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‘To escape Gaza is already an achievement. And then to be trans?’: the women defying national and gender boundaries

Yolande Zauberman’s documentary The Belle from Gaza follows a population under permanent threat, recording their courage and surprising faith

Her film was not meant to be “a demonstration of anything”, but its title and synopsis alone – the story of transsexual women moving from Palestine to Tel Aviv to live out their new identities – risked being read as a political statement on the current conflict. In Israel, gay marriage can be registered but only if it is performed abroad, and male-to-female sex reassignment surgery is carried out in public hospitals, while in the Palestinian territories homosexuality remains a taboo. A veteran film-maker of nine documentaries and features, Zauberman, 69, chanced on her subject during the making of her César award-winning M, about an Israeli man who was raped in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community as a child and becomes attracted to transsexual women later in life.

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