The Intimate Infrastructure of Transgender Refugee Security in Lebanon: State Violence, Hypervisibility and Disrespectability

Despite hosting the highest proportion of refugees per capita in the world, Lebanon refuses to recognize the designation of refugee status, and imposes restrictive residency permit guidelines and securitization policies that create impediments to the mobility of Syrian refugees, most of whom lack legal residency and live under extreme poverty. Against this backdrop of racialized state violence that characterizes refugee governance in Lebanon, transgender refugees occupy a particular position, where they live simultaneously as “refugee deviants” and as “transgender deviants”. “Doubly deviant” transgender refugee subjects lack access to documentation (as deportable migrants without legal residency or UNHCR refugee status, and as transgender subjects with incongruent gender markers), to passing as “real” women and men in a heteronormative and gendered public and private space, and to capital. In this sense, (non-passing) transgender refugee bodies are simultaneously invisiblized and hypervisiblized by the nation-state, non-state actors, and social norms. Using ethnographic data from participant observation and interviews with Syrian transgender refugees in Lebanon, this article investigates what security means for hypervisible subjects who are outside of the framework of the law and who experience double illegality and erasure. It does so by developing the relationship between the notions of hypervisibility, (dis)respectability, and space.