According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), between 2011 and 2017, Turkey has received over 387,000 non-Syrian asylum applications, mostly from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran. The significant surge in the number of non-Syrian asylum applications in Turkey in recent years- in comparison to 77,000 applications received between 1995 and 2010- is mainly due to sectarian violence in Iraq and the economic sanctions on Iran. The second wave of migration of thousands of Afghani refugees from Iran and the increased number of refugees from Iraq have resulted in a backlog of pending cases in the UNHCR offices in Turkey, which in turn has significantly lengthened the bureaucratic process. The harsh living conditions for many queer and trans refugees and the long waiting period without access to basic rights have resulted in several suicides and health-related deaths among queer and trans refugees. Using ethnographic data from interviews with the Iranian queer and transgender refugee applicants, the UNHCR, and NGOs in Turkey, I explore the way that refugee rights as a temporally and spatially contingent concept normalizes queer and transgender refugee subjects, while managing the lives and deaths of different populations. I ask, how does the productive tension between security and precarity come to demarcate rightfulness and rightlessness? How does transitioning from the naturalized domains of sexuality and citizenship to zones of indeterminacy complicate notions of rights and choice? How do regimes of transnational governmentality that include NGOs, multiple states, internet technologies, diasporas, and medical and psychological institutions come to regulate transgender and queer refugee lives? How do transgender and queer refugees navigate "risk" as they transition across national boundaries, sexual norms, geopolitical terrains, and neoliberal economies? By approaching these questions, I point to the inconsistencies in the universality of human rights and its chronopolitics. The Iranian queer and trans refugees in Turkey are suspended in an in-between zone of recognition, where rightfulness and rightlessness come together in a temporal standstill. The 'protection' of transgender and queer refugees under the rhetoric of rights in this in-between zone is tied to the management of life and death of populations in biopolitical, necropolitical, and geopolitical realms.