Trans*it: Transgender and gender nonconforming asylum claimants’ narratives in Greece

Abstract

In this article, I reflect on two interviews of transgender/gender nonconforming asylum claimants in the broader West. In the Trans*it documentary that my partners and I created, a non-binary person and a transgender woman, Ilios and Christina, interview each other on the difficulties of being a transgender/gender nonconforming asylum applicant in Greece. Greece is an understudied area with huge migration flows at the border of the EU and has no official data for Sexual Orientation Gender Identity asylum claims. The documentary, this article contends, provides a starting point for reflecting on the experiences of transgender/gender nonconforming applicants at the borders of Europe and their transition from their country of origin to the West/Greece, and for importing non-Western migrant subjectivities into our current thinking on sexuality/gender. In particular, I problematize the legal framework of Refugee Status Determination and explore the decolonization of gender identity/expression in refugee law. Finally, I reflect on the process of making the documentary and my attempt to centre the voices of gender nonconforming asylum claimants while minimizing the impact of my gaze as a white Greek researcher in the field. In doing so, this article shows how documentary film can be used as a means to further considerations of gendered normativities of asylum claims in a key, yet understudied, context. It concludes by arguing for a decolonializing approach that questions the normalization of Western standards of gender, and their transgression, in Refugee Status Determination.