Content uploaded by Mariza Avgeri
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Mariza Avgeri on Apr 27, 2021
Content may be subject to copyright.
Here vs. There
Sexualities
2021, Vol. 0(0) 1–15
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13634607211013278
journals.sagepub.com/home/sex
Transit: Transgender and
gender nonconforming
asylum claimants’
narratives in Greece
Mariza Avgeri
Department of Law, Maynooth University, Greece
Abstract
In this article, I reflect on two interviews of transgender/gender nonconforming asylum
claimants in the broader West. In the Transit documentary that my partners and I
created, a non-binary person and a transgender woman, Ilios and Christina, interview
each other on the difficulties of being a transgender/gender nonconforming asylum
applicant in Greece. Greece is an understudied area with huge migration flows at the
border of the EU and has no official data for Sexual Orientation Gender Identity asylum
claims. The documentary, this article contends, provides a starting point for reflecting on
the experiences of transgender/gender nonconforming applicants at the borders of
Europe and their transition from their country of origin to the West/Greece, and for
importing non-Western migrant subjectivities into our current thinking on sexuality/
gender. In particular, I problematize the legal framework of Refugee Status Determination
and explore the decolonization of gender identity/expression in refugee law. Finally, I
reflect on the process of making the documentary and my attempt to centre the voices of
gender nonconforming asylum claimants while minimizing the impact of my gaze as
a white Greek researcher in the field. In doing so, this article shows how documentary
film can be used as a means to further considerations of gendered normativities of asylum
claims in a key, yet understudied, context. It concludes by arguing for a decolonializing
approach that questions the normalization of Western standards of gender, and their
transgression, in Refugee Status Determination.
Keywords
Gender identity, gender expression, asylum, gender non-conformity, decolonization
Corresponding author:
Mariza Avgeri, Department of Law, Maynooth University, 4, Pavlou Mela street, Athens 16233, Greece.
Email: marizavg@hotmail.com
Introduction
Greece remains a gateway for migration in the Schengen area, with lots of irregular
arrivals from the Middle East and Africa. In 2019, 77.287 asylum claims were lodged in
Greece and another 87.461 were pending (GCR, 2020). Greece witnessed a huge mi-
gration flow in the years 2015 and 2016, mainly from Syria and Afghanistan (IOM, 2016).
Despite this, Greek asylum jurisprudence remains under researched, and there is no
publication of first/second instance decisions except in very crucial cases. For this reason,
Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) legal asylum practices remain invisible in
public consciousness in Greece as do the experiences of gender nonconforming
applicants.
Concurrently, with the ongoing migration and humanitarian crisis, on the 10
th
of
October, 2017, the Greek parliament voted on a new law on gender recognition removing
requirements for sterilization, medical treatments and psychiatric diagnoses, but in-
troduced a court process for the change of the gender marker (ILGA Europe, 2017). By
not introducing a simple administrative process based on gender self-identification, it is
contended that Greece has missed the mark on trans rights despite the legal progress
(Knight, 2017). Currently, although there is no mention in the law for asylum claimants,
there have been cases where their gender marker has been changed on their request
(ECRE, 2018). Despite these legislative shifts, both the Greek and, even more so, the
migrant and refugee trans and gender nonconforming community faces many challenges
in Greece today in terms of discrimination (FRA, 2020). The documentary Transit
(https://youtu.be/CEiJ6Kcfiz8) is an effort to centre the voices of trans and gender
nonconforming migrants and refugees in a context where their invisibility both in their
communities and in the asylum process hinders their access to justice, education, work,
social life and personal expression.
This short article is designed to be read as a commentary piece alongside watching the
documentary to elucidate certain points that arise from the documentary Transit (https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEiJ6Kcfiz8&feature=youtu.be). I initially problematize
the legal framework of Refugee Status Determination in order to provide a more inclusive
framework in which asylum applications such as the ones of Christina and Ilios would be
more thoroughly and justly examined. I then reflect on the process of making the
documentary and my attempt to centre the voices of gender nonconforming asylum
claimants while minimizing the impact of my gaze as a white European researcher in the
field. Thirdly, I reflect on the decolonization of gender identity in refugee law drawing on
the interviews of Christina and Ilios and trying to address Western meta-narratives of
gender non-conformity and migration in the context of Greece, a Balkan country at the
border of the EU. In doing so, this article furthers our considerations of trans experiences
of seeking asylum in a central but understudied place through a documentary film.
2Sexualities 0(0)
Problematic legal frameworks: Gender identity and expression
in refugee law
According to the 1951 Refugee Convention Article 1(A), a refugee is:
any person who…owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, re-
ligion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the
country of his nationality and is unable to, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself
of the protection of that country.
Thus, when Refugee Status Determination bodies come across Sexual Orientation and
Gender Identity asylum applicants, they try to determine whether they belong to a par-
ticular social group and because of that reason, have a well-founded fear of being
persecuted in their country of origin (UNHCR, 2012).
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) defines a particular social group
as a group of persons who share a common characteristic other than their risk of being
persecuted, or who are perceived as a group by society (2002). The characteristic will
often be one which is innate, unchangeable, or which is otherwise fundamental to identity,
conscience or the exercise of one’s human rights. According to the jurisprudence, such
characteristics refer to gender identity and sexual orientation as well (UNHCR, 2012). On
the other hand, as other scholars have noted, there are several issues that arise in the
identification of transgender, gay and bisexual individuals as belonging to particular
social group. These relate mainly to the discretion requirement and disbelief towards
asylum applicants as being LGBTQI+ (e.g. Andrade et al., 2020;Berg and Millbank,
2013;Dustin and Held, 2018;Millbank, 2009).
In addition, identity-based questions often disregard the particular discourse and
practice in non-Western countries, where identification with a particular social group often
follows other paths. In their 2018 article, Nasser-Eddin, Abu-Assab and Greatrick propose
the shift from SOGI protection to Sexual Practices and Gender Performance (SPGP)
protection, which would allow for a less identity-based framework of Refugee Status
Determination. This indeed is a valid point; on the other hand, it excludes cases where
identity, practice and performance formation are prohibited due to the restrictive and
oppressive environment where the applicants are fleeing from. A framework that protects
identities, practices and performances that are non-normative and correspond to the sexual
minority characteristics of the applicant, whether these are externalized or reflected upon
or not, does not exist. Both gender identity and gender expression (as well as non-binary
identities), cases such as those of Christina and Ilios, should be considered as a ground for
asylum if they have a plausibly persecutory impact when expressed. This would be
a positive direction since the fixed identity-based line of interrogation presumes west-
ernized notions of self-awareness on the part of the applicants, and it views gender identity
as fundamental only when it fulfils a particular emotional journey and self-definition
(Berg and Millbank, 2009).
Berg and Millbank (2013) propose a framework of Refugee Status Determination for
transgender asylum claims that centres gender non-conformity as opposed to gender
Avgeri 3
identity claims. This allows for the inclusion of non-normative gender expression and
performance, and it focuses on the failure of the applicants to fulfil normative ideas about
gender in the country of origin that results in their persecution. Coupled with narratives of
self-identification and/or gender expression, the gender non-conformity framework is
more inclusive as well to other, under-represented identities and to divergent trajectories
of gender configuration that are time- and place-specific with a discriminatory social
impact in the country of origin. The Transit documentary attempts to provide a point of
reference for exploration of gender non-normative experiences from the perspective of
non-Western asylum claimants in Greece, a Balkan and Mediterranean country at the
border of the EU, which serves as a point of entry to the West and the EU. The proposed
legal framework in Section 1 serves as refined lens through which gender expression/
gender identity asylum claims, as those of Christina and Ilios, can be better examined in
the refugee determination process, providing an inclusive and safer framework for the
protection of transgender, gender nonconforming and non-binary applicants.
Transit documentary practice and contestations
The Transit documentary, which informed my PhD thesis on a critical analysis of the
legal framework concerning trans asylum claims in the EU, speaks back to these legal
failings. The goal of the documentary was to centre trans and gender nonconforming
applicants’voices, in order to identify the key issues that arise in their experiences as
asylum seekers in the EU in their own words, and incorporate their narratives in the
sociolegal analysis of refugee status determination jurisprudence
1
. In the Transit
documentary, concealment or discretion is something very often required by asylum
applicants in order to survive in their country of origin, thus creating the grounds for
denying their application for asylum. Asking applicants to be discreet about their identity
in the future in order for them not to be at risk of persecution violates their human rights in
adopting practices and performances that correspond to their sense of identity (Jansen and
Spijkerboer, 2011). Having said that, it is important not to require applicants to be out in
the past in order to accept that they qualify for international protection, given the so-
ciopolitical circumstances in their country of origin. On the other hand, interrogating
applicants on their identity poses fundamental challenges on the part of the case worker
since they often adopt westernized notions of gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans identities
that erase the specific context where the applicants come from (Abu-Assab et al., 2018;
Hertoghs and Schinkel, 2018;Jordan, 2009;Raj, 2017;Tschalaer, 2020).
I had the idea of producing a documentary with first-hand interviews of asylum
claimants in Greece since my network and activist engagement there has given me access
to these kinds of contacts, and I was considered a safe person to talk to. Being a non-binary
assigned female at birth and lesbian-identified individual myself who has been involved in
migrant and LGBTQ+ initiatives in Greece and abroad, I was indeed seen as an both an
ally and a stakeholder in queer asylum issues. Since Transit was mainly an exploratory
project, which did not seek to have a representative sample of qualitative data, but rather
to make transgender and gender nonconforming asylum applicants’narratives more
visible, interviewees who felt more comfortable with sharing their experiences publicly
4Sexualities 0(0)
were selected. In this process, I am aware that other gender nonconforming experiences
become erased; this is why it is very crucial to remember that these interviews do not serve
as a representation of gender nonconforming applicants, but rather shed light on just
a handful of experiences of LGBTQ+ migrants in Greece. Issues of anonymity and
empowerment became quite important. I tried to make the process as participatory as
possible by giving the option to the interviewees to choose from a series of questions only
the ones that they wanted to answer, add their own questions and format the overall
interview accordingly. The questions were co-designed by me and the interviewees
although I indicated the themes upon which I wanted to focus. I also asked them if they
would like to interview each other in an informal setting in order to minimize the effect of
my gaze and to centre their voices instead of the voice of the researcher.
I worked on the project in order to find a team that the interviewees would feel
comfortable with, namely, an artistic director, an interpreter and a sound editor who could
collaboratively work with me, Christina and Ilios. I was able to access journalistic footage
from Muzungu Producciones, which I edited accordingly together with the interviewees.
The footage included scenes from Greece and refugee camps in the territory. We did not
include LGBTQI+ related footage since we wanted to imply the invisibility of gender
nonconforming refugees in the Greek context. I decided to undertake a voice over of the
interviewees, distorting their voices slightly for anonymity purposes. Their names were
changed from the start in all files and correspondence for safety reasons. Since both
participants were coming from countries that have two of the largest migrant populations
in Greece, it was my view that they would not be affected by disclosing their country of
origin in the audio. Details (direct or indirect) of their exact place of origin were not to be
given, so that it would be further guaranteed that they will not be identified by either the
authorities or other members of their respective migrant population.
The documentary was released with the prior consent of the interviewees. I also
included several psychosocial support services in the consent forms that were signed prior
to the interviews for the sake of their well-being after and during the project. Fortunately,
according to their own accounts, they experienced the whole process as very empowering
and fun. In order to enable this, I had to take many precautions and to be wary of my
privileges and power position as a Greek white researcher.
The project was very enriching from a researcher’s perspective, and Christina and Ilios
indicated in their statements that they found it empowering. The choice of the inter-
viewees together with the fact that we co-edited the questions and they interviewed each
other without my intervention sought to challenge the hierarchical relationship between
the researcher and the interviewees and broadened the agenda setting for the interview
according to their needs, desires and demands instead of the assumptions, values and
motivations that inform a Western researcher like myself (Smith, 1999). The interviewees
had an extensive understanding of Western discourses, and their narratives shed light on
the impossibilities of being a trans/non-binary asylum claimant in Greece and Europe.
The intersection between homophobia/transphobia and racism that are experienced in
Western contexts by non-Western migrants became clear throughout the interviews, as
well as the difficulties experienced in this ‘elsewhere’that the country of reception
represents.
Avgeri 5
Being myself a non-binary person assigned female at birth and attracted to mainly
female-identified people, who prescribes cautiously to the queer political project, I
identify with several narratives included in the trans umbrella. I experience my gender
identity as fluid, but away from the initial location that was assigned to me although I am
often perceived as a ciswoman, which I experience no severe discomfort with. My gender
expression has varied along the years, from quite conforming to the sex I was assigned at
birth to evidently androgynous. I have indeed experienced stigma mostly because of my
sexuality and gender nonconforming expression, but I have not been through the same
with my experienced gender identity mainly because I have come out only in more
tolerant contexts. Given the above, I relate to the suppression of trans identities in several
cultural environments and the desire to live freely, which blurs the public/private divide in
matters of gender and sexuality.
Having experienced myself and in my community, the intersecting marginalization of
sexuality, gender identity and expression and having worked with LGBTQ+ and migrant
individuals as a lawyer at the Greek Asylum Service, both as a Member of the Appeals’
Committees in Greece and as a case worker, this project reflects my need to further social
justice and give back to my community. In the above capacities, I have seen first-hand the
discrepancies arising in the refugee determination status for trans applicants that come
from outside the North-West. I consider this research area quite relevant for the purposes
of gender justice but also for our understanding of what gender is and the deconstruction
of double standards when it comes to non-westernized notions of queerness.
Coming from Greece, which is a Mediterranean and Balkan country, and having lived
also in Germany, the Netherlands, Brussels and Ireland, I understand the differences in the
content of identity categories and the need for a more culturally informed perspective
when it comes to social constructs such as the one of gender. In addition, coming from
a country with large immigration flows, I am very sensitive to the politization of this issue
by the migration management regimes, and I am an advocate for an expanded view of
human rights in refugee law so as to do justice to those who need protection.
In light of the foregoing, I understand that my experience does not entail most ex-
periences found under the trans and queer umbrella. For this reason, I find that it is crucial
to be aware of both my Greek and EU citizenship privilege, of my whiteness, the fact that I
do not come from an asylum claimant background and do not experience gender dys-
phoria or persecution. Furthermore, it is important to acknowledge that in my effort to
speak about gender identity, I might appropriate experiences that I do not possess or
exclude narratives that I am not personally familiar with. In view of the above, I find it
very important that the interviewees chose to discuss between them their experiences of
gender non-conformity in their countries of origin and in Greece, away from the gaze and
far from the voice of the European researcher.
Decolonizing gender identity in refugee law
Hearing the narratives of Christina and Ilios as asylum claimants in the broader West and
distance between their experiences as gender non-conforming in Iraq and Syria as op-
posed to those in Greece makes as think about the ‘Here versus There’question when it
6Sexualities 0(0)
comes to gender and sexuality in the Global North/West and South/East. It shows that on
one hand, transphobia is present both in the country of origin (Iraq/Syria) and reception
(Greece/EU) and that on the other hand, its intelligibility and narration changes according
to surrounding context and culture. In this light, one needs to think about decolonization
of gender identity and expression in refugee law. According to Betts, decolonization has
figured in recent years in the intellectual attempt to reconfigure the world by decentring it
from its Eurocentric representation. The effort is for the formerly acclaimed Eurocentric
vision of the world to be replaced as a mindset by a more just, inclusive and context-
specific view (2012: 31).
When asylum claims based on gender identity and gender expression are examined,
one must be very cautious about whether Western assumptions and classifications can
capture non-Western experiences of gender non-conformity (Abu-Assab et al., 2018;
Hertoghs and Schinkel, 2018;Jordan, 2009;Raj, 2017;Tschalaer, 2020). It should be
noted though that both the interviewees use globalized English terms to describe their
identities in the documentary, which are also broadly used in Greece nowadays as a result
of Western influence. The modernization of Greek society found the country moving
away, at least officially, from its Balkan kinships and looking to the West for more
acceptable standards and proposals. Older linguistic terms for LGBTQ+ individuals now
consist of a cacophonous remnant of the pre-liberated and pre-liberating Greek queers
(Simati, 2020: 267–268). This raises a question of whether it is required by asylum
claimants to use Western globalized narratives in order for their experiences to be le-
gitimized and heard in the asylum process. As Ilios mentions, though there are no words in
his culture to express non-normative gender identity/expression/sexual orientation (‘In
my country there is no such thing as sexual orientation’[18.44]), one must think of what
would happen if the applicants did not have access to Western influences in order to
describe and validate their experience. The addition of non-conforming gender expression
to the refugee grounds for asylum would be able to capture discursive performances that
may lead to persecution and do not fit the Western democratic rights–based framework
that is represented in the text and the interpretation of the Refugee Convention.
In addition, as Mannur and Braziel note, the diasporic background of gender non-
conforming asylum claimants complicates their narratives, in that they are historically and
culturally specific and are shaped by the dispersal and movement from a geographic
location to other disparate sites (2003: 3). As it is clear from the documentary, asylum
applicants move between different contextualizations of their gender identity and self in
the country of origin and reception. They often have to change frameworks and language
to describe their experience. Mishra’s analysis argues that the diasporic imaginary is
framed within an ‘episteme of real or imagined displacements’(2007: 1), precariously
positioned between material and imagined differences. Trans and gender nonconforming
diasporic subjectivities reflect different configurations of desire, nostalgia and belonging,
full of disruptions and contradictions when it comes to the imaginary of ‘home’
(Gopinath, 2005: 4).
Diasporic subjectivity is also connected with the position of the ‘subaltern’. The
subaltern in Spivak’s work is characterized by analytical ambiguity. According to Spivak,
the group of subalterns, which is oppressed by colonialism, lives ‘deeply in shadow’since
Avgeri 7
it is positioned ‘in between’spaces of culture (Spivak, 2006: 32; Bhabha, 1994: 2). One
must be very cautious about the invisibilities that such a state produces when it comes to
trans and gender nonconforming applicants. As it is with the subaltern women, this group
of applicants is positioned in a ‘double bind’, between the spaces of patriarchal na-
tionalism and colonizing Western discourses. As Ilios mentions, given that there are no
words for describing sexual orientation or gender non-conformity in their culture, except
derogative ones, one has to think whether the only option available to non-Western
LGBTQ+ migrants is to prescribe to Western rights-based discourses and narratives that
do not draw on particular cultural specificities or histories and experience. In this way, the
narrative of Greece as a ‘bearer’and enforcer of LGBTQ+ friendly Western policies
representing bourgeois and European/North American progress is promoted by gender
nonconforming individuals that need protection against the normalized domestic
anti-trans violence. According to Simati, this representation of modern Greece often
symbolizes progress, quality, but also LGBTQ+ visibility (2020: 83). This Western
representation of Greece moves away from the political projects of the backward province
of Balkan/Oriental Greece with all its structural problems and historical specificities that
differentiate it from the north-western countries of Europe (Simati, 2020: 240). Though,
according to Papanikolaou, ‘[a]t the same time, trying to […] unearth “gay identity”and
queer citizenship emergence in the Greek past runs the risk today of creating a cleansed,
“white-washed”, stable history of gay emergence that could possibly support homo-
normative if not homonationalist agendas and undermine the ability of queer politics to
address the contemporary intersectional demands of queer subjects in extreme precarity’
(2018: 176).
When it comes to conceptualizing refugeehood in a postcolonial discourse, Kapur
argues for an analysis that focuses on the corporeal position of subaltern sexualities
instead of a monolithic legal paradigm which views sexual minorities as lacking agency
(2005: 13). Colonial knowledge production obscures the ways that subjects resist
conditions of subordination and privileges or promotes linear narratives of victimhood
(Kapur, 2005: 21). In order to resist those tendencies, decision makers must interrogate the
space between the knower and the interrogated subject (Razack, 1998: 37). Especially
when assessing fear of disclosure or exposure in the country of origin, one needs to think
how the ‘closet’functions in a diasporic context as a shifting mode of self-regulatory
violence in a structurally oppressive environment in queer bodies. In Ilios’s narrative, it
becomes apparent that everything that is gender nonconforming in their country takes
place in secrecy and that when one realizes their non-conformity, they feel like they are
they only one out there. Most often, their first (if any) means of socialization is social
media with all the risks that may entail (‘…the least that can happen is that you go to
jail…’ [14.27]). Sedgwick argues that ‘the closet is the defining structure of gay op-
pression this century’(1990: 7), which operates through the performance of silence
(Sedgwick, 1990: 3). ‘Coming out’of the closet, a milestone of LGBTQI+ identity in the
Western representations, involves the fact that queer subjects are concealed or shamed
into managing their visibility (Brown, 2000: 1). In international protection status de-
termination, though, silence, speech and (in)visibility are not interpreted under the above
lenses, but rather what is expected is a confirmation of the account of victim and saviour.
8Sexualities 0(0)
The positionality of adjudicators as well as the differential operation of (in)visibility in
different contexts and locations is something that needs to be reflected upon, in order to
minimize these projected representations (Abu-Assab and Nasser-Eddin, 2020: 197).
According to Abu-Assab and Nasser-Eddin, decolonizing refugee law can help us
familiarize ourselves with terminologies other than the dominant ones, with which non-
Western trans and gender nonconforming individuals may well not identify (2020: 197,
see Ilios’s interview). This does not mean that concepts such as gender identity or gender
expression will or should be abandoned but that they need to be expanded and pro-
blematized in order to capture the complex narratives and identifications of asylum
applicants. It is implicit, for example, in the film that Ilios has socialized as a gay male, but
they also identify as an androgyne; then, the question becomes, how do we capture these
complex experiences in the intersection of diaspora, culture, gender identity and sexu-
ality? There is of course some authority and access to institutional protection in clas-
sifying individuals according to a legal framework. On the other hand, there is some extra
responsibility in understanding, without preconceptions, the nuanced narratives of the
asylum claimants and being able to relate those to expanded and inclusive legal defi-
nitions. It is true that there is a totalizing effect of legal definitions, which reflects Western
hegemony, but one can resist this effect by (a) historicizing the issue, that is, being aware
of the cross-cultural history of the phenomena one is studying, (b) politicizing the issue,
that is, thinking about the political agendas that are involved in it, (c) contextualizing the
issue, that is, identifying the interlocking and intersecting structures of oppression that are
present there and finally (d) globalizing the issue, that is, thinking about the global
structures that shape the specific phenomena that one is trying to address (Abu-Assab and
Nasser-Eddin, 2020: 198). These strategies can help us decolonize sexuality and gender in
the refugee process combined with positioning one’s self and trying to expand one’s
knowledge based on the marginalized person’s perspective, bearing in mind that they are
the main knowledge bearers of their journey (Abu-Assab and Nasser-Eddin, 2020: 200).
Among others, neocolonial epistemic categories of gender, race and sexuality sustain
colonial heteronormativity. Decolonizing gender entails interrogating systems of clas-
sification and taxonomies that classify people according to their skin colour, biological
composition or body configuration. Delinking knowledge and being from coloniality
means rethinking and reconfiguring experience without centring Western and Eurocentric
thought and taxonomies (see Grosfoguel, 2007). As legal scholars, we use legal concepts
in order to address pre-existing phenomena and deliver justice for previous wrongdoings,
but one must be aware of the potential reproduction of hierarchies of power through the
processes of institutional protection from a position of authority towards oppressed people
(Bruce-Jones, 2015). In examining the conditions of erasure of diverse ways of being that
exist against progressive queer championship of the West, it is possible to reimagine
‘freedom’in new ways beyond the liberal project of rights by exploring other, non-
Western avenues of meaningful agency (Kapur, 2019). Our systems of knowledge have
been largely produced by institutional and formal education, writing and inquiry that
privileges narratives of Euro-American domination and ignores violent colonization of
non–Euro-American spaces (Puwar, 2020). Epistemological practices that are detached
from the subjects of inquiry are presented as scientific and objective and deemed a priori
Avgeri 9
progressive. Coloniality has been constitutive and not derivative of modernity, so it is
indeed very difficult to question its assumptions. Decolonizing gender identity in refugee
law means delinking from discourses that privilege Euro-American–centric knowledge
and giving voice and learning from the subaltern non-normative subject (Bakshi et al.,
2016: 4). This would entail problematizing gender and sexuality in a way that it does not
only represent Western experiences of people with citizenship status but also experiences
such as Christina’s transness and Ilios’s non-conforming gender and sexuality as a lived
reality across states and cultures (Iraq, Syria and Greece) intersecting with their status as
migrants and asylum claimants.
Feminist, LGBT rights, decolonial, pacific, ethnic minority rights and anti-fascist
critiques of refugee law have been largely initiated by domestic activists and not foreign
refugees demanding justice. Changes in refugee law and the fact that it now addresses
gender and sexuality claims, as opposed to the 1950s and 1960s, reflects mostly Western
gender equality and LGBTQI+ historical developments and not the fact that such claims
based on gendered persecution did not exist before (Spijkerboer, 2015: 9). One must be
aware of the ways that these Euro-American developments reflect Euro-American
representations of experience and demands, but need to be delinked from them since
they do not do justice to a variety of global and specifically situated gendered trajectories
(Spijkerboer, 2015). For example, compulsory gender conformity in Iraq and Syria has
a differentiated impact and function than in Greece, which is evident in both Christina’s
narrative of not being able to go out as a woman in Iraq (I have no right, as a transgender,
to be a woman [6.15]) and Ilios’s description of gay self-realization in the Syrian society
as thinking at first that you are the only one out there.
According to Colpani and Habed, through the advancement of LGBTQI+ rights,
‘Europe establishes itself as a space of sexual exceptionalism and ultimately as a sexual
fortress under siege’(Colpaniand Habed, 2014: 74). Puar in Terrorist Assemblages
similarly argues that the politics of homonormativity, the appropriation of hetero-
normativity by homosexuals, normalize Western homosexuality and at the same time,
homonationalism deems non-Western queers inappropriate. Homonationalism is ‘a form
of sexual exceptionalism –the emergence of national homosexuality’(Puar, 2007:2).
Puar argues that homonormativity is the normalization of homosexuality in Western
countries according to Western standards of sexual regulation similar to those of hetero
relationships. These countries use homonationalism ‘as a regulatory script not only of
normative gayness and queerness, but also of the racial and national norms that reinforce
these sexual subjects’(Puar, 2007: 2). The same can hold true for transgender individuals
that assume their subjectivity in terms of their whiteness and Western citizenship. For
Puar, the display of domesticated homosexual individuals demonstrates national progress,
which in turn reinforces material, cultural and discursive domination over non-
homonational countries (Puar, 2007:39–40), such as Iraq and Syria. As Christina de-
scribes in the documentary, there is indeed racism in Greece both towards Muslims and
LGBTQ+ issues, and of course at the intersection of both.
Assigning asylum status to non-Western queers can be such a homonationalist project,
in which ‘the myth of sexual exceptionalism, the freedom for people of all sexual ori-
entations and practices is invested upon to gloss the atrocities in the war economy of
10 Sexualities 0(0)
homonationalist countries’(Sharif, 2015: 5). This can be argued to apply in all LGBTQI+
asylum applications, but it is particularly the case when asylum becomes a means for
decision makers to always discover homophobia and transphobia elsewhere, which
according to Christina’s narration is definitely not the case. Christina vividly states as
a trans migrant woman, ‘...in Iraq they kill you, here in Greece you live, but you die
slowly’[05.13].
Reinforcing binaries between the progressive West and the barbaric elsewhere and
misrepresenting non-Western gender non-conformity by submitting subjects to the
normative boundaries of Western queerness is usually the way asylum can be transformed
into a means of Western domination. Expectations to demonize the home country as
homo- and trans-phobic and provide a shock value victimhood spectacle on the part of
Western adjudicators in the asylum interview come at the cost of complicated diverse
experiences of non-Western queers and help to reinforce the homonationalist project
(Sharif, 2015: 13) According to Murray, ‘LGBT refugee claimants face daunting chal-
lenges negotiating a system in which questions of authenticity are constructed through an
evaluation of bodily appearances, comportment and narratives that are consistently
evaluated for their fit with western homonationalist sexual categories’(Murray, 2014: 29).
Razack (1998: 97) notes that tribunal members, legislators, lawyers and the media are
the ones whose descriptions, imaginaries and gazes construct asylum seekers as worthy of
protection from the tyranny of their own culture or unworthy of it. In this process, the
assessment of sexual and gender persecution operates in highly racialized and essentialist
terms and privileges narratives of violence from the applicant’s community against
narratives of violence as colonized subjects (Razack, 1998: 99). As Haritaworn argues,
the West enshrines narrow concepts of diversity defined in terms of freedom and choice,
that not incidentally conform with the neoliberal free market ideology whose own in-
herent exclusions are harder to identify (Haritaworn, 2012: 3). Luibheid (2002) has argued
that successful refugee claims often require producing a racialized, colonialist narrative of
disassociation from the nation state from which the claimant comes. In addition, the
claimant must construct their gender identity and sexuality as immutable characteristics
through universalized colonialist frameworks and also void of all other material and
emotional relations between the applicant and their community (Luibheid, 2002:179). It is
very important to identify narratives of imperialism, colonialism, racism and resistance in
the asylum applicant’s process of sexual identity configuration, in order to be able to
identify ‘how these systems of domination produce and maintain violence against ra-
cialized sexual minorities both within and beyond national borders’(Murray, 2014: 29).
According to Ilios, for example, Greeks are not racists, but nationalists (‘…every person
who is Greek thinks that they own the ground’[18.05]). Safety for Ilios is experienced on
terms, given that they do not go to places where there are other refugees or racists and do
not ‘shout’that they are gay.
The Refugee Status Determination process does not capture both non-normative
genders that do not qualify as binary (such as Ilios’s androgyneity) and closeted
gender identities/expressions that have not been disclosed in the country of origin
since this would lead to persecution. Forced concealment is a human rights violation
per se, and it should not be a variable in refugee decision making although reasonably
Avgeri 11
tolerating secrecy and being private in order to avoid persecution has been an implicit
requirement by adjudicators for many years (Millbank, 2009:398;Wessels, 2017).
Decolonizing gender identity in refugee law means not judging on standard Western
terms and projecting these representations on trans and gender nonconforming
asylum claimants and non-Western migrants. The import of their unmediated voices
together with raw visual material from migrant sites in Greece created a way to hear
Christina and Ilios’s narratives that sought to minimize the lens of Western uni-
versality while empathizing with their own configuration of experiences and re-
flections and connecting with their internal (in)consistencies instead of comparing
them to a credible Western standard. The question of what this decolonializing
approach that questions the normalization of Western standards of gender, and their
transgression, might offer Refugee Status Determination needs ongoing and thor-
ough interrogation.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/
or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this
article.
ORCID iD
Mariza Avgeri https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7927-2903
Note
1. Refugee Status Determination refers to an administrative process, where caseworkers (at first
instance) or Members of Appeals’Authorities (at second instance) determine whether an asylum
claimant is entitled to international protection, namely, refugee or subsidiary status. This is
usually determined by an interview with civil servants or judges, who then apply national, EU
and international refugee law on an individual basis examining if the applicant demonstrates
a well-founded fear of persecution at the country of origin due to one of the Refugee Convention
grounds.
References
Abu-Assab N, Greatrick A and Nasser-Eddin N (2018) Reconceptualising and contextualising
sexual rights in the MENA region: beyond LGBTQI categories. Gender & Development 26(1):
173–189.
Abu-Assab N and Nasser-Eddin N (2020) Decolonial approaches to refugee migration: nof Nasser-
Eddin and Nour Abu-Assab in conversation. Migration and Society 3: 190–202.
Andrade VL, Danisi C, Dustin M, et al. (2020) Queering Asylum in Europe: A Survey Report.
SOGICA Project/University of Sussex. Available at: https://www.sogica.org/wp-content/
uploads/2020/07/The-SOGICA-surveys-report_1-July-2020-1.pdf (accessed 30 March 2021).
12 Sexualities 0(0)
Bakshi S, Jivraj S and Posocco S (2016) Introduction. In: Bakshi S, Jivraj S and Posocco S (eds)
Decolonizing Sexualities: Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions. Oxford: Coun-
terpress, 1–15.
Berg L and Millbank J (2009) Constructing the personal narratives of lesbian, gay and bisexual
asylum claimants. Journal of Refugee Studies 22(1): 1–17.
Berg L and Millbank J (2013) Developing a jurisprudence of transgender particular social group.
UTS: Law Research Paper No. 2013/1. In: Spijkerboer T (ed) Fleeing Homophobia. Routledge,
121–153. Available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=2312887 (accessed 4 March 2020).
Betts RF (2012) Decolonization a brief history of the word. In: Bogaerts E and Raben R (eds)
Beyond Empire and Nation. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 23–37.
Bhabha H (1994) The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge.
Braziel JE and Mannur A (2003) Nation, migration, globalization: points of contention in diaspora
studies. In: Braziel JE and Mannur A (eds) Theorizing Diaspora. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,
1–22.
Brown M (2000) Closet Space: Geographies of Metaphor from the Body to the Globe. London and
New York: Routledge.
Bruce-Jones E (2015) Death zones, comfort zones: queering the refugee question. International
Journal on Minority and Group Rights 22(1): 101–127.
Colpani G and Habed AJ (2014) "In Europe it’s different": homonationalism and peripheral desires
for Europe. In: Ayoub PM and Patternote D (eds) LGBT Activism and the Making of Europe: A
Rainbow Europe? London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 73–93.
Dustin M and Held N (2018) In or out? A queer intersectional approach to ‘particular social
group’membership and credibility in SOGI asylum claims in Germany and the UK. GenIUS-
Rivista di Studi Giuridici Sull’orientamento Sessuale e L’identit`
a di Genere 2018(2): 74–87.
ECRE (European Council for Refugees and Exiles) (2018) Greece –District court of Mitilini allows
transgender refugee to change ID documents. In: European Database of Asylum Law, 31.
Available at: https://www.asylumlawdatabase.eu/en/content/greece-%E2%80%93-district-
court-mitilini-allows-transgender-refugee-change-id-documents (accessed 19 August 2020).
FRA (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights) (2020) EU LGBTI survey II: A long way to
go for LGBTI equality (country data: Greece). Available at: https://fra.europa.eu/sites/default/
files/fra_uploads/lgbti-survey-country-data_greece.pdf (accessed 19 August 2020).
GCR (Greek Council for Refugees) (2020) Statistics (Greece). In: Asylum Information Database.
Available at: https://www.asylumineurope.org/reports/country/greece/statistics (accessed 19
August 2020).
Gopinath G (2005) Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Grosfoguel R (2007) The epistemic decolonial turn. Cultural Studies 21(2–3): 211–223.
Haritaworn J (2012) The Biopolitics of Mixing: Thai Multiracialities and Haunted Ascendencies.
Abingdon: Ashgate.
Hertoghs M and Schinkel W (2018) The state’s sexual desires: the performance of sexuality in the
Dutch asylum procedure. Theory and Society 47: 691–716.
ILGA Europe (2017) Greece improves gender recognition law but misses chance to introduce self-
determination. Available at: https://www.ilga-europe.org/resources/news/latest-news/greece-
gender-recognition-law-oct2017 (accessed 19 August 2020).
IOM (International Organization for Migration) (2016) Mixed migration flows in the Mediterranean
and beyond: compilation of available data and information. Available at: https://www.iom.int/
sites/default/files/situation_reports/file/Mixed-Flows-Mediterranean-and-Beyond-Compilation-
Overview-2015.pdf (accessed 19 August 2020).
Avgeri 13
Jansen S and Spijkerboer T (2011) Fleeing homophobia, asylum claims related to sexual orientation
and gender identity in Europe. Available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/4ebba7852.html
(accessed 4 March 2020).
Jordan SR (2009) Un/Convention(al) refugees: contextualizing the accounts of refugees facing
homophobic or transphobic persecution. Refuge 26(2): 165–182.
Kapur R (2005) Erotic Justice: Law and the New Politics of Postcolonialism. London: Glass House
Press.
Kapur R (2019) On gender, alterity and human rights: freedom in a fishbowl. Feminist Review
122(1): 167–171.
Knight K (2017) Greece should do better on transgender legal recognition: while Bill is an im-
provement, abusive tenants remain. In: Human Rights Watch. Available at: https://www.hrw.org/
news/2017/09/25/greece-should-do-better-transgender-legal-recognition (accessed 19 August
2020).
Luibheid E (2002) Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Millbank J (2009) From discretion to disbelief: recent trends in refugee determinations on the basis
of sexual orientation in Australia and the United Kingdom. The International Journal of Human
Rights 13(2–3): 391–414.
Mishra V (2007) The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary.
London: Routledge.
Murray D (2014) Real queer: ‘authentic’LGBT refugee claimants and homonationalism in the
Canadian refugee system. Anthropologica 56(1): 21–32.
Papanikolaou D (2018) Critically queer and haunted: Greek identity, crisiscapes and doing queer
history in the present. Journal of Greek Media & Culture 4(2): 167–186.
Puar J (2007) Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. USA: Duke University
Press.
Puwar N (2020) Puzzlement of a d´
ej`
a vu: illuminaries of the global South. The Sociological Review
68(3): 540–556.
Raj S (2017) A/Effective adjudications: queer refugees and the law. Journal of Intercultural Studies
38(4): 453–468..
Razack S (1998) Looking White People the Eye: Gender, Race and Culture in Courtrooms and
Classrooms. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Sedgwick E (1990) Epistemology of the Closet. Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press.
Sharif R (2015) White gaze saving brown queers: homonationalism meets imperialist islamophobia.
Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies 21(1): 1–19
Simati A (2020) ‘Dalikes’and Their Women: Female Masculinities and the Politics of Female
Homosexual Desire. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. University of the Aegean, Department
of Social Anthropology and History.
Smith LT (1999) Decolonizing Methodologies : Research and Indigenous Peoples. London, New
York: Zed Books Ltd.
Spijkerboer T (2015) European Sexual Nationalism: Refugee Law after the Gender & Sexuality
Critiques. Key Note Speech, Nordic Asylum Seminar. University of Uppsala. Available at
SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2607476 (accessed 20 June 2020).
Spivak G (2006) Can the subaltern speak? In eds. Ashcroft B, Griffiths G and Tiffin H (eds) The
Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 66–111.
Tschalaer M (2020) Between queer liberalisms and Muslim masculinities: LGBTQI+ Muslim
asylum assessment in Germany. Ethnic and Racial Studies 43(7): 1265–1283.
14 Sexualities 0(0)
UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) (2002) Guidelines on International Protection No.
2‘membership of a particular social group’within the context of Article 1A(2) of the 1951
convention and/or its 1967 protocol relating to the status of refugees. Available at: https://www.
refworld.org/docid/3d36f23f4.html (accessed 4 March 2020).
UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) (2012) Guidelines on international protection No.
9: claims to refugee status based on sexual orientation and/or gender identity within the context
of Article 1A(2) of the 1951 convention and/or its 1967 protocol relating to the status of refugees.
Available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/50348afc2.html (accessed 4 March 2020).
Wessels J (2017) Publicly manifested-fatefully determined-invariably "discreet": the assessment of
sexuality-based asylum claims in Germany and France. Canadian Journal of Women and the
Law 29(2): 343–374.
Mariza Avgeri is a qualified lawyer currently completing her PhD at Maynooth Uni-
versity, Ireland, at the Department of Law working on transgender asylum claims and
jurisprudence in the context of the European Union. She is a John and Pat Hume scholar
and an Associate Lecturer in Law, Culture and Society at the Open University, United
Kingdom. In the past, she has worked as a legal researcher specializing in human rights,
LGBTQI+ rights and migration, a case worker at the Greek Asylum Service and
a Member of the Appeals’Committees.
Avgeri 15
