Displacements: Queer Migration & Anti-Gender Politics

What does queer migration look like day to day? Paperwork, barriers, and belonging...

In this episode of Dialogues for Resistance, we move beyond headlines about migration “crises” and listen instead to the lived realities of queer, trans, feminist, and LGBTIQ+ people displaced by anti-gender politics. We ask what happens when staying becomes impossible — and when arrival does not yet mean safety.

Through stories of persecution, border violence, asylum interviews, racism, bureaucracy, and life in exile, the episode explores how displacement is shaped not only by movement across borders, but by paperwork, waiting, fear, and the constant demand to prove one’s suffering.

But this is not only a story of harm. It is also a story of care, friendship, and resistance: of migrant-led Pride spaces, queer refugee collectives, mutual aid, and “bubbles of safety” built when institutions fail.

Join us for an episode about borders, belonging, survival — and the solidarities that make life possible in exile.

Keyword: refugees, migrants, queer migrants, displacement, political repression, anti-feminism, anti-LGBTIQ+, homophobia, transphobia, racism, authoritarian regimes

Episode Citation: Kulpa, R., & Zabrzewska, A. (2026). Vulnerabilities: Weak Resistances and Precarity (S01E02). Podcasting Social Justice: Dialogues for Resistances (Podcast Series). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22048374

CITING THE PODCAST SERIES:

Kulpa, R., & Zabrzewska, A. (2026). Podcasting Social Justice: Dialogues for Resistances (Podcast Series). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21676257

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome. You're listening to Dialogues of Resistance, a podcast series about anti-gender politics and queer feminist resistances. My name is Roberto Kulpa. And I'm Ada Sabashewska.

SPEAKER_01 0:16

In the series, we examine everyday life consequences of anti-gender politics in parliaments, media, across civil society, and the institutions that shape people's lives.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

In this season, we stay close to the lived experiences. We ask how anti-gender politics shapes ordinary life and what it does to safety, belonging, and access to care.

SPEAKER_01 0:41

We trace how the same politics travels across borders, through migration regimes, and the everyday violences that gather at Europe's edges, alongside the solidarities people build to survive and to resist. Welcome to the episode 4 dedicated to the displacement and specifically what displacement looks like for queer, trans, feminist people navigating anti-gender politics and hostile border regimes.

SPEAKER_00 1:09

Have you noticed, Erda, that we often hear about migration, usually in the language of crisis, numbers, or security? Our focus in this episode of Podcasting Social Justice is not on that, but on the everyday. The paperwork, the interviews, the waiting, the constant calculation of risk, and the question of belonging.

SPEAKER_01 1:35

And we also want to make a careful point from the start. For many people in the Resist project, leaving one's place of living was not simply moving. It was a forced choice shaped by persecution, surveillance, and shrinking civic space.

SPEAKER_00 1:51

Sadly, the arrival to new country did not automatically meant safety for them. This is because displacement can mean escaping one set of violences and entering another. Border regimes, asylum procedures, racism, and the slow grind of bureaucracy.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

In many contexts, anti-gender mobilizations create conditions that drive people to leave. And these include rising public hostility, criminalization, targeted repression, violent attacks, and the growing sense that you can't appear in public, organize, teach, or even simply live without being police.

SPEAKER_00 2:34

Our participants consistently described how legal restrictions, police harassment, public hostility, and authoritarian governance push them to seek protection elsewhere.

SPEAKER_01 2:47

And this matters because anti-gender politics often travels with nationalism and authoritarianism, producing layered exposures to harm.

SPEAKER_00 2:56

This is so true, and so subtly exemplified in our transnational case of people living in exile from Turkey and Northern Kurdistan.

SPEAKER_01 3:29

And another one, a transwoman activist, simply said, I would have died if I stayed.

SPEAKER_00 3:34

These sad stories don't end at individual risk. Anti-gender rhetoric also works as a framing device, a way to brand queer feminist and Kurdish dissidents as perverts, terrorists, or threats to the nation.

SPEAKER_01 3:49

This totally reminds me about moral panics about which we have talked in the previous episode of our podcast series. The politics of protection becomes permission for persecution.

SPEAKER_00 4:01

There is another point worth highlighting. If anti-gender politics helps push people out, then border regimes and asylum systems often pull them into new systems of violence.

SPEAKER_01 4:14

And in the resist findings, we have again many examples when participants describe displacement as a process, not a single moment, shaped by illegal pushbacks, dangerous routes, and degrading camp conditions.

SPEAKER_00 4:28

For some people, a fellowship or visa made travel possible. For others, the only routes available were criminalized and risky. These routes exposed people to detention, assault, and systematic humiliation.

SPEAKER_01 4:44

Let me quote a Kurdish activist who powerfully describes the reception centers and attitudes. In the arrival camps, they humiliate you so much, you feel like a bug.

SPEAKER_00 4:56

Let's put it clear, that's not administration, that's a form of violence.

SPEAKER_01 5:02

And it sits alongside something else. The way racism and xenophobia decide who is treated as deserving of protection in the first place.

SPEAKER_00 5:13

Because borders don't regulate movement, they evaluate and rank humanity. They judge people who is worthy of protection and who's not.

SPEAKER_01 5:24

And it's done through race, nationality, class, and also gender and sexuality. The border is a filter set. And for queer and trans people, it often demands that you explain your life in a way that fits other people's expectations.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

Let's now talk more about what happens once someone is inside the asylum system. Because many participants described the asylum process itself as a continuation of harm and violence.

SPEAKER_01 5:57

You can hear this in phrases that come up again and again. Disbelief, moral judgment, heteronormative expectations, and excessive demands for proof. One participant described it like this you're selling your trauma just to get help.

SPEAKER_00 6:10

The asylum interview becomes a credibility test shaped by norms and expectations. What does a real lesbian look like?

SPEAKER_01 6:20

What kind of story is legible as proper persecution? What emotions are expected?

SPEAKER_00 6:25

And whose fear is taken seriously.

SPEAKER_01 6:28

And the irony is brutal. These systems often ask for coherent chronological narratives at the exact moment when people are living through trauma, uncertainty, and disorientation.

SPEAKER_00 6:40

So displacement becomes paperwork, bureaucratic hell of waiting, stopped time, and suspended life. A calendar organized around appointments, deadlines, and the threat of refusal.

SPEAKER_01 6:58

For many queer trans and feminist people, exile begins as an urgent step away from the political repression, but arrival to a supposed place of safety rarely brings immediate belonging.

SPEAKER_00 7:11

Yes, people seeking asylum and people without legal right to stay face encampment, detention, and deportation. Life in exile often involves housing insecurity, precarious work, bureaucratic barriers, racism, and emotional strain.

SPEAKER_01 7:30

In the resist data, our participants described exile not as an ending, but as a continuation of struggle, a slow negotiation between survival, dignity, and belonging. A feminist academic from Turkey described displacement as not only the loss of a job or status, but the loss of being a political subject.

SPEAKER_00 7:51

And Belarusian feminists echoed this shift. People described the emotional shock of going from being a rights defender to someone who cannot rent a flat without a guarantor, losing the ability to speak or act publicly without fear.

SPEAKER_01 8:09

This is what makes displacement so hard to narrate in simple terms. Exile is a kind of in-betweenness. Safer but not safe. Freer but not free.

SPEAKER_00 8:24

And the pressures don't stop at legal status.

SPEAKER_01 8:28

Participants described ongoing surveillance by home country actors, online harassment that followed them across borders, fear of informants in diaspora communities, and guilt for those left behind.

SPEAKER_00 8:40

So the past doesn't stay behind, it travels.

SPEAKER_01 8:45

And yet this is crucial, as the stories we have gathered during the research are not only about harm. Practices of resistance, care, and solidarity emerge in exile, and they challenge narratives that reduce displaced queer subjects to victims.

SPEAKER_00 9:02

Yes, and that is so uplifting. Care is often discussed as private emotion, but in contexts where institutions fail, care becomes an infrastructure of survival.

SPEAKER_01 9:16

People described rebuilding life through shared meals, small mutual aid networks, translation help, solidarity actions, and collective art.

SPEAKER_00 9:25

What's important here is that care and agency are not opposites. Emotional fragility can coexist with political action.

SPEAKER_01 9:34

Or friendship can be a form of survival, and survival can be a quiet form of resistance.

SPEAKER_00 9:40

As the episode finishes, let's summarize three key points about displacement and migration as intersected with the anti-gender politics.

SPEAKER_01 9:51

First, displacement is not only a movement across borders, it is often a forced response to persecution, repression, and public hostility. And anti-gender politics can be one of the engines that makes staying impossible.

SPEAKER_00 10:05

Second, the border is not a single line. It becomes a system. Camps, interviews, credibility tests, waiting, and the bureaucratic demand to translate your life into something legible. And that system can reproduce harm through racism, xenophobia, and heteronormative assumptions.

SPEAKER_01 10:29

Third exile is not only loss, it is also a site where solidarities are built, where care, creativity, and friendship become political practices of survival.

SPEAKER_00 10:39

Displacement replaces one vulnerability with another, but it also creates new ways of organizing life. And that matters because anti-gender politics try to shrink the space of possibility.

SPEAKER_01 10:55

Hence building networks that sustain people in exile is itself a form of resistance. Thanks for listening.

SPEAKER_00 11:03

Thank you. You've listened to Dialogues of Resistance, a podcast series about how anti-gender politics travels and how queer feminist resistances answer back.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

We follow those dynamics across Europe, and you've just listened to the episode 4 on displacement, queer migration, and the border as a site of political struggle.