By Jasmin Lilian Diab
“Feminist refugee law ends with us. We confuse it. We confront it.”
—Transwoman, Syrian, activist, 37, Beirut
What does it mean to be “protected” when legal frameworks are not only indifferent to your safety — but structurally designed to exclude you? This question sits at the heart of a study we undertook with ten trans Syrian refugee women engaged in sex work in Lebanon, all of whom participated in a trauma-informed self-defence training designed for survival in conditions of legal abandonment.
This research did not emerge from abstract legal theory but from an urgent ethical imperative: to reckon with the fact that feminist legal and humanitarian frameworks have yet to account for those who exist at the furthest edges of state concern and feminist inclusion alike. While much of feminist refugee law has evolved to address gender-based violence and patriarchal state violence, it still overwhelmingly centres cisgender, heterosexual, and legally “legible” women. Feminist legal responses, even in their most progressive iterations, continue to assume the state as the primary guarantor of protection. But what happens when the state itself is the threat?
Trans refugee sex workers are not merely neglected by refugee law. They are erased from it. Their lives are treated not as sites of harm, but as legal impossibilities. Their labour is criminalized. Their gender identity is denied. Their migration status is weaponized. And their sexuality — fluid, transactional, stigmatized — is used as justification for their exclusion. These are not unfortunate gaps. These are deliberate boundaries policed by law, morality, and the state’s own fragile masculinist anxieties.
This study emerged from a refusal to accept that absence. It demanded that we take seriously what it means to be a legal subject — and who gets to count as one. Intersectionality was not a framing device, but a starting point. Our participants did not face compounded risks as an accumulation of marginalities. They were not “trans” on Monday, “refugees” on Tuesday, and “sex workers” on Wednesday. They existed at the confluence of these identities at all times, and it is precisely at that intersection that the law becomes not a shield, but a sharpened blade.
Queer necropolitics offers a powerful lens here. The state does not merely fail to protect—it actively renders certain bodies killable, disposable, ungrievable. Protection is withheld not due to bureaucratic oversight, but as a political decision. In this context, the act of learning self-defence was not a supplementary life skill. It was an insurgent legal act. It was a refusal to be disappeared. As one participant put it: “Every time we stand up for ourselves, we challenge the idea that we are disposable.”
Self-defence in this study was not only about public space or physical threat. It bled into intimate spaces, into abusive partnerships shaped by emotional dependence and gendered vulnerability. Participants used self-defence not just to ward off violent clients or hostile police officers, but to interrupt cycles of private coercion and reclaim a sense of bodily autonomy in relationships where violence had long been normalized. In a world where the law refuses to acknowledge their humanity, standing one’s ground in an intimate encounter became a profound and transformative political act.
What emerged was not just a narrative of individual resilience, but of collective legal creativity. Legal abandonment had given rise to legal invention. Participants built informal safety networks, shared tactics, exchanged knowledge, and created collective infrastructures of care in the absence of state recognition. These were not survival hacks. They were legalities of another kind — community-based, embodied, relational, and deeply feminist. They represented a form of law that did not originate from state codification, but from shared vulnerability and radical solidarity.
These findings demand that we confront not only the failures of refugee law, but the limitations of humanitarianism. Mainstream protection frameworks reduce queer refugees to case numbers, speak of them in hushed tones of “vulnerability,” and erase their agency through well-meaning paternalism. But the participants in this study reject that framing. They do not live in the binary of victim and agent. They are subjects of political resistance, carving out dignified lives in the ruins of legal abandonment.
Feminist refugee law must do more than advocate for better inclusion. It must interrogate the foundations of the legal systems it engages. It must call for the decriminalization of survival. It must recognize that criminalized labour, gender nonconformity, and displacement are not marginal exceptions but the defining conditions of many refugees’ lives. The time has come to acknowledge that legal resistance does not only happen in courtrooms or policy reform processes. It also lives in everyday acts of refusal — in the courage to survive, to fight back, to hold space for oneself and others when the law refuses to do so.
This is not simply a women’s issue. In fact, we are arguably closer to including men in feminist refugee discourses than we are to including trans women. Why? Because trans women hold up a mirror to the state and society that is too accurate, too uncomfortable. They challenge the fictions of coherent gender, of moral order, of “national purity”. And in Lebanon, as in many contexts, these are fictions the state is desperate to preserve. Trans refugee sex workers are not abandoned because they fall through cracks. They are targeted because they expose them. They confront us with how queer, how complex, how fluid our societies truly are; and they destabilize the patriarchal and religious ideologies that desperately seek to keep that complexity hidden.
As feminist scholars, practitioners, and legal advocates, we must sit with an uncomfortable but necessary question: Is international refugee law even designed to protect the people most in need of protection? And if not, can we stretch its sources, its definitions, its possibilities?
Because here lies a deeper provocation. If international refugee law is fundamentally suggestive — open to interpretation, precedent, and evolving norms — then what are its sources? Are we willing to admit that refugee law is shaped as much by discourse and power as by formal instruments? And if so, why are we so afraid of expanding its foundation to include feminist, participatory, lived sources of legal knowledge?
What would it mean to take the knowledge generated by trans refugee sex workers as seriously as a treaty or a judicial opinion? What would it mean to centre their practices of protection—not as anecdotes, but as jurisprudence in their own right?
The answer to these questions will determine not only the future of feminist refugee law, but whether it has a future at all. Because until it is built to feel, to hear, and to see those it has historically erased, refugee law will remain a promise unfulfilled. The women in this study are not passive recipients of protection; they are its most radical architects. The real challenge is whether feminist refugee law is brave enough to be rebuilt in their image. These women are not asking to be included; they are demanding that protection be reimagined on their terms. If feminist refugee law cannot meet them there, it risks becoming another system they must learn to survive.
This study is carried out jointly between the Institute for Migration Studies at the Lebanese American University and MOSAIC MENA in Lebanon.
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