I had never imagined that, during a Zoom session for one of France’s leading seminars on modern Arabic literature, I would witness the meeting being hijacked. Suddenly, a video filled the screen: Hitler, wearing the Nazi armband, stood watching a naked Black man engaged in an explicit sexual act. Yet Hitler’s gaze was not fixed on the man. It was directed at the viewer, at us.

The academic atmosphere collapsed within moments. We found ourselves confronted with a form of far-right political fetishism at a time when the world is witnessing an alarming resurgence of violence, extremism, and political fascism.

That violent disruption of the seminar forced me to rethink the violence now inflicted, politically, upon all those who cross boundaries, whether borders, gender, or culture. Whether we live between two cultures, are geographically and politically categorized as refugees, or navigate the world as transgender or queer people, we all face the same three possible responses to violence: freezing, fleeing, or fighting back. Meanwhile, the violence and danger continue to escalate around us, leaving us suspended, stripped of the privilege of simply carrying on with life as though nothing stood in our way.

Violence has touched us all. Yet the violence that follows from living as people who cross cultures, who cross places and borders as refugees, or who cross gender boundaries, means inhabiting the space between two places, between two cultures, or even existing in a placeless realm. It also means contributing to what Mexican American feminist scholar and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa called a new Mestiza consciousness: a consciousness born of racial, ideological, cultural, and biological intermingling. It emerges as an alien consciousness, a hybrid Mestiza consciousness, a woman’s consciousness, the consciousness of the borderlands.

This new era of violence and global political fascism has driven us all to retreat from the outside world into our own inner shelters, into that “placeless” space. It is there that Enan escapes all of Iraq by retreating into her room, angry at her region, her family, her society, and her state, which criminalizes gender transition.

Nothing could soften the weight of this conversation. Before it even began, I found myself caught in an unexpected ethical dilemma. I had tried to identify a song Enan had shared on her Instagram story, alongside an image of a cat wearing the wired earphones so characteristic of the Y generation. The song, performed by the Iraqi singer Sabah Mahmoud, included the lyrics: “I once thought of ending my life… of throwing myself off the bridge… of drowning in the Euphrates… because of the pain of this life.”

I was simply trying to verify that the song really existed and that I had not imagined it. Instead, the search engine interrupted me, displaying the French suicide prevention hotline and urging me to seek help if I, or someone I knew, was thinking about suicide. It reassured me that I was not alone.

That happened before I decided to interview the writer Inan M.bly, and before she sent me another picture that made us both laugh, a small act of irony and quiet rebellion against violence. The photo showed Saber, her lesbian friend’s cat, whom she had once found shivering in the rain and named Saber because one of his eyes had been damaged by the cold. Saber, affectionately called Sabouri, was wearing a turban worn by clerics from the Najaf seminary. It was not the turban of a sheikh, at least not in the colloquial Syrian sense of the word. In the Najaf seminary, all students are considered men of religion, and man of religion is the formal title used without further distinction. According to Enan, Sabouri loves to play but is also afraid of being left alone.

Today, I sit down with Inan for this remote conversation, aware that I enjoy many privileges that make our exchange possible. Those privileges do not diminish our shared effort to unpack violence, both in the Arab world and globally, in its social and political forms. We speak about writing, independent journalism, and our reflections on the Arab media platform that has embraced us most generously and treated our pain and our realities as women writers with dignity and without conditions.

Because conversations between women cannot simply end abruptly, Inan and I decided to continue this dialogue as a kind of ritual, one that challenges conventional narratives about women, mothers, and grandmothers in the Mashreq. It is a conversation that resists both Eastern and Western forms of fascism and insists that Enan’s voice, and the voices of all those she represents in Iraq, be heard.

Daraj spoke with her in the following interview:

Interview by Rana Zeid

Rana Zeid: About two years ago, the Iraqi parliament passed a law criminalizing LGBTQ+ people under the pretext of preserving the fabric of Iraqi society. As I understand it, the law imposes fines of up to around $10,000, in addition to prison sentences that may extend for years. It appears that the criminalization is not limited to physical gender transition, but may also encompass gender identities that do not conform to the sex assigned at birth or officially declared identity. For example, could someone who identifies as nonbinary, without having undergone any physical transition, also be targeted under the law?

Inan: It is impossible to survive vague and elastic laws. Isn’t that precisely the function of laws in our Arab countries? To remain flexible enough to be drafted, packaged, and interpreted according to the mood of those in power?

The 1988 Anti Prostitution Law (No. 8), later amended into the Anti Prostitution and Homosexuality Law, does not contain terms such as gender, gender identity, or gender transition. In fact, before the first draft of the amended law was introduced, some campaigns ultimately led to the prohibition of the word gender, which came to be treated as synonymous with homosexuality. It was replaced in the media and in state institutions by the term sexual deviance. State institutions were even prohibited from working with or hosting organizations, many of them feminist, simply because they used the word gender. As a result, an entire feminist current was denied the language needed to expose both the visible and invisible forms of gender based violence embedded within the patriarchal system.

At the same time, the law established a legal framework that enables the authorities to prosecute anyone whose gender identity does not correspond to the sex recorded on their official documents.

Inan: The law distinguishes between two main provisions under Article Seven. The first criminalizes what it calls “imitating women.” This is a behavioral and performative provision that does not require any surgical or hormonal intervention. It is enough for a police officer or a judge to interpret someone’s appearance, mannerisms, or way of speaking as “imitating women.” That interpretation may extend to clothing, hairstyles, accessories such as necklaces or earrings, and even bodily gestures.

The second provision criminalizes what it calls “changing one’s biological sex.” It targets medical interventions involving the body and punishes both the individual undergoing them and the person performing them. Between these two provisions lies an enormous grey area into which almost any form of criminalization can be fitted.

Concepts such as demigender or nonbinary simply have no place in the language of this law. The text does not recognize gender as a category distinct from biological sex. It denies that distinction altogether. A person who identifies as nonbinary, has not undergone any medical intervention, and has not altered their appearance in a way that could be interpreted as “imitating women” may still find themselves trapped in a legal vacuum shaped by repression. The law offers them no protection. If they openly identify themselves, that alone can be interpreted as “promoting homosexuality,” another vague and undefined expression broad enough to encompass a social media post, an article, a public statement, or simply introducing oneself in a public setting.

There is another question as well. What if a trans man takes hormones without undergoing surgery, or only has facial feminization or masculinization procedures? The law says “changed their biological sex,” but that phrase itself is elastic. Does altering one’s voice through hormone therapy constitute a “biological change”? What about women who receive hormone injections for athletic performance or bodybuilding? Could that be interpreted as an attempt to change one’s sex or as “imitation”? The law provides no answers. Instead, it leaves such determinations to the discretion of judges or forensic doctors, much like the so-called discretionary forced anal examinations. This deliberate vagueness is not an accident. It is central to how the law functions.

In our Arab countries, laws are often written in this open-ended way so they can serve as political instruments in the hands of those in power before they serve as instruments of justice. They can be packaged and interpreted according to political expediency and the prevailing mood.

The notion of “imitating women” is not a medical or psychological category. It is a social and disciplinary one. It is enough for someone else to perceive an appearance as “imitation,” even if the individual neither identifies nor understands themselves as a trans woman. In medical and gender related terms, they may not be one at all. This means the law targets gender expression, not only gender identity. Anyone who departs from patriarchal binary expectations of masculinity and femininity becomes vulnerable to prosecution.

In my own case, as a trans woman, this entrapment becomes even more severe. If I undergo medical treatment, I fall under the provision criminalizing the “changing of biological sex.” If I simply live with an appearance that others interpret as “imitating women” without any medical procedures, I fall under the provision against effeminacy. If I speak openly about my identity, I risk being accused of promoting homosexuality. And if I do nothing, I remain trapped inside a body whose very existence torments me, a body I long to shed.

In Iraq, the danger does not end with the law. It is compounded by the threat posed by militias and by social and familial violence that extends far beyond the legal text, reaching the point of murder. I am trapped between being killed and killing myself. All of this exists independently of my work as a writer, which, in itself, is already treated as an accusation.

Rana Zeid: A moment ago, you said something that may be one of the most painful statements in this entire conversation, and I want to pause there with great respect and care. What is it that makes fear and pressure reach this point? What are the daily risks, legal, social, or familial, that you face as a trans woman in Iraq and that leave you feeling your life is so completely besieged?

Inan: I stopped hiding my suicidal thoughts three years ago. These thoughts are not new to me. On the contrary, they are the logical consequence of relentless, systematic violence, violence that the 2024 law has only intensified. My body does not belong to me. It belongs to the state, to society, and to my family. Every day, it continues to grow under that imposed ownership. I first realized, before puberty, that I was not a man and never would be. Today, I know that I am a trans woman.

My need for medical care is not a luxury. It is my right to exist. The hormones my body needs are what allow the daily sense of alienation, the constant desire to shed my own skin, to subside. They have now become a criminalized commodity. Even before the law was amended, the dangers came from every direction: militias, society, and family. Any one of them could be fatal.

There is a black market where you might be able to obtain what you need, but that is another form of death. It is not only that the medications may be counterfeit. Gender affirming healthcare requires continuous medical supervision, and self-administering treatment without proper care carries serious risks, including dangerous overdoses. That is what this daily siege looks like. You need treatment to live, yet accessing that treatment can itself become a death sentence, not only metaphorically. You may suffer a stroke or liver failure.

In every possible scenario, the body is under threat, and the only “safe” option is to do nothing, to remain suspended, watching your body slowly deteriorate from within.

Remaining trapped is another kind of slow death. Your body, the law, and society become a prison, while your mind turns into a place of impossible calculations. Every morning, you wake up asking yourself the same question: which risk do you choose among different forms of death? This constant negotiation between the prison of the state, the prison of society, the prison of militias, the prison of family, and unsafe access to care, where every option carries potentially fatal consequences, drains whatever capacity for endurance remains.

Even thoughts of suicide do not emerge as a sudden solution. They become, in my mind, the logical outcome of what happens when every path to treatment is closed off, when the body becomes an unbearable place to inhabit. Survivall is reduced to a succession of days spent standing still, waiting for something to collapse.

Often, after repeatedly writing to seek help leaving Iraq and receiving no response, death by my own hand begins to feel less terrifying than the slow death imposed on me by geography, culture, society, political authority, and even economic circumstances. Less terrifying, not because I want to die, but because I want to escape a body that has become a living tomb.

Rana Zeid: In light of these legal and social restrictions, what is the reality of accessing healthcare or medical interventions related to gender transition in Iraq? Does the absence of legal and medical protection push some people toward the black market or other unsafe practices?

Inan: When I speak about the black market, I am not referring only to some dark place where people are forced to use contaminated injections, counterfeit medication, expired drugs, hormones smuggled without refrigeration, or fake products, although all of that can certainly happen. I also mean something else. The medication may be legally stocked in a licensed pharmacy and approved by the state. Yet, hormones, which normally require a prescription, are sold unofficially at several times their actual price.

The economic burden compounds the tragedy, especially for someone without stable employment or a reliable source of income. That is the reality for people forced to live in the shadows. Every purchase comes at the expense of savings, debt, or additional work that may expose a person to exploitation or ongoing sexual abuse.

One of the cruelest aspects of this system is its instability. There is no guarantee of continued access. A person’s body may begin adapting to hormone therapy, only for treatment to suddenly become unavailable. Estrogen or testosterone levels revert, symptoms return, and gender dysphoria comes back with even greater intensity. This cycle of stopping and restarting treatment can be just as harmful as remaining on incorrect dosages.

A trans person ends up paying three separate prices. The first is the inflated financial cost of medication. The second is the health risk of taking unsupervised doses of medication whose quality cannot be guaranteed. The third is the psychological cost of living in a constant state of fear.

The state completes this cycle of harm. It does not merely deny people access to safe healthcare by treating their very existence as a crime. It has also created a black market that drains people financially while endangering their health. Simply seeking safe medical care means your body becomes both captive and economically exploited, while the medication you depend on may itself become a slow poison.

The tragedy is that the faster alternative can begin to seem like suicide or choosing to forgo treatment altogether to stay alive, which is another form of self-destruction.

The financial, psychological, and social consequences are relentless. They isolate people, making it difficult to participate in society or maintain employment, while also deepening mental health struggles for which there is little accessible care, financially or psychologically. Even seeking therapy often ends, at best, with a psychiatrist or psychologist trying to reaffirm the sex recorded on your official documents rather than addressing your actual needs.

Rana Zeid: When you speak about the existence of a black market for medical transition, I want to ask about its impact on you personally. How have you lived through this reality? What has it done to you psychologically, physically, and in terms of your sense of safety?

Inan: For a long time, I remained steadfast in my refusal to resort to any alternative treatment without proper medical supervision. I believed, and still believe, that access to safe healthcare is a fundamental human right.

That conviction was tested when, at the age of twenty-one, I found myself overwhelmed by the countless labels imposed on me by human rights advocates and feminists within Iraq’s civil society every time I introduced myself as a trans woman. Eventually, because I simply could not afford proper treatment, I began taking birth control pills as a substitute for hormone therapy.

I was not the first to do this. In different countries and under different circumstances, many trans women have turned to birth control pills as an alternative. But these pills are only a flawed substitute. They contain ethinyl estradiol, a synthetic form of estrogen, rather than the bioidentical estrogens used in gender affirming hormone therapy. The dosage is not designed for transition-related care, and they do not contain testosterone blockers, which my body needs to suppress testosterone production.

In other words, I was taking something that resembled treatment without actually being treatment. My body was receiving contradictory signals: synthetic estrogen in imprecise doses, without any suppression of testosterone and without medical monitoring of liver function, cholesterol levels, or blood clotting. Meanwhile, my body’s natural testosterone continued to counteract the relatively weak estrogen contained in birth control pills. The harm outweighed any potential benefit.

There was a period when I was at real risk of developing a blood clot or suffering liver damage before I would ever see the physical changes I longed for, changes that remained far out of reach. Birth control pills do little more than reduce body hair, soften the skin, and increase the risk of blood clots.

Inan: But I eventually stopped after experiencing waves of nausea, uncontrollable crying, and overwhelming anxiety. Those episodes left me confined to my bed until I eventually lost my job. The experience did not give me any greater sense of safety. The fear had simply shifted. Instead of coming from an external force acting upon my body, it now came from the pills I was taking myself.

At first, “it’s better than nothing” was a small lie I kept telling myself whenever I began to feel repulsed by them. But over time, the experience reshaped my understanding of my own identity as well. It placed me in that terrifying middle ground where every possible choice carried its own form of death.

Stopping the medication was my decision. It was never a rejection of gender transition itself. It was a sovereign decision about how I would transition. Refusing those pills meant returning to an earlier stage in my life, not only in rejecting unsafe medical practices, but also in rejecting the conditions imposed upon me simply to exercise the most basic autonomy over my own body.

Even if I never receive legal or social recognition, I will at least have been able to say: this is my body, and I am the one who lives in it.

Rana Zeid: How does Iraq’s regional and political diversity shape the realities of trans people? Do life, opportunities, and risks differ across different parts of the country?

Inan: In one way or another, I think we always have to acknowledge this, despite all the suffering: every one of us stands at some distance of privilege from someone else, whether that privilege is rooted in class, social status, gender, or geography. These forms of privilege do not diminish the dangers people face, but they remain privileges nonetheless. They shape how we understand ourselves and our lives.

Take two trans men or two trans women living through what appears to be the same experience. If one has a room where they can close the door and the other does not, that single difference fundamentally alters their opportunities, the risks they face, and their daily experience of living or even exploring their identity.

Yet there is one experience we all share: an unspoken loss. Or, as the Argentine activist Lohana Berkins called it, desarraigo. I prefer to use that word as well. It refers to uprooting. When a trans woman or a trans man decides to live according to their true identity, the consequence, more often than not, and in Iraq almost always, is the loss of home, the severing of family ties, and exclusion from public life, from the city, or even from the country itself. It is a deliberate and structural policy practiced by a society that criminalizes our very existence.

In Iraq, this uprooting takes forms shaped by geography, but it is never limited to geography alone. The differences between Baghdad, Basra, the Kurdistan Region, central Iraq, and western Iraq lie in the intensity of persecution, the availability of support networks, even clandestine ones, and the extent of whatever shared public space still exists.

A trans woman in central Erbil, for example, may have access to certain spaces through queer activists or underground networks. Yet if she is Syrian or Iraqi, she may face a different set of risks related to residency status, language barriers, and employment.

Even within a single governorate, experiences vary dramatically. In the southern province of Maysan, for instance, a trans woman living in the marshlands, where communities are facing environmental destruction and forced displacement, lives a very different reality from someone in the provincial capital, where conservative tribal structures and the growing influence of militias shape everyday life in other ways.

Rana Zeid: You describe uprooting as the norm, yet you also suggest that it can become a new site of knowledge production because those who have been uprooted develop a different understanding of the systems that seek to erase them.

If we step back for a moment, how would you describe the situation of trans people in Iraq during the rule of the Ba’ath Party and Saddam Hussein? And after 2003, under the new political order, how did that reality change? In your view, what were the most significant legal, political, and social transformations?

Inan: Like all dictatorships, Saddam Hussein’s regime was primarily threatened by conventional political opposition. But Arab nationalist projects, and Arab dictatorships more broadly, are also built upon rigid gender binaries that they seek to enforce.

I often wonder how many trans women died in Saddam’s senseless wars without anyone ever knowing they were trans women. Some may have died in the trenches or in Iranian cities, others on the road back from Kuwait, or in Saddam’s prisons because they refused compulsory military service. As Kanan Makiya explained in his analysis of the Ba’ath regime, and as I have argued in my own writing on citizenship as a trans woman, Ba’athist rule functioned as an authority that created an atmosphere of fear, reshaping everyday life and training people to obey to survive.

Legally, there was more continuity than rupture. Before the passage of the Anti Prostitution and Anti Homosexuality Law, both the former regime and the current one relied on the vague notion of “public morality,” another elastic concept used to target people whose lives fell outside socially accepted norms.

Socially, even today, Iraq is full of same sex relationships that society chooses to ignore, depending on the sexual practices involved. This selective tolerance is rooted in the same patriarchal logic and rigid gender binaries that judge people according to their perceived role within a sexual relationship. Although I dislike these labels, someone considered the “top” is often overlooked because they are seen as performing the role expected of men. By contrast, the receptive partner is feminized and therefore condemned.

When we read United Nations reports documenting the murders of trans women after 2003, particularly during the campaigns carried out by militias affiliated with Muqtada al Sadr, we find that many of those women had already been engaged in sex work before the fall of the regime. Here, I return to the idea of uprooting. Even if they managed to access hormone therapy, they could not change the gender marker on their identity documents. Without legal recognition, stable employment remained out of reach.

The two political systems endangered trans women and LGBTQ+ people more broadly, in different ways. The difference lay in the form of gender discipline imposed by those in power.

The militias that emerged after 2003 are not simply local armed groups. They are also an idea and an ideology. Beyond their military structure, they have refused to submit to the authority of the state while simultaneously entering electoral politics through political wings.

All of this has transformed them into a governing political force. Today, they are part of the state itself. At the same time, they function as a social organization. Across all of these intersecting levels, they hold a clear vision of what society should look like, how its institutions should function, and how personal status should be governed.

Within that vision, LGBTQ+ people are cast as part of a conspiracy threatening the purity and religious integrity of society. That logic ultimately produced the law we have today, after years in which we were murdered and our bodies were dumped in the streets. And that violence has never truly stopped.

Inan: None of this means that Saddam Hussein was more compassionate toward LGBTQ+ people. Reports and personal accounts describe a gay nightlife in Baghdad, but it was deeply shaped by class. It was accessible only to those who possessed certain privileges. Similar dynamics can be found today in parts of Europe, where some trans women can access hormone therapy with relative ease because they have the necessary resources. The existence of privileged exceptions does not make an authoritarian system any less brutal. If anything, the Ba’ath regime excelled at pouring salt into the wounds of its victims.

Rana Zeid: Does this resemble, to some extent, the situation of queer people in Syria under Bashar al Assad, and later under the rule of Hay’at Tahrir al Sham and Ahmed al Sharaa? Have we reached a point of what might be called political fetishism (Le fétichisme politique), where identity becomes a political obsession rather than a personal matter?

Enan: In Iraq, both in the past and today, this extends beyond LGBTQ+ people. Many believe that a higher economic status can shield them from the realities they face. To some extent, that is true.

As for Syria under Bashar al-Assad, I cannot claim deep knowledge of the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ Syrians beyond the existence of vague legal provisions criminalizing what was described as “intercourse contrary to nature.” Those laws were certainly available as tools for prosecuting gay people.

What cannot be overlooked, however, are the security practices that accompanied them. Security agencies systematically extorted LGBTQ+ people, demanding money in exchange for not exposing them to their families or arresting them. Others were pressured into becoming informants for the intelligence services. Those who were less fortunate almost certainly endured psychological torture, physical abuse, and systematic sexual violence in detention.

After both Saddam Hussein and Bashar al Assad sought to appease conservative religious currents, Saddam in 1991 and Assad in the years leading up to and following 2011, accusations of immorality increasingly became another instrument for persecuting political activists and human rights defenders, serving as an additional mechanism of intimidation, torture, and blackmail.

Later, when ISIS and Jabhat al Nusra seized parts of Syria, these jihadist organizations responded to LGBTQ+ people with executions, including throwing people from rooftops.

After Assad fled and Ahmed al-Sharaa assumed leadership of the Syrian government, these jihadist movements continued to reproduce many of the same methods. They, too, seek to impose their own vision of what society should look like and how it should be ordered. At a time marked by acute sectarian divisions, church bombings, and the unresolved fate of thousands of forcibly disappeared and detained people, they were publicly pursuing and torturing trans women.

Inan: After the fall of the Assad regime, many photographs surfaced. One that stayed with me showed al Nimr, I believe, in military uniform embracing a young person whose gender expression clearly did not conform to conventional masculinity. That image reminded me of people I have known, gay men and trans women who, in one way or another, became close to militias and armed factions that would not hesitate to kill them. This pattern extends beyond Syria. We see it among the Houthis in Yemen and within Hezbollah in Lebanon as well.

This brings me back to the idea of uprooting that we discussed earlier. Sometimes the violence of that condition drives people to seek shelter beneath the shadow of the very monster that threatens them. From the perspective of gender and sexual minorities themselves, becoming part of the entourage of an armed faction leader is not necessarily a privileged choice. It is often a survival strategy in an environment that is hostile, violent, and deadly, a bargain in which life is exchanged for absolute submission and the continuous performance of loyalty.

This resembles a form of sexual slavery. The queer person exists not as someone who is recognized, but as someone who is completely controlled. They are permitted to exist only insofar as they are not queer in ways that would justify killing them or depriving them of freedom of movement, choice, or independent desire. All of those freedoms remain suspended.

The body is allowed to exist only so that it can be consumed. Patriarchal military systems lack a genuine moral ideology. What they seek is power and domination. Within that logic, the gender nonconforming body becomes simultaneously an object of secret pleasure and a sacrificial offering to public virtue, or what I earlier described as political fetishism.

Rana Zeid: The French anthropologist Marc Augé describes the concept of the non-place (non-lieu) as a space “destined for solitary individuality, transit, the temporary, and the ephemeral.” Listening to your story, I wonder whether your room has become, for you, a kind of non-place, even if outside the context of the supermodernity in which Augé developed the concept. Has it become the only place where you can exist, as though you were escaping all of Iraq, politically and socially, into that single room?

Inan: As a trans woman, the non-place is not merely a complex anthropological concept. It is my daily reality and the only way I know to survive within a space that can only be described as profoundly violent.

In the city, I do not experience the street, the neighborhood, or even my family home as ordinary places. They are spaces filled with watchful eyes that judge my body, demand that I become someone else, or threaten to kill me. That constant suffocation pushes me to search for corners and grey zones where I can breathe beyond that surveillance, a surveillance that begins the moment I reach the front door.

Behind that wooden door, the meaning of safety changes completely. My room, which should have been an intimate place, fragments in my experience and becomes an inner non-place, as though time itself were to stop outside its walls. The time of family and society is suspended, and I enter a different kind of time, a liminal state in which I move back and forth between the mask I wear to survive outside and the reality of who I am, a reality that has nowhere else to breathe except within this narrow space.

In truth, my room has become an enforced refuge where I can shed the identity imposed upon me. It has turned into a non-place because I have completely severed it from the rest of the house, as though it no longer belongs to it at all.

Inan: That isolation does not end at the walls or the door. I feel it reshaping me from within. Even before my room, before the city itself, I see my body as my first non-place: a space where I exist in a continuous state of transition between lived reality and a truth held under siege.

The room itself becomes little more than a physical shell protecting my vulnerability. At once, it is a space of endurance and an embodiment of constant estrangement. Day after day, its walls become my entire world, while I wait for a wider space that does not require my erasure for me to exist.

Rana Zeid: In France, discussions about diverse gender identities, including concepts such as demigender, have become part of public debate. As an Iraqi trans woman, how do you view these conversations? Do they feel distant from your reality, or do they also provide a language through which people in Iraq can express themselves?

Inan: In Iraq, we inhabit an entirely different reality.

Earlier, we were discussing how a single city can shape people’s understanding of themselves, and how geography changes the experience of fear. While people in France are debating concepts like demigender, I find myself having conversations, mostly in the small spaces that still exist online because there is no safe civic space left in Iraq, with people asking whether I am even human. Whether I deserve to live. Whether I am mentally ill.

Even within civil society, a journalist friend recently told me that someone working in the media office of one of the only two political parties in Iraq that presents itself as secular was unhappy to see Iraq’s LGBTQ+ community discussed in alternative media. He argued that talking about LGBTQ+ rights would only draw attention to the community. Meanwhile, LGBTQ+ people are being killed. So am I expected to remain nothing more than a news story?

Then some exclusionary feminists oppose trans people by importing debates from white British feminism, often associated with issues promoted by J. K. Rowling, such as trans women in sports or access to public bathrooms. Yet these public bathrooms scarcely exist in Iraq in the first place. Instead of questioning how patriarchal systems shape public space for women by forcing them to organize their lives around biological constraints, I become the problem. I have become the alleged threat in bathrooms that barely exist in my own country.

That said, I do not dismiss the possibility that identities such as demigender exist in Iraq, even if the terminology itself is absent. The ability to think about one’s identity in those terms is also shaped by privilege. A queer person in the Kurdistan Region, Baghdad, or Anbar may feel that demigender accurately describes their experience. But in places where daily life is dominated by the struggle to survive, there is little room for reflection beyond immediate lived experience.

And after the passage of the criminalization law, I do not believe this language can be used openly, not because people are incapable of understanding it, but because society is armed, and using such terminology could itself be treated as promoting criminalized identities.

Rana Zeid: I know you are deeply interested in literature and contemporary theories of place, including Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the new mestiza consciousness. How can poetry create that hybrid consciousness through imagination while remaining inside Iraq? And today, is leaving Iraq a necessary condition for developing your own hybrid consciousness as a trans woman?

Inan: Whenever I think of Gloria Anzaldúa, I feel that I know this hybrid consciousness from the inside.

The border that Gloria described as an open wound where the First World and the Third World meet along the US-Mexico border was never, for me, a geographical frontier. It was my own body.

Every morning, borders pass through it: between sex and gender, between the public language that dismisses me as someone merely “imitating” women and the language through which I define myself, between the name on my identity documents and Enan, between the law, the militias, the tribe, and the family. I do not merely cross these borders. I live within them.

But I do not want to romanticize this suffering. Anzaldúa did not create her mestiza consciousness through imagination alone. It emerged from the physical experience of the border itself, from racial, economic, and gendered violence. My own hybrid consciousness was not born solely through reading or writing, either. It was forged through the burden of impossible choices, the different forms of death I described earlier.

Perhaps the real question is whether poetry alone is enough to carry that hybrid consciousness indefinitely without exhausting the body that bears it.

I believe writing can keep that hybrid consciousness alive, but it cannot keep lungs breathing or a liver functioning when treatment is unavailable, and the law criminalizes your existence. That is the contradiction imagination cannot resolve. I may be capable of articulating a complex hybrid consciousness that dismantles every system surrounding my body. In contrast, the body itself, my first border, is slowly consumed within violent spaces, and I do not know how to save it.

So perhaps the question is not whether leaving is necessary for consciousness to emerge. Perhaps leaving is necessary simply to keep alive the physical body that carries that consciousness, so that it can continue writing.

And in the end, can those two things truly be separated?