I was born in a body I learned to call "boy" in a place I learned to call "Israel," and believed indisputably that both were my home, while instinctively knowing that neither belong to me.

Growing up in Jerusalem, I did not have the language to understand the truth between the huge gap of actual reality and the narratives I was told. The Hebrew street names taught me that the neighborhood I lived in was inherently Israeli; the olive tree in my grandma’s backyard had a nook in its trunk the size of my foot which made it seem like it was made for me. Her stories about escaping Nazi Germany to Latin America and then escaping the civil war in San Salvador to Israel made it feel like there was no other place for us to be. The forest named after her deceased husband — my grandfather — was where I celebrated my birthdays. Once in a while, something would disrupt this "utopia" — a bus explosion, or a friend whose sibling died in the army, or the killing of Prime Minister Rabin in a peace demonstration we attended as a family. But the narrative was one of war, of ancient conflict between two people, of occupation (but only in the West Bank and Gaza), of dead Jews whose names you know and dead Palestinians whose names you never hear, of bad apples on both sides that had nothing much to do with the "we" my community asserted itself to be.

The adjectives that were placed onto me with the title "boy" also smudged the gap between my actual gender and who I was told I ought to be. "Good boy," "funny boy," "creative boy," "sensitive boy," "nice Jewish boy," "momma’s boy" left enough room for me to express parts of myself, but no option to move across and between genders to become who I fully am.

Things got violent when adolescence kicked in, as Zionist masculinity was aggressively imposed by the culture, making it harder to distinguish between gendered expectations and a nationalist agenda. This was also when my secret desire for boys arose, which I interpreted as a sign of being gay. (What is a bigger femme mistake in this world than putting your desire for a man before your definition of self?) My skinny, pale body suddenly earned me the nickname "Holocaust boy" next to all the buff guys training to get accepted into elite units in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). My hyperactivity made my teachers yell at me, asking how I planned to be a soldier one day when I couldn’t even sit still in my chair. While my bass voice and charisma earned me the honor of reading the memorial text for fallen soldiers during Boy Scouts ceremonies, my inability to fight back in the constant, pointless fist fights made me ashamed of the incompetence of my masculinity. My secret attraction to guys made me repeatedly tell myself, “You must go into the army one day. If not, they will find out you are _____ and you will be shunned.” Toxic masculinity, militarism, and nationalism, in my mind, merged into one thing I was expected to become.

And so I ended up in combat training, trying to prove to myself and the world that I, too, could become an Israeli man. I cannot remember when in the process something started to shift.

Perhaps it was when I saw a Palestinian prisoner getting repeatedly bitten by a dog, blindfolded and handcuffed, while a large part of my unit stood around clapping in synchronicity, excited to see some "action."