The story of Laila Sawan, a Syrian transgender activist, did not end when she was found dead in her apartment in Damascus in June 2026. Two years earlier, Tala Barakat, a Syrian trans woman living as a refugee in Lebanon, was murdered. A trans woman may spend her entire life defending her identity, only to lose the ability to do so at the very moment when decisions concerning her body pass into the hands of other individuals and institutions.

Although the circumstances of their deaths differ, death reveals another dimension of the ongoing struggle over trans women’s bodies. It not only deprives us of the ability to defend our bodies but may also place our names, photographs, relationships, and even the rituals through which we are mourned under the authority of those who can impose competing interpretations of who we were and how we should be remembered.

I write about Laila and Tala because I refuse to accept death as the moment when a trans woman’s identity is taken from her once again. I also write about the mourning we carry, about the friends who find themselves compelled to defend the names of those they have lost, and about the families we create and choose.

I do not approach the family, the state, or religion as homogeneous institutions that invariably exercise violence, nor do I regard chosen families as idealized spaces free from contradictions. Rather, I seek to understand how these different forms of authority and relationality intersect, and how the rights to bodily autonomy, memory, and mourning are redistributed after death.

Sovereignty and Death

Power over life and death is exercised not only through direct acts of killing but also through the conditions that render certain populations less able to live in safety. This does not mean that trans women’s lives can be reduced to a continuous experience of suffering. We develop and sustain relationships grounded in care, and we negotiate the conditions that seek to constrain our existence. Yet our capacity for agency does not absolve institutions of their responsibility for producing circumstances that expose some lives to heightened vulnerability.

In this context, Aslı Zengin distinguishes between deaths that conform to prevailing social norms, in which families, legal and religious institutions, and communities cooperate to organize burial and mourning, and what she describes as transgressive death, which may expose fractures within these established arrangements.

When the identity through which a deceased person lived conflicts with the classifications that institutions recognize as legitimate, the body becomes a site where multiple forms of sovereignty intersect. The state exercises authority over official documentation and legal procedures; the family occupies a privileged social and legal position; religious institutions participate in the regulation of funerary practices; and friends assert their right to care for and bid farewell to the deceased.

These competing claims to authority are reflected in the differences between how Laila was commemorated by her biological family and by her friends and colleagues, as well as in the role Tala’s friends played in securing her burial.

The deaths of Syrian trans women do not necessarily mark the end of the violence exercised over their bodies. Rather, they may initiate another phase of negotiation and contestation over who possesses the authority to define, name, mourn, bury, and commemorate the deceased.

At the moment of death, a trans woman’s body does not escape relations of power; it enters another configuration of them.

Laila Sawan

Laila Sawan was a Syrian activist who spent years in exile across Jordan, Türkiye, and Argentina. In Argentina, she worked to expand economic and professional opportunities for transgender people and served as Executive Director of Trans-IT, an organization dedicated to the economic empowerment of trans communities through training, grants, and employment opportunities. Laila understood her own experience through a sense of belonging to a community of women who shared knowledge, care, and solidarity.

Laila returned to Syria following the fall of the Assad regime. On June 26, 2026, she was found dead in her apartment in Damascus. The circumstances surrounding her death remained unclear, but uncertainty was not the only issue that accompanied her passing.

I consider Laila’s return to Syria a significant dimension of her story. She had spent years in exile, during which she was able to build a life under her own name and identity. Yet returning to one’s country of origin does not necessarily mean that the relationships and forms of recognition established in exile can be carried back under the same conditions.

When one of Laila’s friends asked me to help obtain further information about her death, I turned to Facebook, a platform that many Syrian families continue to use to publish death announcements. There, I found an obituary for Laila published under her deadname, following the conventional format of Syrian family death notices. The announcement was accompanied by photographs from earlier periods of her life.

The obituary used a name she had not wished to use, while her friends commemorated her by the name she had chosen for herself, remembering her as a trans woman who had made a meaningful contribution to their lives and to the communities with which she worked.

I do not wish to reduce the circumstances surrounding Laila’s commemoration to a binary opposition between a family that erased her identity and friends who recognized it. Grief, love, and power may coexist within the same relationship, and the complexities of these relationships cannot be adequately understood through a simplistic distinction between recognition and denial.

What matters here is that Laila’s death deprived her of the ability to intervene in how her identity was represented to others. During her lifetime, she exercised the capacity to name herself and establish relationships through her chosen name. After her death, however, that capacity was no longer guaranteed.

The contestation over her name is inseparable from a broader question concerning the production and ownership of knowledge. Information about her final circumstances is distributed among different individuals and institutions: her biological family, the hospital to which she was transferred, the relevant police authorities, and the civil registry institutions responsible for recording her death.

Each of these actors, by virtue of their institutional position or personal relationship with Laila, may possess different fragments of information about her life and the circumstances of her death. Meanwhile, others, including her friends and loved ones, continue their efforts to establish what happened and understand the circumstances of her final hours.

I have no evidence that Laila’s friends were excluded from an investigation or that her family or the authorities deliberately withheld information concerning her death. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that knowledge of a person’s life cannot be reduced to official documentation or biological kinship. Friends who shared Laila’s life may possess significant knowledge about her, even when their relationships are not formally recognized by the law.

This requires distinguishing between two forms of knowledge that are neither interchangeable nor mutually exclusive. Medical and judicial institutions, through their respective procedures and professional expertise, can collect evidence that may help establish the cause and circumstances of death. Friends and others who shared Laila’s life, however, may possess intimate knowledge of her relationships, needs, and decisions that is not necessarily reflected in official records.

Such intimate knowledge may make these individuals important contributors to understanding the deceased person’s life and the wider context in which her death occurred.

Tala Barakat

On May 13, 2024, Tala Barakat’s body was found in the Daoura area, north of Beirut. Several days later, Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces announced the arrest of two individuals in connection with her murder, presenting an account suggesting that the killing had resulted from a dispute of a sexual nature.

However, Helem, a Lebanese LGBTQ+ rights organization, situated the crime within a broader pattern of assaults, threats, and extortion reported by trans women in the Daoura and Bourj Hammoud areas, including practices involving the extraction of protection payments and other forms of violence.

Reports also emerged concerning the desecration and filming of Tala’s body. The way her murder was represented in the media, including speculation about the motives behind the crime and her occupation, together with the filming and violation of her remains and the refusal of a member of her biological family to receive her body in Syria, demonstrates how violence can extend beyond the act of killing itself.

Such practices affect the dignity of the deceased, the ways in which she is represented to others, and the terms through which her memory is subsequently constructed.

The concept of necroviolence, as discussed by Zengin, provides a framework for understanding this continuation of violence beyond biological death. The violation of a body, the denial of a deceased person’s identity, and interventions in burial practices or the preservation of memory can reproduce relations of violence even after life has ended.

Several days after Tala’s murder, the Public Prosecution in Mount Lebanon authorized the release of her body to her friends so that she could receive a dignified burial. This decision enabled individuals connected to her through social and affective relationships to assume one of the most intimate responsibilities associated with death.

Tala was buried in a Christian cemetery in Lebanon. A memorial gathering was also organized by Helem with the assistance of the QMA group. Her friends attended the gathering and delivered speeches commemorating her life and sharing their memories of her.

These circumstances reveal multiple dimensions of belonging after death. The selection or availability of a burial site may involve intersecting religious, social, and legal classifications. Tala’s burial in a Christian cemetery does not, in itself, establish that she had been refused burial elsewhere, nor does it justify attributing specific religious motivations to the decision without further evidence.

Nevertheless, the circumstances invite reflection on how burial spaces become accessible to trans women living as refugees and who possesses the authority and resources to negotiate the procedures involved.

The memorial gathering, meanwhile, constituted a different space of recognition, one that acknowledged Tala’s relationships with her friends and the community to which she belonged.

The words spoken by her friends were not merely acts of remembrance for a woman who had been murdered. They were also social practices through which Tala was represented through the relationships, experiences, and memories of those who had shared her life, rather than being reduced to the security and media narratives surrounding her death.

The Mourning We Have Been Denied

I reflect on the burden carried by friends when they lose a woman close to them. Before we can find space to grieve, loss sometimes becomes a succession of responsibilities, uncertainties, and fears that consume time, emotional energy, and material resources, while grief itself remains deferred.

In Laila’s case, commemorating her could not be separated from defending her name, identity, and life story, or from the efforts of those close to her to understand the circumstances of her death and navigate the information circulating about her.

In Tala’s case, the struggle to secure a dignified burial intersected with confronting the violence inflicted upon her body and the representations that denied her identity.

Yet the language of being denied the right to mourn does not fully capture what occurs in the aftermath of such losses. We are not simply deprived of the opportunity to express grief; we may also find ourselves required to undertake additional forms of work in order to make mourning possible.

At times, we must search for information, communicate with people we do not know, verify circulating reports, explain our relationship with the deceased, or defend the name by which she lived. In other circumstances, we may have to participate in arrangements concerning the body, burial procedures, and their associated financial costs.

I propose describing this burden as “the work that precedes mourning.”

This does not suggest that grief begins only after practical arrangements have been completed. We grieve while searching, communicating, waiting, and organizing. Rather, the concept refers to the urgent responsibilities that loss can impose, responsibilities that may prevent us from attending to our grief or expressing it on our own terms.

Such work may also be distributed unequally within the community itself. Some friends may assume disproportionate responsibilities because of their proximity to the deceased, their experience, or their ability to communicate with institutions. Under conditions of exile, these burdens may be further intensified by geographical distance, national borders, and the dispersal of those involved across different locations.

Kenneth Doka’s concept of disenfranchised grief offers a useful framework for understanding losses that are denied adequate social recognition or support, whether because of the identity of the deceased or the nature of the relationship between the deceased and those who mourn her.

A relationship that lacks legal or social recognition may nevertheless be profound, intimate, and sustained over many years. Yet the loss of such a relationship may not receive the same acknowledgment granted to conventional familial bonds.

Judith Butler, meanwhile, interrogates the conditions under which certain lives become recognizable as worthy of mourning while others are denied such recognition. Mourning is therefore not merely a private emotional experience; it also reveals how societies distribute recognition of the value of human life.

What I seek to contribute to this discussion is the observation that the absence of recognition does not simply restrict our ability to express grief. It may also compel us to undertake additional labor precisely when our emotional capacity to do so is most diminished.

When our relationships with the deceased are not automatically recognized, we may be required to demonstrate the legitimacy of those relationships or assume responsibility for protecting her memory.

This inequality becomes particularly apparent when we are compelled to explain that our trans friend was a woman before we are even able to speak about her life or mourn her death.

I refuse to accept mourning as another test through which we must establish our humanity. We have the right to grieve without explaining our existence, justifying our relationships, or repeatedly defending the legitimacy of our pain.

We also have the right not to transform every loss into a political act. Grief is not an activist obligation, and we should not be expected to extract political meaning or a narrative of victory from every death. Yet when we choose to mourn collectively, we create alternative spaces in which the relationships that connect us can be acknowledged and sustained.

I want the spaces in which we gather to remember those we have lost to become places where fear, anger, longing, and loneliness can be expressed, rather than spaces where we are compelled to conceal our wounds or translate them into narratives of perpetual resilience.

The Right to Truth and Memory

I do not regard collective mourning as a substitute for the right to truth or the pursuit of justice.

In Laila’s case, the available information remains insufficient to establish the cause of her death. In Tala’s case, a criminal investigation was initiated, and Lebanese authorities announced the arrest of two individuals in connection with her murder. However, information concerning subsequent legal proceedings has remained unavailable to us, and we do not know whether either individual was ultimately convicted.

The two cases differ in their circumstances and in the evidence available concerning them. Acknowledging these differences, however, does not diminish the importance of investigation, accountability, or the protection of the dignity and privacy of the deceased.

The right to truth does not mean that the deceased person’s body should become an object of public curiosity. What we seek is the establishment of facts where uncertainty persists, accountability where crimes have been committed, and recognition of testimonies that may contribute to understanding what occurred.

We also insist that the manner of death should not become the defining or sole surviving narrative of the women we have lost.

In her research, Zengin develops an understanding of the deceased as part of a social and affective archive through which relationships between the living and the dead continue to be sustained. Memories of deceased friends, the belongings they leave behind, and the rituals through which they are commemorated may become sites for the reconstruction of kinship and belonging.

Zengin extends this argument by suggesting that the body of a deceased trans person, together with the memories and relationships gathered around it, may become a temporary home, both material and symbolic, for the community that mourns her.

I find in this proposition a way of articulating the need to construct forms of memory that extend beyond records of human rights violations and counts of victims. This is not because documentation is unnecessary, but because relying on it alone risks reducing the women we have lost to statistical entries, known only through the dates and circumstances of their deaths.

For this reason, I want to remember Laila through her professional trajectory, her relationships, her interest in technology and education, and her hope that a life of greater freedom could be built.

I also want us to have the space to know Tala through the memories preserved by her friends, rather than exclusively through police reports and the details circulated by the media about her murder. I do not want our knowledge of Tala to remain confined to what her attackers did to her body.

We do not carry our dead merely as numbers in lists of victims, nor simply as evidence of a world that denies us the possibility of living. We carry them because they were part of our lives, and because the relationships we formed with them do not end when their bodies cease to live.

I understand collective mourning as a practice through which memory and kinship can be reclaimed, and care as a form of sovereignty constituted through love, labor, and shared responsibility.

This form of sovereignty does not eliminate our need for rights, institutions, and protection. Rather, it reminds us of our capacity to produce relationships and meanings that dominant systems do not always recognize.

To embrace mourning also means acknowledging our vulnerability and relinquishing the expectation that we must remain perpetually strong. We have the right to experience pain, anger, and longing, and to allow loss to remain loss, without transforming it into an obligation or an achievement.

We are the dead, perhaps, within an imagination that considers our bodies violable, our names erasable, and our relationships less deserving of recognition. But we are not dead before we die.

Translation note: This article was translated from Arabic into English with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI).

references

1. Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), 11–40.
2. Zengin, A. (2019). The afterlife of gender: Sovereignty, intimacy, and Muslim funerals of transgender people in Turkey. Cultural Anthropology, 34(1), 78–102.
3. Zengin, A. (2015). Sevginin ölüm dünyası: Aile, arkadaşlık ve trans kadın cenazeleri [The death-world of love: Family, friendship, and trans women's funerals]. Kültür ve Siyasette Feminist Yaklaşımlar, (26).
4. Butler, J. (2009). Frames of war: When is life grievable? Verso.
5. Rainbow Railroad. (2025, March 4). TRANScending adversity: Leila's story of courage & community.
6. Megaphone. (2024, May 21). Security forces arrest those responsible for Tala's killing [قوى الأمن تلقي القبض على قَتَلة تالا].
7.Al-Jumhuriya. (2026, September 25). Syria’s Sarah Hegazi. Al-Jumhuriya.