I write these words following the sudden collapse of the Assad regime on 7 December 2024. For many Syrians, this was a long-anticipated goal, but it came at a great cost. Since then, Israel has challenged Syria’s sovereignty by attacking its military sites, taking control of vital water infrastructure, and expanding its settler-colonial efforts beyond occupied Jawlan into Quneitra, Daraa, and the Damascus suburbs.Footnote 1 Meanwhile, calls for affordable housing, stability, social support, and accountability—referred to by many in Syria as “transitional justice”—have united popular voices on the streets and social media since the regime’s fall.Footnote 2 Recent general security raids targeting what are called fulul, or remnants of regime forces, in Homs, Jaramana, and Sehnaya have intensified these demands.Footnote 3 Public opinions about these developments vary; some see these remnants as complicit in regime crimes, whereas others question whether the detentions and raids are fair. Their main concern is: How can the new state ensure military and security actions are not driven by sectarian, ethnic, or class biases?Footnote 4 These concerns are especially relevant as the interim government continues to justify military operations on the Syrian coast in March and in Sweida in July, under the pretext of “accountability” and defending “state sovereignty” against the fulul. Footnote 5 In this sense, “the accountable subject,” as defined by the state and supporters, includes the fulul, as well as victims and survivors of the coastal and Sweida massacres, primarily minorities like the Alawites and Druze. Today, questions of accountability and sovereignty are particularly urgent, as the interim government often marks previous state officials as fulul and the “accountable subjects” and enemies of the 2011 revolution.
This intervention aims to move the discussion beyond questions of who is the accountable subject and instead rethink notions of sovereignty outside the centrality of the state. It emphasizes community-led and popular approaches, acknowledging the legacy of years of popular protests and the influence of other revolutions in the region, which have fostered a tradition of collective memory rooted in community-based politics and participatory governance. In doing so, I focus on the story of Duaa, a transgender woman soldier, whose story disrupts the binary of “prorevolution” versus “proregime” that dominates mainstream narratives on political subjectivity in Syria. In 2012, while stationed near Damascus countryside close to the Lebanese border, Duaa refused to embody the role of the soldier assigned to her by the state. Instead, she redefined herself as what she called the “mother of all soldiers,” through acts of care, solidarity, and kinship. In these practices, Duaa both nurtured antiwar soldiers and challenged the cisnormative and militarized expectations imposed on her. Drawing on Indigenous and Palestinian scholarship that has informed recent debates about popular sovereignty, I argue that Duaa’s trans mothering, grounded in community, care, and kinship, is countering the state’s militarization and sovereign violence, perpetrated first by the Assad regime and now by the interim government, offering an alternative model of sovereignty shaped by the soldiers themselves. This shift in perspective from below enables us to see Duaa as a soldier-political subject, reshaping how we might imagine accountability, sovereignty, and justice in Syria today, beyond statist and cisnormative frameworks.
In what follows, I begin by reviewing the literature on trans mothering with a focus on debates about trans care and mothering within the trans activist community. I then review literature on sovereignty, focusing on Palestinian anthropologist Amahl Bishara’s approach, which highlights alternative geographies of public sovereignty.Footnote 6 My goal in engaging with Palestinian feminist scholarship in the Syrian context is both pedagogical and political, especially in light of counterrevolutionary efforts to disconnect Syria’s struggles from those of the Palestinian liberation movement, notably in recent attempts to normalize relations between Syria’s new interim government and Israel.Footnote 7 Then I present an ethnographic account and life history interviews with Duaa, illustrating her mothering as a form of popular sovereignty. I demonstrate that in Duaa’s story “trans mothering” becomes a mode of survival, dissent, and identity formation under authoritarian, militarized, and counterrevolutionary conditions. This article is based on my doctoral research, which involved ethnographic fieldwork and oral history interviews with thirteen Syrian and Palestinian LGBTQ asylum seekers in Lebanon, primarily in Beirut, between 2018 and 2019. I employed snowball sampling and used my network as a longtime activist in Lebanon and Syria to connect with Duaa through other interlocutors I met during my fieldwork. For privacy and security reasons, pseudonyms are used throughout the text.
Trans mothering
Much of the research on LGBTQ parenting is published in Western academies.Footnote 8 Historically, social science and humanities research has centered on racial and heteronormative conceptualizations of family.Footnote 9 Bulbul Gupta draws on Nicole Maines’ biography, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family, which portrays the struggles of Maines’ mother in dealing with her child’s gender dysphoria.Footnote 10 This body of work demonstrates how mothering occurs in “queer ways—that is, in ways that resist normative practices and normalizing impulses,” in which alternative forms of parenting, kinship, and communal care extend beyond conventional biological boundaries.Footnote 11 Irene Oh observes how “motherhood as performative emphasizes mothers’ agency by focusing on what mothers self-consciously do rather than what mothers biologically are.”Footnote 12 Kate Henley Averett argues that feminist research has yet to address “de-essentializing motherhood” and rethink cisnormative notions of gender embodiment.”Footnote 13 By extending early feminist research that demonstrated motherhood as “culturally constructed, not natural,” Averett highlights the impact of Black feminist and queer research that centers class and race in formulating such constructions.Footnote 14
Examples of such research are the works of Patricia Hill Collins and Cathy Cohen, who demonstrate how, due to the racialized division of labor, white women and Black women have not historically experienced motherhood in a similar manner.Footnote 15 In her seminal article, “Punks and Welfare Queens,” Cohen critically examines the radical queer organizing movement’s emphasis on identity politics and its conceptualizations of queer as an identity free from racial and class considerations.Footnote 16 Focusing on Black working-class women, such as the welfare queen and single Black mothers, Cohen underscores the historical racial foundations in which families are acknowledged solely when envisioned as white, and Black families are fragmented and destabilized by enslavement laws and their enduring legacies. Cohen, then, further expands approaches to queer beyond liberal notions of identity politics by complicating and racializing “heterosexuals outside heteronormativity.”Footnote 17 In this context, mothering is understood as racially constructed rather than innate. This notion is also examined within transfeminist Marxist literature and oral history archives that highlight initiatives led by trans women activists, such as the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) established by Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, which foster and shelter houseless trans youth.Footnote 18 Other trans activist efforts illustrate that the reproduction of motherhood extends beyond biological relationships between mothers and children, advocating for a reevaluation of cisgendered approaches to motherhood.Footnote 19
For example, in an article published on the Raseef22 website in 2023, the Palestinian-Syrian trans activist Naya Rajab cites an interview with Jad, a trans woman in Lebanon, who describes trans mothering experiences as a “a beautiful feeling, especially if you are providing assistance to LGBTQ+ individuals or others.”Footnote 20 Rajab calls for the decentering of birthing as a prerequisite for organizing reproductive rights. She describes the experiences of trans women in Beirut, the Lebanese capital, as differing among her generation compared to older trans and queer activist communities in Lebanon. Rajab references various experiences of trans women, including mothering, caring for, and raising abandoned queer, trans, and heterosexual children and youth who have been forsaken by their biological parents. Rajab describes how Jad and others she interviewed express that mothering “offers moral and psychological support and recognition of strength after trends of social exhaustion and constant discrimination in society.” Trans mothering, in this sense, can be understood as a form of trans kinship, mutual aid, world-making, and gender affirmation. Rajab’s argument offers a new perspective and contributes to ongoing discussions in recent literature about Syrian LGBTQ asylum seekers in Lebanon and nearby countries. These studies primarily focus on the legal, social, and political challenges faced by asylum regimes and host governments and communities. Although this body of work rightly highlights bureaucratic obstacles, anti-Syrian nationalist hate speech, and urban policies that reinforce class hierarchies and gender nonnormative biases against Syrian LGBTQ asylum seekers, it lacks perspectives on the agency of Syrian LGBTQ persons beyond narratives of suffering.Footnote 21
In this short article, I explore Rajab’s approach to trans mothering as a form of world-making in the context of the regime’s counterrevolutionary war and the backlash against the 2011 Syrian revolution. I focus on Rajab’s portrayal of trans mothering experiences as a form of “recognition of strength” amid “social exhaustion and constant discrimination.” Duaa, a transgender woman and soldier, shared that her mothering at the regime’s military base forged an alternative world for herself and her fellow soldiers. I argue that such mothering transforms military zones and frontlines, such as her deployment site, into spaces that not only reject war and challenge military logic but also foster care, affirmation, and mutual support among soldiers. In the next section, I expand on Rajab’s idea by including the notion of popular sovereignty. I argue that rejecting the military role linked to the gender assigned at birth and instead transitioning into “the mother of all soldiers” is a countersovereign act by Duaa, a role that is also affirmed by her fellow soldiers.
Popular sovereignty
If, as Antonio Agamben argues, the “sovereign is he who decides on the value or nonvalue of life,” then popular sovereignty, as several scholars show, can be understood as a deterritorialization of that power that defines supreme life.Footnote 22 For example, Cynthia Weber suggests that states are not natural entities but are discursively constructed, contends that sovereignty is not a fixed reality but a form of statecraft that is fundamentally fictive, materialized, and policed through embodied figurations of “perverse” homosexuals.Footnote 23 Similarly, Aslı Zengin’s work examines how sovereignty operates through the regulation of trans death, in which the state, religious authorities, and heteronormative families collaborate to assert control over trans bodies and erase nonnormative forms of kinship.Footnote 24 Zengin shows how these institutional alliances deny trans people recognition in death, often excluding chosen families from mourning and funerary processes. In response, Zengin explores how trans communities enact alternative forms of sovereignty through care, mourning, and affective ties, asserting relational authority outside of state and familial structures. Zengin’s analysis is informed and inspired by Indigenous scholarship on popular sovereignty, which conceptualizes sovereignty as relational, emergent, and collectively practiced rather than enacted through centralized state power. This framework allows Zengin to theorize trans death as both a site of marginalization and a space for enacting resistant, communal sovereignties.
Scholarship on Syria has canonically focused on a state-centered approach to sovereignty. For example, Patrick Seale’s Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East frames Syrian politics through statecraft and geopolitical strategy, centering the regime as the decisive actor.Footnote 25 Similarly, Joshua Landis’s scholarship and commentary often emphasize the Assad state’s resilience and legitimacy. Recent debate on the concept of popular sovereignty in the Syrian context has largely focused on specific areas, notably the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES), also known as Rojava.Footnote 26 Scholars argue that the governance of federated semidirect democracy in Rojava exemplifies popular sovereignty as it “shifts and undercuts much of the state’s power and influence and heralds a new way of designing social order.”Footnote 27 Academic work on the Syrian revolution mainly highlights how social and political changes in public spaces—such as squares, streets, and alleys—occur through popular protests, including masāʾiyyāt (night protests), ṭayyāra (flight protests), and home protests, arguing that these protests serve to reclaim public spaces and establish popular autonomy.Footnote 28
Although this body of work does not directly discuss popular sovereignty, it emphasizes that antiregime protests temporarily reshaped and created alternative public spaces and social bridges that transcended confessional and ethnic lines, at least temporarily, during the early stages of the revolution.Footnote 29 Scholars describe these large-scale participatory efforts for political change as world-making, outlining the leadership of key intellectuals, activists, and women in civil society whose acts of refusal against authoritarianism and empire, amid loss and grief, contribute to reshaping a different world, an alternative Syrian life and future.Footnote 30 My article contributes to the broader epistemological and methodological shift in Middle East studies by moving away from treating the state as the central sovereign power and instead foregrounding people’s sovereignty, especially as it emerges through popular protests and revolutionary struggles.
I situate my analysis in the context of the Israeli invasion of Mount Hermon on 7 December 2024, following Bashar Assad’s escape.Footnote 31 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed in a video speech from Mount Hermon in Jawlan, a southern Syrian territory occupied since 1967, that the binding agreement of the “buffer zone” was no longer applicable, justifying the occupation of more Syrian land and promising to build additional settlements.Footnote 32 Subsequent to Netanyahu’s colonial speech from Jawlan came the withdrawal of Syrian Army soldiers from their positions along the borders with the occupying state, on the same day as Assad’s escape from the country. In this sense, Syria’s borders were first violated and undermined by Israel and, subsequently, by the so-called anti-imperial authoritarian Assad regime. Syria’s national army, therefore, did not secure the state or the people’s sovereignty but rather that of the president. Those familiar with the regime’s history of surrendering Jawlan to Israel in 1967, its ongoing crimes in Palestinian camps in Lebanon and Syria, and its historical detention of Palestinian resistance leadership since the 1980s know that its role in giving up more Syrian land to the occupation in December 2024 was not something new.Footnote 33
I draw on the approach to popular sovereignty by Palestinian anthropologist Amahl Bishara. Bishara argues that revolutions in the Middle East serve as a “means of disrupting colonial or authoritarian state sovereignty.”Footnote 34 Bishara contends that Palestinians and others in the region have enacted “provisional versions of popular sovereignty.”Footnote 35 Discussing Syria, Bishara points out that nearly half of the population has become refugees, creating an opportunity for new, alternative forms of sovereignty to emerge. I find the concept of popular sovereignty useful for rethinking political subjectivity and the demands for transitional justice in today’s context, despite the different circumstances of authoritarianism within Syrian borders and settler-colonialism in occupied Palestine and Jawlan. By highlighting Duaa’s story as the “mother of all soldiers,” I illustrate that examples of nonnormative mothering “produce new collectivities, contest the legitimacy of state authorities, and offer different formulations for the operation of power.”Footnote 36
“I am the mother of them all”
I met Duaa through another interlocutor in the fall of 2018. Several interlocutors I interviewed in the field described the manhunt for eligible soldiers at checkpoints as state abduction. Those who managed to flee emerging cartographies of checkpoints crossed the borders into Lebanon and sought asylum. The regime’s counterrevolutionary war against the 2011 revolution required a large recruitment of soldiers and reserves, most of whom were working-class men who could not afford to flee the country, pursue graduate studies abroad, or pay a high exemption fee.Footnote 37 This caused many young men to “disappear from the city,” as one friend in Damascus put it. Many soldiers chose to defect from the regime’s army and sought to fight alongside the revolutionary armed wing, the Free Syrian Army. Some of my interviewees mentioned that they extended or deliberately failed their studies to avoid being summoned by the army. Others tried to bribe the government-linked network of officials who profited from the plight of forced army recruitment by creating fake medical reports. Some interviewees mentioned using pardoning documentation; many LGBTQ individuals relied on this to seek exemption from forced conscription. By claiming “gender identity disorder” as a medical condition preventing them from fulfilling military duties, many gay men and trans women used this loophole to dodge military service despite invasive bodily examinations.
“Gender identity disorder” exemption
Duaa was not one of them. She was unaware of the documentation and was forced to join the army’s frontlines in Damascus around mid-2011. I explained that I had spoken with other interviewees about how they sought pardon from the army by preparing this documentation and visiting a government doctor, who then forced them into humiliating bodily examinations to be officially exempted due to “sexual disorder.” As a working-class trans woman from a Syrian suburban area, Duaa was not involved in Al-Jaw, an underground network mainly comprising cisgender gay men and a few trans women. Al-Jaw functions as a network in which members introduce and vouch for new gay members, acting as trusted guarantors when they join the underground community. Interviewees also describe the network in various ways, as a community that provides shelter, financial assistance, and emotional support. It also offers advice and discreet information to help members cope with the regime’s anti-LGBTQ policies and practices.
Others describe Al-Jaw as unfriendly to lesbians and “over” figures like effeminate gays and trans women, including Duaa, who feels isolated within the gay and transgender community there. According to Duaa and other noncisgender interviewees, Al-Jaw is mainly accessible to cisgender gay men. Although Duaa lost access to vital information about the “sexual disorder” exemption that some trans women and gay men use to avoid military service, information that could have helped her avoid hardships, she does not seem to regret disengaging from Al-Jaw. She said, “I stayed away from Al-Jaw; there was a lot of harm. Listen, because I pass, I receive a lot of hate from other trans women. It was a relief to seek a life away from Al-Jaw.” The lack of accessible community ties with other gay men and networks highlights how trans people, including trans women like Duaa, face challenges and isolation, mainly from the state, due to legal, political, and socioeconomic barriers, rejection, and sometimes violence from their families and society. They also experience exclusion within gay community networks, a phenomenon widely documented in global trans archives and activist histories.
Duaa at the military base
Duaa recalls that being forcibly drafted into the military was one of the hardest periods of her life, a turning point that eventually led her to seek asylum in Lebanon. Stationed for a year in the Damascus suburbs, she endured tough military conditions. In the excerpt below, Duaa shares this chapter of her journey in her own words:
The first year in the military was damar (catastrophic). When I had to go there [the military], imagine, [putting down her coffee cup on the café’s table], they expect you to shave your hair to zero. I swear to you, three days, and I cut my hair this much [showing me one inch with her hands]. Just to itḥammal (bear) the idea that my hair will be short, and I didn’t itḥammal. I didn’t look like myself, and my appearance was not myself. This is not me. Is it not enough that my body is not mine? There are some things that I want, and there are things that I don’t want. On top of all that, I have cut my hair and become a young man. Eh, I went, and they gave me a uniform and a weapon, just like everyone else, like all the other soldiers.Footnote 38
Duaa said the last few words slowly before pausing for a moment. I felt like letting that pause pass without interruptions or follow-up questions. After the pause, she began telling me about the soldiers she met during her military service, including one who fell in love with her and how she got into trouble with the commanding officer because of it. Her account of her first year in the military as damar (catastrophic) highlights how militarization and the Syrian state establish sovereignty through bodily coercion. The forced haircut and uniform exemplify the state’s technologies of cisnormativity and military masculinity, making the body a central site for constructing sovereignty. Through the lens of feminist and queer critiques of the state, Duaa’s experience demonstrates how authoritarian sovereignty reproduces itself through militarization and cisgender, heteronormative masculinization of its subjects. Yet, by describing many of her fellow soldiers as neither proregime nor antiregime, Duaa humanizes them outside the binary political categorizations imposed by the state and mainstream revolutionary discourse. To her, soldiers belonged to a different category of citizens in Syria; she often said, “Soldiers’ lives are cheap.” She recounted a near-death experience on the frontlines, feeling she might die at any moment and believing her life held little value. She also described the strict hierarchy in the Syrian army, in which soldiers face food shortages, walk and live in mud, sleep in crowded shared spaces, and endure harsh training and humiliation from elite officers. I argue that such hierarchies of soldiers and elite commanders, her humanization of her fellow soldiers, and the outcast position of those, including herself, who did not want to participate in the war, reveal the limitations of state sovereignty in Syria.
Duaa’s trans mothering
Most importantly, and despite the harsh conditions of military life, Duaa found ways to perform her trans womanhood, asserting her chosen identity in defiance of the army’s cisnormative, classist, and masculinist hierarchies. She let her hair grow under her khaki cap, applied children’s powder to her skin, and wore leggings beneath her uniform. By refusing to perform the male soldierly role assigned to her at birth, Duaa challenged both the army and the state’s broader claims to exceptional sovereign power and control. In addition, these everyday acts of gender affirmation, as well as her gender performance, were inseparable from her intersubjective relationship with her fellow soldiers. Duaa describes the relationships she cultivated with her peers at the base, emphasizing mutual support among those who, like her, had been forcibly conscripted and were against the war and being part of it:
Look, we didn’t want war; we didn’t want to be in the army. Let me tell you, 80 percent of soldiers—I’m talking about soldiers—did not want to enlist. We were away from our families, we were alone and scared. We cried together, grieved one another, and went through a lot.
Duaa shared the following when I asked about her relationship with her fellow soldiers:
Look, people tell me I have a beautiful character. I enjoy making people smile. They [fellow soldiers] were attracted to me and sought my ḥanān ([حنان] connotes tenderness and compassion, a term linguistically and culturally associated with maternal care in the region). They liked me and wanted to be with me because I was kind to everyone and cared for them. That’s why they saw me as their mother, the mother of them all.Footnote 39
I argue that Duaa’s everyday acts of gender affirmation are inseparable from her trans care to her fellow soldiers, together forming an alternative vision and practice in the military space beyond the normative masculine military subjectivity assigned by the state. In turn, this alternative, non-military vision was shaped by the soldiers themselves, including those who were against the war despite their active involvement in it. Her embodiment of trans womanhood, together with her labor of care, refused the soldierly role assigned by the army and contested the state’s broader claims over sovereign power. The soldiers’ recognition of her nonnormative identity amplified this sovereign subversion: by affirming her womanhood and participating in reciprocal care, they enacted an alternative social order grounded in mutual support rather than surrendering to state coercion. Drawing on Bishara’s approach to popular sovereignty, I situate Duaa’s labor of mothering as producing temporary, popular sovereignty, shaped from below (the soldier class) rather than being imposed by the state and military elite. This intersubjective relationship shapes the contours of an alternative world, creates provisional communities, affirms Dua’s trans womanhood, and sustains mutual care on a military base. Duaa’s trans mothering constitutes a countersovereign act.
This is not to suggest that Duaa’s gender affirmation is solely dependent on her relationship with soldiers. Duaa explains that she assumed numerous responsibilities at the base, including distributing food, managing guard shifts, overseeing administrative tasks, organizing morning meetings, coordinating sports activities, maintaining base cleanliness, and managing storage. In this sense, she emerged as the key figure in organizing daily life, shifting her role to embody trans mothering for her fellow soldiers. This transition transformed the army’s routine, initially meant to uphold military discipline, into gestures of care and mutual support. As in Rajab’s approach to trans mothering and Bishara’s conceptualizations of popular sovereignty as practices generated from below, Duaa reoriented her labor from serving the institution to sustaining human relations among conscripted soldiers. Her trans mothering can therefore be understood as an act of world-making, one that forges temporary and community-formed popular sovereignty that persists in defiance of the state’s absolute sovereign power. Within this reordering of her military service, Duaa momentarily unsettles the state’s sovereign power through the very routines meant to uphold it.
Concluding remarks
Returning to transfeminist debates on mothering and Palestinian and Indigenous conceptualizations of popular sovereignty, Duaa’s story demonstrates how acts of trans mothering within the Syrian regime’s military strongholds can serve as a form of antimilitary dissent. By fostering solidarity, care, and mutual support among forcibly conscripted soldiers, Duaa’s trans mothering subverted the regime’s military and gendered expectations. Her trans care embodied a practice of mutual solidarity and support among her fellow soldiers that temporarily ruptured the hegemonic war logic from within. This reframing of trans care work highlights how trans survival practices can extend beyond revolutionary politics, urging us to reconsider the binaries of revolutionary subjects versus full subjects in today’s context. Transfeminist Marxist scholarship emphasizes that trans care and kinship are forms of labor, as embodied in Duaa’s relationships with her fellow soldiers. These acts of mutual solidarity created a temporary refuge and act of defiance, demonstrating that alternative forms of sovereignty can emerge even on frontlines and state military bases.
Furthermore, Duaa’s story invites us to reconsider notions of accountability and transitional justice in the Syrian context today. By centering people from below, such as Duaa and other soldiers, we can rethink forms of accountability that move beyond military and punitive frameworks and instead focus on community-based forms of belonging and citizenry. This perspective challenges the masculinist militarized and authoritarian structures and envisions futures that prioritize care, solidarity, and the reimagining of a war-torn community. Duaa’s narrative exemplifies how dissent can manifest in unexpected ways, even in regime-controlled spaces, urging us to expand our understanding of political subjectivity and antiwar dissent from the perspectives of soldiers themselves, rather than those of the political elite. We are reminded that trans mothering fosters popular sovereignty, paving the way for envisioning alternative futures in Syria. Finally, Duaa’s trans mothering not only temporally challenges sovereign and militarized state power but also reconstitutes soldiers’ agency through affective, relational, and collective forms of world-making.
Acknowledgments
I am truly grateful to the interlocutors who generously shared their experiences with me in Lebanon, especially Duaa, whose articulate insight inspired this work. This research would not have been possible without funding from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (Beirut office) and the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) through the CSS research grant, supporting my fieldwork in Lebanon between 2018 and 2019. I am grateful to the reviewers for their generous and constructive suggestions, as well as to the editors and staff of the Review of Middle East Studies for their careful comments and support of this project. Finally, I thank my parents for helping to fund this project and for their support and encouragement throughout.
