The “carceral continuum” (Moran et al., 2017) has been recently explored as a useful analytic in migration studies. It brings to the fore the ways in which the regulation of human mobility is a continuous process operating at different levels of intensity and formality. Yet, its “epistemological cisheteronormativity” (Ritholtz, 2022) remains unchallenged. In this paper, I explore how gender and sexuality shape the “carceral continuum” in the context of migration between the Middle East and Europe. I suggest that queer refugees enact what I refer to as 'intensified gender and sexual performance’- that is, deliberately and strategically exaggerating normative gender and sexual expression - in their attempts to navigate “confinement in motion” (Balaguera, 2018). Relying on three months of ethnographic fieldwork in Athens, I analyze the impact of Iraq-Greece’s cis-heteronormative carceral geographies on the life of Ziri, an Iraqi trans woman stuck in limbo. While tracing her (im)mobility trajectories through time-space, I focus on her relational encounters with (1) border police and flight attendants at the airport-prison, (2) humanitarian workers and refugees at the camp and NGO accommodations, and (3) smugglers at borders. I argue that Ziri futilely mobilizes masculinity and/or femininity to escape confinement in these sites, which in turn impacts her gender subjectivity. Ziri's path has prompted a reconfiguration of our understanding of how gender and sexual norms are inextricably linked to the experience of carcerality. It contests the homonationalist discourse which characterizes queer migration as a unidirectional journey from repression in the "country of origin " to liberation in the "country of reception". My study thus brings together and contributes further knowledge to debates on carcerality in geography and queer migration by queering the carceral continuum as both a gendered and relational experience that is not necessarily bound to place.