Being an LGBTI+ in Turkey: ‘We are not safe’

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While the Pride Month is still ongoing, the LGBTI+ community in Turkey has been facing mounting hate speech and police violence, especially as a result of the targeting remarks of the government.

The remarks used by politicians and ruling parties against the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex plus (LGBTI+) community "target" the LGBTI+s and constitute a "hate crime" in that regard. LGBTI+s raise concerns that they do not feel safe in Turkey.

'You are constantly subjected to violence'

One of these people is Yıldız İdil Şen from the LGBT rights assembly of the Peoples' Democratic Congress (HDK).

Defining herself as a trans woman, Şen underlines that Turkey ranks 48th among 49 countries in terms of LGBTI+ phobia. Talking about the difficulties of being a Kurdish LGBTI+ person in Turkey, Şen describes her experience of being an LGBTI+ in Turkey as follows:

This is where you are overwhelmed most, where you see that contradiction. You are constantly subjected to violence on the street. Both psychologically and physically... To give you an example... Most recently, while I was walking on the road, an oncoming vehicle drove over me. Or you lead your life under the eyes of people, they look at you everywhere. Another side of is about the process; I go through the same things when I start a process. For instance, there is this thing that they call a 6-month reparative therapy; you start undergoing it following the approval of a psychologist. I went there for 4 months and I was expecting that in the meantime, the hospital would prepare a report for the court, saying, 'This person attended the treatment.' However, when I went there in the 5th month, I saw that this report had not been prepared for 4 months."

'Everyone is their enemy'

Nazlıcan Doğan is a Boğaziçi LGBTI+ activist investigated for opening a rainbow flag representing the LGBTI+ community on February 1. Nazlıcan says that she was one of the lucky students that day. "I think the university is faced with such a sanction by state pressure because I was not taken into custody that day," says Doğan, noting that she was directly put on a disciplinary investigation for holding a rainbow flag.

Doğan says, "While I was going to this investigation, I was detained because I was walking with the LGBTI+ flag in my bag and alongside my three friends and because I was not hiding the flag in my bag. Then, it led to the process at the end of which the June 3 rainbow case was filed."

At this point, Doğan comments, "During this judicial process, we have understood that everything which they are really strangers to, everything which they cannot understand and falls outside the binary gender system or outside their normative norms of thought is their enemy."

Targeting

Defining oneself as non-binary, Lambdaistanbul volunteer Alaz Ada Yener describes the state violence briefly as follows:

When you talk about any group in a country as traitors, when you portray them as against the homeland, then, it means you turn everyone into a target. Because it triggers an existential anxiety of such people at some point. These are concepts that are purely constructed on violence, such as patriotism and nationalism, and our existence, which poses an imaginary threat against these concepts, questions the binarism of men-women, it questions the heterosexual order, thereby questioning the homeland and the nation at one point.

(VÖ/SO/SD)