Lamya’s realization, acceptance, and integration of her queer identity is the central theme of Hijab Butch Blues. Throughout the memoir, she frames her efforts to find and create a community that is supportive of this identity as an integral part of her journey toward self-acceptance. She develops this theme in three stages that align with the three parts of the memoir. In Part 1, Lamya describes how she discovered and learned to acknowledge her queer identity as a nonbinary person who likes women. In Part 2, she describes how she opened up about this identity to her friends and searched for a community that understands and supports her queerness. In Part 3, Lamya describes how she fully integrated her queer identity into her life, began dating, and embraced the community around her.

The memoir opens with Lamya’s reading of Maryam as someone “like her,” that is, someone who does not like men. At age 14 in a conservative Muslim community, Lamya did not yet have the words to describe her identity, but through her reading of scripture, she began to reckon with her own queerness. At this stage of her life, this realization felt isolating.