With their hands linked together, Iranian women of every age and background have taken to the streets and online to spread revolution.
Their protests were sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini who was killed in custody after being arrested by Tehran's morality police.
I am watching it unfold from the relative safety of Australia, but I know what it's like to be one of them.
When I go online, I see the backdrop to my childhood, the streets of Iran, broken and bleeding. I see the same horrors that caused me to flee Iran repeated anew.
Although I am in another country, my breath is ragged even though this time there is no tear gas to hurt me. I am imagining my fellow protesters holding a napkin drenched in vinegar over my mouth to help me breathe after being gassed and beaten.
My generation grew up forced to repeat dehumanising chants like, "The blood in our veins is a gift to our leader" or "God protect Khomeini's movement, reduce from our lives and add to his life" every day at school. It ruined so many childhoods.
But the product of these 43 years of brainwashing is a global shout of "Woman, Life, Freedom": a revolutionary manifesto that stands for intersectionality, for the right to life and humanity, and demands the distortion of the Islamic Republic as a terrorist regime.
Now schoolgirls are burning pictures of the supreme leader taken from their books, kicking out a senior education ministry official from their school in Karaj and removing their mandatory hijabs.
Memories are like a physical pain
I was a teacher in Tehran at a prestigious university, advocating for women and children on death row and directing an art therapy project in an orphanage, but I fled persecution with nothing but my daughter Minerva and a bag in 2010.
My brother, too, left Tehran. I still can't forget the sound of his screams when the Islamists dragged him to the ground, into a van and then to their jail when he was a young photojournalist.
When he was released, his body had been crushed by their flogging, his assets confiscated or frozen.
Now he's based in London and works for the BBC.
I can't forget the teenage dissidents who chose to end their life rather than buckle beneath the jackboot of the regime.
I can't forget the voices of my students and classmates that scar the land like shrapnel.
I can't forget the sound of kissing was banned, how love, happiness and dancing were forbidden.
Each memory slams into me with physical pain. Worse still, these crimes are being repeated, re-traumatising Iran and the Iranian diaspora.
Hope is political
Many Iranians see no future under the regime except the possibility of more surveillance, disadvantage, discrimination, and poverty.
Systems of exclusion have destroyed any sense of belonging and many believe rebellion is the only way to get recognition as human beings in a system that has lost the trust of religious as well as secular people in Iran.
With a heart full of thrill and hope, we participated in the protests, and in each defeat, it looked like it had atrophied and in our veins only silence ran. That's why I think hope is political.
In one of the protests I attended in Iran, my shoe came off my foot when I was running away from the guards. My mother kept the other shoe as a memento. I wrote a poem about that day.
Often the unknown frightens us. But for Iranian people, state violence is infused in their daily life and is not an unfamiliar component. Their courage is the antidote to the dreadful desperation to survive.
My people have come to realise that for more than 43 years, they have been living on death row, on a gradual death, where the imagination of any prosperity and freedom was impossible.
I learned how to live invisibly
Memories of growing up in Iran keep flooding back to me.
From the age of six or seven, we were forced to live invisibly.
I remember the veiled body of our childhoods and being forced to go to school wearing only four regulation colours: black, brown, grey, and navy.
The compulsory uniforms taught us to forget about life, colour, happiness, and choice and prepare for control of our hobbies, the sports we could play and our freedom of expression.
Since the Shia Islamists seized power in 1979 there have been many protests against the compulsory hijab.
The regime has defended it to the West for decades, saying this law is a part of Iranian culture that should be respected. Yet many women lose their chance to study, work or move around freely if they refuse to submit to patriarchal subjugation.
There is a long history of exclusion and suppression of dissident women in the Ayatollah's Iran, from the murder of Farrokhroo Parsa in 1980, a year after the regime came to power.
She was one of the first Iranian women to sit in parliament, the first female cabinet minister, and served as education minister during the Pahlavi dynasty. She was killed by a firing squad in Tehran Evin prison under the orders of Ruhollah Khomeini's regime.
This time protesters take back what they've been denied
I spoke with protester Raziyeh via an app, in Persian. She was one of the women who burnt her scarf during this month's protests.
"For years, for me the sounds of black boots meant the regime guards were coming to harass and intimidate us," she says.
"This civil disobedience empowered many to fight back against the torturer black boots guys. The fire dance around the ash of scarves authorises us to weep, mourn and scream together what we have been deprived of."
Her father was arrested in the 1980s as a political prisoner.
Raziyeh explains that he was tortured in many ways, but in his diary, he mentioned being locked in a coffin, drops of water falling from the ceiling onto his face and having his teeth ripped out.
"My father was severely tortured. He ended his life after being released from Mullah's jail. I was banned from entering the university as a starred student due to our political background."
She describes being isolated by the regime as more debilitating than grievous bodily harm done by them in the public. "Loudly chanting cleans lengthy terror from my psyche," she says.
Muslim woman Fatemeh Sepehri, appearing in her traditional hijab, bravely spoke out on Iran International TV, demanding the overthrow of the Islamic Republic. She called Mahsa Amini "the Innocent Child of Iran".
But her activism didn't last long.
Fatemeh was arrested soon after.
These protests are only the latest in a long line of rebellions as the Iranian people fight back against their oppressors.
Australia can do more
Last week, about 4000 people gathered in Sydney to support anti-regime protests, and to urge Australia to do more to support protesting Iranians.
I proudly spoke at the rally, calling on the United Nations to respond practically and help run a democratic election that freely, equally and inclusively values peoples' choice over their lives.
Australia, among other countries in the West, hasn't always stood up to Iran's patriarchalism.
Last year Australia's ambassador complied with the compulsory hijab rule and wore a black chador to visit Fatemeh Masumah Holy Shrine in Qom alongside Iranian authorities, who called for the enhancement of Al-Mustafa's cooperation with Australia's academic institutions.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong condemned the attacks on protesters in a statement last month.
"Australia regularly raises Iran's significant discrimination against women and human rights violations with officials in both Tehran and Canberra, as well as in multilateral fora," Wong said.
"Australia stands with Iranian women and girls in their struggle for equality and empowerment, and we call on Iran to cease its oppression of women."
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been silent.
There is much more Australia could do, including recalling its ambassador or expelling the Iranian ambassador.
The power of images
In Iran, now we are documenting death in real time.
Close to where I used to live in Tehran, a pixelated 90-second clip of Neda Agha-Soltan's last moments has shocked the world.
But the power of these horrific images not only underlines Iran's hostility towards women, it also subverts the regime's propaganda. It's hard for those who want to apologise for the regime to legitimise its brutality with these powerful images of the state-sanctioned killing of women.
The physical war in the streets is being backed up by this digital war and 43 years of rebellion is unfolding in front of the cameras.
Women who do not have representation in the state-run media are unveiling themselves in front of the camera, cutting their hair over the graves of loved ones killed by the regime and defying state surveillance.
They are also defying the West's image of Iranian women — refusing to be seen as passive, stagnant and oppressed waiting for the white Western saviour.
Then there's the prevalence of legitimate self-defence against the guards to save themselves. The images depict people successfully pushing back the guards to run away, the protesters collectively supporting each other to escape.
In Iran right now citizens are taking back power. Whether it is women demanding rights over their own bodies or those seeing on social media the serious gaps between themselves and those in power and demanding equality.
This rebellion is one of the stages of the process, or it may even be the final line.
A revolution that destroys the strong foundation of an authoritarian government takes consistent work and diverse voices.
Victory is a process, not an event.
Dr Saba Vasefi is an Iranian-Australian scholar journalist. She is an expert on media, cultural studies, gender studies and teaches at the University of Sydney.
