Nahal smokes yet another cigarette on her mother's balcony overlooking Tehran, one of the few peaceful places the 19-year-old transgender woman has in Iran, where her identity can bring harassment and prying, judging eyes on the street.
Nahal recalled how she had hardly started high school before being forced to leave over her classmates' insistence she dress as a man. Her manicured fingernails, painted pink, brushed away her long brown hair as she looked through old photographs of her childhood, recounting how even her own family has struggled to accept her.
"I no longer see my relatives," she said. "Maybe I'm a sign that if your own children will have a similar problem later, you can accept it."
"People on the street call me 'womanish;' they ask, 'Is she a man or a woman?'" says Nahal, who asked to be identified only by her first name as some in her family are angry with her. "Sometimes they say: 'May God cure him!'"
Iran's former hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad famously told students at New York's Columbia University in 2007: "In Iran we don't have homosexuals like you do in your country."