Somewhere beneath the hum of fluorescent lights, a trans woman is packing a suitcase with essentials. She slips her passport between the many layers of personal paraphernalia. Before stepping out of the door, she stops to look back at the room she may never see again, wondering whether home will ever feel like this again.
All the while, in parliamentary chambers, television news studios, and the endless churn of social media, another story is being told. Politicians are speaking of migration as a threat. Commentators are repeating the same arguments about essentialist biology, colonial traditions, and national citizenship. Anti-gender politics have become a defining feature of public life, shaping new discriminatory laws and influencing entire populations’ understanding of gender and sexuality that follows capitalist, heteropatriarchal ideology.
Trans people are once again being turned into symbols, debated in parliaments, dissected in newspapers, and pulled into the centre of cultural conflict across the globe. Even though transness preexists every law written about us, every panic constructed around us. Long before politicians began tokenizing us, long before media commentators distorted our lives for televised debates , we were here - loving, surviving and becoming. The backlash may be loud, but it is never permanent. What remains again and again, is the quiet persistence of people who refuse to disappear. We are forced to the edges, only to build new worlds there. Like rivers finding their way back to the sea, we return to ourselves.
Anti-trans narratives do not appear in a vacuum. They travel across borders and platforms, repeated and hardened by anti-trans, fascist groups. This kind of rhetoric is produced and peddled through anti-rights, propagandist political networks, media ecosystems, and organised movements that have learned how to turn fear into strategy. While the language may differ from place to place, the intent remains the same: to narrow who is regarded as legitimate and credible in the eyes of law enforcement authorities, and to dictate the parameters of gender expression, embodiment and belonging.
Many trans people who live under fascist regimes, in contexts where transness is stigmatised, are forced to live in hostile, dangerous environments. Increasing criminalisation, surveillance, rejection, unemployment,, and violence are not distant possibilities but everyday realities for trans communities.
Choosing to be visible as a trans person can be a death sentence in every facet of society: in the home, online and on the streets. When push comes to shove, when your life is at great risk, you have no other way but to flee, leaving behind languages that shaped your childhood, streets that carried irreplaceable memories, and families who may never grasp the reasons for your departure. That is, to be able to live a life without fear.
For trans people who choose to seek asylum in Europe, the journey takes a turn for the worse, rather than ending in settling down safely, and with dignity. Asylum systems are bureaucratic and violent, demanding documented proof of identity that betrays a trans person’s reality, run by a colonial structure that scapegoats trans people and refugees.. Immigration interviews are really just trials of credibility. Bodies are subjects of institutional scrutiny. Waiting for approval to be a ‘legal citizen’ becomes a way of life.
According to the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 54% of LGBTI asylum seekers and refugees across EU Countries report experiencing discrimination regularly.Trans women are among the most affected groups, with 64% reporting discrimination in the previous year, while 77% reported experiencing harassment motivated by public hostility and hate crimes in the same period. Behind each percentage is a real person, carrying the weight of constantly negotiating their safety, dignity and belonging in systems that rarely ever offer all three.
I think of Amira when I reflect on this. We met in Berlin, in a city that carries both refuge and fracture. She spoke softly at first, as if measuring the weight of each word before letting it go. “I did not run away,” she said . “I moved closer towards myself.” Amira grew up in Malaysia in a conservative environment where gender-diverse expressions are criminalized and only practiced in secret. Long before she had the language to know who she was, she understood the cost of being seen for who she wanted to be. Over time, however, concealment became impossible to maintain. What followed was a long, unknown journey crossing border after border , moving through land where safety never fully set in.
“When I got into Europe, I thought I would finally be safe.I thought the hardest part was over,” Amira ruminated. Instead, she entered systems that struggled to recognise her beyond the bioessentialist categories in government paperwork . “They saw a case before they saw a woman.” Even then, she carried herself with a steadiness that resisted reductionist models of identity proscriptions and prescriptions. Later, as we walk through Berlin, she laughs suddenly, sharply, as if reminding both of us that survival is not only endurance, but also brief returns of light.
Laila’s story, on the other hand, moves differently but with the same grieving weight of loss and struggle. She left Egypt after choosing to become visible in underground queer networks, where online spaces offered fragile but authentic forms of connection and care. Until, the same visibility risked Laila’s life, and these immediate perils eventually caught up with her.
What follows is something Laila rarely describes in detail. Arbitrary detention, state violence and humiliation that still sit too close to language. “It was hell,” she said. “But I kept imagining another life.” That very possibility, the imagination of a safer life led Laila toBerlin. The reality she found there has been slower, heavier and hindered by red tape.
Laila’s asylum case remains unresolved today, suspended in bureaucracy that stretches time without breaking it. And yet, she persists. She has a knack for designing dresses. She participates in mass demonstrations. She navigates the city with a quiet insistence on presence. “They punished me for wearing a dress.Now I wear one whenever I can,” she asserted with utter confidence.
From these stories it is abundantly clear that trans lives are repeatedly placed at the centre of political disputes, as though the existence of trans people is what unsettles the world rather than the inherently oppressive systems that refuse to make space for them. State-sanctioned erasures and punitive measures trans people face are not isolated. They sit alongside wider structures that govern the lives of migrants, racialised communities, women, and anyone who does not fit into rigid hierarchies of power.
Discrimination doesn’t arrive in a single form, it accumulates, layering itself into everyday life until it becomes difficult to separate one struggle from another. This is why feminism cannot afford to draw lines around who counts. A feminism that excludes trans women does not strengthen collective liberation, it effectively narrows the definition of it to serve the same, patriarchal structures of power. The policing of gender always expands, finds new targets, and sharpens the colonial logic of control. Trans women are not outsiders to feminist struggle. They have always been a part of it, organising, resisting, building networks of care, and insisting on dignity in places where it is withheld.
Around World Refugee Day, I return to something I have learned through my own lived experience. Home is not a fixed place, nor a country. It is something carried, in the body, in memory, in the stubborn refusal to disappear. Home is a practice of becoming, shaped by what has been lost and what still remains.
For trans refugees, home is often assembled slowly, out of fragments, out of survival, out of the decision to keep going. We build a home in spite of everything that tries to deny us. When I think of Amira and Laila, I think of continuities of lives that refused erasure and people who crossed borders not only between nations, but between fear and becoming. In a world increasingly shaped by exclusion, their existence insists on a world where dignity is not conditional and freedom is not rationed. A world where no one is forced to choose between authenticity and survival. That world is not yet here. But it is already being cultivated through the resistance and brilliance of trans people, and through the wisdom of our ancestors who handed us the guidebook not only to dismantle systems of oppression, but to rebuild in their place something profoundly beautiful, shaped by inclusion and rooted in our collective love, care and compassion for one another.