Body As the Site of Resistance Against Authoritarianism: The Case Study of Trans+ Youth in the Contemporary Islamic Iran.

Iran, a Muslim-majority society in the Middle East, has seen several social movements recently, from the Green Movement in 2009 and the December-January 2017-2018 to the October 2019 movement and the current one, Woman, Life, Freedom (WLF), which began in September 2022. In all these movements, the protesters were oppressed in the form of either being arrested and jailed or killed by the police. However, the WLF movement was quite different from the previous ones, both in nature and in the quality of the protesters: it was a gender-sexual revolutionary movement developed by Iranian youth, girls, boys, and LGBTQ+ communities. The WLF was initially formed after the death of Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by the Iranian "morality police" due to her so-called improper veiling and later killed suspiciously. Many Iranian youth, particularly those born from 2009 onwards, came to the streets and launched campaigns on social media in support of her. They used their bodies strategically to undermine the Islamic gender binary system. For example, they tattooed strange figures on their arms and chests and cross-dressed unprecedentedly to show their secular lifestyles. Among them are the transgender youth whose bodies and identities have already been considered threatening to the gender binary system in Iran. They joined the protesters and brought their bodies and symbols to the forefront of the movement. Some had been arrested and jailed, while others lived in hiding. No academic research so far has focused on the transgender youth's contribution to the movement. In this regard, the subject study aims to capture the lived experiences of trans youth who participated in the WLF and exposed themselves to danger. Using snowball sampling and in-depth interviews, the research findings will contribute to the current understanding of trans+ activism in Iran.