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Israel’s first transgender beauty pageant, won by a Christian Arab on Friday, brought together contestants from the Holy Land’s three main faiths on Friday in an unconventional show of tolerance and coexistence.

In what organisers described as an ethnic “mosaic”, the 12 vying for the Miss Trans Israel 2016 crown included a Jewish confectioner from an Orthodox Jerusalem family, a Muslim belly-dancer from Tel Aviv and a Christian ballerina from Nazareth.

Pakistan Today reports that Christian ballerina Ta’alin Abu Hanna, Miss Trans Israel 2016, will be Israel’s representative at the Miss Trans Star International pageant in Barcelona in September.

This year will be the first time that Israel has taken part in the international competition.

“Our country deserves to come out on top,” Abu Hanna, 21, told journalists. “Our country allowed me, a Christian Arab from Nazareth, to end the war between my soul and my body. So if it made peace for me, our country is only a country of peace.”

Unlike elsewhere in the Middle East, Israel has mostly liberal laws on sexual identity, with openly gay and transgender troops in its conscript military.

But people who are homosexual or transgender often face hostility from religious conservatives in the Jewish majority and Muslim and Christian Arab minorities. An ultra-Orthodox Jew is on trial for murder, accused of killing a teenage girl in a stabbing spree at last year’s Jerusalem gay pride parade.

“Israeli people like transgenders but they don’t have enough information about transgenders,” said pageant judge Efrat Tilma at the prestigious venue, Tel Aviv’s Habima National Theatre.

“Among us there are judges, there are doctors, there are lawyers, there are people who are working in hi-tech positions and, as well, people who would like to go to the Israeli parliament and to represent us in our parliament.”

The contest allowed for transgender women to be celebrated, a sharp contrast to the alienation and violence some contestants said they faced when they first came out.

“My cousins, my father, my brother-in-law all came and beat me and took me by force and cut my hair, tied me to the bed and left me there for three days with no food,” 24-year-old contestant Caroline Khouri told NBC News.

 

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