1. Queer Zion

I have thought it well here to utter a provisional warning against the lamentable error of proposing (just as people have encouraged a Zionist movement) to create a Sodomist movement and to rebuild Sodom.

~ Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

Garrett T. Frasier Graham was, by 2007, a successful lawyer, businessman, homosexual, and landlord almost fifty years of age. In March of that year he released a deranged little tract titled The Quest for an Independent Gay Nation-State, advancing his cause for “our own Gay homeland,” “free from the utter despair that the Straight majority imposes upon us.” For the location of this homeland he advised “a Caribbean archipelago” or “land currently in Brazil” – two already common sites of gay sex tourism – with caveats that gay nationalists must remain open to any nation with pitiful enough GDP to admit affordable mass land purchase. Queer settler-colonialism could then proceed in two parts: the “Homotannia Land Company,” handling practical matters of land acquisition and real estate development, and the “Society of Gays,” handling political and cultural affairs such as allocation of funds.

Absurd and fantastic as these visions of homosexual sovereignty may seem, they are utterly banal¹ as the mere gay iteration of nationalizing impulses expressed, to varying degrees, by every internationally oppressed group of people under global capitalism. It is not even unfair to speculate such nationalist responses to the international hatred of faggotry are Zionist in essence, plastering the homosexual over the Jew. Garrett directly claimed he was channeling the spirit of “my Teddy” [Theodor Herzl], “whose writings on Zionism and the concept of a Jewish State have transcended time,” further rhapsodizing that Theodor may have been homosexual himself. The very first FAQ on the website of Gay Homeland Foundation, another gay nationalist pipe dream, asks “What is your position on Israel?” and responds “We fully acknowledge the right of Israel to exist.” Various historic gay liberation projects are connected to Zionism more tentatively. Garrett’s gay nation implicates lesbian separatism when he claims it would contain an auxiliary state, Sappho Island, as an “internationally renowned womyn’s territory.” The lesbian separatist statement from the Jewish Feminist Conference of 1982 declared “You might find a lot of similarities between lesbian separatism and Zionism”; lesbian memoir-propagandist Andrea Dworkin’s Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women’s Liberation, published in 2000, offered full-throated support for both Jewish colonization and female colonization of Indigenous lands.² Camp gay liberation gestures, such as The Gay Kingdom of Coral Sea (2004), an Australian micronation declared in protest against the denial of same-sex marriage, or Stonewall Nation (1970), a mostly theatrical proposed takeover of rural Alpine County, California by gay radicals, are routinely cited as post-ironic ancestors to this quixotic movement towards queer Zion.

Even the most Zionist of queer nationalists, however, never went so far as to claim they had literally already found their gay state in Israel. Their silence on this possibility for a country in which same-sex marriage is illegal is unsurprising. Israel is a homophobic state. Yet this truth has not stopped Israeli officials from, with the paternalism typical of advanced homophobia,³ declaring Israel queer, for the queer, only whenever queerness can be used and abused to their profit. In solidarity with Palestinian activists living under Israeli apartheid we name this behavior “pinkwashing.”⁴ Izzy Mustafa, a diasporic Palestinian activist and transgender man living in New York City, defines it so:

On no Israeli city has the designation of gay been so willfully branded as Tel Aviv. The first major attempt to “turn the white city pink,” as is said, occurred in 2010, with the opening of the Tel Aviv Gay Vibe campaign targeting France and Germany. “Fun, Free, and Fabulous” was its slogan; the Tel Aviv LGBT community lodged complaints upon realizing their government spent on the order of 10 to 200 times more money on gay tourism than gay locals (11 to 340 million shekels against 1.5).⁵

Gay Vibe began after the tenth annual Herzliya Conference on national policy reaffirming Israeli investments in “city branding” focusing on “personality and attraction.” “Personality and attraction” are deliberately not exclusive to homosexuality, and the more general Brand Israel campaign actually has a heterosexual orientation – Kinsey scale one, I might suggest.⁶ “Israel’s image among New York men aged 18-38 is lacking,” head of media affairs at the Israeli Consulate General David Saranga said, and so the July 2007 issue of Maxim magazine ran “Girls of Maxim: Israeli Defense Forces,” featuring nubile veterans dressed in softcore pastiche of military regalia spouting lines like “I loved shooting the M-16.” Such pornography is not thematically out of place next to Israeli gay tourism advertisement until we decide to indulge our preferences and masturbate.

Tel Aviv advertised itself gay within this militarized heterosexualist regime by use of the city brand. “We made a switch,” said Yaniv Waizman, advisor to the mayor on LGBT issues and chairman of the city’s Tourism Committee, “We no longer talked about Israel, but Tel Aviv.” The unique sexuality of Tel Aviv has reached the extent that the city is sometimes referred to as הבועה [HaBuah/The Bubble]⁷ to signify its sexual isolation within the Israeli world; Tel Aviv even gets called the Middle East’s “gay mecca”⁸ – a painfully ironic phrase, given the context. While displaced Palestinians live distributed all across historic Palestine at varying levels of disenfranchisement from the Israeli state,⁹ queer Palestinians inside Israel are more often redisplaced into The Bubble,¹⁰ while those immobilized in Gaza Strip or West Bank’s Area A and B contend with human rights violations from both Israeli and Palestinian society. Thus Haneen Maikey, former director of Palestinian queer organization القوس للتعددية الجنسية والجندرية في المجتمع الفلسطيني [AlQaws/Rainbow for Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society] adds, “The framework of propaganda is not accurate enough to describe the colonial nature of pinkwashing.”

AlQaws recognizes this myth in Palestinian consciousness as إسقاط [isqat/downfall]: a “pervasive linking of non-normative sexuality and Palestinian collaboration [with Israel]… [which] works to substantiate a very specific kind of homophobic fear within Palestine.” Belief in queer Zion religiously produces straight Palestinian homophobia, the creation story of gay colonization, and the impossibility of the Palestinian queer, a doubly abject figure perpetually enduring blame on both sides of their oppression for want of the other.

“Once you forgo your Palestinian identity then they would have won,” says Jana Dalia, a trans woman sheltering in Amman, Jordan. “Zionists would have successfully erased you from Palestine completely. So you must hold onto your identity so that one day you will return to your homeland.” Like her and her family, most Palestinians are already outside Palestine, removed by force. Queer Palestinians inside Israel lacking citizenship or work papers, especially young trans women, have been recorded resorting to survival sex work for their colonizers.¹¹ Meanwhile news sources of the Global North report on those in Gaza and the West Bank almost exclusively as victims of Palestinian anti-queer violence, their bodies pictured with minimal quotation or platform. Of the ongoing massacre of Palestinians in Gaza by Israeli militants, our culture manufactures silence.

A number of elisions undergird this failed conjunction of Zionism and queer nationalism, which I have here called into being as queer Zion. Central of these will always be the Israeli subject in place of the Palestinian, or more generally, the colonizer in place of the colonized. It is enough to note that Brazil, the commonest recommendation for gay colonization, has one of the highest murder rates of trans women per capita, to recognize that any actually existing queer Zion would also be ruled by cisgender masculine interests. But queer Zion does not exist. There is no such thing as a queer nation-State.¹²

2. Shit Land

The reservation where I live is a harsh place, situated on a high plateau valley in the west. Most people wonder why anyone would want to live here.

~ M. Owlfeather, Children of the Grandmother Moon

Rio Grande Western Railway Company, subsidized as Utah division of the transcontinental railroad, published in 1896 a map of Palestine, rotated to mimic the topography of what would become the greater Salt Lake City metropolitan area. “The Promised Land!,” they wrote, “A Striking Comparison! The New State of Utah, ‘Deseret,’ and the Holy Land.” Utah’s Mormon pioneers made routine use of this Zion metaphor: they named their greatest river the Jordan; they called Salt Lake hot springs Pools of Siloam; they even, in confused native minstrelcy inspired by British Israelists, claimed both they and the Ute peoples they colonized shared Hebraic bloodlines. To their Church of Latter-Day Saints, Zion was not just a myth of autochthony¹³ or matter of inner spirit, but a place to be made. By true American theology, Zion’s place was in the settling of the Wild West.

Two queer sexual practices distinguished these Mormon settlers from their urban Eastern compatriots. One of these was a greater willingness to marry Indigenous women; the infamous other, not unrelated, was polygamy. The Mormon doctrine of plural marriage was possible only in undeveloped country, where European morality could not be so effectively sanctioned. This was a common appeal, often necessity, of America’s first great western migrations.¹⁴

Mormons had suffered a series of small massacres, consistent denial of land ownership, and Executive Order 44 from Lilburn Boggs, governor of Missouri, that “The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the state.” For queer settlers whose sexual politics were less heterosexual and anti-woman, push factors westward were more extreme. Sodomy and (to a less punitive yet more public extent) crossdressing were already illegal through state rulings in not just Missouri but every eastern settlement. All practicing gay and trans Americans risked a felony conviction, so long as they remained in settled territory.¹⁵ “Homosexuality was probably common among pioneers and outdoor men… groups that are considered virile,”¹⁶ Alfred Kinsey’s immensely popular 1948 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male disclosed to a shocked reading public. Yet without protection from an organized church or community such queer settlement was infinitely less coherent than Mormon coloniality. In one case 15-year-old transgender “M” was told by father in 1867 that “if I were seen in girls clothes again he would cripple me… I soon became despondent… and made my way to the then far west, landing in Grand Island, Nebraska.” In a second case, fifty years later and further west, a nameless transgender “monomaniac” escaped brutal lashings from mother for the “queer actions” of bathing in women’s clothing, only to be imprisoned in Livingston, Montana for the same crime. Ever further west: “San Francisco is a refugee camp for homosexuals,” Carl Wittman introduced his 1970 Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto, “We have fled here from every part of the nation, and like refugees elsewhere, we came not because it is so great here, but because it was so bad there.” Thus western American colonizers – whose opposite is not refugees but Native refugees¹⁷ – have, relative to the east, an unhappy quality of queer refuge.

The great western migrations were settler-ordained but not settler-specific. Native peoples, whose pre-colonial gender and sexual practices also often broke from European mores, were forced west via so-called “Indian removal,” most horribly official in the Trail of Tears, but also unofficially, by countless intentional plagues, child abductions, and murders amounting to genocide. Today, because of these forced migrations, states which grant Native tribes legal recognition do not always contain their ancestral homelands.¹⁸ When there was no more west to push Indigenous Americans into, their extermination became more deliberate;¹⁹ in California it was most severe. Its Native population remains the largest.²⁰

All these migratory patterns and population distributions live on today in the hints of laughably speculative Indigenous and queer US demography. Indigenous peoples, we hear, are relatively greatest in Oklahoma, New Mexico, and the Dakotas. Queer populations, meanwhile, are largest along the border, particularly the coasts, particularly the west coast – with a single additional outlier of, yes, Utah’s Salt Lake City.²¹ In 1970, 2 of the only 3 existing gay pride parades were in San Francisco and Los Angeles (the other, New York City). A 2009 sample of Craigslist advertisements published in Original Plumbing magazine has three times more gay trans men searching for hookups in San Francisco than the next most popular, Portland. Of queer Indigenous peoples fewer numbers are known. Before colonization gender variance was most heavily venerated on the western plains.²² Many today, for at least a time, rank among the half of all Indigenous Americans who live in settler cities.²³ Gay American Indians, a queer Native liberation organization, was founded in San Francisco, 1975. But a Native “can be gay and still live there [on the reservation],” lesbian Navajo Erna Pahe said in interview with GAI, “If you’re way secluded, like in Snake Flats or Chinle, it isn’t going to make any difference to anybody.”

Given these varying degrees of westward displacement for the oppressed, then, it should not surprise us that western land is worse. This is a brash judgment. No land is inherently worse than other land, but the American west became worse than the east, under the colonial rubric that quality of land is the measure of its agricultural production, just as quality of a person’s sexuality is the measure of their human reproduction. To make western land more productive required over a century of deeply unsustainable colonial water and energy projects from the United States Bureau of Reclamation and Society of Civil Engineers.²⁵ Pre-colonial American population statistics are fiercely debated, mostly by settler racists, but Natives and animals had been mainly bound in size by sustainable water sources, of which the west has fewer. The vicious “digger”²⁶ slur for western Natives, which pictured Indigenous Americans scuttling around the desert digging up root vegetables and insects, arose from the settler imaginary of this ecology. Here the “Indian” became “the lowest dregs of humanity”; “All they are fit for is slaves,” wrote Thomas Bullock, Mormon pioneer. Atop this bigotry is the fact that Native peoples, much moreso than queer settlers, have been under the reservation system continually redisplaced onto the least habitable of this least habitable land. “We have taken their acorns, grasshoppers, fisheries, and hunting grounds,” California’s first senator William Gwin reported to congress in 1852. Later that decade Konkow leader Tome-ya-nem interviewed with newspapers about his people’s displacement from Feather River 300 miles west to Mendocino reservation, itself 200 miles northwest of San Francisco: “We were very hungry and did not know where to get enough to eat… [We] began to die very fast.” Native unemployment rates in the area today are almost 25%. Many move to the city for survival.

If such stories of queer and Indigenous migration, which truly do range across half a continent, must be foreclosed to one city, we choose San Francisco. Coastal California experiences temperate conditions and seasonal rainfall entirely unlike the rest of America’s western desert. Yerba Buena, the original Spanish colony around which San Francisco formed, was elegantly situated within this rare greenery as a seaside trading post, securing the future city as a growth machine. The first Indigenous San Franciscans were “Mission Indians,” “domesticated,” as settlers say, Christianized and enslaved by Spanish colonists. An 1846 carrier of Mormons doubled its population by 240. As the big city of the southernmost free state, Black Americans streamed in westward to escape slavery; Chinese immigrants arrived by port to satisfy demands for cheap railroad labor; in fact nearly every kind of migrant filtered through San Francisco, and many chose to stay. Any rational population constraint vanished the moment prospectors found gold in the hills.

The irrational population constraint of western migration was called woman drought. It corresponded to real drought. “The great excess of males in newly settled territories illustrates the influence of immigration on the disparity of the sexes,” reports Joseph Kennedy, superintendent of the Eighth American Census, 1864. Male-to-female ratio of California was recorded 3:2; San Francisco, 4:1; Colorado, 20:1; across all “foreign-born,” 5:4. Undeniably there was high demand and minimal oversight, a sociosexual formation in which trans women could drink our first twisted drops of settler acceptance. In San Francisco you could walk into a bar and purchase gay sex for a dollar. A sex worker could really make a life for herself back then.

Frontiersmen visiting the city tossed out marriage proposals left and right, often at first sight. Traveling trans pianist Helen Manley (her name an early drag joke, perhaps) was said to have turned down countless men before being wooed and discovered the night of consummation; one Mrs. Nash really did marry, three soldiers in a row, before news of her penis was broadcast after death. Where there were few or no women, such as goldminer’s camps, men carried a stock of gay dresses to doll up one another and dance together. All manner of bed tricks were concocted, many of such farcical quality that even the most aggressively transgender of historians must admit a few were men in skirts. One nameless “Chinese who at one time was a female impersonator” was selected by a white huckster for a sex slave grift; after money had swapped hands the fooled slavebuyers were sent hurtling in a carriage down the 1800s equivalent of a parkway until they dove from the vehicle in fear of a crash. Such incidents teach us everything was sexualized out west, not least race. Drag shows were often performed alongside blackface. Many Indigenous cultures prized long braids, even or especially in men; Native men in Native dress could be jailed on similar travesty charges to settler trans women. Boté, trans feminine people in the Crow culture,²⁷ were incarcerated and forced to shave their heads by Bureau of Indian Affairs in the late 1890s. But it was Asian minority, particularly Chinese, who settler racists most despised through feminization. Early male-to-female ratio of Chinese immigrants in California was over 1000:1, leading to an American myth Asian men were all homosexual (therefore criminal, killable, fuckable). As sex ratios evened up, 85% of Chinese women in San Francisco became sex workers. Famous drag bar Finocchio’s advertised “cute, Oriental Li-Kar”;²⁸ in Chinatown, nightclub Forbidden City sold “a bevy of Oriental cookies.” If such conditions for trans women and sex workers were miserable and painful (and they often were), they are at least survival, independence, self-affiliation hugely preferable to the government-mandated executions and arrests staining so many of our previous histories. Or, at least, they had been preferable.

Westward incursion of the federal government was the cause of westward migration seeking to escape it. In this sense western refuge was futile. Already in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act (heavily influenced by associations between Chinese women and sex work) decimated the burgeoning Chinese underground of San Francisco, as white colonizers’ projected fears of being colonized encouraged senseless massacres of Chinese workers in Oregon and Wyoming. Come 1890, the Mormon church finally relinquished their practice of polygamy in order that Utah receive admittance into the United States. The White-Slavery Traffic Act of 1910 gave western police full legal backing of eastern politicos to arrest sex workers, interracial couples, transvestites, adulterers, sodomists. Cops increased shakedowns of gay bars. New loitering laws in the ‘40s and ‘50s encouraged San Francisco pigs to pick up trans women on spurious charges, molest them, and dump them off in the Tenderloin, Barbery Coast, the “vice district” miles away from home – yet another tiny displacement.

Crooked cops and imperialist robber barons had long delighted in the same lack of government oversight and market regulation that made San Francisco’s queer underground possible.²⁹ With the dot-com bubble and explosion of the Californian tech industry in the late 1990s, their supremacy entered new heights, as did their simultaneous collaboration, competition, and complicity with the US government. “Neoliberalism,” an often misused term, describes this financial relationship, where US tax dollars buoy major market failures of the ever-expanding private sector, while the American proletariat and global colonized are coerced into covering the losses. Technology capitalists, seeking to expand their free reign, will accept liberal social policies, such as out queer employees, but push conservative economics, the absolute unchecked tyranny over city life by big business. In doing so, they actively overwrite queer consciousness. New gay media representations, such as Patrick Murray, the main character in HBO’s gay 2014 drama Looking, work as video game designers. Ex-Google vice president and Chief Technology Officer for the Obama administration Megan Smith married her wife in the Bay Area before sponsoring countless tech diversity initiatives. The highest-paid female CEO in the world, Martine Rothblatt, changed her sex at the age of forty, but more importantly has career-long ties out of Silicon Valley to the US military.³⁰ Of course, the mark of old transgender western life is still visible, most plainly in Nevada’s exceptional partial legal acceptance of brothels. Yet it is precisely these criminal avenues of historical transness such as sex work, incarceration, right to the city, and racial minority which are suppressed or abused by this new round of so-called assimilation.

Today San Francisco sex workers are priced out of house and home by their own clients. Fag queen Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore recalls how her background for oral sex shifted, from sucking men off “in cars for 30$… but it was so convenient – Capp Street was literally a block away from the house,” to “the Mission… giving blow jobs in plush, off-white hotel beds while the TV flashed stock prices behind me.” Rent had ballooned from a 150$ backroom squat shared with a friend to 1,200$ condos, forcing a string of historic gay bars to close. Drag mainstay Finocchio’s shuttered in 1999, after sixty-odd years; working class Latinx bar Esta Noche followed in 2014 after almost thirty. “Esta Noche – that was our social, political place for brown boys and girls,” remembered northern Paiute Randy Burns, co-founder of Gay American Indians, “That was where GAI partied.” “As Silicon Valley transforms the Bay Area into a boundless Google campus,” Lil’wat Nation descendant Julian Brave NoiseCat writes, “the urban Native population is shrinking, down by 19 percent from 2000 to 2010.”

Homebrew radical queer holdouts such as Gay Shame, working alongside local activists like Anarchist People of Color, publish critiques on “The Terror of Gay Capitalism” and wheatpaste around the city appropriate slogans such as “Queers Hate Techies.” “One of the most troubling features of ‘Tech’,” says Gay Shame member Mary Radclyffe, “is its deep entanglement with values that will be remembered one day as ‘progressive’… No amount of neoliberal workplace diversification will drive back down the real estate values it inflates, or undo the US military application of its big ‘disruptive’ ideas.” She points out Twitter, “one of the biggest displacers of public Black life in the Tenderloin,” commissioned a Black Lives Matter mural in its lunchroom.

This modern gentrification scheme is not so modern; it is the ongoing capitalist elaboration of bigoted policies which pushed and push queer people and other minorities westward, creating a shit land with precarious employment over a century ago. Sexual reactionaries even today demand the displacement of American faggots; “Give them [homosexuals] an island,” Albany County legislator George Langdon IV orated on April 2021, “They’ll be gone [dead] in forty years.” On the contrary: overwrought ‘70s queer liberation writing constantly referred to San Francisco as a gay ghetto, even gay reservation; about forty years later, the city was promoted as “gay Israel,” a “gay mecca.”³¹ This is an attempt at spatial recuperation in a sexual economy which does not encourage queer people as queer everywhere. This is replication of the ghetto, domesticated.³²

San Franciscans responded to first calls for an international queer-Palestinian solidarity network earlier than any other North American city. Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT), founded in 2001, still lives, mostly as a pressure group against local LGBT film festivals accepting funds from the Israeli Consulate. Its solidarity network (which had other major nodes in New York and Toronto), according to queer Palestine scholar Sa’ed Atshan, “reached a plateau in 2012.” Queer solidarity is unnaturally limited by our ability to recognize queer oppression as one among oppressed peoples. In this it actually is appropriate to compare against the history of San Francisco Jewry. Before the second World War even San Francisco’s Jewish elite were anti-Zionist. Less informed by Palestinian struggle than QUIT (which was founded by a non-elite Jewish lesbian), wealthy anti-Zionist Jews in San Francisco then nonetheless faced related economic pressures. Julius Kahn, a Jewish lawmaker representing the 4th district in 1919, admitted before congress, “For me the United States is my Zion and San Francisco is my Jerusalem.”

3. The Gender Refugee

Not me sold out my people but they me. So yes, though “home” permeates every sinew and cartilage in my body, I too am afraid of going home.

~ Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

This essay is an attempt to hold myself to account. I am a Jewish transgender woman who migrated westward to California. My great-great-grandfather was a poor Lithuanian Jew who lived in a mass ghetto we call the Pale of Settlement. That kind of ancestry doesn’t matter so much in America now; sometimes in the house my mother managed a word of Yiddish for flavor. I was alienated from this family, culture, and religion very early in life. This was less because they were abusive as such, than simply because they had reared me into communal forms in which trans girls had no place. So I left. In one month I will drive a few hours north to San Francisco, home of the best facial feminization surgeons in the world, where a man will cut my face for five hours. Then that city will be carved into my skull.

I am pained when someone reprimands me for choosing a migratory option, because it did not feel like a choice. Philosopher and internet meme Slavoj Žižek, for example, asserts “transgenderism goes together with the general tendency in today’s predominant ideology to reject any particular ‘belonging’… it is an utter obscenity to put together elite ‘nomads’ flying around the world and refugees desperately searching for a safe place where they would belong.” He insinuates trans people are these elite nomads: “self-proclaimed rootless universalists” and “‘cosmopolitan’ anti-nationalist intellectuals.” This rootless cosmopolitan slur is a classic trope of antisemitism.

“A nomadic existence,” una existencia nómada,³³ is exactly how elite transgender writer Paul Preciado describes his own life. He claims, “The status of trans people is in political terms similar to the migrant, the exile, and the refugee.” Crispin Long critiques, “He [Paul] likens himself, a successful Western European academic who chooses to travel, to people risking their lives to flee their countries”; “Misleading in scale,” Maxi Wallenhorst graciously understates. These published critiques are importantly different from Slavoj’s because they are particular to one man,³⁴ who actually is quite annoying, and whose critics are other trans people familiar with intra-trans class dynamics. As Maxi writes, “When we say Black trans lives matter we mean that they matter to relatively niche autotheory, too, to the world of middlingly interesting Middle European art fair discourse, and to what style is. Refugee trans lives matter.”

In thoughtless speech I have been a refugee. I live 2,500 miles away from where I was born because it offers me more safety and richer life. In this sense I may fall under the category of economic refugee, whose cause of displacement is so universal to asylum seeking it is perversely regarded as insufficient. Really, however, this label is an attempt to metonymize an obvious refugee oppression, poverty, in place of its primary cause: my transness, my gender.

The gender refugee³⁵ is not recognized in such a universal cause of displacement. There are strong reasons I should be denied the title. For one, my persecution is not so severe. My country, the United States, sits with western Europe at the head of an imperial economy of refugee life and death in which global transgender survival is constantly being readjudicated. Yet in March 2017 New Zealand’s Immigration and Protection Tribunal did grant Englishborn trans woman “A.L.” permanent residence on humanitarian grounds resembling refugee law,³⁶ for trauma resembling my own. According to Deportation Decision #502911, A. “bec[ame] reclusive” in childhood despite strong academic performance, “increasingly withdrawn” into adolescence, eventually growing “too depressed to function.” There was “overt hostility and verbal abuse as a ‘freak’… she was target of strangers coming up and asking, ‘What are you?’”

A therefore clearer reason to deny I am a gender refugee is that I have not crossed an international border. I was born on one coast of the United States and live on the other. This required many new forms of identification, but I never lost citizenship. Thus in law I am neither gender refugee nor even gender migrant; gender has merely perplexed my relationship to homeland. Importantly, I have never been stateless.

The same cannot be said for Eliana Rubashkyn. In 2013 they³⁷ were detained and sexually abused by the Immigration Department of Chek Lap Kok airport for gender mismatched identification papers, which they had flown to Hong Kong specifically to change. In order to maintain refugee protections against deportation, they renounced their birthright citizenship to Colombia (which no longer would have accepted their passport anyway). “I became stateless,” they recalled, “I lost my country.”

This was not the Rubashkyn’s first experience of forced migration. Eliana’s mother had fled the USSR; their grandmother had been a Holocaust survivor. Their immense vulnerability in travel and transition is in part an inheritance of diaspora. Growing up in Colombia, “I always felt I was not the person [my family] were trying to force me to be. In my adolescence things became difficult.” By the age of 18 they had fully developed breasts (which their mother forced them to bind) and an estrogenic profile “three times higher than a woman.” “I was targeted as a trans person,” they said, “Social cleansing groups attacked me several times in my back. To me and other trans friends.” Out of fear of disclosing to their family, they could not access effective health care for their stab wounds. “I still have those scars… Even though I wasn’t a trans woman, I was representing something they hate.” “And I understood that my place was not a place for me to be. In any sense. Because my family didn’t understand, my community didn’t understand… So I decided to escape.” In Taiwan they learned they were intersex condition ovotestis 46,XX/46,XY. For this reason their estrogen therapy was especially transformative and their fear of returning to Colombia especially rationalized. They said, “My mom is a refugee, my great-grandmother was a refugee. I am a refugee. I’m running away from hate and discrimination and a lack of understanding of gender diversity. My mom ran away from antisemitism, my great grandmother ran away from antisemitism.” Their application for assistance from the Israeli embassy was rejected on three separate occasions.³⁸

At a refugee center in Yuen Long they were placed in a shipping container because authorities could not decide to house them with men or women. In this precarious isolation they were gang raped by several male refugees, hospitalized for weeks in the aftermath, still requiring reparative surgery in New Zealand where they were finally granted citizenship. “I made history by being the first trans person… to be recognized as a woman under international law, something the United Nations did to enable my protection.”

Eliana’s case has many unfamiliar aspects, even within the already unfamiliar category of gender refugee. They are of partly European ancestry, highly educated, rather well-spoken, a polyglot, and had already been living in a foreign country. The sense of disoriented horror in their voice is palpable. “No one can imagine what is being a refugee,” they waver, “what is being a refugee when you’re never even expecting that.” There were no refugees like Eliana in Hong Kong, where displaced person camps were mostly composed of Southeast Asians and Africans. For that reason they call themself “a refugee among refugees.” “Everywhere I go I’m the first or one of the first,” Eliana says, “That’s how I find out we trans people are the most vulnerable segments of society. That’s how I find out I’m privileged [among displaced trans people]… to have the financial means to seek asylum… to move out of the cities.”³⁹

Most gender refugees are, unlike Eliana, expected – by which we mean only that they are part of a more familiar exodus. In population transfer and ethnic cleansing gender minorities have never once been excepted. Việt Kiều who filled Eliana’s Hong Kong refugee camp two decades before them created substantial communities in California’s Bay Area; Loan Nguyen, who arrived as Vietnamese refugee to Orange County by boat in 1975, raised her trans daughter between there and Montreal. Uyghar Muslims, currently undergoing a brutal ethnocide from the Chinese government, include transgender women; Shashana was placed in a concentration camp on government suspicion because she traveled to Thailand for vaginoplasty and held gender mismatched documentation. “According to Thailand,” she agrees with an interviewer, “I went there and disappeared for two years.” Palestinians, queer or not, have been in diaspora since the establishment of Israel in 1948; Sara, a Palestinian trans woman living in Lebanon, cannot even make new home in exile. “I felt like I would rather die,” she said about her sexual assault during wrongful imprisonment in one cell with eighteen men. Syrian trans women refugees living in Lebanon have reported a similar detention.

These are all gender refugees in a loose sense, in that their trans minority is parsed within named, respected, and deeply studied cis majority refugee crises: Vietnam’s Thuyền nhân, or Boat People; Palestine’s النكبة‎ [AlNakba], or The Catastrophe; Europe’s שארית הפליטה [Sh’erit haPletah], or the Surviving Remnant. For United States citizens, who are not main hosts to any such mass refugee crisis, there belongs its close cousin of the economic migrant and our transgender undocumented.

Jennicet Gutiérrez,⁴⁰ for example, immigrated to Los Angeles County at the age of fifteen not because she was transgender but because her single mother was searching for better means to raise a family of nine children. In 2015 she obtained national infamy for interrupting then-President Barack Obama during his White House LGBTQ Pride reception. “President Obama,” she intervened, “stop the torture and abuse of trans women in detention centers! President Obama, I am a trans woman. I’m tired of the abuse.” As she was escorted out, she began chanting, “Not One More Deportation! ¡Ni una mas deportación!” For an undocumented trans woman to proclaim this on national television was in fact a risk, and revealed several political splits on the cross-section of identities where Jennicet seats her politics. “Seeing the reaction from my community I really felt very devastated,” she recalled, “The reaction was clear. They wanted to silence my voice.”

Several major LGBT publications framed Jennicet’s protest as a question of “rudeness,” rather than refocusing post-Pride commentary on the US-sanctioned torture of transgender migrants. The migrant rights movement has, meanwhile, routinely supported norms of gender and law, skipping out on the reality of queer and youth migrants who reach the border without family supports. When Barack Obama declared his immigration policy would deport “felons, not families,” Yesenia Valdez, an organizer at Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement, where Jennicet works as Community Advocate, responded:

The Not One More Deportation campaign, in which trans and queer migrant organizers figured prominently, was a response to these realities. While deportations decreased under the Trump administration, length of detainment increased; the 2018 death by dehydration of 33-year-old HIV-positive trans woman Roxsana Hernández under U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody reminded the transgender public of such a campaign’s necessity. Roxsana’s 2,000-mile path out the impoverished “Northern Triangle” of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador destroys our common portrait of undocumented migrants as merely voluntary, merely economic. “I’m making this trip out of necessity,” said Nikolle Contreras, another trans female member of Roxsana’s 1,200-strong migrant caravan. “Discrimination because of my sexuality, lack of work, discrimination within my own family for being gay and worse, for being a trans person. It’s very, very difficult.” “Lack of work”: in 2009 a US-backed military coup in Honduras suppressed wages for its poor workers, 80% of the population. “Discrimination because of my sexuality”: in an effort to appeal to tourists, before and during their coup US-backed Honduran security forces murdered and allowed murders of thousands of street vagrants, presumed criminal, including roughly 200 gay and trans sex workers. The past decade, every major migrant caravan has begun in Honduras.

That more immigrants have begun filing for legal asylum before entry was a main reason the Trump administration, against promises, lowered US deportation rate. In response president Trump assaulted the entire asylum seeking apparatus. His “Remain in Mexico” policy converted the Mexico-US border into virtual purgatory where asylum seekers wait years in deprived border towns without any access to legal assistance, in vague hopes their case might turn up refugee. The Biden administration has maintained the core of this policy.

This refugee purgatory of Mexican border towns has a global sequel in the satellite cities of Turkey. Here the gender refugee concept begins to crystallize, such that queer migrants awaiting permanent resettlement can sensibly refer to a local “LGBTI refugee community.” Most queer asylum seekers in their given Turkish transit city are housed near each other; in Kayseri they rent out rooms from the same apartment complex. Yet Turkey, a country whose social prejudice actively generates gender refugees out of its own trans woman citizens, is not where gender refugee community can easily thrive. Resettled queer refugees leave behind clothes, bedding, and make-up for new arrivals. It is like making friends in an especially cruel airport.

This refugee community is Iranian: between 2010 and 2013, 471 of 537 Turkish asylum applications specifically for gender and sexuality discrimination were from Iranians,⁴¹ whose government criminalizes gay sex acts and transness without genital reassignment. Many such refugees’ first relocation was an attempt to retain citizenship, at young ages to Tehran.⁴² Iran’s capital is actually quite gay, in its underground way. There are real cruising grounds, actual gay nightlife; men even use Grindr through a VPN. Yet work can be scarce, thanks in part to decades of anti-citizen US and EU trade sanctions (which, on a personal note, have previously prevented me from sending cash to my trans Iranian friends). “The way this [economic situation in Iran] is going,” gay refugee Pejman asserted, “all 70 million Iranians have legitimate cases to become refugees!” Yet the desirability of asylum seeking in the words of most queer refugees remains insistently fused to sexuality. Only after murders of her two trans sex working friends did Aynaz, for instance, hop the border to Turkey. She said, “If we had a government that defended us, that let us study, that let us get a degree, and didn’t bother us, then I would have become an educated person. And my life would have been different.”

In depatriation, queer Iranians develop new vulnerabilities out of their original dispossession. Many are in employment. “I am applying [for work],” a trans woman states, “They look at me for five to ten minutes, laughing.” Because Turkey ironically respects international refugee law only for Europeans, much paid refugee labor is done without protections of a work permit. This exploitation also prevents refugee trans women, alongside trans male and especially HIV-positive counterparts, from accessing vital health care. One stated simply, “I have no money to buy my medicine.”

Designed as refugee waystation, Turkey does not facilitate adaptation necessary to overcome culture shock. No refugee network for learning Turkish exists beyond immersion. Nonprofits teach English classes to those bound for resettlement, but “we would not attend,” noted one gay Iranian, “because we are scared of other refugees from our country.” Cisgender heterosexual populations still dominate extremely limited refugee space, even moreso under a Trump administration which banned Muslim immigration to the United States. Having incompletely escaped their native country’s persecution, queer Iranian refugees must then survive within the six small cities Turkish government habitually places them,⁴³ many more socially conservative than Iran’s capital. “I was the first trans person in Nevşehir,” one female asylee reported, “Police told me about the conditions here, how to live, how to fit in… They told me be careful. They told me wear men’s clothes. They told me walk like a man.” Mere legality, it turns out, only roughly maps to the quality of queer life.

Gender refugees survive in abeyance to such arrangements of national power and sexual hegemony. “I can’t even get out of the house,” says one trans woman who had previously sought work as a hairdresser. Said another, “Too many men see me and know I’m trans. Two young ones pulled a knife on me… since then, I don’t go out on evenings.” Such forced interiority in a rented apartment is a familiar condition of womanhood.⁴⁴ Many queer refugees are similarly unable to leave the whole of Turkey, stuck in transit, permanently in temporary asylum. Beyond Trump’s Muslim ban, since 2011 mass influx of over three million Syrian civil war refugees (a small portion of whom are, of course, also LGBTI⁴⁵) has utterly deprioritized Iranian resettlement.

“I’ve stopped counting the years since I came here,” said Ali, a gay Iranian asylee who has forgotten his own age. Sarah, a lesbian living through Trump’s Muslim ban, recounted her refuge interview being postponed by three months, receiving a call to reschedule, followed by a cancellation two days later. Human rights flicker in time before her, lost to the blink of an eye. The hope, of course, is that life will improve elsewhere, usually United States or Canada. “Before I came to Turkey,” said one queer asylee, “I had wanted to stay here. But I don’t want [that] anymore.”

For transgender refugees on the African continent there is less this time of rights than a space of transition, which for many is South Africa. Eshe, for example, migrated to South Africa not only so that her “community was legalized,” but because “I also had an idea of male to female transitioning.” Her idea was unrealizable in her neighboring country of origin. Unlike much to its north, South Africa neither endorses new anti-queer legislation nor retains the old imposed by colonial rule before the gay liberation movement.⁴⁶ Unlike Turkey, South Africa does follow international refugee law, granting permanent asylum to those outside Europe. Unlike Palestine, the apartheid of South Africa is over; the country has an Indigenous president, with majority Indigenous, Black citizenry, so neocolonial logics of pinkwashing have lost their severity. When Cape Town brands itself a “Pink Capital,” as Tel Aviv did, we understand their pursuit of moneyed white men as merely par for the course of gay tourism.⁴⁷

Virtually all gender refugees in South Africa are, of course, Black. Exactly unlike tourists, they begin their time in the least sightly locales: a line outside the Johannesburg or Cape Town Refugee Reception Offices, which constantly relocate across high-crime neighborhoods. These offices have binary queuing systems; most trans refugees simply stand in line with whichever sex finds them least bullied. “I dress differently [at the RRO],” says Kelly, “… because I don’t want trouble with people… I put on big jeans, a big t-shirt… I stand in the men’s queue. There’s nothing you can do, my dear.” Refugees who transition throughout the asylum process strategically swap lines to avoid further abuse from security and other refugees; Stella, migrating from east Africa, switched during her office’s relocation. These are the unwelcoming beginnings to attempted resolution of what has been a functionally stateless life.

African queer refugees tell origin stories which fit to queer refuge narratives across all borders. Having usually lost family, local inheritance, and physical security, they first move to a big city within state borders (should they not already live there). Thus Victor Mukasa, a trans man famous for successfully suing the Ugandan state after their illegal raid on his house, hails from Kampala; Azu Udogu, underground drag winner of Miss Nigeria and the first known trans African to ever file a refuge claim for sexual oppression, arrived from Lagos. Many resist leaving home or cannot; Beyonce Karungi “moved to Kampala with my friends who introduced me to sex work,” but has remained there building power as director of Transgender Equality Uganda despite multiple attempts on her life.

Once the decision to escape local prejudice is made or forced, it always incomplete. “We are all the time feeling like we are still running away from the same country we ran away from,” gay refugee Kabenge Festo asserts. Queer refugees in his Block 13 of Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya have been subject to over 50 attacks in the past year, including rape and murder by fire, some even carried out by other refugees from their country of origin. This degree of brutality is, in the words of lead Block 13 spokesman Gilbert Kagarura, “unprecedented.” Block 13, composed of some 200 queer African refugees, continually plans for a “long trek” escape out of Kakuma into its desert, but the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, rather than bringing them to safety, kennels them into their open-air prison with tear gas. Within the borders of Kakuma this is queer genocide; because queer refugee crises are small, numerous, and dispersed, few answer their constant demands for relocation, reparation, and aid. “We are hostages,” Gilbert says. “Do you know who is persecuting us? It is no longer the community that rejected us. It’s those who have brought us to their doorsteps.” In solidarity Ola Osaze, a queer trans masculine refugee from Nigeria and project director of Black LGBTQ+ Migrant Project, said “For me the Free Block 13 Campaign is about the liberation of all Black people.” “It enrages me that we still live in this context that, especially for Black LGBTQ folks, around the world, nowhere is safe for us. Even when we seek asylum, that is not even a safe situation. Seeking asylum in the U.S. is a scary and contentious situation.” For trans people, refugees, Black trans refugees, no country is “safe.” There is only a global distribution of danger, uneven and irregular, channeling our and their movement.

Every queer African narrative of refuge has its specificity. Many fit no consensus. Tiwonge Chimbalanga was raised by her uncle, a Malawian village chief, with such local acceptance that she was not even transgender. Only upon encountering the Malawian state, which regards her as a gay man and criminalizes homosexuality, did human rights frameworks of “gay” or “transgender” begin to cohere around her. This encounter reminds a postcolonial situation of many African nations, where national identity arose to fit the state, rather than state from nationalism. “The first time I heard the word ‘gay,’” Tiwonge said, “I saw it next to my photograph in the newspaper” unceremoniously publicizing her engagement. When homophobic crowds stormed her wedding, she was in tears. Due mainly to international pressure, her incarceration of 14 years was pardoned; she has since sought refuge in South Africa, in a Malawian émigré community where everyone calls her “Aunty.”

Other queer Africans experience South Africa as refuge in other than legal sense. Those in bordering countries often retain vital connections to homeland, even leaving for South Africa at specific request from their supportive families. “Home is the best,” said Bobbie, an undocumented trans woman, recalling the healing process after a sex work client broke her knee, “I just phoned my mother and she send the money… I went home for nine months.” Such trans people retain clear national bonds outside South Africa, even traveling back and forth across the border. Queer refugees striving for documentation often first develop a private mythology of South Africa, discovering it online, but it is closer to a collective imaginary in bordering nations. The country idealized is a kind of queer utopia, another gay fantasy – the only one. “You don’t need an ID,” Tricia offers a spot of magical thinking, “they [South African border security] just understand you are gay.” One trans man, Arthur, distilled the dream to this: before arriving, to him South Africa was “freedom, freedom, freedom.”

One last story. In 2017, Uganda’s largest intersex advocacy organization, SIPD, released a report on “intersex realities” of 120 Ugandans, 1 Kenyan, and 1 Rwandan. The Rwandan describes seeking refuge in an Nyamirambo LGBTI camp. Sydney from Kenya describes, “When one [intersex child] reaches teenage, they will ask you to leave the homestead and go far away.” Local activist group Transgender Advocacy and Education works to ensure all intersex children are registered at birth regardless of genitalia. Despite this, in all three countries intersex people report a profound “sense of statelessness.”⁴⁸

It is this sense of statelessness I believe so many queers of every nationality inherit, though not remotely in equal measure. To sense statelessness is not the same as building an account of our sensations, a recognition of who is actually stateless, who is near to it, and who affords metaphors. This account of difference in conditions alongside similarity in feeling is my start to international solidarity: an affirmation of which calls for statehood and citizenship reduce suffering, and a negation of which ones increase it. This must be inter-national in the literal sense, a care for every thing states choke out, unless we should reach the fictive global utopia where states choke out nothing. It is not fair, of course, how such solidarity work falls on queers, exactly because queerness brings our nationality and national belonging closer to jeopardy. But it does fall on us, and will continue to for however long states are sexual, and differentiate themselves from one another sexually. That is, until our system of nation-States at last collapses in upon itself, head first, brought down by the weight of its own obscene violence.

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