‘Inside I Was a Girl, but No One Knew It’: The Incredible Story of Rina, a Transgender Fourth-grader

8 min readMar 11, 2021

Nine-year-old Rina rummages through a drawer in her room, looking for something creative to do. The room is painted in a shade of pink and is crammed with books and games. She pulls out a class photo from first grade, staring at it for awhile.

“This is what I used to look like,” she says, handing me the picture. “Sometimes it’s hard for me to look at it.”

There she is, standing among her classmates, short haircut, dreamy gaze.

“It’s not hard for me to see myself with short hair,” she explains, sounding surprising mature for someone her age. “Lots of women have short hair, including my grandmother,” she adds, smiling. “That’s not the main thing. The main thing is that I wanted to be a girl. And I was. Inside myself I was a girl, but no one knew it.”

Rina, an intelligent person, an outstanding pupil, inquisitive, full of life and humor, effervescent and very brave — was born a boy and for the first years of her life was raised as her parents’ second son. When she was 7, her parents courageously decided to respect her identity and allow her to grow up as a transgender person.

“When I was about 5, I started to feel not good about my body,” she says. “I was still mostly a happy girl, but I was feeling uncomfortable with my body. When I looked at girls, I felt like I was born with the personality of a girl but in the body of a boy.”

“It was very hard,” she says, with a sad smile. “I felt that I was born a girl, only in the body of a boy — that was the feeling. I saw girls and I understood that I was like them, but I didn’t know if what I felt could exist.”

Did you try to share your feelings with anyone?

“I only tried with Mom and Dad, but each time I would stop. A lot of times I’d say to Mom, ‘I want to tell you something.’ She would ask what, and then I would say, ‘Never mind, never mind.’ I didn’t know how to say it. I didn’t know what they would say or how to explain it.”

What did you want to say?

“Around the age of 5, I wanted to say to Mom and Dad that I felt like I was in the wrong body — that people were treating me like a boy because of my body. I wanted to ask if they could find out if there was such a thing in the world.”

In the living room of their elegant home in the Sharon region, in central Israel, Rina’s family speak openly about the exceptional journey they undertook in the wake of their daughter. It was a journey driven by their choice to support, accept and fight for Rina against all the obstacles society creates.

“We chose to tell our story frankly, because we have nothing to hide,” explains her mother, Dr. Keren Rivkin Nudelman, 38. “On the contrary: We are proud of our daughter. We feel that she is extraordinarily brave.”

Global trend

Although no official data exist about the number of transgender children and adolescents in Israel, people involved in the field speak of a dramatic increase in recent years. In 2013, when the Clinic for Gender-variant Children and Youth at the Dana-Dwek Children’s Hospital (part of Ichilov Hospital) in Tel Aviv, the largest clinic of its kind in Israel, started out, it had three trans children as patients. Now there are an average of 85 new patients a year: All told there are 200 children and teenagers under the clinic’s care, the youngest a boy of 4 and a half.

“It’s part of a world trend,” says the clinic’s director, Dr. Asaf Oren, a pediatric endocrinologist.

“There is a flood of applications,” says Dr. Ilana Berger, a psychotherapist, social worker and jurist, who was one of the pioneers in treating trans people in Israel. When she started out, in 1996, she treated only adults, “but since 2015, all my new patients are children and teens.”

The reason for the surge, Berger explains, is that “parents are exposed to more information via the media. When their son or daughter stubbornly and persistently expresses distress over their gender assignments, it rings a different bell for the parents.” Accessibility to treatment also promotes change. “The first clinic in the United States dedicated to treating transgender children and adolescents opened in 2007. Today, due to the demand, there are 50 clinics.”

‘At age 5, I wanted to say to Mom and Dad that I felt like I was in the wrong body. I wanted to ask if they could find out if there was such a thing.’

Oren concurs. “There is far more discussion of the subject today,” he notes. “That raises awareness and enables people to overcome their shyness about approaching the clinic. People come to our clinic from all over the country and from all socioeconomic classes, including Arabs and Orthodox Jews.”

Similarly, Nora Grinberg, who for 20 years has been advising, supporting and working with trans people of all ages — “I had one person who transitioned at the age of 85” — sees an increase that “boggles the imagination, in trans children who give expression to the situation at a young age, and in families who respect the children’s gender adjustment.”

Grinberg, who is 69, underwent gender transition when she was 48, after having been married and having two children. One of the most active members of the community in Israel, 15 years ago she got the Interior Ministry, by way of a public campaign, to amend the procedure for name changing, so that trans people were no longer required to have sex-reassignment surgery in order to change their names to reflect their gender identity.

“I grew up in such a different world, where trans children were not thought to exist,” Grinberg says. “In my view, trans children haven’t changed — what has changed is society’s attitude.”

Dresses and nail polish

Rina is the second child of Keren Rivkin Nudelman, a psychologist, and Guy Nudelman, 42, who works in customs clearance. The couple divorced when their elder son, Dror, was 4 and Rina was 2. A short time later, Keren met her present partner, Baruch Rivkin, 46, an emotional and psychodrama therapist, who was previously married and is the father of a girl. They were married three years ago.

Keren remembers clearly when the first signs appeared. “At the age of 3–4, there were flickers,” she relates. “It came and went, there was nothing consistent. For example, one time the children went to shop for clothes with their grandmother. When Dror went to the boys’ section, my mother noticed that Rina was looking at girls’ apparel.”

At the Passover seder when Rina was 4, she found the afikoman, the piece of matza that is hidden during the meal for the children to discover. Her father asked what she wanted as a prize for making the find. A princess’ gown, she said.

“He was pretty dumbfounded,” Keren recalls. “He consulted with me, and finally bought her a dress like the one worn by Elsa, the heroine of ‘Frozen.’”

Guy, Rina’s father, adds that he was definitely surprised, but thought “she was testing the limits of her own gender. Not for a moment did I think she was transgender.”

Keren, too, says she didn’t think there was a trans identity issue. “I had no idea that children could express clearly that they were transgender at such a young age,” she says. “I thought, ‘Fine, children play, dress up, try out things.’”

Rina wore the dress once or twice, Rina says, and then lost interest in it. Rina, asked how she felt the first time she wore the dress, replies perfectly naturally, “I felt confident.”

“There was another day when she wanted me to paint her nails,” Keren says. “I said to myself, ‘So she’s not such a gender conformist — fine,’” she says, laughing, emphasizing that she didn’t yet understand the signals. “She was delighted with the nail polish.”

At the age of 5, the signals Rina was sending out became more frequent. “Suddenly she wanted to wear an earring,” her mother says. “I agreed, and one ear was pierced the way they do for boys. Coming out of the store, she asked for the other ear to be done, too. I let her do it. The saleswoman was uncomfortable. Today I realize that that’s what Rina wanted from the start, but that she didn’t dare ask. She led us on gradually. She didn’t want to have her hair cut, and started to grow it long. She wouldn’t let anyone touch her hair.”

Keren recalls Rina’s grandfather telling her that when he was a student at the Technion in Haifa, he also grew his hair long, as he showed her in a photograph. Rina asked him, “Grandpa, when you grew your hair, did you also want to be a girl?”

Signs of distress

Around this time, the child also started to show clear signs of distress. “When I came to say good night, it was clear that something serious was weighing on her,” Rina’s mother recalls.

“She would cry. I tried to understand what was going on, and she would reply, ‘I don’t understand, I don’t know.’ Sometimes she would say, ‘Mom, I feel different.’ I asked her, different in what way, and she couldn’t explain it. In the everyday, she behaved regularly. In school everything was fine, she was happy and sociable. The distress was internal. She gradually closed up, became less talkative, sadder.”

Keren continues: “I started to connect the dots — wanting to wear a dress, use nail polish, have earrings in both ears, not cutting her hair — and I understood that I needed advice. I didn’t know a thing about trans children and had no idea that it was that. I studied psychology, but at university I never learned about trans children. I think there’s a huge lack of accessible knowledge on the subject; and psychologists, social workers, teachers and physicians don’t get trained in it.

“I looked for a therapist who specialized in gender, because I had a feeling it was related to that. I contacted Lee Reuveni Bar David, a social worker who deals with LGBT people and an instructor for parents on gender issues. At first I went alone — I wanted to understand what it was all about.”

Bar David asked about Rina’s body image, the games she played, whether she played more with boys or girls, whether she related to herself as a girl.

“At the end of the meeting,” Keren says, “she told me that it was impossible to know how things would go — that she might grow up to be gay, trans or none of the above. She gave me important advice: to let things happen, to allow whatever she wanted and not to block anything. But very quickly I discovered that that wasn’t enough.”

When a dancing class that Rina went to held a sale of dance gear, “I realized that she was looking at the leotards for girls, but that she didn’t dare ask about them,” her mother recalls.

“I asked her whether she wanted me to buy them, to try them on, and her eyes lit up. You had to give her the courage, the knowledge that it was all right, and then she would really go for it. I also gradually started to see that when she did things the way girls do, or dressed like a girl, she radiated relaxation.

‘Inside I Was a Girl, but No One Knew It’: The Incredible Story of Rina, a Transgender Fourth-grader

Written by Elizabeth Elena

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