WHO WE ARE:
Since its founding in 2010, the Gila Project for Trans Empowerment has been a leading force, championing the rights and well-being of Israel's transgender community. We hold diversity, inclusivity and intersectionality as core values. We believe transgender rights are fundamental to a broader movement for human rights, social justice, and a free and equitable society for all.
THE CHALLENGE:
Israel's transgender community faces pervasive marginalization, resulting in disproportionately high rates of poverty, violence, criminalization, and a lack of access to employment, education, healthcare, and adequate social services.
PATH TO CHANGE:
We believe that the discourse surrounding the trans community should be largely shaped by its members. This means challenging external narratives and empowering transgender individuals to represent themselves, and define their own knowledge and narratives - as well as reclaim power in both private and public spheres.
The challenges faced by the transgender community are systemic, intersectional, and deeply intertwined with broader human rights issues - thus requiring a comprehensive approach that addresses them across various levels, from institutional structures to the community itself.
OUR VALUES:
Courage
It is our obligation to do first of all what is considered impossible. Courage is a belief in the power, knowledge and abilities of everyone. Audacity is a commitment to dream for the trans community.
Courage requires going where there is none - to keep track. To see what is missing and what is needed for our community, and to reach to the places where we are needed. Courage is creating a place for entrepreneurship and take an action in order to change our reality.
love
We are commited to action out of shared destiny, from a point of view that sees the trans community as a family, for better or for worse, a family that loves you whether you come or go. Love is a mutual guarantee and solidarity, out of awareness of the power relations whilst refusing the hierarchy of help: the helpers are also helped.
Love is openness to change, to renewal, to different currents, to the sub-communities and indeviduals that create the trans diversity. Love requires partnership in making decisions and implementing them, without hierarchies.
Justice
A requirement for economic, cultural and family prosperity for the trans community. A commitment to justice is a commitment to change here and now, without sacrificing those who barely survive today for the sake of another's tomorrow.
Justice is an insistence on both the goal and the means, both on principles and on concrete solutions.. Justice is first of all standing by the weakest links in the human chain of the trans community, those who suffer from multidimensional oppression, and not only by the their gender identity.
Truth
A commitment to integrity in our conduct: with our community, with organizations and institutions, and with society in general. Truth is an insistence on presenting the trans reality of life, for its beauty and difficulty, and a refusal of mobilized narratives.
Truth is a refusal to flatter ourselves, to refine the message or to justify ourselves. Truth is the recognition of the enormous freedom that lies in the self-determination of gender identity, precisely from the understanding that gender is a tool of oppression, of control, and of an unfair distribution of life opportunities.
