Queer Iranians in Iran and in exile: Negotiating identity following forced migration

By Isabel Rose Soloaga | OMC 2025

Author’s own illustration. Simurgh is a legendary Persian bird sought in The Conference of the Birds by Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar. Simurgh symbolises multiplicity, unity of difference, an arduous journey leading to self-rediscovery.

In Iran, consensual same-sex conduct remains legally punishable by death. While gender reassignment surgery is legal, queer and trans individuals face immense pressure from both the state and society at large to adhere to strict binary roles. These pressures play an important role in structuring society and deeply influence the lives of individuals across Iran, irrespective of sexual orientation or gender identity. But how do queer Iranians in Iran and in exile understand their relationship to themselves, their sexuality, and their gender identity? Drawing on semi-structured interviews in combination with participatory research methods, this research provides an unfiltered account of the process of identity formation amongst exiled communities. In particular, I explore how individuals utilise language — learned, invented, and reclaimed — to describe themselves and their inner journeys.

Through the course of the project, Negotiating Queer Identities Following Forced Migration, my research team and I investigated identity and language through personal accounts of 57 queer Iranians in Iran, Turkey, Canada and the UK. In addition, small-group poetry workshops gave many participants another avenue to express their identities through creative means. Dr. Nilofar Shidmehr, lead facilitator of the workshops, selected some of these poems together with the authors to publish the poetry book Rainbows on Rugged Terrains (Transnational Press London, 2024). 

Despite the environment queer Iranians inhabit in Iran, our research finds that younger generations increasingly understand and connect over queer issues, both in Iran, online, and over the course of their migration journeys. Most of our participants conceived of identity as something that evolves over time, embracing a radical fluidity of sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC). Their choice of words to describe themselves — and their notable rejection of harsh, inflexible labels — reflects a growing awareness of the power of change, and of a queer identity that evolves with them over time and across place.

Poetry as Praxis

Iran has a deep tradition of poetic subversion, from Rumi’s mysticism to Hafez’s metaphors of same-sex longing. Today, that lineage continues on social media channels, in whispered verses under flickering detention-center lights, in poetry slams in diaspora cities.

One participant, now in Vancouver, wrote:

Who cares if the world rejects you; What matters is that you yourself embrace you. (You? Myself?)

Through poetry, some participants found ways to express what conventional language could not. In their hands, words became weapons of resistance and mirrors of transformation.

Digital Diaspora, Fluid Futures

Within Iran and abroad, social media and online support groups became lifelines, both for those in transit and for individuals persecuted for their identity within Iran. Participants described scrolling through diaspora reels and feeling, some for the first time, seen. 

Here, we found a significant difference in experience between participants in their late thirties and forties and those in their twenties and early thirties. Arghavan, 42, described a profound lack of understanding of trans experiences while she was growing up. This led her to question her own sanity: ‘I didn’t hear about trans life, at that time there was no internet, there was no international access and, especially, Iran was a very, very isolated country. So, you didn’t have access to very much information…’ 

Today, many participants describe using the internet to find a common language to describe themselves and platforms to connect. Some participants found inspiration through the internet by reading works by queer theorists and influencers. For example, X (in Iran) said that ‘the first book in gender studies that I downloaded was the translation of a selection from Judith Butler’s writings’. 

Pasha, who also lives in Iran, concluded that it was through internet sources that ‘we learned that one can actually live like this and have a job and all without the consequences that we were told were awaiting us’. Critically, internet connectivity allowed our participants to understand that they were not alone. 

Younger generations increasingly access queer culture through the internet, leading to a proliferation of debates and discussions on language and terminologies that can help them to understand their identities and simply to connect. This interconnection helped enable queer Iranians to actively participate in public movements such as Pride and, notably, the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ demonstrations. These struggles gave some queer Iranians the opportunity to share — many for the first time — their queer identities on a public, political, and global stage.  

Words that Wound, Words that Heal

For many participants, English became the preferred language of queerness. As Parham, still in Iran, explained: ‘In Persian, I have to use terms that are humiliating. In English, I can just say I’m gay.’.

And yet, there is resistance within Persian too. New terms emerged, like degarbash (heterogeneous being), creatively blending degar (other) and bash (to be). Critics questioned whether these words merely reinforced notions of deviance. However, for some, new language offered pride.

Saghi, now in Canada, reflected:

Hamjensgara is a beautiful name. That when somebody says I am hamjensgara, they can be, you know, happy with it, they can like it. They can be proud of it… Hamjensgara means somebody who is interested and can fall in love and be sexually romantically or erotically interested in the same sex…

The invention—and reclamation—of words is not just a linguistic act, but a political act that impacts policy, even in Iran, where homosexuality remains legally punishable by death. Karimi and Bayatrizi (2018) noted changes in discourses around gay relationships in 2013: Iranian lawmakers removed the derogatory term hamjens-baz from legal frameworks, replacing it with hamjens-gara, which is the term accepted by most Iranian queer organisations.

Living Between Names

For some, naming brought comfort; for others, it invited persecution. As Amira described: ‘Once I was just Amira. Now I’m “the one who is trans”, “the man who looks like a woman”. Why must we say man or woman at all? I am just myself.’.

For many, like Shaya, who now lives in Canada, learning about queer identities and categories gave them hope that there were others like them:  

The mere fact that I had found a term that I could describe myself with, even if it was [seen as] a disease, was a ray of hope for me. To feel like I too am someone and I too have a name. Prior to this it felt like because I was different from everyone else, nature would omit me.

For Shaya, having knowledge of the terminology that described her, even if it had negative connotations, brought a sense of hope and belonging.  

Rewriting the Self

The queer Iranians in this study are not merely adopting new identities. They are writing them — across borders, across languages, across silences.

This is not a story of easy liberation. It is a story of negotiation, of loss and invention; of shifting between shame and survival to name one’s own identity. It is a story of people who refuse to be defined by the language of the state — or the assumptions of the West. Instead, they are writing poetry books and a new way forward. 

They are asking, still: Who am I, actually? And in the asking, they are becoming.

I am not a rainbow. I am this murky sky. Dark as dirt. And full of light.

• Peyman, Turkey, from Rainbows on Rugged Terrains

In addition to the publication of the poetry book Rainbows On Rugged Terrains, the Negotiating Queer Identities Following Forced Migration team also published The Other Place, a documentary film on this topic. You can watch the film for free here: https://iranqueerefugee.net/outputs/#documentary

Bristol University Press will publish the full co-authored book on the topic of Iranian Queer Migration, entitled Decolonizing Queer Migration: Perspectives from Iran, in 2026. 

Isabel Rose Soloaga 

Isabel is a documentary filmmaker, researcher, and communications strategist specialising in forced migration and transnational activism. She has worked with refugee communities across Europe and North America, integrating participatory storytelling methods into her research and advocacy. As the director of Growing Up in America: Life After the Taliban, Isabel has won over 14 international documentary film awards and partnered with CNN to amplify refugee voices. She is currently a Research Fellow at the University of Sussex School of Law, Politics and Sociology. Follow her @isabel.soloaga and online at isabelsoloaga.com