Trans migrations: Seeking refuge in "safe haven" Toronto.

Trans and gender nonconforming (TGNC) people who make refugee claims in Canada negotiate a complex nexus of identity, belonging, and citizenship. Drawing on insights from TGNC refugees, immigration lawyers, and frontline workers, in this paper we examine the ways the state controls the trans body through the refugee claims process and in the process of integration into life in Canada, while also highlighting trans refugee methods of survival and resistance. What emerges is an understanding of the ways that refugees navigate the tension between gender, sexuality, and homecoming as both intimately felt and geopolitically managed. We convey TGNC refugee narratives to demonstrate how they both confirm and expand upon the existing literature on Canadian LGBTQ+ refugees. TGNC refugees' experiences at the Immigration and Refugee Board confirm insights from existing LGBTQ+ refugee studies. However, TGNC refugees' day‐to‐day lives differ significantly from LGB refugee lives as recounted in the literature. In TGNC refugees' attempts to access gender‐affirming documentation, healthcare, housing, and income, they confront distinct systems of transgender exceptionalism, border imperialism, and racial and heteropatriarchal capitalism that limit their access to basic necessities and impact how they build home both conceptually and materially. Key Messages: Refugee narratives elicited at the Immigration and Refugee Board follow a logic of "transgender exceptionalism" and often diverge from the complexity of Trans and gender nonconforming (TGNC) refugee experiences.TGNC refugees experience barriers to accessing housing, healthcare, adequate documentation, and employment due to histories and systems of oppression.These narratives demonstrate that the trans refugee homemaking process is implicated in nationalism, but also shows the needs to push against this limiting frame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]