Yasmine Smallens

After two years together, Ramita and Shilu—both pseudonyms to protect their identities—traveled to Sindhuli this month to register their marriage under Nepal’s June 2023 Supreme Court ruling which allows for same-sex marriages. But instead of recognition, the couple reportedly faced harassment, delays, rejection, and were forcibly separated, with police complicity and family hostility exacerbating their ordeal.

As local officials stalled the registration process, citing uncertainty about legal procedures, Ramita’s family reported her “missing.” Despite Ramita’s insistence that she felt unsafe with her family and wanted to marry Shilu, police handed her over to relatives she described as abusive. According to both women, police mocked their relationship and subjected them to verbal harassment. One officer allegedly made demeaning comments questioning the legitimacy of their relationship.

The 2023 Supreme Court interim order instructed the Nepali government to create a separate register for marriages between people of the same sex as well as third gender people, who have been recognized in principle based on self-identification for over a decade. The intention was to give queer couples interim legal recognition while the court deliberates a pending marriage equality case. But officials have been inconsistent in applying the order.

Since 2023, a handful of same-sex couples have successfully registered their marriages. Additionally, two same-sex couples in which one partner was Nepali and the other a foreigner were able to obtain spousal visas, but both had to take their cases to the Supreme Court.

Ramita and Shilu’s experience also reflects a broader pattern: lesbian women often face pressure, frequently enforced by their families, to conform to “compulsory heterosexuality,” a societal expectation that women should be in relationships with men. Ramita has said she fears being sent to a faith healer. “Even if you die or become disabled, I’ll still make you marry a man,” her sister-in-law reportedly told her. Shilu remains in fear and grief, unable to contact Ramita, whom she described as being held in a “hostage-like condition” since the attempted registration.

Rights advocates have condemned the incident as a grave human rights violation, calling for immediate protections and an investigation into local authorities’ conduct.

Same-sex couples who want to marry in Nepal have the legal right to do so. But the prolonged period under the interim order and lack of accountability for officials’ actions are undermining Nepal’s reputation as a global LGBT rights leader.

Karar Nushi, an Iraqi model well known for his long blond hair and flamboyant clothing, was found dead in Baghdad on July 2, 2017. Nushi was reportedly tortured and stabbed, and his body mutilated. His attackers also cut his hair. Indeed, friends of Nushi believe he was murdered by an armed group because of his long hair.

For lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, who are often pushed to the social margins, hair can be an especially significant form of self-expression. Styling can signal group affiliation, or simply distance from the mainstream. But in repressive settings, hairstyles can also be a liability, visible markers of difference, and even a catalyst for violence. In some contexts in Iraq, hair can trigger egregious acts of cruelty by armed groups, and, in numerous instances, even death.

Nushi’s case is one among many others Human Rights Watch (HRW) documented in a recently published report on Iraqi armed groups’ killings, abductions, torture, and sexual violence against LGBT people. In numerous accounts, the attackers shaved their victims’ hair, or demanded that they sign documents pledging they would cut their hair.

Springing up amid the breakdown of security after the US-led 2003 invasion, armed groups in Iraq feed on poverty when recruiting members, offering unemployed men a job and the prospect of gaining power and influence through violence. Although many armed groups in Iraq have claimed to be enforcers of their interpretation of Sharia (Islamic law), a Human Rights Watch report demonstrated how a 2009 killing campaign of men suspected of same-sex conduct, led by Iraqi armed group members, violated standards in Sharia law for legality, proof, and privacy. Stretching over the last two decades, violence directed against LGBT people in Iraq can be understood in the context of patriarchal social norms, the low social status of women, and a culture of impunity.

In Iraq’s environment of persistent violence, why would armed groups pay such close attention to something as seemingly inconsequential as a hairstyle? As many people told HRW, hairstyles are an important symbol of compliance and conformity with social norms and gender roles.

Policing hair has become a part of a crude enforcement of gender norms among some powerful armed groups in Iraq. When hairstyles publicly signal difference by breaking with rigid gender roles, they symbolise a perceived threat to the social order and an affront to authority.

Last year, an 18-year-old gay man was stopped by an armed group called Hashd al-Atabat in Karbala governorate in central Iraq. He was told it was due to his “shameful appearance,” in this case: having long hair. He said, “after the armed group’s leader came, he told his men to cut my hair and then let me go.”

Of the 54 LGBT people interviewed, 48 said that unconventional hairstyles were regarded by armed groups as a punishable offense. This means that men and transgender women with long hair, or women and transgender men with short hair, were perceived as deviant and hence more likely to be targeted. The consequences of having non-normative hairstyles can range from arrest to torture, rape, and even death.

Ahmad Majed al-Mutairi, known as Hammoudi, had been targeted and shot by suspected armed groups in 2018 due to his long hair. Hammoudi was popular on social media for posting pictures highlighting his feminine appearance. He was only 14 when he was murdered. A video of his gruesome murder circulated widely on social media. The attackers can be heard taunting him with homophobic slurs as Hammoudi, bleeding from his abdomen, pleads to see his mother.

These violent attacks are not new. In 2012 HRW documented attacks directed against young people who participated in  “emo” subculture, based on a form of alternative rock music, characterized by a distinctive style of dress, and unconventional haircuts. In the wake of systematic and fatal attacks, panicked “emos” scrambled to change their wardrobes and cut their hair.

Gender nonconforming hairstyles are also conflated with homosexuality, which is further construed as inherently anti-Islamic and pro-Western. One of the documented forms of punishments in the attacks on LGBT people is rape—and in particular male attackers sexually assaulting male subjects as a form of punishment for consensual same-sex activity, or gender non-conformity. Anti-sodomy laws which were reintroduced in Iraq in 1919 during the British Mandate, after the Ottoman Empire abolished them in 1858, and are still in use today. 

Some police and members of armed groups mete out brutal punishments that leave permanent scarring; those carried out in public are intended as a clear message to others. That message is that difference and freedom of expression outside of stereotypical gender roles will not be tolerated.

No one should be punished for how they style their hair. In addition to protecting LGBT people from violence, the Iraqi government should undertake public campaigns to end stigma against LGBT people and work with ministries, institutions, and civil society to raise awareness about respecting diversity in gender norms, including free expression through hairstyles.