Dear reader,

We bring you the 7th report of the Sexuality Hotline, a year and a half late. We doubt that this comes as a surprise—we've always had a bit of a backlog when it comes to publishing our Sexuality Hotline reports. The last six years have thrown at us crisis after crisis with unimaginable horrors. They slow us down, and we have this good/bad habit of not publishing anything we’re not completely ready to. We take great joy in writing these reports and in analyzing the data we get from the calls to the Sexuality Hotline. We are cautious and careful with this information, as we know it takes a great deal of strength for callers to reach out to us, and we wish to honor this effort on our end.

In many ways, we are like our callers: we hesitate, we think, we rethink, we write, we rewrite, we ask ourselves the question of how we should present this/these issues? Are we doing them and you justice? Are people protected in this portrayal? Are the reports useful? Are they contributing to our agendas and narratives around sexual rights and reproductive justice? 

Our Sexuality Hotline is run by people like you. We pride ourselves on being an accompaniment hotline, made up solely of people who have been where you've been and want a kind, gentle, political, and informed person on the other end of the line. Our hotline counselors are the readers, and they are the callers—and so are we.

And like everyone else, the past year and a half has given us great pause. As we finalize this report in the first quarter of 2025, after having borne witness to—and lived through—tragedy after tragedy: genocide, war, and hardships beyond the scope of imagination. It is in times like these that we must recognize what we are capable of, what is important, and what is needed.

From here on in, we plan on writing less in these reports. We plan on giving you your data back faster and giving ourselves more time to write blogs, research, fiction, poetry, and record more podcasts for our Fasleh. The 2023 Sexuality Hotline Report will be the last one of this length. Generally speaking, the world could use fewer reports. It does not, however, need less writing, less reflection, less analysis, or less emotion—on the contrary, now more than ever, it needs all of that and more. So we pledge to give you the data faster and make space to put our political thought and action elsewhere.

The value of these reports has always been about enumerating and visualizing, in an ethical and anonymous way, the stories, hardships, joys, wins, and struggles of people who reach out to us on our hotline. The paucity of data amongst youths, unmarried women, migrants, refugees, queer, and trans people—on sexual and reproductive health and rights and the strifes and lengths they go through in their journeys to bodily autonomy and agency in our region—has always been too large.

But this isn't the place to tell those stories justly. This is the place to fill the gap in the literature, to support advocacy, to zoom out, and show just how much people go through—in silence and in hiding—through their own queries and not those of academics and professionals. We will continue to show how grand, how brave, how courageous, how brilliant, and how strong people are in achieving the lives they want for themselves and for their loved ones.

Last year, amidst zionist airstrikes and fires, we turned ten. With death and destruction looming over and targeting us and our beautiful region and lands, there was little to celebrate, and we didn't even realize it at the time. It’s been a decade of forging solidarities and making small differences that speak largely to our values and politics. Who knows what the next decade holds for us. But we know this: the fight for liberation—in body, in land, in love—is one that we solemnly believe in and will always fight for.

For now, we give you the 2023 Sexuality Hotline Report, and we promise you the 2024 data before the end of the year. 

Till next time, reader.

Sneak peek to the report summary
 

This publication is the seventh edition of the Sexuality Hotline Reports. It presents data collected from calls made to the hotline in 2023, offering a closer look at the questions, concerns, and realities voiced by our callers throughout the year. The report is divided into two parts: the 2023 calls and their callers. 

The first part of the report explores the demographics and themes of the 1,230 calls received [...]