Māori to self-determination and sovereignty. No carceral and military system in the world can be separated from its creation and purpose as a tool of state oppression and colonial settler occupation. Queer and trans liberation can only be realised through global prison abolition, for which international solidarity is absolutely vital.
IDF officials who spoke on condition of anonymity told +972 and its Hebrew-language site Local Call that the army does not really know what to do with a transgender inmate, and that a various levels of the professional echelon (including the Chief of Staff’s Advisor on Gender Affairs) are involved in tackling the question. For the purposes of comparison only, the Israel Prison Service, which runs civilian prisons, holds transgender prisoners in isolation — or in other words, in even harsher conditions than others.
Incarcerated transgender people are often put in solitary confinement “for their safety”, which the United Nations considers torture. In Aotearoa, incarcerated transgender people are generally offered the choice to enter protective segregation, which sometimes results in complete isolation for up to 23 hours each day. In Israel, they are subject to solitary confinement by default. Statutory provisions for “choice” and for “case by case” consideration are meaningless in the context of a system which is necessarily coercive and designed to disregard the needs of queer and trans people. Many trans women of color in Aotearoa “choose” to be placed in protective segregation to minimize exposure to sexual and physical violence, and are assaulted in segregation nevertheless.
The Israeli Defense Force decides how to treat trans soldiers with regard to gender on a “case by case” basis: it retains full power to disregard any person’s gender identity or needs. The admission that they do not “really know what to do” with transgender people does not bode well for any material improvement in conditions. The modern military, as Katri recognizes, is built on patriarchal and white supremacist conceptions of gender and gender roles, and can never be safe for trans people, be they soldiers, civil servants, inmates or victims of its violence.
Aiden Katri’s objection to serving in the IDF and her subsequent imprisonment contradicts Israel’s pinkwashing narrative where it attempts to present itself as an LGBT friendly face to colonial settler occupation and apartheid. Israel’s Pinkwashing is an attempt to distract you from the violent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, the stark inequality between Israeli settlers and Palestinians, ongoing illegal settlements, and mass incarceration of Palestinians, including children under the age of 16 years old. In Katri’s statement, she described witnessing some of the daily violence in the lives of Palestinians:
I went to the Friday protests in the Palestinian village of Bil’in to protest the theft of the village lands for the growth of the neighboring settlement, and I saw the violent suffocating space the children grow up in. When the military does not allow the residents to protest legally, as it shoots tear gas canisters at elders, children, men and women that are trying to protest, I can’t but feel shame.
These are some statistics of the imprisonment of Palestinians:
20% of the Palestinian population has been imprisoned
40% of Palestinian men have been imprisoned
The conviction rate is 99.7% with no access to international standards of a fair trial
406 Palestinian minors were held in Israeli prisons at the end of Jan 2016
6,072 Palestinian security detainees and prisoners were held in Israeli prisons, 342 of them from the Gaza Strip. An additional 873 Palestinians were held in Israeli Prison Service facilities for being in Israel illegally, 27 of them from Gaza
The conditions of detention are deliberately degrading, with sexual violence, torture and other forms of dehumanising treatment being systematically practiced. Intended to debilitate the Palestinian population, particularly as they resist oppression, the corrupt and arbitrary nature of imprisonment negatively encompasses all spheres of life, including education.
In the Auckland Pride Parade 2014, the Israeli Embassy was given a platform to pinkwash Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. But we see with their treatment of trans conscientious objectors, this narrative quickly falls apart. As queer and trans people committed to the liberation of all people, we need to stand with those who are most marginalised and support the resistance against military occupation, genocide, colonisation and apartheid. We can do this by standing with Aiden Katri and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement in Aotearoa and internationally until there is justice for Palestine.
No Pride in Prisons stands in solidarity with the people of Palestine and in full support with Aiden Katri’s decision to conscientiously object to participation in the IDF. There are no statistics on the sexual assault of trans women in the IDF. However, given that 1 in 8 women and 1 in 5 gay men have reported being sexually assaulted and given that, where data exists, transgender women are assaulted at a far higher rate than cis women and gay men, it is not unreasonable to assume that Katri would have been placed in an unsafe situation even if she had not conscientiously objected.
Katri was put in a position where she had two choices: to be at risk of sexual assault and participate in a violent imperialist occupation, or to be at risk of sexual assault in a men’s prison because she refused to participate. No Pride in Prisons recognises that many trans women are placed in similarly impossible situations in Israel, Aotearoa and around the world, and maintains that the advancement of transgender rights therefore cannot happen without the global abolition of prisons and of military forces.
Written by A. Zionov, with assistance from K. Foster and MZ for No Pride in Prisons
