It’s a January night in Damascus. Outside, the weather is bone-cold. Nadine, 26, is living here with friends, though she’s originally from Homs. She and a few others are gathered inside for a New Years’ birthday party, complete with a DJ.
Suddenly, armed men storm in. She thinks they might be associated with the Islamist Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) militants who took over Syria in a breakneck offensive just a month earlier. She can’t be sure. Somehow, though, the gunmen knew to attack here — Nadine and her friends are trans women.
“They came in and beat us,” Nadine says, later adding: “They kidnapped some of them for a couple of days, but we still don’t know what happened to five of the people [at the party].”
Nadine fled to Lebanon shortly afterward, hoping for safety.
She’s not alone. Just three months after the birthday party, Nadine is among about a dozen young folks sitting around a meeting room table at Helem, a community center and NGO for LGBTQ people in Beirut. Some of them, like her, came from Syria only in the past couple of months, taking the risky journey over mountain roads to get here. Others have been here for longer after leaving their homes in Damascus, Homs and elsewhere. A handful are Lebanese.
“What’s something you love about yourself?” One of the young Syrians at the table, a transgender woman in her twenties, pulls a folded paper icebreaker question from a jar that the group is passing around. “I love everything about myself!” she announces to the room, passing the jar of questions to the next person.
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Nadine stays mostly quiet. One attendee, lanky and spinning around in their chair, cracks jokes with the others.
They’re here at the invitation of Marley Kudsy, a 19-year-old trans woman from Syria who’s been running a series of psychosocial support sessions. There’s a lot to talk about: fleeing the bombs during Israel’s recent deadly war on Lebanon, ostracization from their families, trouble finding work. The Syrians in attendance say they faced arbitrary arrest and harassment both under the old Assad regime and at the hands of Syria’s new authorities, after HTS’s takeover of the country in December thrust its leader, Ahmad Sharaa, to power.
One attendee at Kudsy’s workshop, a young LGBTQ man named Hamoudi, says he was imprisoned for seven years in Syria’s notorious Sednaya torture prison, once dubbed “the human slaughterhouse.” Two of those years were in solitary confinement, where he faced extra abuse due to his sexuality. “The day I got out was the day I was reborn,” he later tells me.
Some 400,000 Syrians have packed up and headed back home from neighboring countries, including Lebanon, since the fall of Assad in December, pinning high hopes on Sharaa’s new government.
But for the people around the table today at Helem, it’s not so clear whether Syria is any safer than before.
At first, there was some hope. Dec. 8, the day Assad fled the country, effectively ending 50 years of his family’s brutal rule, “was the best day of my life,” Kudsy tells me. “It was 6:00 a.m. when I found out. I cried and couldn’t stop crying.”
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Just 19 years old, Kudsy was born in Beirut to Syrian parents. They later moved back to Syria when they were a young child. Both their parents took part in the peaceful 2011 revolution. After their mother and father both died during the war, Kudsy and their siblings went to live with religiously conservative relatives in northwestern Syria’s Idlib government, the home turf of Sharaa’s HTS movement.
There, they founded Sowtonna, a nonprofit that runs support workshops for LGBTQ people and other marginalized groups. But their work and identity made her the target of HTS threats, Kudsy tells me. They fled to Aleppo, then still under Assad’s control, where authorities also harassed them. Eventually, they made it to Lebanon in September 2024, just as Israel expanded its deadly bombing there. I remember those days of the bombing, too — a million people suddenly fleeing their homes, and bombs crashing down on apartment blocks with residents still inside.
There’s been a tenuous ceasefire since November — with Israel bombing southern Lebanon and elsewhere daily — but in Beirut the dust is largely settling. Kudsy is still running their Sowtonna workshops, including the psychosocial support sessions they invited me to attend last month.
Everyone there, including Kudsy, told me it’s too dangerous for them to consider returning to Syria right now. For now, they’re watching the new Syrian authorities take hold from afar.
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According to the Guardians of Equality Movement (GEM), a Syrian LGBTQ organization, the first months of 2025 saw “an increase in cases of assault, violence, harassment, discrimination, physical and sexual torture, and death threats against LGBTQIA+ individuals.” In one video that emerged in early 2025, gunmen “without official affiliation” stormed a house in Jaramana, on the outskirts of Damascus, where several trans women were living.
“I hope, I hope, I can return home someday,” says Nadine, who escaped the attacked birthday party back in January. But at just 26 years old, she’s already been detained four times under the previous Assad regime and is scared the new Syrian authorities won’t be any better. “I’m losing my hope.”
Maya, a 25-year-old transgender woman, and Jad*, 27, a cisgender man, first met in Homs two years ago, says Jad. “When I first saw her, she looked like an angel,” he recalls.
“Three years ago,” Maya corrects him, smiling. Behind her, a table covered in lipsticks and eyeshadows, and the couple’s tiny kitchenette stocked with cups and straws for drinking yerba mate.
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I’m sitting with Jad and Maya in their basement apartment in early May, one of the first hot, sunny days after a long winter. Only Jad came up onto the street to show me the way to their door — the couple feels it’s too unsafe for Maya to appear outside around their neighbors, in the town where they live about 20 minutes north of Beirut.
When they fled to Lebanon two years ago, they had hoped it would be a refuge. Maya had already endured imprisonment three times in Syria, under the Assad regime, for being visibly trans, she says. Syria’s penal code includes a handful of laws targeting LGBTQ people, including one that criminalizes “any sexual act that goes against the course of nature.”
On top of that, she and Jad both come from religiously conservative Alawite families along the Syrian coast. When Maya’s family sent threats to her and Jad, they decided it was time to leave.
Though Lebanon is sometimes seen as a sort of regional haven for LGBTQ people, the reality can still be harsh. The Lebanese penal code punishes “any sexual intercourse contrary to the order of nature” with up to one year in prison.
To stay safe from family, neighbors, and strangers alike, trans women often dress masculine in order to hide that they are trans, according to Human Rights Watch. Maya, whose hobby is makeup, told me she went without makeup and wore masculine clothing while travelling within Lebanon to avoid harassment at checkpoints.
Anti-LGBTQ sentiment — and even physical violence — has been on the rise in Lebanon in recent years. Jnoub al-Rab, a far-right Christian group, ramped up harassment toward LGBTQ people in the months leading up to the war in 2023, eventually attacking a queer-friendly bar in Beirut that August.
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That’s just what has reached the public eye. Once Maya and Jad made it to Lebanon, they found their way to a village near Tyre, where they knew someone from their home region in Syria. There, Maya told me she faced harassment from Lebanese security authorities, who targeted her for being trans. She alleges one officer used the threat of deportation to Syria in order to demand sexual favors.
At one point, both she and Jad were in a men’s jail in Tyre for several days, though in separate cells and were unable to speak with each other. “I just heard her crying across the wall and I didn’t know if they were hurting her or not,” he remembers.
According to Human Rights Watch, Lebanon’s penal code doesn’t specifically punish transgender people for being trans.
Instead, they’re often targeted for a series of other (sometimes vague) laws. This law has also been regularly enforced to arrest transgender women who are misidentified as “gay men,” according to HRW. Trans people are also targeted under laws of “violating public morality,” “incitement to debauchery,” and “secret prostitution.” One law penalizes “any sexual intercourse contrary to the order of nature” with up to a year of prison time. Another one mandates up to six months in prison for “every man who masquerades as a woman to enter women’s spaces.”
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In October 2023, when Israel began bombing parts of Lebanon in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, Maya and Jad had to leave Tyre — quick. Strikes had hit neighboring buildings, and they weren’t safe. Leaving behind their personal documents, they hitched a ride to the nearby Rashidieh Palestinian refugee camp and slept on the sidewalk. Later, Helem helped them pay for transportation to Beirut, where they stayed at a shelter set up for displaced LGBTQ people.
With small monthly stipends from the UN — now being cut off — and some income from Jad working odd jobs, they eventually made it to the tiny apartment north of Beirut. Maya can’t work, still fearing harassment if she goes outside. It’s a precarious existence, they say, though they’re happy to be together.
In their basement apartment, Maya and Jad tell me they just want to live together in peace. “But it’s hard to live here. It’s hard to live anywhere,” Jad says. They’ve applied for resettlement through UNHCR and attended an interview together three months ago, but are still waiting for a decision — they are hoping for Canada.
I ask them what their dream jobs would be, if they could choose anything. She’d be a makeup artist; he’d drive taxis. They’d move together to another country, somewhere far away.
“I’d go live anywhere else than here,” Maya says.
In her dream life, she tells me, she and Jad have gotten married. It is serene there, and she can simply exist without fear. She has a full-size kitchen. “I’m in a beautiful house away from everyone else, and I’m cooking dinner for Jad.”
*Indicates a pseudonym.
**All photos by João Sousa. Sousa is a photojournalist based in Lebanon and focused on social issues.
