Governing legibility: Recognition, protection, and mental health among LGBTIQ+ asylum seekers in the United Kingdom and Lebanon

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Methods We draw on 120 semi-structured interviews conducted between 2023 and 2025 with LGBTIQ + people seeking asylum (50 in England/Scotland; 70 in Beirut and surrounding areas) to develop a legibility–governance framework with two axes: legal recognition of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) claims and material protection in practice. Results The UK represents a system of recognition without protection, while Lebanon exemplifies partial protection without recognition due to criminalization and outsourced governance to UNHCR. Across these distinct systems, we identify four mechanisms that transform asylum governance into mental health harms: credentialized queerness, visibility penalties, community exposure, and affirmation gaps. Conclusions Mental health challenges are not only generated by violence experienced before leaving one’s country of origin, but by harms produced by asylum governance systems themselves through uncertain waiting, skepticism and isolation. Policy Implications Our analysis underscores the need to reduce evidentiary burdens in SOGI asylum claims, design SOGI-sensitive and safer housing, and expand LGBTIQ+-affirming, culturally competent mental health services within both formal and outsourced asylum systems. LGBTIQ+ asylum mental health legibility–governance sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) United Kingdom Lebanon Introduction Across the world, the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ+) people seeking asylum reveal systemic failures that cut across national borders, even when international human rights frameworks acknowledge sexual orientation and gender identity as valid reasons for asylum (García Rodríguez 2023 ; García Rodríguez and Giametta 2024 ; Diab & Samneh 2024 ; Diab 2024 a; Avgeri 2021 ; Cory 2019 ). The challenges LGBTIQ + claimants face before, during, and after their asylum journey often lead to mental health problems (Nematy et al 2023 ; Gottlieb et al 2020 ; Christinaki et al 2023 ; Istiko et al 2024 ; Nesterko 2025). Despite the value of comparative analyses across countries with different systems to engage with people seeking asylum, to date no study has sought to compare LGBTIQ + mental health experiences among people seeking asylum. To remedy this gap, this article explores how issues such as uncertainty and systemic hostility impact the mental health of LGBTIQ + asylum seekers by examining the interconnections of institutional practices, public attitudes, and legal frameworks in Lebanon and the United Kingdom (UK). In Lebanon, the absence of a national asylum framework and the outsourcing of refugee protection to UNHCR combined with criminalization under Article 534 and widespread social stigma produce legal precarity and concealment among queer people (Janmyr, 2016 ; 2017a ; Saleh, 2020 ; Diab & Samneh 2024 ; Nagle & Fakhoury 2021 ; Allouche 2017 ; Chaer 2023 ). LGBTIQ + asylum seekers are particularly vulnerable to violence, arbitrary imprisonment, and discrimination in the context of political and economic instability, regional conflicts, and outbreaks of violence (Diab 2024 b). In contrast, the UK has a formalized asylum system regulated by domestic as well as international frameworks such as the Refugee Convention (Mayblin 2019 ). British asylum proceedings, however, have widely been debated as an example of structural inefficiencies, subject to an ascending political climate marked by anti-immigration rhetoric (Perez 2023 ; Yeo 2024 ; Wells et al 2024 ). In the UK, LGBTIQ + asylum seekers face convoluted bureaucracy and frequently encounter suspicion from immigration officials who demand that they prove their gender identity or sexual orientation through invasive interrogation and normative Western-centric identity categories (Åberg 2023 ; Gordon-Orr 2021 ; Gray and McDowall 2024 ; Struthers 2020 ). Rather than presenting the UK as a unique case, we utilise it as an example of a sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI)-recognizing formal asylum regime in which legal acknowledgment coexists with bureaucratic restriction and a wider “hostile environment.” Juxtaposing this with Lebanon, where an asylum framework is absent, allows us to theorize how recognition without protection and partial protection without recognition can produce similar harms for LGBTIQ + applicants. In both cases, protection emerges as a relative, instead of absolute, term. Considering this context, we ask several key questions: How do incongruities between legal recognition and material protection generate patterned mental health harms for LGBTIQ + asylum seekers? Through which mechanisms do these harms unfold in distinct architectures, from the British formal SOGI-recognizing system to the Lebanese outsourced legally ambiguous framework? Our analysis extends work on LGBTIQ + asylum that documents patterns of credibility testing, invasive evidentiary demands, and systemic disbelief (Zisakou 2025; Lunau & Schröder 2025; Danisi et al 2021 ; Ferreira 2022; Jansen & Spijkerboer 2011 ; Raj 2017), and puts them in dialogue with mental health experiences. Following scholarship on legibility and governance, we treat legibility as the institutional rendering of people and claims into recognizable and auditable forms for decision-making (Scott 1998 ; Bowker and Star 1999 ; Power 1997 ; Torpey 2000 ; Hull 2012 ; Merry 2011 ). Within asylum systems, legibility means than one’s sexual orientation and/or gender identity must be described, evidenced and shared in a manner that fits bureaucratic expectations, while governance relates to the interconnected assemblages of welfare actors, the state and humanitarian organizations that shape refuge eligibility, mobility, and access to services. We bring these two elements together in what we call a legibility-governance framework to distinguish between two axes. The first one is the legal recognition of SOGI-based asylum claims (considering whether non-normative gender identities and sexual orientations are recognized as grounds for asylum in law). The second one is material protection, through which we reflect on whether or not, and to what extent, LGBTIQ + people seeking asylum are supported to live safely and receive support such as housing, income or healthcare services in practice. When we consider these two axes together, we can then map the different configurations of harm and care for queer people seeking asylum. In this matrix, the UK represents a system of recognition without protection where sexual and gender minorities can, in principle, claim asylum on SOGI grounds, but current challenges including a decision-making culture of skepticism and anti-immigration and anti-gender discourses restrict their actual protection. In Lebanon, by contrast, we find forms of partial protection without recognition since refugee governance is outsourced to UNHCR within a criminalizing legal environment, and existing protection is discretionary and uneven. Across both sites, we argue that mismatches between legibility and protection generate what we term debilitating governance, where slow and cumulative harms emerge from disbelief, waiting, and containment rather than from direct violence alone. The four mechanisms that we identify in the findings (credentialized queerness, visibility penalties, community exposure, and affirmation gaps) turn this theoretical framework into concrete outputs by explaining how legibility and protection are negotiated in everyday encounters and how these negotiations shape the mental health of LGBTIQ + people seeking asylum. The four mechanisms that we have identified explain how and why LGBTIQ + claimants experience mental distress differently from other asylum seekers, even when certain macro stressors (poverty, waiting) are shared. Analytically, we treat waiting, disbelief and containment as debilitating governance based on slow harms that generate everyday exhaustion (Berlant 2007 , 2011 ; Auyero 2012 ) extending and specifying critical accounts of conditional care (Fassin 2011 ; Ticktin 2011 ) and debility (Puar 2017 ) to the domain of queer asylum, and building on literature that reflects on waiting, disbelief, and containment as techniques of migration governance (Good 2007 ; Mountz 2011 ; Griffiths 2015 ; Rotter 2016 ; Peutz and De Genova 2010 ). Throughout the subsequent sections, our article makes three key contributions. First, we introduce a legibility-governance framework to interrogate the interaction of recognition and protection in SOGI-based asylum claims. Second, we present the first comparative study that explicitly focuses on LGBTIQ + asylum seekers’ mental health across Lebanon and the UK. Third, we introduce four clear mechanisms that identify how asylum systems produce cumulative mental health harms. Mental health, legal barriers and socio-political hostility As scholars based in Lebanon and the UK, we decided to implement a comparative analysis to juxtapose the experiences of LGBTIQ + people seeking asylum within these two settings. Our collaboration on queer asylum-related activities led us to identify both similarities and differences between the contexts we work within. These insights led us to pursue this comparative analysis to not just reveal the specificities of each context, but to also explore transnational patterns of marginalization and mental health challenges. As Chatty notes, “comparative studies can draw out the features and qualities which transcend borders, local cultures and the humanitarian aid regime” to identify commonalities between different contexts (2007, p. 265). Dumke et al explain how a comparative approach “can help to identify distinct and common barriers faced by different patient populations and guide the development of targeted interventions” (2024, p. 10). Aligned with such academic debates, our comparative approach allows for a better understanding of overlapping experiences of exclusion and psychological distress for LGBTIQ + people seeking refuge by exploring an informal system in Lebanon, heavily reliant on international agencies, and the formalized, but increasingly exclusionary, British system. In this article, we use the term “mental health” to refer to clinical diagnoses (e.g., depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder), but also to describe our interlocutors’ own idioms of distress. As scholars, we are not assigning diagnoses to them but instead draw on how the LGBTIQ + people seeking asylum we spoke with described their own experiences, from using terms like “panic attacks” to “not being able to sleep” or having “suicidal thoughts”. Our approach is aligned with cultural-psychiatric work that emphasizes explanatory models and the social production of suffering (Kirmayer 2011 ; Kleinman et al. 1978 ). Following Berlant’s account of slow, attritional harms (2007; 2011) and Puar’s analytics of debility (2017), we read waiting, disbelief, and constrained mobility as governing techniques that organize everyday exhaustion. We use LGBTIQ + as an umbrella for legal and policy discussions and queer as an analytical lens and, when referring to our interlocutors, we use their self-descriptors. Asylum seekers often survive violent persecution, war, and human rights violations prior to displacement, which can result in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety (Fox et al 2020 ; Istiko et al 2024 ; Hopkinson et al 2017 ; Held 2022 ). The process of displacement can disrupt one’s sense of stability and individuals are often exposed to further trauma through detention, exploitation, and legal uncertainty. After arrival in host countries, many experience socio-economic vulnerabilities, insecure migration statuses, and prolonged waiting times that lead to chronic stress and social isolation. LGBTIQ + people seeking asylum encounter additional vulnerabilities and are subject to discrimination both pre- and post-displacement (Diab & Samneh 2024 ; Alessi 2016 ). Many flee state-sponsored persecution, family rejection, and violence and abuse in their countries of origin (CoOs) tied to their sexual orientation or gender identity. This can take the form of corrective rape, conversion therapy, or honor-based violence (Alessi et al 2016 ). In exile, they often experience continued marginalization, exclusion and violence, especially in asylum housing such as hotel accommodation and refugee camps, where homophobic and transphobic acts are common (Human Rights Watch 2023 ; Alessi et al 2019). These unwelcoming conditions exacerbate anxiety and mental distress, especially since these individuals often do not have support networks. Legal barriers also exacerbate mental health issues. Many asylum systems require claimants to provide evidence of their non-normative sexual orientation or gender identity, an often-criticized practice that can be invasive, retraumatizing, and based on Western-centric, normative and stereotypical assumptions (Jansen and Spijkerboer 2011 ; Murray 2014 ; Danisi et al 2021 ). If individuals fail to convince authorities, they are at risk of deportation to their CoOs, where they can face renewed violence or even death (Millbank & Berg 2009 ; Lewis 2014 ; Shuman & Bohmer 2014 ). These legal challenges produce persistent periods of uncertainty, which is often associated with increases in mental health problems. LGBTIQ + people seeking asylum in Lebanon remain hidden due to a combination of political instability, social stigma, and legal precarity, which lead many to suffer from chronic anxiety, depression, and fear of being exposed (Diab & Samneh 2024 ; Diab 2024 a; Nagle & Fakhoury 2021 ; Allouche 2017 ; Chaer 2023 ). In the UK, psychological distress is worsened by bureaucratic barriers, lengthy processing timeframes, and the ongoing fear of deportation, which reinforces trauma patterns that occurred prior to, during, and following forced migration (Pollard & Howard 2021 ). Despite the widespread mental health distress in this population, access to appropriate trauma-informed and culturally sensitive mental health treatment remains limited (Diab et al 2024 ). Many LGBTIQ + claimants may not reveal their sexual orientation or gender identity in healthcare contexts due to both social and self-stigma, creating further isolation from support services. Our analysis of mental health experiences is influenced by critiques of humanitarian reason (Fassin 2011 ) and humanitarian governance that unintentionally reproduce hierarchies of deservingness (Ticktin 2011 ). This body of scholarship helps to explain participants’ experiences of conditional care, triage logics, and the performance of eligibility demanded by credibility assessments. When exploring mental health challenges among LGBTIQ + individuals from the Global South, we also seek to situate our analysis within work that questions the portability of SOGI/LGBTQI categories across borders (especially considering how normative categories are used to evaluate “authenticity” in asylum claims). Rather than assuming stable identity labels, we pay attention to situated practices of gender and sexuality and to the risks of reifying Western-derived taxonomies (Nasser-Eddin, Abu-Assab, & Greatrick, 2018 ). This orientation informed our comparative design since we decided to analyze Lebanon and the UK not to classify identities but to map how different regulatory architectures organize harm, care and recognition across different borders, as we explain in the next section. Methods This article results from two studies for which we conducted 120 semi-structured interviews across two sites: England/Scotland (n = 50) and Beirut and surrounding areas (n = 70). In England, data used in this article was collected between June 2023 and July 2025, while in Lebanon it was between September 2023 and February 2024. Ethical approval was granted by [anonymized boards]. In the two contexts, data collection was intentionally rooted in a trauma-informed and participatory framework (Diab and Al-Azzeh 2024 , Diab and Alpes 2024 , Diab 2025 ). Understanding the vulnerabilities faced by LGBTIQ + individuals seeking asylum due to the experience of trauma prior to their forced migration, abuse in-transit, and marginalization after arriving in the host countries, the interviews were designed to prioritize the preference of participants on how they represented their agency and voices. Trauma-informed practices were operationalized through a range of strategies, from participant-chosen interview locations to staged consent, options to pause and/or skip questions; post-interview debriefs with local referral lists; and follow-up check-ins after our meetings where consented. Participants self-identified within the LGBTIQ + spectra and varied by age, nationality, sexual orientation, gender identity and asylum status since some had submitted their asylum claim, some had a pending appeal, and some were already recognized as refugees. Participants were recruited via NGOs and service providers and initial contacts were followed by snowball sampling. A limitation to note here is that our purposive sample privileges those linked to NGOs and may under-represent individuals avoiding services entirely. Participation was voluntary with written and verbal informed consent. Interviews averaged 90 minutes, and saturation was assessed via thematic redundancy. We took additional precautions in Lebanon to avoid known surveillance locations and referrals to psychosocial support were provided as needed. Participatory elements included the co-design of topic guides with individuals with lived experience and feedback sessions where preliminary themes were discussed. We used reflexive thematic analysis with an abductive approach. First, we independently open coded a sample of interviews (balanced by site) to build a shared codebook with structural codes (including, for example, LGBTIQ+-specific mechanisms; mental health impacts; support services, etc.) We then applied the codebook to the full data, holding debriefs to refine code definitions. We built cross-case matrices to test our legibility-governance model and conducted disconfirming-case analysis (e.g., participants reporting resilience despite high evidentiary pressure). Throughout this process, the data analysis software NVivo was used to support data analysis. Our positions as queer individuals with migrant experiences (despite not having sought asylum), who are Spanish, French, Arabic and English-speaking researchers based in Lebanon and the UK shaped access, rapport and analysis. We mitigated power asymmetries through community partnerships, transparent boundaries, and constant feedback processes. All identifying information was anonymized and data was subjected to encryption and secure storage. Lastly, our study followed standards for qualitative research reporting such as SRQR (Standards for Reporting Qualitative Research) and COREQ (Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research). Results Four LGBTIQ + mechanisms of debilitating governance In what comes next, we organize our findings based on our identification of four mechanisms impacting the mental health of LGBTIQ + people seeking asylum rather than by country to reveal emerging differences and similarities within each theme. Across the subsections below, we interweave the British and Lebanese cases to show how these mechanisms operate in very different architectures while producing similar mental health harms for LGBTIQ + claimants. In the UK, our interlocutors navigated the legal recognition of their SOGI claims amid constrained protection. At the start of this research, the former Conservative government rhetoric and policy measures were reported by participants as creating a climate of hostility. After Keir Starmer’s tenure as Prime Minister began on 5 July 2024, marking the transition to a Labour government, many reported a continued sense of being directly targeted by anti-asylum discourses. These narratives were seen to maintain stigma against refugees and asylum seekers and were combined with increasing transphobic debates legitimized by governmental and public discourses. In Lebanon, as noted above, asylum is based on an outsourced type of governance without legal recognition in a criminalizing context. The experience of LGBTIQ + asylum seekers in Lebanon is shaped by a convergence of legal invisibility, state negligence, and societal hostility. Unlike countries with national asylum systems, Lebanon operates without any formal domestic asylum framework. Refugee status determination (RSD) is outsourced to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which functions as a surrogate for state obligations with limited authority, capacity, and transparency (Janmyr 2017a ). For LGBTIQ + people seeking asylum, this lack of a structured protection system is exacerbated by the absence of national legal protections for sexual and gender minorities. Article 534 of the Lebanese Penal Code, often used to selectively prosecute “sexual relations that contradict the laws of nature,” remains a threat (Zgheib 2023). While there have been progressive court rulings in recent years that interpreted the article narrowly or declined to prosecute, enforcement remains discretionary and can depend heavily on the personal biases of judges, police officers, and community leaders (Anabtawi 2022 ). In this context, LGBTIQ + asylum seekers live in constant fear of being outed, arrested, or assaulted while simultaneously lacking access to any consistent protection. Guided by our legibility-governance framework, the sections below organize our findings around four LGBTIQ+-specific mechanisms that translate asylum governance into mental health harms: credentialized queerness, visibility penalties, community exposure, and affirmation gaps. These mechanisms often take place simultaneously. For example, evidentiary demands worsen visibility risks while communal exposure amplifies avoidance, and delays in affirming care intensify mental health crises. Mechanism 1: Credentialized queerness When we write about regimes of recognition without protection, we speak about the formation of a notion of legibility around LGBTIQ + people seeking asylum as a process that takes shape through institutionalized evidentiary burdens (from relationship timelines to intimate questioning) built around the expectation of disclosure and identity performance. On the other hand, partial protection without recognition regimes can lead us to witnessing how legibility falters into credibility voids, where participants are uncertain whether SOGI risk “counts,” and such an experience can generate anticipatory stress. Across both models, these dynamics correlate with anxiety and retraumatization because narratives of harm must be repeatedly rehearsed or withheld. Considering this context, we use the notion of credentialized queerness to refer to the governance practices that demand that sexual orientation and gender identity be rendered legible through recognizable narratives and evidence materials. In the UK, participants described adjudicatory practices of disbelief and evidentiary demands that encouraged disclosure as well as the performance of a Western model of identity under conditions of precarity. Although formal recognition exists in the UK, material protection is often limited by the requirement to “prove” one’s SOGI identity in ways that can be different from claimants’ lived trajectories, especially where their pre-asylum life in their CoOs required hiding these identities. The emotional labor of rehearsing, repeating and aligning their stories with expected templates led to intrusive thoughts, flashbacks and anxiety. Participants connected this to a broader sense that current political hostility legitimized disbelief and reduced any possibilities for care as the examples below show: The British government is campaigning against refugees, and their transphobia and homophobia are coming out. Like Victorians, they’re bringing back their history. (Ayesha, South Asian transgender woman, 35, UK) I don’t know what my future is going to be, so I guess being queer and an asylum seeker is really tough to survive in the UK because the government is not supporting you, they are against us. You’re just hanging because the government doesn’t help you. (Angelina, African lesbian woman, 27, UK) In Lebanon, credentialization took the form of a credibility void through which uncertainty about whether SOGI-related risk would “count” within humanitarian triage produced anticipatory narrative work. This took place with a range of different actors and at various geographies, from intake desks to clinics, checkpoints, and with landlords. Rather than acting as a formal test, legibility took place in a discretionary and opaque manner. Participants described adjusting disclosure of their SOGI depending on the institutions they interacted with to avoid being either “too queer for safety” or “not queer enough for help.” This anticipation and the practices of self-editing generated chronic anxiety for some, as a participant illustrates below: It doesn’t matter what the law says on paper. If someone accuses you of being gay, they can take you in. I had a neighbor who went to the police after seeing me hug a friend outside. The police came to my place at night. They searched my phone. They asked if I was HIV positive. They didn’t charge me, but I had to leave the neighborhood. Everyone knew. I moved three times in two years. Every time I start feeling safe, something happens again. (Omar, Middle Eastern cisgender gay man, 29, Lebanon) Through the lens of legibility-governance, the UK’s formal tests and evaluation of legibility (based on a Western model of gender and sexuality) and Lebanon’s void of legibility represent two different sides of credentialized queerness. These two routes involve constant narrative labor from queer claimants in contexts of risk, leading to mental health harms through anticipation, rehearsal, and their frequent revisiting of intimate histories. Mechanism 2: Visibility penalties Having discussed the notion of credentialized queerness, we now move to explore how legibility is negotiated through asylum claimants’ sexual orientations, gender expressions and documents. In Lebanon, policing practices sometimes result from anti-LGBTIQ + legislation, landlord surveillance and neighborhood scrutiny turn gender nonconformity and ID mismatches into grounds for eviction or harassment for trans people. In the UK, misnaming and misgendering in clinics and placement in accommodation where one’s gender identity is not taken into consideration also formalize administrative misrecognition. Our interlocutors connected their continuous self-monitoring of voice, clothing and movement to experiences of hypervigilance, panic symptoms and social withdrawal due to the fear of violence from others in society. In this section, we use the term visibility penalties to describe “punishments” that are triggered by claimants’ perceived queerness, gender expression, or documentation that does not match their self-identification in everyday experiences. In Lebanon, criminalization and discretionary enforcement mean that visibility can attract direct penalties through policing, landlord action and clinic practices. Participants described practices of hypervigilance about their voices, the way they dressed, and their own movement across geographies as survival strategies that ultimately diminished their self-worth and intensified mental health problems, as the examples below show: I can’t be who I am. I have to dress like a man to get into certain places or to even be left alone in the street. Once I wore eyeliner, just eyeliner, and my landlord told me to leave the apartment because the neighbors were uncomfortable. I’ve lived in seven places in two years. My ID still says male, and that’s all anyone cares about. When I go to hospitals or clinics, they call out my legal name and people laugh. I cry in the bathrooms and wipe my face before going back outside. It’s like I’m in between worlds, too visible to be safe, too erased to be helped. (Nour, Middle Eastern transgender woman, 30, Lebanon) I don’t think people understand what it means to never be able to exist fully, not even for a second. I can’t wear what I want. I can’t talk like myself. I fake my voice when I go out. I feel like I’m lying all the time. But if I stop lying, I might die. You know what honor killings are? So, I smile, and I lie, and I hate myself. I haven’t looked in a mirror in weeks. I keep having panic attacks. (Layal, Middle Eastern non-binary participant, 25, Lebanon) In the UK, visibility penalties are widespread in administrative and service spaces. For example, the practice of misnaming and misgendering in clinics and the provision of accommodation placements that did not consider the gender identities of asylum seekers transformed spaces that are supposed to be for protection into constant sources of discrimination and fear. Our interlocutors explained that these everyday experiences had led to social withdrawal, anxiety, depression, insomnia, and hopelessness. As we have discussed before, formal recognition exists in the UK on the grounds of SOGI, but our interlocutors’ experiences show that protection is weakened when service infrastructures misrecognize identity. For example, one of them explained her experience of constant anxiety by sharing one of many examples of transphobia in asylum accommodation: The transphobia was continuously happening [in the asylum hotel]. One day, I was playing guitar with my lesbian friend, and an Iranian guy, he was an asylum seeker, came to us, he said he could play an instrument. “Can I jam with you guys?” My friend said, “OK, yeah you can come.” (…) Then, he texted me and said, “Why isn’t your friend replying to me?” And I said, “I don’t know why she’s not texting you.” And he said, “Tell me, is your friend a lesbian?” I said, “Why are you asking such personal things about my friend? If you have any questions, you can ask her directly.” When he discovered that my friend was a lesbian, he became homophobic against us. And one day, he attacked me. He tried to burn my hand. He tried to cut my hair. He tried to sexually abuse me, and he said he was gonna kill me. My friend rescued me. We called the police, and he was arrested. (Ayesha, South Asian transgender woman, 35, UK) If we explore these examples through the legibility-governance framework, both Lebanon and the UK see one’s SOGI as sufficiently legible to be policed but insufficiently protected to be safe. In Lebanon, penalties are often direct through police action or landlord eviction. This is different in the UK, since they tend to be administrative and environmental due to misrecognition or placement in dangerous spaces, but the mental health consequences are very similar. Mechanism 3: Community exposure Complementing credentialized queerness and visibility penalties, social geographies such as shared asylum housing and refugee camps also create spaces where both intra-diasporic and staff homo/transphobia can impact everyday safety. These exposures are structurally distinct from broad stressors that other people seeking asylum also experience because they are triggered by SOGI legibility and proximity to individuals who share the same nationality or religion, or who, independently of this, exhibit homo/transphobic behaviors. Knowing that others living in their same asylum accommodation could be openly discriminatory and violent due to their SOGI led many of our interlocutors experiencing constant anxiety and worry. In fact, many of them associated these dynamics with sleep disturbance, depressive symptoms, dissociation, and strategic isolation by staying in their rooms all day and avoiding communal spaces. Community exposure refers to homo- and transphobic risks embedded in communal living arrangements that are integral to asylum governance such as reception hotels, shared houses, camps, shelters, and precarious rentals. Because housing and dispersal are central to protection, exposure is not incidental but infrastructural. Across both sites, participants developed tactics to avoid shared spaces (e.g., remaining in rooms, timing kitchen use) and linked nocturnal vigilance to sleep disturbance and daytime exhaustion. In the UK, our interlocutors reported experiences of humiliation and mockery, homo/transphobic slurs, scrutiny, and threats in shared accommodation. All of them explained that their placement decisions had ignored their gender identity or sexuality-related risk, which for most had amplified exposure to violence. While many considered that they “would be free to be LGBTIQ+” after arriving in the UK, this promise of “freedom” contrasted with their lived enclosure: I’m not saying that I’m not free to be a lesbian here, but the feelings inside myself are getting lower because I’m not able to do anything. (Arianne, lesbian cisgender African woman, 24, UK) The asylum process is very depressing. It’s depressing to feel useless, to not be able to work, to not be able to have a decent life, a normal life. (...) We’re all equal, we’re all humans, we’re all people, and we all feel. But that category of the migrant is inferior to everything, just because it says asylum on the card is very dehumanizing. It’s sad not being able to do things, it’s sad to be looking at a window in your room. (Silvia, Latin American transgender woman, 34, UK) The accounts above point to a combination of emotional exhaustion and structural barriers exacerbating pre-existing mental health challenges. Arianne’s reference to feeling “worse” in the UK than in her CoO leads us to reflect about how the UK, imagined as a space of safety pre-arrival, often falls short of expectations in practice. Aligned with Fassin’s ( 2011 ) notion of “humanitarian reason”, care is granted conditionally and hierarchically, often exacerbating, rather than reducing, marginalization. As Fassin states, “humanitarian reason governs precarious lives: the lives of the unemployed and the asylum seekers, the lives of sick immigrants and people with AIDS, the lives of disaster victims and victims of conflict— threatened and forgotten lives that humanitarian government brings into existence by protecting and revealing them” (2011, p. 4). In Lebanon, common examples of community exposure that led to new or worsened mental health challenges among our interlocutors included, among others, landlords’ discriminatory practices resulting from neighborhood pressures and networks of individuals who shared the same ethnicity or country of origin of LGBTIQ + claimants. Due to a lack of protection from the Lebanese state towards gender and sexual minorities, queer people seeking asylum often experience a feeling of dual exclusion. This emerges from, firstly, the wider society due to xenophobic attitudes to claimants’ nationality and refugee status and, secondly, from spaces shared with individuals of their same CoO or ethnicity due to their non-normative sexuality and/or gender. Participants described these incidents in relation to mental health challenges such as dissociation (through processes including, for example, numbing and depersonalization), depression, and avoidance behaviors (e.g., avoiding people, places they considered unsafe, and sometimes most social contact). For example, one of them explained: I tried to report the abuse from my family. The police told me to ‘go home and be a good daughter.’ I left home, stayed on couches, then in shelters. Now, I live with friends who don’t know I’m gay. Every day, I lie to survive. There’s no place for someone like me here. I’m not a refugee, I’m not welcome, I’m not safe. I’m just invisible. If I were Lebanese, then maybe things would be different for me. I’m a double negative, though. (Amal, Middle Eastern cisgender lesbian woman, 28, Lebanon) In some cases, members of staff and case workers intervened to support LGBTIQ + individuals who faced discrimination and violence, which led to mood improvements especially when relocated to accommodation shared with other LGBTIQ + people or where they did not have to share a room or apartment with others. However, where staff minimized incidents accusing individuals of exaggerating or making up their experiences or portrayed their experiences of violences and discrimination as “disagreements” with other residents, their distress intensified. It is in this context where the framework of governance–legibility contributes to elucidating how this third mechanism works since shared accommodation is always delivered without attending to the claimants’ sexual orientations and gender identities, which leads supposedly “safe” infrastructures to become sites of harm. Mechanism 4: Affirmation gaps The final mechanism we discuss has to do with how, even when mental health services are available, there is a lack or delay in the provision of truly affirming, trauma-informed and culturally competent care. In the British context, long waiting times and limited trans-affirming services left participants stuck in uncertain liminalities between their urgent needs and eligibility criteria. In Lebanon, difficulties to navigate referral systems and limited provider competence in LGBTIQ + needs generated parallel deferrals of care. Many of our interlocutors described abandoning help-seeking or self-medicating, which in practice increased for some their crisis thresholds and raised their suicidality risk. Affirmation gaps are visible in delays in mental health service access, scarcity of services and bureaucratic difficulties to access culturally competent and LGBTIQ+-affirming mental healthcare. In the UK, mental health was impacted by a hostile environment, long waiting times and non-affirming encounters with medical professionals: I’m telling you, you know, sometimes you just wake up and see some news, “The UK has done this”. And that just throws you into another layer. Like, you don’t even know... It takes a strong mind because sometimes I just tell myself, “pray, be calm”. (Rene, gay cisgender African man, 35, Nigeria) This process affects you so much mentally, but we struggle to get the mental health support we need, just waiting forever. (Anthony, gay cisgender African man, 26, UK) I applied for mental health support when I first came to England last year, and after a year, I’m still in the queue. There’s no support for that. They say there’s support if you call the emergency number, but I’m like, I’m not gonna call emergency to come pick me up for a suicide thought, you know, but it’s better to have that mental health support. (Sohail, Middle Eastern transgender man, 27, UK) In Lebanon, LGBTIQ + people seeking asylum face complex UNHCR or partner referrals, service providers with low awareness of SOGIESC-specific needs and unreliable follow-ups. Some community-based organizations provide important (often life-saving) support, but these spaces can be unstable and unequally accessible depending on the claimant’s location (for example, services are easier to access if they are in urban areas like Beirut instead of in remote or rural locations). The excerpts below illustrate some of the experiences shared by our interlocutors: UNHCR told me they would refer me to a psychologist because I was having suicidal thoughts. Two months passed, and no one called. I followed up, and they said I was on a waiting list of one of their local partners, whatever that means. I started self-medicating with sleeping pills. I still haven’t seen anyone. If it weren’t for [the LGBTIQ + NGO] MOSAIC, I don’t know if I’d be alive. (Nour, Middle Eastern transgender woman, 30, Lebanon) I went to an NGO that helps refugees, and when I told the caseworker that I was gay, she said, “Don’t tell anyone else this, it will make things harder for you.” She looked uncomfortable, like I was a problem she didn’t know how to deal with. I walked out and never came back. I thought they were supposed to help us. But now I feel more alone than before. (Khaled, African cisgender gay man, 32, Lebanon) For the first time in years, I entered a room and didn’t feel like I had to shrink myself. They let me talk, cry, and scream. They didn’t ask me to prove anything. They didn’t look at me like I was dirty or crazy. I go there just to breathe sometimes. It’s not just a center, it’s like a sanctuary. But it shouldn’t be the only one. We need more of this. We’re not safe anywhere else. (Yasmine, Middle Eastern cisgender lesbian woman, 27, Lebanon) When analyzed from the perspective of the legibility-governance binary, it is possible to identify affirmation gaps across the two settings, which, while occurring due to different reasons, generate similar outcomes for LGBTIQ + people seeking asylum. In the UK, recognition without proactive, continuous and affirming protection leads to the bureaucratically generated worsening of the claimants’ mental health. Despite the existence of services and protection rights, their delayed provision and enactment can often feel indistinguishable from denial. In Lebanon, the provision of protection through humanitarian institutions without the official recognition of specific needs resulting from one’s gender identity and sexual orientation makes care discretionary and contingent. The mental health outcomes in the two contexts are convergent: worsening depressive symptoms, panic, and, for some, suicidal thoughts. Discussion The intersecting identities of our interlocutors in the UK and Lebanon shaped the consequences and the intensity to which each of the mechanisms explored above were experienced by them. Among others, nationality, race, ethnicity, social class, educational background, language proficiency, disability, health status, gender identity, and sexual orientation, intensified their exposure to discrimination and violence, simultaneously impacting their potential to access services. For example, trans women described more violence and discrimination in accommodation, as well as challenges when navigating documentation processes and health settings than cisgender interlocutors. Across the four mechanisms identified in this article, we have revealed how the legibility-governance framework turns recognition and protection incongruences into a form of debilitating governance in which slow harms are shaped by disbelief, skepticism, disguise, and containment. Despite the differences between the British and Lebanese systemic structures when engaging with people seeking asylum, the mental health impacts are often homologous. Considering our findings, our interlocutors’ voices must be considered seriously if we seek to advance a comparative sociology of genders and sexualities under divergent asylum systems, which we have sought to achieve by exploring how legibility-governance frameworks organize and shape LGBTIQ + mental health. Our two-axis matrix has brought together legal recognition and material protection to illustrate how and why the British model of recognition without protection and the Lebanese system of partial protection without recognition generate similar challenges. Why does LGBTIQ + specificity matter in this context? Several stressors here (inactivity, waiting lists) affect all asylum seekers, but our data show distinctive LGBTIQ + specific experiences and needs due to the existence of evidentiary burdens that require a performative disclosure of stereotypical non-normative gender and sexual expression and intimacy, visibility penalties, community exposure, and affirmation gaps. These mechanisms intensify self-isolation and rumination beyond what participants attributed to “waiting alone”. In Lebanon, where asylum infrastructure is dysfunctional, legal invisibility and state inaction shape the experiences of LGBTIQ + individuals navigating displacement. As we have seen, lengthy waiting periods, disbelief, and containment act as debility-producing conditions (Puar, 2017 ), revealing a process of slow wearing down of everyday life (Berlant, 2011 ) rather than episodic crises alone. In the Lebanese context, fear of surveillance and arrest, and legal ambiguity, led many of our interlocutors to hide and try to pass as heterosexual or cisgender, while societal intolerance and state indifference add to their isolation. This erasure is replicated in the UK in different ways since legal protections for sexual orientation and gender identity grounds for asylum do exist, but they are systematically impacted by normative credibility assessment, intrusive questioning, and demands to perform queerness based on Western LGBTIQ + identities. Asylum seekers are subjected to skepticism, pushed to recreate traumatic events to “authenticate” themselves to decision-makers. In this way, while in Lebanon most challenges result from the absence of state intervention and the criminalization of LGBTIQ + individuals and the British “hostile environment” occurs in a context of systemic skepticism, both systems serve to delegitimate the experiences of LGBTIQ + individuals. When it comes to the mental health impact of navigating forced migration, these gaps leave LGBTIQ + individuals to navigate fragmented and often non-affirming mental health services. As noted, even though in the British system we witness a formal, bureaucracy-rich system, and in Lebanon we find an informal, UNHCR-dependent one, these differences do not necessarily result in diverging outcomes for those who move through them. Rather, in each state, the asylum process is defined in terms of uncertainty and precarity expressed in ways experienced by LGBTIQ + individuals as alienating and ultimately constitutive of further marginalizing systems rather than protection. Table 1 below summarizes how legibility (legal recognition of SOGI-based claims) and governance (material protection in practice) intersect across both sites. Table 1 Legibility–governance framework across sites. Site Legibility (legal recognition of SOGI claims) Governance (material protection in practice) Dominant mechanisms UK Legal SOGI recognition Constrained by disbelief, normative credibility assessment and hostile environment Credentialized queerness; visibility penalties in services; community exposure in accommodation; affirmation gaps Lebanon No legal SOGI recognition Outsourced to UNHCR and discretionary Visibility penalties (policing, housing, clinics); community exposure; credibility voids; affirmation gaps One of the strongest similarities found between the two countries is the mental health impact of extended uncertainty and lack of mental health support. Our interlocutors in both Lebanon and the UK experienced symptoms of depression, anxiety, and PTSD, further triggered by decision delays, not being allowed to work, housing instability, fear of discrimination, violence or deportation and the actual experience of harassment and violence from others. In the UK, an inability to work and gain access to mental health services in a culturally sensitive and timely manner leave many living in limbo or existing in “just waiting” mode. In Lebanon, hypervigilance and isolation were engendered by fear of targeted violence, exposure, and arrest. Although formal mental health services exist, in some cases, they become unavailable to LGBTIQ + asylum seekers because of extended waiting lists, lack of cultural understanding, and untargeted support. In Lebanon, psychosocial support is largely in the hands of overstretched NGOs, and public health services remain highly stigmatizing for queer communities. Institutional and civil society responses in each country demonstrate the potential and the limits of community-based support. In Lebanon, civil society organizations such as MOSAIC, Helem, and AFE provide critical services (e.g., gender-affirming care, legal aid, psychosocial services) in an environment of criminalization and abandonment but are limited by funding cycles and capacity. In the UK, larger in scale and better formally resourced, many mainstream healthcare and asylum support services do not engage in meaningful ways with LGBTIQ + specific needs, tending to perpetuate heteronormative conceptualizations. When services are affirming, trauma-informed, and participatory, they can have positive effects on mental health and resilience (Alessi et al 2023 ; Levenson et al 2023 ). Based on our research, however, in Lebanon and the UK this type of services is the exception rather than the norm. Another area of alignment between the two sites is discourse’s role in constructing daily lived experiences of asylum. In Lebanon, religious conservatism in combination with political turmoil and militarized policing of borders generates an atmosphere in which queerness is read as foreign, deviant, or immoral. In the UK, anti-immigration discourse fused with growing anti-gender (i.e. transphobic) discourses within mainstream politics and media serve to portray LGBTIQ + asylum seekers as hazards to national identity and public order. In each context, queer asylum seekers must maneuver exclusionary institutions and society’s norms in which they are seen as suspicious by nature, less deserving, or contaminating. This comparison demonstrates that legal regimes alone do not ensure protection. Having asylum law in place in the UK does not prevent LGBTIQ + individuals from experiencing systematic disbelief, racialized gatekeeping, and mental health issues. Conversely, not having asylum law in place in Lebanon does not completely bar the possibility of care and provision, as seen by the work of community-based actors. What becomes clear from this pairing is an extended critique of how asylum regimes, whether formal or informal, can become technologies of control. To conclude our discussion, a key aspect we would like to raise is that our comparative analysis is not intended to rank levels of suffering between one and the other context, but instead it is seeking to interrogate the place of LGBTIQ + asylum seekers within international patterns of exclusion. We can see how the two states are engaged in regimes of queer un-belonging through criminalization, inaction, or surveillance, creating uncertainty that extends beyond legality into daily life for LGBTIQ + individuals. Policy implications Our findings above show the need to align legal recognition with material protection to protect the mental health and ensure the everyday safety of LGBTIQ + people seeking asylum. As explored, architectures of recognition without protection in the UK, and partial protection without recognition in Lebanon, both generate cumulative harms through credentialized queerness, visibility penalties, community exposure, and affirmation gaps. Therefore, we argue for the urgent need to introduce effective policy interventions to address gaps in asylum law as well as in administrative, housing, and mental health infrastructures through which protection is (or is not) delivered, ensuring that LGBTIQ+-specific needs are explicitly integrated into asylum governance. This should include: Tackling credentialized queerness by reducing evidentiary burdens, avoiding stereotyped credibility assessments and introducing trauma-informed asylum interviews. Addressing visibility penalties and community exposure by ensuring housing allocation takes account of SOGI-related risk and needs, avoids placing LGBTIQ + claimants in unsafe communal accommodation, and responds to homo/transphobic incidents proactively. Closing affirmation gaps by investing in long-term, LGBTIQ+-affirming and culturally competent mental health services accessible regardless of legal status, reducing long waiting times and reliance on underfunded NGOs. Using the legibility–governance matrix as an assessment tool in both formal and outsourced asylum systems to identify mismatches between recognition and protection and to monitor their mental health impacts. Conclusion In this article, we have asked how inconsistencies between legal recognition and material protection generate mental health challenges for LGBTIQ + asylum seekers and what the mechanisms are through which these harms unfold in Lebanon and the UK. To answer these questions, we have argued that a key factor impacting the mental health of LGBTIQ + asylum seekers is how institutions make these individuals and their claims legible (and whether that legibility is matched by real protection) independently of whether or not a country “has asylum law”. To critically engage with this scenario, we have introduced what we call a legibility-governance framework, which can be used to evaluate systems based on two different axes. The first axis has to do with the legal recognition of SOGI-based claims to assess whether this is present or absent. The second relates to material protection to ascertain whether it is robust or constrained. To operationalize this matrix, we have compared the Lebanese and British contexts. We have demonstrated how non-normative sexual orientations and gender identities can be recognized as valid grounds for protection while still being impacted by skepticism, evidentiary burdens and unsafe infrastructures, and, conversely, how limited protection can be offered in the absence of legal recognition under criminalizing conditions. Across both settings, these discrepancies lead to the emergence of cumulative mental health problems for LGBTIQ + asylum seekers. To conclude, we also want to emphasize the implications for practice of our legibility-governance framework. Firstly, reducing credentialized queerness requires lowering evidentiary burdens and abandoning stereotyped (often Western-centric) credibility assessments to instead implement trauma-informed interviewing techniques. Secondly, to tackle visibility penalties and community exposure, it would be required to provide accommodation that recognizes the gender identity and sexuality-related risk rather than solely treating accommodation as a neutral space. Lastly, to address current affirmation gaps we require prolonged investment in LGBTIQ+-affirming and, importantly, culturally competent mental health provision that is accessible regardless of legal status, to avoid having to rely on underfunded NGOs or emergency responses. It is through some of these shifts that we could move away from suspicion and control towards protection and care. Declarations Funding This work was supported by the [Anonymised] under Grant [anonymised]. Competing interests The authors have no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article. Ethics approval All procedures involving human participants were conducted in accordance with the ethical standards of the relevant institutional research committees and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Ethical approval for this study was granted by [anonymized] in the United Kingdom and Lebanon. Consent to participate Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. Availability of data and material Due to participant confidentiality and safety considerations, the interview data generated and analysed during the current study are not publicly available. Authors’ contributions Both authors contributed equally to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by both, and they read and approved the final manuscript. References Åberg, K. (2023). A requirement of shame: On the evolution of the protection of LGB refugees. 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Also discoverable on Platform About Our Team In Review Editorial Policies Advisory Board Help Center Resources Author Services Accessibility API Access RSS feed Manage Cookie Preferences © Research Square 2026 | ISSN 2693-5015 (online) Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information {"props":{"pageProps":{"initialData":{"identity":"rs-8115427","acceptedTermsAndConditions":true,"allowDirectSubmit":true,"archivedVersions":[],"articleType":"Research Article","associatedPublications":[],"authors":[{"id":558329934,"identity":"c3731063-2f4d-40a0-8437-94e523f8b5ee","order_by":0,"name":"Diego Garcia Rodriguez","email":"data:image/png;base64,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","orcid":"","institution":"University of Nottingham","correspondingAuthor":true,"prefix":"","firstName":"Diego","middleName":"Garcia","lastName":"Rodriguez","suffix":""},{"id":558329935,"identity":"b0481220-5e08-420a-b667-b493e170b335","order_by":1,"name":"Jasmin Lilian Diab","email":"","orcid":"","institution":"Lebanese American University","correspondingAuthor":false,"prefix":"","firstName":"Jasmin","middleName":"Lilian","lastName":"Diab","suffix":""}],"badges":[],"createdAt":"2025-11-14 13:23:10","currentVersionCode":1,"declarations":"","doi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-8115427/v1","doiUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-8115427/v1","draftVersion":[],"editorialEvents":[{"content":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-026-01338-1","type":"published","date":"2026-04-18T15:58:40+00:00"}],"editorialNote":"","failedWorkflow":false,"files":[{"id":97966932,"identity":"876b56d1-7f39-41b7-b254-5a349e6ea781","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2025-12-11 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10:00:59","extension":"html","order_by":4,"title":"","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"acdc-reference","size":155192,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"","description":"","filename":"earlyproof.html","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-8115427/v1/23b495e83993e1ab718fb2d1.html"},{"id":107350892,"identity":"c36a0a00-69f2-48ed-8450-b677f0be3cfb","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2026-04-20 16:06:31","extension":"pdf","order_by":0,"title":"","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"manuscript-pdf","size":398098,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"","description":"","filename":"manuscript.pdf","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-8115427/v1/0d7fd348-dd0c-489d-a333-98e45058062e.pdf"}],"financialInterests":"No competing interests reported.","formattedTitle":"Governing legibility: Recognition, protection, and mental health among LGBTIQ+ asylum seekers in the United Kingdom and Lebanon","fulltext":[{"header":"Introduction","content":"\u003cp\u003eAcross the world, the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ+) people seeking asylum reveal systemic failures that cut across national borders, even when international human rights frameworks acknowledge sexual orientation and gender identity as valid reasons for asylum (Garc\u0026iacute;a Rodr\u0026iacute;guez \u003cspan citationid=\"CR29\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e; Garc\u0026iacute;a Rodr\u0026iacute;guez and Giametta \u003cspan citationid=\"CR30\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e; Diab \u0026amp; Samneh \u003cspan citationid=\"CR23\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e; Diab \u003cspan citationid=\"CR21\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003ea; Avgeri \u003cspan citationid=\"CR8\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2021\u003c/span\u003e; Cory \u003cspan citationid=\"CR16\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2019\u003c/span\u003e). The challenges LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;claimants face before, during, and after their asylum journey often lead to mental health problems (Nematy et al \u003cspan citationid=\"CR61\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e; Gottlieb et al \u003cspan citationid=\"CR35\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e; Christinaki et al \u003cspan citationid=\"CR15\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e; Istiko et al \u003cspan citationid=\"CR42\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e; Nesterko 2025). Despite the value of comparative analyses across countries with different systems to engage with people seeking asylum, to date no study has sought to compare LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;mental health experiences among people seeking asylum. To remedy this gap, this article explores how issues such as uncertainty and systemic hostility impact the mental health of LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;asylum seekers by examining the interconnections of institutional practices, public attitudes, and legal frameworks in Lebanon and the United Kingdom (UK). In Lebanon, the absence of a national asylum framework and the outsourcing of refugee protection to UNHCR combined with criminalization under Article 534 and widespread social stigma produce legal precarity and concealment among queer people (Janmyr, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR43\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e; \u003cspan citationid=\"CR44\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2017a\u003c/span\u003e; Saleh, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR69\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e; Diab \u0026amp; Samneh \u003cspan citationid=\"CR23\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e; Nagle \u0026amp; Fakhoury \u003cspan citationid=\"CR59\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2021\u003c/span\u003e; Allouche \u003cspan citationid=\"CR5\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2017\u003c/span\u003e; Chaer \u003cspan citationid=\"CR12\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e). LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;asylum seekers are particularly vulnerable to violence, arbitrary imprisonment, and discrimination in the context of political and economic instability, regional conflicts, and outbreaks of violence (Diab \u003cspan citationid=\"CR21\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003eb). In contrast, the UK has a formalized asylum system regulated by domestic as well as international frameworks such as the Refugee Convention (Mayblin \u003cspan citationid=\"CR52\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2019\u003c/span\u003e). British asylum proceedings, however, have widely been debated as an example of structural inefficiencies, subject to an ascending political climate marked by anti-immigration rhetoric (Perez \u003cspan citationid=\"CR63\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e; Yeo \u003cspan citationid=\"CR76\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e; Wells et al \u003cspan citationid=\"CR75\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e). In the UK, LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;asylum seekers face convoluted bureaucracy and frequently encounter suspicion from immigration officials who demand that they prove their gender identity or sexual orientation through invasive interrogation and normative Western-centric identity categories (\u0026Aring;berg \u003cspan citationid=\"CR1\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e; Gordon-Orr \u003cspan citationid=\"CR34\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2021\u003c/span\u003e; Gray and McDowall \u003cspan citationid=\"CR36\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e; Struthers \u003cspan citationid=\"CR72\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e). Rather than presenting the UK as a unique case, we utilise it as an example of a sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI)-recognizing formal asylum regime in which legal acknowledgment coexists with bureaucratic restriction and a wider \u0026ldquo;hostile environment.\u0026rdquo; Juxtaposing this with Lebanon, where an asylum framework is absent, allows us to theorize how recognition without protection and partial protection without recognition can produce similar harms for LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;applicants. In both cases, protection emerges as a relative, instead of absolute, term.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eConsidering this context, we ask several key questions: How do incongruities between legal recognition and material protection generate patterned mental health harms for LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;asylum seekers? Through which mechanisms do these harms unfold in distinct architectures, from the British formal SOGI-recognizing system to the Lebanese outsourced legally ambiguous framework? Our analysis extends work on LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;asylum that documents patterns of credibility testing, invasive evidentiary demands, and systemic disbelief (Zisakou 2025; Lunau \u0026amp; Schr\u0026ouml;der 2025; Danisi et al \u003cspan citationid=\"CR17\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2021\u003c/span\u003e; Ferreira 2022; Jansen \u0026amp; Spijkerboer \u003cspan citationid=\"CR46\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2011\u003c/span\u003e; Raj 2017), and puts them in dialogue with mental health experiences. Following scholarship on legibility and governance, we treat legibility as the institutional rendering of people and claims into recognizable and auditable forms for decision-making (Scott \u003cspan citationid=\"CR70\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1998\u003c/span\u003e; Bowker and Star \u003cspan citationid=\"CR11\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1999\u003c/span\u003e; Power \u003cspan citationid=\"CR66\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1997\u003c/span\u003e; Torpey \u003cspan citationid=\"CR74\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2000\u003c/span\u003e; Hull \u003cspan citationid=\"CR40\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2012\u003c/span\u003e; Merry \u003cspan citationid=\"CR53\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2011\u003c/span\u003e). Within asylum systems, legibility means than one\u0026rsquo;s sexual orientation and/or gender identity must be described, evidenced and shared in a manner that fits bureaucratic expectations, while governance relates to the interconnected assemblages of welfare actors, the state and humanitarian organizations that shape refuge eligibility, mobility, and access to services. We bring these two elements together in what we call a legibility-governance framework to distinguish between two axes. The first one is the legal recognition of SOGI-based asylum claims (considering whether non-normative gender identities and sexual orientations are recognized as grounds for asylum in law). The second one is material protection, through which we reflect on whether or not, and to what extent, LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;people seeking asylum are supported to live safely and receive support such as housing, income or healthcare services in practice. When we consider these two axes together, we can then map the different configurations of harm and care for queer people seeking asylum. In this matrix, the UK represents a system of recognition without protection where sexual and gender minorities can, in principle, claim asylum on SOGI grounds, but current challenges including a decision-making culture of skepticism and anti-immigration and anti-gender discourses restrict their actual protection. In Lebanon, by contrast, we find forms of partial protection without recognition since refugee governance is outsourced to UNHCR within a criminalizing legal environment, and existing protection is discretionary and uneven. Across both sites, we argue that mismatches between legibility and protection generate what we term debilitating governance, where slow and cumulative harms emerge from disbelief, waiting, and containment rather than from direct violence alone. The four mechanisms that we identify in the findings (credentialized queerness, visibility penalties, community exposure, and affirmation gaps) turn this theoretical framework into concrete outputs by explaining how legibility and protection are negotiated in everyday encounters and how these negotiations shape the mental health of LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;people seeking asylum. The four mechanisms that we have identified explain how and why LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;claimants experience mental distress differently from other asylum seekers, even when certain macro stressors (poverty, waiting) are shared. Analytically, we treat waiting, disbelief and containment as debilitating governance based on slow harms that generate everyday exhaustion (Berlant \u003cspan citationid=\"CR10\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2007\u003c/span\u003e, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR9\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2011\u003c/span\u003e; Auyero \u003cspan citationid=\"CR7\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2012\u003c/span\u003e) extending and specifying critical accounts of conditional care (Fassin \u003cspan citationid=\"CR27\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2011\u003c/span\u003e; Ticktin \u003cspan citationid=\"CR73\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2011\u003c/span\u003e) and debility (Puar \u003cspan citationid=\"CR67\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2017\u003c/span\u003e) to the domain of queer asylum, and building on literature that reflects on waiting, disbelief, and containment as techniques of migration governance (Good \u003cspan citationid=\"CR32\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2007\u003c/span\u003e; Mountz \u003cspan citationid=\"CR56\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2011\u003c/span\u003e; Griffiths \u003cspan citationid=\"CR37\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2015\u003c/span\u003e; Rotter \u003cspan citationid=\"CR68\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e; Peutz and De Genova \u003cspan citationid=\"CR64\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2010\u003c/span\u003e). Throughout the subsequent sections, our article makes three key contributions. First, we introduce a legibility-governance framework to interrogate the interaction of recognition and protection in SOGI-based asylum claims. Second, we present the first comparative study that explicitly focuses on LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;asylum seekers\u0026rsquo; mental health across Lebanon and the UK. Third, we introduce four clear mechanisms that identify how asylum systems produce cumulative mental health harms.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eMental health, legal barriers and socio-political hostility\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs scholars based in Lebanon and the UK, we decided to implement a comparative analysis to juxtapose the experiences of LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;people seeking asylum within these two settings. Our collaboration on queer asylum-related activities led us to identify both similarities and differences between the contexts we work within. These insights led us to pursue this comparative analysis to not just reveal the specificities of each context, but to also explore transnational patterns of marginalization and mental health challenges. As Chatty notes, \u0026ldquo;comparative studies can draw out the features and qualities which transcend borders, local cultures and the humanitarian aid regime\u0026rdquo; to identify commonalities between different contexts (2007, p. 265). Dumke et al explain how a comparative approach \u0026ldquo;can help to identify distinct and common barriers faced by different patient populations and guide the development of targeted interventions\u0026rdquo; (2024, p. 10). Aligned with such academic debates, our comparative approach allows for a better understanding of overlapping experiences of exclusion and psychological distress for LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;people seeking refuge by exploring an informal system in Lebanon, heavily reliant on international agencies, and the formalized, but increasingly exclusionary, British system. In this article, we use the term \u0026ldquo;mental health\u0026rdquo; to refer to clinical diagnoses (e.g., depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder), but also to describe our interlocutors\u0026rsquo; own idioms of distress. As scholars, we are not assigning diagnoses to them but instead draw on how the LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;people seeking asylum we spoke with described their own experiences, from using terms like \u0026ldquo;panic attacks\u0026rdquo; to \u0026ldquo;not being able to sleep\u0026rdquo; or having \u0026ldquo;suicidal thoughts\u0026rdquo;. Our approach is aligned with cultural-psychiatric work that emphasizes explanatory models and the social production of suffering (Kirmayer \u003cspan citationid=\"CR47\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2011\u003c/span\u003e; Kleinman et al. \u003cspan citationid=\"CR48\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1978\u003c/span\u003e). Following Berlant\u0026rsquo;s account of slow, attritional harms (2007; 2011) and Puar\u0026rsquo;s analytics of debility (2017), we read waiting, disbelief, and constrained mobility as governing techniques that organize everyday exhaustion. We use LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;as an umbrella for legal and policy discussions and queer as an analytical lens and, when referring to our interlocutors, we use their self-descriptors.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAsylum seekers often survive violent persecution, war, and human rights violations prior to displacement, which can result in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety (Fox et al \u003cspan citationid=\"CR28\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e; Istiko et al \u003cspan citationid=\"CR42\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e; Hopkinson et al \u003cspan citationid=\"CR39\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2017\u003c/span\u003e; Held \u003cspan citationid=\"CR38\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e). The process of displacement can disrupt one\u0026rsquo;s sense of stability and individuals are often exposed to further trauma through detention, exploitation, and legal uncertainty. After arrival in host countries, many experience socio-economic vulnerabilities, insecure migration statuses, and prolonged waiting times that lead to chronic stress and social isolation. LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;people seeking asylum encounter additional vulnerabilities and are subject to discrimination both pre- and post-displacement (Diab \u0026amp; Samneh \u003cspan citationid=\"CR23\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e; Alessi \u003cspan citationid=\"CR2\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e). Many flee state-sponsored persecution, family rejection, and violence and abuse in their countries of origin (CoOs) tied to their sexual orientation or gender identity. This can take the form of corrective rape, conversion therapy, or honor-based violence (Alessi et al \u003cspan citationid=\"CR3\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e). In exile, they often experience continued marginalization, exclusion and violence, especially in asylum housing such as hotel accommodation and refugee camps, where homophobic and transphobic acts are common (Human Rights Watch \u003cspan citationid=\"CR41\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e; Alessi et al 2019). These unwelcoming conditions exacerbate anxiety and mental distress, especially since these individuals often do not have support networks. Legal barriers also exacerbate mental health issues. Many asylum systems require claimants to provide evidence of their non-normative sexual orientation or gender identity, an often-criticized practice that can be invasive, retraumatizing, and based on Western-centric, normative and stereotypical assumptions (Jansen and Spijkerboer \u003cspan citationid=\"CR46\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2011\u003c/span\u003e; Murray \u003cspan citationid=\"CR58\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2014\u003c/span\u003e; Danisi et al \u003cspan citationid=\"CR17\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2021\u003c/span\u003e). If individuals fail to convince authorities, they are at risk of deportation to their CoOs, where they can face renewed violence or even death (Millbank \u0026amp; Berg \u003cspan citationid=\"CR54\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2009\u003c/span\u003e; Lewis \u003cspan citationid=\"CR51\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2014\u003c/span\u003e; Shuman \u0026amp; Bohmer \u003cspan citationid=\"CR71\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2014\u003c/span\u003e). These legal challenges produce persistent periods of uncertainty, which is often associated with increases in mental health problems.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;people seeking asylum in Lebanon remain hidden due to a combination of political instability, social stigma, and legal precarity, which lead many to suffer from chronic anxiety, depression, and fear of being exposed (Diab \u0026amp; Samneh \u003cspan citationid=\"CR23\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e; Diab \u003cspan citationid=\"CR21\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003ea; Nagle \u0026amp; Fakhoury \u003cspan citationid=\"CR59\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2021\u003c/span\u003e; Allouche \u003cspan citationid=\"CR5\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2017\u003c/span\u003e; Chaer \u003cspan citationid=\"CR12\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e). In the UK, psychological distress is worsened by bureaucratic barriers, lengthy processing timeframes, and the ongoing fear of deportation, which reinforces trauma patterns that occurred prior to, during, and following forced migration (Pollard \u0026amp; Howard \u003cspan citationid=\"CR65\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2021\u003c/span\u003e). Despite the widespread mental health distress in this population, access to appropriate trauma-informed and culturally sensitive mental health treatment remains limited (Diab et al \u003cspan citationid=\"CR25\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e). Many LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;claimants may not reveal their sexual orientation or gender identity in healthcare contexts due to both social and self-stigma, creating further isolation from support services. Our analysis of mental health experiences is influenced by critiques of humanitarian reason (Fassin \u003cspan citationid=\"CR27\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2011\u003c/span\u003e) and humanitarian governance that unintentionally reproduce hierarchies of deservingness (Ticktin \u003cspan citationid=\"CR73\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2011\u003c/span\u003e). This body of scholarship helps to explain participants\u0026rsquo; experiences of conditional care, triage logics, and the performance of eligibility demanded by credibility assessments. When exploring mental health challenges among LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;individuals from the Global South, we also seek to situate our analysis within work that questions the portability of SOGI/LGBTQI categories across borders (especially considering how normative categories are used to evaluate \u0026ldquo;authenticity\u0026rdquo; in asylum claims). Rather than assuming stable identity labels, we pay attention to situated practices of gender and sexuality and to the risks of reifying Western-derived taxonomies (Nasser-Eddin, Abu-Assab, \u0026amp; Greatrick, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR60\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2018\u003c/span\u003e). This orientation informed our comparative design since we decided to analyze Lebanon and the UK not to classify identities but to map how different regulatory architectures organize harm, care and recognition across different borders, as we explain in the next section.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Methods","content":"\u003cdiv id=\"Sec3\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis article results from two studies for which we conducted 120 semi-structured interviews across two sites: England/Scotland (n\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;50) and Beirut and surrounding areas (n\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;70). In England, data used in this article was collected between June 2023 and July 2025, while in Lebanon it was between September 2023 and February 2024. Ethical approval was granted by [anonymized boards]. In the two contexts, data collection was intentionally rooted in a trauma-informed and participatory framework (Diab and Al-Azzeh \u003cspan citationid=\"CR21\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e, Diab and Alpes \u003cspan citationid=\"CR22\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e, Diab \u003cspan citationid=\"CR20\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2025\u003c/span\u003e). Understanding the vulnerabilities faced by LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;individuals seeking asylum due to the experience of trauma prior to their forced migration, abuse in-transit, and marginalization after arriving in the host countries, the interviews were designed to prioritize the preference of participants on how they represented their agency and voices. Trauma-informed practices were operationalized through a range of strategies, from participant-chosen interview locations to staged consent, options to pause and/or skip questions; post-interview debriefs with local referral lists; and follow-up check-ins after our meetings where consented. Participants self-identified within the LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;spectra and varied by age, nationality, sexual orientation, gender identity and asylum status since some had submitted their asylum claim, some had a pending appeal, and some were already recognized as refugees. Participants were recruited via NGOs and service providers and initial contacts were followed by snowball sampling. A limitation to note here is that our purposive sample privileges those linked to NGOs and may under-represent individuals avoiding services entirely. Participation was voluntary with written and verbal informed consent. Interviews averaged 90 minutes, and saturation was assessed via thematic redundancy. We took additional precautions in Lebanon to avoid known surveillance locations and referrals to psychosocial support were provided as needed.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eParticipatory elements included the co-design of topic guides with individuals with lived experience and feedback sessions where preliminary themes were discussed. We used reflexive thematic analysis with an abductive approach. First, we independently open coded a sample of interviews (balanced by site) to build a shared codebook with structural codes (including, for example, LGBTIQ+-specific mechanisms; mental health impacts; support services, etc.) We then applied the codebook to the full data, holding debriefs to refine code definitions. We built cross-case matrices to test our legibility-governance model and conducted disconfirming-case analysis (e.g., participants reporting resilience despite high evidentiary pressure). Throughout this process, the data analysis software NVivo was used to support data analysis. Our positions as queer individuals with migrant experiences (despite not having sought asylum), who are Spanish, French, Arabic and English-speaking researchers based in Lebanon and the UK shaped access, rapport and analysis. We mitigated power asymmetries through community partnerships, transparent boundaries, and constant feedback processes. All identifying information was anonymized and data was subjected to encryption and secure storage. Lastly, our study followed standards for qualitative research reporting such as SRQR (Standards for Reporting Qualitative Research) and COREQ (Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research).\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e"},{"header":"Results","content":"\u003cdiv id=\"Sec5\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e\u003ch2\u003eFour LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;mechanisms of debilitating governance\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn what comes next, we organize our findings based on our identification of four mechanisms impacting the mental health of LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;people seeking asylum rather than by country to reveal emerging differences and similarities within each theme. Across the subsections below, we interweave the British and Lebanese cases to show how these mechanisms operate in very different architectures while producing similar mental health harms for LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;claimants.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the UK, our interlocutors navigated the legal recognition of their SOGI claims amid constrained protection. At the start of this research, the former Conservative government rhetoric and policy measures were reported by participants as creating a climate of hostility. After Keir Starmer\u0026rsquo;s tenure as Prime Minister began on 5 July 2024, marking the transition to a Labour government, many reported a continued sense of being directly targeted by anti-asylum discourses. These narratives were seen to maintain stigma against refugees and asylum seekers and were combined with increasing transphobic debates legitimized by governmental and public discourses. In Lebanon, as noted above, asylum is based on an outsourced type of governance without legal recognition in a criminalizing context. The experience of LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;asylum seekers in Lebanon is shaped by a convergence of legal invisibility, state negligence, and societal hostility. Unlike countries with national asylum systems, Lebanon operates without any formal domestic asylum framework. Refugee status determination (RSD) is outsourced to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which functions as a surrogate for state obligations with limited authority, capacity, and transparency (Janmyr \u003cspan citationid=\"CR44\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2017a\u003c/span\u003e). For LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;people seeking asylum, this lack of a structured protection system is exacerbated by the absence of national legal protections for sexual and gender minorities. Article 534 of the Lebanese Penal Code, often used to selectively prosecute \u0026ldquo;sexual relations that contradict the laws of nature,\u0026rdquo; remains a threat (Zgheib 2023). While there have been progressive court rulings in recent years that interpreted the article narrowly or declined to prosecute, enforcement remains discretionary and can depend heavily on the personal biases of judges, police officers, and community leaders (Anabtawi \u003cspan citationid=\"CR6\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e). In this context, LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;asylum seekers live in constant fear of being outed, arrested, or assaulted while simultaneously lacking access to any consistent protection.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGuided by our legibility-governance framework, the sections below organize our findings around four LGBTIQ+-specific mechanisms that translate asylum governance into mental health harms: credentialized queerness, visibility penalties, community exposure, and affirmation gaps. These mechanisms often take place simultaneously. For example, evidentiary demands worsen visibility risks while communal exposure amplifies avoidance, and delays in affirming care intensify mental health crises.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eMechanism 1: Credentialized queerness\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen we write about regimes of recognition without protection, we speak about the formation of a notion of legibility around LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;people seeking asylum as a process that takes shape through institutionalized evidentiary burdens (from relationship timelines to intimate questioning) built around the expectation of disclosure and identity performance. On the other hand, partial protection without recognition regimes can lead us to witnessing how legibility falters into credibility voids, where participants are uncertain whether SOGI risk \u0026ldquo;counts,\u0026rdquo; and such an experience can generate anticipatory stress. Across both models, these dynamics correlate with anxiety and retraumatization because narratives of harm must be repeatedly rehearsed or withheld. Considering this context, we use the notion of credentialized queerness to refer to the governance practices that demand that sexual orientation and gender identity be rendered legible through recognizable narratives and evidence materials. In the UK, participants described adjudicatory practices of disbelief and evidentiary demands that encouraged disclosure as well as the performance of a Western model of identity under conditions of precarity. Although formal recognition exists in the UK, material protection is often limited by the requirement to \u0026ldquo;prove\u0026rdquo; one\u0026rsquo;s SOGI identity in ways that can be different from claimants\u0026rsquo; lived trajectories, especially where their pre-asylum life in their CoOs required hiding these identities. The emotional labor of rehearsing, repeating and aligning their stories with expected templates led to intrusive thoughts, flashbacks and anxiety. Participants connected this to a broader sense that current political hostility legitimized disbelief and reduced any possibilities for care as the examples below show:\u003cdiv class=\"BlockQuote\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe British government is campaigning against refugees, and their transphobia and homophobia are coming out. Like Victorians, they\u0026rsquo;re bringing back their history. (Ayesha, South Asian transgender woman, 35, UK)\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI don\u0026rsquo;t know what my future is going to be, so I guess being queer and an asylum seeker is really tough to survive in the UK because the government is not supporting you, they are against us. You\u0026rsquo;re just hanging because the government doesn\u0026rsquo;t help you. (Angelina, African lesbian woman, 27, UK)\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn Lebanon, credentialization took the form of a credibility void through which uncertainty about whether SOGI-related risk would \u0026ldquo;count\u0026rdquo; within humanitarian triage produced anticipatory narrative work. This took place with a range of different actors and at various geographies, from intake desks to clinics, checkpoints, and with landlords. Rather than acting as a formal test, legibility took place in a discretionary and opaque manner. Participants described adjusting disclosure of their SOGI depending on the institutions they interacted with to avoid being either \u0026ldquo;too queer for safety\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;not queer enough for help.\u0026rdquo; This anticipation and the practices of self-editing generated chronic anxiety for some, as a participant illustrates below:\u003cdiv class=\"BlockQuote\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter what the law says on paper. If someone accuses you of being gay, they can take you in. I had a neighbor who went to the police after seeing me hug a friend outside. The police came to my place at night. They searched my phone. They asked if I was HIV positive. They didn\u0026rsquo;t charge me, but I had to leave the neighborhood. Everyone knew. I moved three times in two years. Every time I start feeling safe, something happens again. (Omar, Middle Eastern cisgender gay man, 29, Lebanon)\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThrough the lens of legibility-governance, the UK\u0026rsquo;s formal tests and evaluation of legibility (based on a Western model of gender and sexuality) and Lebanon\u0026rsquo;s void of legibility represent two different sides of credentialized queerness. These two routes involve constant narrative labor from queer claimants in contexts of risk, leading to mental health harms through anticipation, rehearsal, and their frequent revisiting of intimate histories.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eMechanism 2: Visibility penalties\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHaving discussed the notion of credentialized queerness, we now move to explore how legibility is negotiated through asylum claimants\u0026rsquo; sexual orientations, gender expressions and documents. In Lebanon, policing practices sometimes result from anti-LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;legislation, landlord surveillance and neighborhood scrutiny turn gender nonconformity and ID mismatches into grounds for eviction or harassment for trans people. In the UK, misnaming and misgendering in clinics and placement in accommodation where one\u0026rsquo;s gender identity is not taken into consideration also formalize administrative misrecognition. Our interlocutors connected their continuous self-monitoring of voice, clothing and movement to experiences of hypervigilance, panic symptoms and social withdrawal due to the fear of violence from others in society. In this section, we use the term visibility penalties to describe \u0026ldquo;punishments\u0026rdquo; that are triggered by claimants\u0026rsquo; perceived queerness, gender expression, or documentation that does not match their self-identification in everyday experiences. In Lebanon, criminalization and discretionary enforcement mean that visibility can attract direct penalties through policing, landlord action and clinic practices. Participants described practices of hypervigilance about their voices, the way they dressed, and their own movement across geographies as survival strategies that ultimately diminished their self-worth and intensified mental health problems, as the examples below show:\u003cdiv class=\"BlockQuote\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eI can\u0026rsquo;t be who I am. I have to dress like a man to get into certain places or to even be left alone in the street. Once I wore eyeliner, just eyeliner, and my landlord told me to leave the apartment because the neighbors were uncomfortable. I\u0026rsquo;ve lived in seven places in two years. My ID still says male, and that\u0026rsquo;s all anyone cares about. When I go to hospitals or clinics, they call out my legal name and people laugh. I cry in the bathrooms and wipe my face before going back outside. It\u0026rsquo;s like I\u0026rsquo;m in between worlds, too visible to be safe, too erased to be helped. (Nour, Middle Eastern transgender woman, 30, Lebanon)\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI don\u0026rsquo;t think people understand what it means to never be able to exist fully, not even for a second. I can\u0026rsquo;t wear what I want. I can\u0026rsquo;t talk like myself. I fake my voice when I go out. I feel like I\u0026rsquo;m lying all the time. But if I stop lying, I might die. You know what honor killings are? So, I smile, and I lie, and I hate myself. I haven\u0026rsquo;t looked in a mirror in weeks. I keep having panic attacks. (Layal, Middle Eastern non-binary participant, 25, Lebanon)\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the UK, visibility penalties are widespread in administrative and service spaces. For example, the practice of misnaming and misgendering in clinics and the provision of accommodation placements that did not consider the gender identities of asylum seekers transformed spaces that are supposed to be for protection into constant sources of discrimination and fear. Our interlocutors explained that these everyday experiences had led to social withdrawal, anxiety, depression, insomnia, and hopelessness. As we have discussed before, formal recognition exists in the UK on the grounds of SOGI, but our interlocutors\u0026rsquo; experiences show that protection is weakened when service infrastructures misrecognize identity. For example, one of them explained her experience of constant anxiety by sharing one of many examples of transphobia in asylum accommodation:\u003cdiv class=\"BlockQuote\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe transphobia was continuously happening [in the asylum hotel]. One day, I was playing guitar with my lesbian friend, and an Iranian guy, he was an asylum seeker, came to us, he said he could play an instrument. \u0026ldquo;Can I jam with you guys?\u0026rdquo; My friend said, \u0026ldquo;OK, yeah you can come.\u0026rdquo; (\u0026hellip;) Then, he texted me and said, \u0026ldquo;Why isn\u0026rsquo;t your friend replying to me?\u0026rdquo; And I said, \u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t know why she\u0026rsquo;s not texting you.\u0026rdquo; And he said, \u0026ldquo;Tell me, is your friend a lesbian?\u0026rdquo; I said, \u0026ldquo;Why are you asking such personal things about my friend? If you have any questions, you can ask her directly.\u0026rdquo; When he discovered that my friend was a lesbian, he became homophobic against us. And one day, he attacked me. He tried to burn my hand. He tried to cut my hair. He tried to sexually abuse me, and he said he was gonna kill me. My friend rescued me. We called the police, and he was arrested. (Ayesha, South Asian transgender woman, 35, UK)\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIf we explore these examples through the legibility-governance framework, both Lebanon and the UK see one\u0026rsquo;s SOGI as sufficiently legible to be policed but insufficiently protected to be safe. In Lebanon, penalties are often direct through police action or landlord eviction. This is different in the UK, since they tend to be administrative and environmental due to misrecognition or placement in dangerous spaces, but the mental health consequences are very similar.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cdiv id=\"Sec8\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e\u003ch2\u003eMechanism 3: Community exposure\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eComplementing credentialized queerness and visibility penalties, social geographies such as shared asylum housing and refugee camps also create spaces where both intra-diasporic and staff homo/transphobia can impact everyday safety. These exposures are structurally distinct from broad stressors that other people seeking asylum also experience because they are triggered by SOGI legibility and proximity to individuals who share the same nationality or religion, or who, independently of this, exhibit homo/transphobic behaviors. Knowing that others living in their same asylum accommodation could be openly discriminatory and violent due to their SOGI led many of our interlocutors experiencing constant anxiety and worry. In fact, many of them associated these dynamics with sleep disturbance, depressive symptoms, dissociation, and strategic isolation by staying in their rooms all day and avoiding communal spaces. Community exposure refers to homo- and transphobic risks embedded in communal living arrangements that are integral to asylum governance such as reception hotels, shared houses, camps, shelters, and precarious rentals. Because housing and dispersal are central to protection, exposure is not incidental but infrastructural. Across both sites, participants developed tactics to avoid shared spaces (e.g., remaining in rooms, timing kitchen use) and linked nocturnal vigilance to sleep disturbance and daytime exhaustion.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the UK, our interlocutors reported experiences of humiliation and mockery, homo/transphobic slurs, scrutiny, and threats in shared accommodation. All of them explained that their placement decisions had ignored their gender identity or sexuality-related risk, which for most had amplified exposure to violence. While many considered that they \u0026ldquo;would be free to be LGBTIQ+\u0026rdquo; after arriving in the UK, this promise of \u0026ldquo;freedom\u0026rdquo; contrasted with their lived enclosure:\u003cdiv class=\"BlockQuote\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m not saying that I\u0026rsquo;m not free to be a lesbian here, but the feelings inside myself are getting lower because I\u0026rsquo;m not able to do anything. (Arianne, lesbian cisgender African woman, 24, UK)\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe asylum process is very depressing. It\u0026rsquo;s depressing to feel useless, to not be able to work, to not be able to have a decent life, a normal life. (...) We\u0026rsquo;re all equal, we\u0026rsquo;re all humans, we\u0026rsquo;re all people, and we all feel. But that category of the migrant is inferior to everything, just because it says asylum on the card is very dehumanizing. It\u0026rsquo;s sad not being able to do things, it\u0026rsquo;s sad to be looking at a window in your room. (Silvia, Latin American transgender woman, 34, UK)\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe accounts above point to a combination of emotional exhaustion and structural barriers exacerbating pre-existing mental health challenges. Arianne\u0026rsquo;s reference to feeling \u0026ldquo;worse\u0026rdquo; in the UK than in her CoO leads us to reflect about how the UK, imagined as a space of safety pre-arrival, often falls short of expectations in practice. Aligned with Fassin\u0026rsquo;s (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR27\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2011\u003c/span\u003e) notion of \u0026ldquo;humanitarian reason\u0026rdquo;, care is granted conditionally and hierarchically, often exacerbating, rather than reducing, marginalization. As Fassin states, \u0026ldquo;humanitarian reason governs precarious lives: the lives of the unemployed and the asylum seekers, the lives of sick immigrants and people with AIDS, the lives of disaster victims and victims of conflict\u0026mdash; threatened and forgotten lives that humanitarian government brings into existence by protecting and revealing them\u0026rdquo; (2011, p. 4).\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn Lebanon, common examples of community exposure that led to new or worsened mental health challenges among our interlocutors included, among others, landlords\u0026rsquo; discriminatory practices resulting from neighborhood pressures and networks of individuals who shared the same ethnicity or country of origin of LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;claimants. Due to a lack of protection from the Lebanese state towards gender and sexual minorities, queer people seeking asylum often experience a feeling of dual exclusion. This emerges from, firstly, the wider society due to xenophobic attitudes to claimants\u0026rsquo; nationality and refugee status and, secondly, from spaces shared with individuals of their same CoO or ethnicity due to their non-normative sexuality and/or gender. Participants described these incidents in relation to mental health challenges such as dissociation (through processes including, for example, numbing and depersonalization), depression, and avoidance behaviors (e.g., avoiding people, places they considered unsafe, and sometimes most social contact). For example, one of them explained:\u003cdiv class=\"BlockQuote\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eI tried to report the abuse from my family. The police told me to \u0026lsquo;go home and be a good daughter.\u0026rsquo; I left home, stayed on couches, then in shelters. Now, I live with friends who don\u0026rsquo;t know I\u0026rsquo;m gay. Every day, I lie to survive. There\u0026rsquo;s no place for someone like me here. I\u0026rsquo;m not a refugee, I\u0026rsquo;m not welcome, I\u0026rsquo;m not safe. I\u0026rsquo;m just invisible. If I were Lebanese, then maybe things would be different for me. I\u0026rsquo;m a double negative, though. (Amal, Middle Eastern cisgender lesbian woman, 28, Lebanon)\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn some cases, members of staff and case workers intervened to support LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;individuals who faced discrimination and violence, which led to mood improvements especially when relocated to accommodation shared with other LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;people or where they did not have to share a room or apartment with others. However, where staff minimized incidents accusing individuals of exaggerating or making up their experiences or portrayed their experiences of violences and discrimination as \u0026ldquo;disagreements\u0026rdquo; with other residents, their distress intensified. It is in this context where the framework of governance\u0026ndash;legibility contributes to elucidating how this third mechanism works since shared accommodation is always delivered without attending to the claimants\u0026rsquo; sexual orientations and gender identities, which leads supposedly \u0026ldquo;safe\u0026rdquo; infrastructures to become sites of harm.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eMechanism 4: Affirmation gaps\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe final mechanism we discuss has to do with how, even when mental health services are available, there is a lack or delay in the provision of truly affirming, trauma-informed and culturally competent care. In the British context, long waiting times and limited trans-affirming services left participants stuck in uncertain liminalities between their urgent needs and eligibility criteria. In Lebanon, difficulties to navigate referral systems and limited provider competence in LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;needs generated parallel deferrals of care. Many of our interlocutors described abandoning help-seeking or self-medicating, which in practice increased for some their crisis thresholds and raised their suicidality risk. Affirmation gaps are visible in delays in mental health service access, scarcity of services and bureaucratic difficulties to access culturally competent and LGBTIQ+-affirming mental healthcare. In the UK, mental health was impacted by a hostile environment, long waiting times and non-affirming encounters with medical professionals:\u003cdiv class=\"BlockQuote\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m telling you, you know, sometimes you just wake up and see some news, \u0026ldquo;The UK has done this\u0026rdquo;. And that just throws you into another layer. Like, you don\u0026rsquo;t even know... It takes a strong mind because sometimes I just tell myself, \u0026ldquo;pray, be calm\u0026rdquo;. (Rene, gay cisgender African man, 35, Nigeria)\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis process affects you so much mentally, but we struggle to get the mental health support we need, just waiting forever. (Anthony, gay cisgender African man, 26, UK)\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI applied for mental health support when I first came to England last year, and after a year, I\u0026rsquo;m still in the queue. There\u0026rsquo;s no support for that. They say there\u0026rsquo;s support if you call the emergency number, but I\u0026rsquo;m like, I\u0026rsquo;m not gonna call emergency to come pick me up for a suicide thought, you know, but it\u0026rsquo;s better to have that mental health support. (Sohail, Middle Eastern transgender man, 27, UK)\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn Lebanon, LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;people seeking asylum face complex UNHCR or partner referrals, service providers with low awareness of SOGIESC-specific needs and unreliable follow-ups. Some community-based organizations provide important (often life-saving) support, but these spaces can be unstable and unequally accessible depending on the claimant\u0026rsquo;s location (for example, services are easier to access if they are in urban areas like Beirut instead of in remote or rural locations). The excerpts below illustrate some of the experiences shared by our interlocutors:\u003cdiv class=\"BlockQuote\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eUNHCR told me they would refer me to a psychologist because I was having suicidal thoughts. Two months passed, and no one called. I followed up, and they said I was on a waiting list of one of their local partners, whatever that means. I started self-medicating with sleeping pills. I still haven\u0026rsquo;t seen anyone. If it weren\u0026rsquo;t for [the LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;NGO] MOSAIC, I don\u0026rsquo;t know if I\u0026rsquo;d be alive. (Nour, Middle Eastern transgender woman, 30, Lebanon)\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI went to an NGO that helps refugees, and when I told the caseworker that I was gay, she said, \u0026ldquo;Don\u0026rsquo;t tell anyone else this, it will make things harder for you.\u0026rdquo; She looked uncomfortable, like I was a problem she didn\u0026rsquo;t know how to deal with. I walked out and never came back. I thought they were supposed to help us. But now I feel more alone than before. (Khaled, African cisgender gay man, 32, Lebanon)\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor the first time in years, I entered a room and didn\u0026rsquo;t feel like I had to shrink myself. They let me talk, cry, and scream. They didn\u0026rsquo;t ask me to prove anything. They didn\u0026rsquo;t look at me like I was dirty or crazy. I go there just to breathe sometimes. It\u0026rsquo;s not just a center, it\u0026rsquo;s like a sanctuary. But it shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be the only one. We need more of this. We\u0026rsquo;re not safe anywhere else. (Yasmine, Middle Eastern cisgender lesbian woman, 27, Lebanon)\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhen analyzed from the perspective of the legibility-governance binary, it is possible to identify affirmation gaps across the two settings, which, while occurring due to different reasons, generate similar outcomes for LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;people seeking asylum. In the UK, recognition without proactive, continuous and affirming protection leads to the bureaucratically generated worsening of the claimants\u0026rsquo; mental health. Despite the existence of services and protection rights, their delayed provision and enactment can often feel indistinguishable from denial. In Lebanon, the provision of protection through humanitarian institutions without the official recognition of specific needs resulting from one\u0026rsquo;s gender identity and sexual orientation makes care discretionary and contingent. The mental health outcomes in the two contexts are convergent: worsening depressive symptoms, panic, and, for some, suicidal thoughts.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Discussion","content":"\u003cp\u003eThe intersecting identities of our interlocutors in the UK and Lebanon shaped the consequences and the intensity to which each of the mechanisms explored above were experienced by them. Among others, nationality, race, ethnicity, social class, educational background, language proficiency, disability, health status, gender identity, and sexual orientation, intensified their exposure to discrimination and violence, simultaneously impacting their potential to access services. For example, trans women described more violence and discrimination in accommodation, as well as challenges when navigating documentation processes and health settings than cisgender interlocutors. Across the four mechanisms identified in this article, we have revealed how the legibility-governance framework turns recognition and protection incongruences into a form of debilitating governance in which slow harms are shaped by disbelief, skepticism, disguise, and containment. Despite the differences between the British and Lebanese systemic structures when engaging with people seeking asylum, the mental health impacts are often homologous. Considering our findings, our interlocutors\u0026rsquo; voices must be considered seriously if we seek to advance a comparative sociology of genders and sexualities under divergent asylum systems, which we have sought to achieve by exploring how legibility-governance frameworks organize and shape LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;mental health. Our two-axis matrix has brought together legal recognition and material protection to illustrate how and why the British model of recognition without protection and the Lebanese system of partial protection without recognition generate similar challenges.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhy does LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;specificity matter in this context? Several stressors here (inactivity, waiting lists) affect all asylum seekers, but our data show distinctive LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;specific experiences and needs due to the existence of evidentiary burdens that require a performative disclosure of stereotypical non-normative gender and sexual expression and intimacy, visibility penalties, community exposure, and affirmation gaps. These mechanisms intensify self-isolation and rumination beyond what participants attributed to \u0026ldquo;waiting alone\u0026rdquo;. In Lebanon, where asylum infrastructure is dysfunctional, legal invisibility and state inaction shape the experiences of LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;individuals navigating displacement. As we have seen, lengthy waiting periods, disbelief, and containment act as debility-producing conditions (Puar, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR67\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2017\u003c/span\u003e), revealing a process of slow wearing down of everyday life (Berlant, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR9\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2011\u003c/span\u003e) rather than episodic crises alone. In the Lebanese context, fear of surveillance and arrest, and legal ambiguity, led many of our interlocutors to hide and try to pass as heterosexual or cisgender, while societal intolerance and state indifference add to their isolation. This erasure is replicated in the UK in different ways since legal protections for sexual orientation and gender identity grounds for asylum do exist, but they are systematically impacted by normative credibility assessment, intrusive questioning, and demands to perform queerness based on Western LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;identities. Asylum seekers are subjected to skepticism, pushed to recreate traumatic events to \u0026ldquo;authenticate\u0026rdquo; themselves to decision-makers. In this way, while in Lebanon most challenges result from the absence of state intervention and the criminalization of LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;individuals and the British \u0026ldquo;hostile environment\u0026rdquo; occurs in a context of systemic skepticism, both systems serve to delegitimate the experiences of LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;individuals. When it comes to the mental health impact of navigating forced migration, these gaps leave LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;individuals to navigate fragmented and often non-affirming mental health services. As noted, even though in the British system we witness a formal, bureaucracy-rich system, and in Lebanon we find an informal, UNHCR-dependent one, these differences do not necessarily result in diverging outcomes for those who move through them. Rather, in each state, the asylum process is defined in terms of uncertainty and precarity expressed in ways experienced by LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;individuals as alienating and ultimately constitutive of further marginalizing systems rather than protection. Table\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Tab1\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e1\u003c/span\u003e below summarizes how legibility (legal recognition of SOGI-based claims) and governance (material protection in practice) intersect across both sites.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"gridtable\"\u003e\u003ctable float=\"Yes\" id=\"Tab1\" border=\"1\"\u003e\u003ccaption language=\"En\"\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"CaptionNumber\"\u003eTable 1\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"CaptionContent\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eLegibility\u0026ndash;governance framework across sites.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/caption\u003e\u003ccolgroup cols=\"4\"\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c1\" colnum=\"1\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c2\" colnum=\"2\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c3\" colnum=\"3\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c4\" colnum=\"4\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cthead\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eSite\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eLegibility (legal recognition of SOGI claims)\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eGovernance (material protection in practice)\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eDominant mechanisms\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003c/thead\u003e\u003ctbody\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eUK\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eLegal SOGI recognition\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eConstrained by disbelief, normative credibility assessment and hostile environment\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eCredentialized queerness; visibility penalties in services; community exposure in accommodation; affirmation gaps\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eLebanon\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eNo legal SOGI recognition\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eOutsourced to UNHCR and discretionary\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eVisibility penalties (policing, housing, clinics); community exposure; credibility voids; affirmation gaps\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003c/tbody\u003e\u003c/colgroup\u003e\u003c/table\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOne of the strongest similarities found between the two countries is the mental health impact of extended uncertainty and lack of mental health support. Our interlocutors in both Lebanon and the UK experienced symptoms of depression, anxiety, and PTSD, further triggered by decision delays, not being allowed to work, housing instability, fear of discrimination, violence or deportation and the actual experience of harassment and violence from others. In the UK, an inability to work and gain access to mental health services in a culturally sensitive and timely manner leave many living in limbo or existing in \u0026ldquo;just waiting\u0026rdquo; mode. In Lebanon, hypervigilance and isolation were engendered by fear of targeted violence, exposure, and arrest. Although formal mental health services exist, in some cases, they become unavailable to LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;asylum seekers because of extended waiting lists, lack of cultural understanding, and untargeted support. In Lebanon, psychosocial support is largely in the hands of overstretched NGOs, and public health services remain highly stigmatizing for queer communities. Institutional and civil society responses in each country demonstrate the potential and the limits of community-based support. In Lebanon, civil society organizations such as MOSAIC, Helem, and AFE provide critical services (e.g., gender-affirming care, legal aid, psychosocial services) in an environment of criminalization and abandonment but are limited by funding cycles and capacity. In the UK, larger in scale and better formally resourced, many mainstream healthcare and asylum support services do not engage in meaningful ways with LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;specific needs, tending to perpetuate heteronormative conceptualizations. When services are affirming, trauma-informed, and participatory, they can have positive effects on mental health and resilience (Alessi et al \u003cspan citationid=\"CR4\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e; Levenson et al \u003cspan citationid=\"CR50\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e). Based on our research, however, in Lebanon and the UK this type of services is the exception rather than the norm.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnother area of alignment between the two sites is discourse\u0026rsquo;s role in constructing daily lived experiences of asylum. In Lebanon, religious conservatism in combination with political turmoil and militarized policing of borders generates an atmosphere in which queerness is read as foreign, deviant, or immoral. In the UK, anti-immigration discourse fused with growing anti-gender (i.e. transphobic) discourses within mainstream politics and media serve to portray LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;asylum seekers as hazards to national identity and public order. In each context, queer asylum seekers must maneuver exclusionary institutions and society\u0026rsquo;s norms in which they are seen as suspicious by nature, less deserving, or contaminating. This comparison demonstrates that legal regimes alone do not ensure protection. Having asylum law in place in the UK does not prevent LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;individuals from experiencing systematic disbelief, racialized gatekeeping, and mental health issues. Conversely, not having asylum law in place in Lebanon does not completely bar the possibility of care and provision, as seen by the work of community-based actors. What becomes clear from this pairing is an extended critique of how asylum regimes, whether formal or informal, can become technologies of control. To conclude our discussion, a key aspect we would like to raise is that our comparative analysis is not intended to rank levels of suffering between one and the other context, but instead it is seeking to interrogate the place of LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;asylum seekers within international patterns of exclusion. We can see how the two states are engaged in regimes of queer un-belonging through criminalization, inaction, or surveillance, creating uncertainty that extends beyond legality into daily life for LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;individuals.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cdiv id=\"Sec11\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e\u003ch2\u003ePolicy implications\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eOur findings above show the need to align legal recognition with material protection to protect the mental health and ensure the everyday safety of LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;people seeking asylum. As explored, architectures of recognition without protection in the UK, and partial protection without recognition in Lebanon, both generate cumulative harms through credentialized queerness, visibility penalties, community exposure, and affirmation gaps. Therefore, we argue for the urgent need to introduce effective policy interventions to address gaps in asylum law as well as in administrative, housing, and mental health infrastructures through which protection is (or is not) delivered, ensuring that LGBTIQ+-specific needs are explicitly integrated into asylum governance. This should include:\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003col\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003cp\u003eTackling credentialized queerness by reducing evidentiary burdens, avoiding stereotyped credibility assessments and introducing trauma-informed asylum interviews.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003cp\u003eAddressing visibility penalties and community exposure by ensuring housing allocation takes account of SOGI-related risk and needs, avoids placing LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;claimants in unsafe communal accommodation, and responds to homo/transphobic incidents proactively.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003cp\u003eClosing affirmation gaps by investing in long-term, LGBTIQ+-affirming and culturally competent mental health services accessible regardless of legal status, reducing long waiting times and reliance on underfunded NGOs.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003cp\u003eUsing the legibility\u0026ndash;governance matrix as an assessment tool in both formal and outsourced asylum systems to identify mismatches between recognition and protection and to monitor their mental health impacts.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/ol\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e"},{"header":"Conclusion","content":"\u003cp\u003eIn this article, we have asked how inconsistencies between legal recognition and material protection generate mental health challenges for LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;asylum seekers and what the mechanisms are through which these harms unfold in Lebanon and the UK. To answer these questions, we have argued that a key factor impacting the mental health of LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;asylum seekers is how institutions make these individuals and their claims legible (and whether that legibility is matched by real protection) independently of whether or not a country \u0026ldquo;has asylum law\u0026rdquo;. To critically engage with this scenario, we have introduced what we call a legibility-governance framework, which can be used to evaluate systems based on two different axes. The first axis has to do with the legal recognition of SOGI-based claims to assess whether this is present or absent. The second relates to material protection to ascertain whether it is robust or constrained. To operationalize this matrix, we have compared the Lebanese and British contexts. We have demonstrated how non-normative sexual orientations and gender identities can be recognized as valid grounds for protection while still being impacted by skepticism, evidentiary burdens and unsafe infrastructures, and, conversely, how limited protection can be offered in the absence of legal recognition under criminalizing conditions. Across both settings, these discrepancies lead to the emergence of cumulative mental health problems for LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;asylum seekers. To conclude, we also want to emphasize the implications for practice of our legibility-governance framework. Firstly, reducing credentialized queerness requires lowering evidentiary burdens and abandoning stereotyped (often Western-centric) credibility assessments to instead implement trauma-informed interviewing techniques. Secondly, to tackle visibility penalties and community exposure, it would be required to provide accommodation that recognizes the gender identity and sexuality-related risk rather than solely treating accommodation as a neutral space. Lastly, to address current affirmation gaps we require prolonged investment in LGBTIQ+-affirming and, importantly, culturally competent mental health provision that is accessible regardless of legal status, to avoid having to rely on underfunded NGOs or emergency responses. It is through some of these shifts that we could move away from suspicion and control towards protection and care.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Declarations","content":"\u003cp\u003eFunding\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis work was supported by the [Anonymised] under Grant [anonymised].\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCompeting interests\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe authors have no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEthics approval\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAll procedures involving human participants were conducted in accordance with the ethical standards of the relevant institutional research committees and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Ethical approval for this study was granted by [anonymized] in the United Kingdom and Lebanon.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eConsent to participate\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eInformed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAvailability of data and material\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDue to participant confidentiality and safety considerations, the interview data generated and analysed during the current study are not publicly available.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAuthors\u0026rsquo; contributions\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBoth authors contributed equally to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by both, and they read and approved the final manuscript.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"References","content":"\u003col\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u0026Aring;berg, K. (2023). 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Abolition of Article 534 of the Lebanese Penal Code. \u003cem\u003eSSRN 4311106\u003c/em\u003e.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\u003c/ol\u003e"}],"fulltextSource":"","fullText":"","funders":[],"hasAdminPriorityOnWorkflow":false,"hasManuscriptDocX":true,"hasOptedInToPreprint":true,"hasPassedJournalQc":"","hasAnyPriority":false,"hideJournal":true,"highlight":"","institution":"","isAcceptedByJournal":true,"isAuthorSuppliedPdf":false,"isDeskRejected":"","isHiddenFromSearch":false,"isInQc":false,"isInWorkflow":false,"isPdf":false,"isPdfUpToDate":true,"isWithdrawnOrRetracted":false,"journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"researchsquare","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":true,"externalIdentity":"","sideBox":"","snPcode":"","submissionUrl":"/submission","title":"Research Square","twitterHandle":"researchsquare","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":false,"editorialSystem":"","reportingPortfolio":"","inReviewEnabled":false,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":true},"keywords":"LGBTIQ+, asylum, mental health, legibility–governance, sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI), United Kingdom, Lebanon","lastPublishedDoi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-8115427/v1","lastPublishedDoiUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-8115427/v1","license":{"name":"CC BY 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"},"manuscriptAbstract":"\u003ch2\u003eIntroduction\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis article explores how inconsistencies between legal recognition and material protection impact the mental health of LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;people seeking asylum in the United Kingdom and Lebanon through a comparative analysis.\u003c/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003eMethods\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eWe draw on 120 semi-structured interviews conducted between 2023 and 2025 with LGBTIQ\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;people seeking asylum (50 in England/Scotland; 70 in Beirut and surrounding areas) to develop a legibility\u0026ndash;governance framework with two axes: legal recognition of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) claims and material protection in practice.\u003c/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003eResults\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe UK represents a system of recognition without protection, while Lebanon exemplifies partial protection without recognition due to criminalization and outsourced governance to UNHCR. Across these distinct systems, we identify four mechanisms that transform asylum governance into mental health harms: credentialized queerness, visibility penalties, community exposure, and affirmation gaps.\u003c/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003eConclusions\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eMental health challenges are not only generated by violence experienced before leaving one\u0026rsquo;s country of origin, but by harms produced by asylum governance systems themselves through uncertain waiting, skepticism and isolation.\u003c/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003ePolicy Implications\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eOur analysis underscores the need to reduce evidentiary burdens in SOGI asylum claims, design SOGI-sensitive and safer housing, and expand LGBTIQ+-affirming, culturally competent mental health services within both formal and outsourced asylum systems.\u003c/p\u003e","manuscriptTitle":"Governing legibility: Recognition, protection, and mental health among LGBTIQ+ asylum seekers in the United Kingdom and Lebanon","msid":"","msnumber":"","nonDraftVersions":[{"code":1,"date":"2025-12-11 10:00:55","doi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-8115427/v1","editorialEvents":[{"type":"communityComments","content":0}],"status":"published","journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"researchsquare","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":true,"externalIdentity":"","sideBox":"","snPcode":"","submissionUrl":"/submission","title":"Research Square","twitterHandle":"researchsquare","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":false,"editorialSystem":"","reportingPortfolio":"","inReviewEnabled":false,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":true}}],"origin":"","ownerIdentity":"4c375387-b2de-44e8-a724-f47fa644108e","owner":[],"postedDate":"December 11th, 2025","published":true,"recentEditorialEvents":[],"rejectedJournal":[],"revision":"","amendment":"","status":"posted","subjectAreas":[],"tags":[],"updatedAt":"2026-04-20T16:04:01+00:00","versionOfRecord":{"articleIdentity":"rs-8115427","link":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-026-01338-1","journal":{"identity":"sexuality-research-and-social-policy","isVorOnly":false,"title":"Sexuality Research and Social Policy"},"publishedOn":"2026-04-18 15:58:40","publishedOnDateReadable":"April 18th, 2026"},"versionCreatedAt":"2025-12-11 10:00:55","video":"","vorDoi":"10.1007/s13178-026-01338-1","vorDoiUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-026-01338-1","workflowStages":[]},"version":"v1","identity":"rs-8115427","journalConfig":"researchsquare"},"__N_SSP":true},"page":"/article/[identity]/[[...version]]","query":{"redirect":"/article/rs-8115427","identity":"rs-8115427","version":["v1"]},"buildId":"8U1c8b4HqxoKbykW_rLl7","isFallback":false,"isExperimentalCompile":false,"dynamicIds":[84888],"gssp":true,"scriptLoader":[]}