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II. Background: Imposing Gender: Identities and Histories

Turkey is a unique society, its present-day identity still built around the rapid “modernization” it experienced under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. That means, as well, that its identity is also still founded on the gender norms that its “modernization” imposed.   

One Turkish sociologist writes that Kemalism was “perhaps the first [political] movement in the world that set the alteration of the existing civilization as its primary objective.”  Its political interventions aimed first at clothing, appearance, and conduct, “penetrating daily life,” targeting “daily practices rather than political ones,” especially “the relationship between the sexes.”⁷

A “modern” Turkey meant “modern” gender roles.  Under the patriarchal aegis of Atatürk a new image of Turkish masculinity arose, strong, set in opposition to past “decadence,” and inculcated through key institutions like the military. Meanwhile, women were unveiled and encouraged to enter public space: but, the same writer notes, “‘Women’s attainment of a new social identity outside the private realm became possible only when they stripped off their sexual identities.’ Women had to be ‘untouchable,’ embodying ‘virtue’ and ‘honor.’”⁸ Men were repressed if they failed to conform; women, if they took liberationist rhetoric too far, and tried to discover themselves outside heterosexual partnership.⁹ Today, secularists and Islamists alike define much of their politics through issues of gender, behavior, and dress.¹⁰  

Many people told us that they see homophobia in Turkish society as intimately connected to the project of modernization, including “modernizing” gender roles.  One gay man told us, “Modernization came so fast, people claimed that they cast off traditional culture altogether.  They rejected all Ottoman culture, became Kemalists overnight. Any traces of homosexual experience before the revolution were simply dismissed as part of the Ottoman past.”¹¹ Another said, “Under Ottoman Islam, homosexual behavior was a sickness—bottoms were sick, they had to be taken care of. But you did not beat or abuse them. Gay-bashing, the hatred of a thing called ‘gayness,’ is imported from the West.”¹²

This report shows that norms around gender and sexuality, masculinity and femininity, “honor” and “shame,” are deeply ingrained in Turkish society. They are ingrained in the practice of state authorities who see any deviation from them—including men or women who simply do not look or act as expected of their gender—as “immoral” or “indecent.” They are ingrained in a powerful military that roots out and humiliates men whose sexuality makes them insufficiently “manly.”  They are ingrained, too, in the letter of the law, which still sweepingly punishes behaviors that can be seen as defying the standards of Turkish manhood, womanhood, or Kemalist morality.¹³

“Identity” is an important concept for many people in Turkey—lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people among them. Again and again men and women we interviewed spoke of the hard-won importance of having built an identity for themselves.¹⁴ “The system identifies and categorizes you,” one pre-operative transgender woman told Human Rights Watch, describing her lifelong struggle to find a way of defining herself. “We have to take the categories and change them. First we have to take back the categories from mass media and society to own them, and then we can start redefining them.¹⁵ And then find the ones we can live in.”¹⁶

In part this importance derives from the difficulty of carving out a space for individuality, much less sub-cultural community, in modern Turkish society where a nationalist affiliation with “Turkishness” has been expected to take priority over, and subsume, every other sense of self.  Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender activists speak often of the importance of identifying with other minority identities long suppressed by the state: whether religious minorities such as Alevis, or ethnic identities such as Kurdish. Yet it also reflects the tenuousness of an identity such as “homosexual,” which has no traditional resonance in Turkish culture.  The term used in Turkish—eşcinsel, “same-sex”—is a recent and synthetic one, modeled after the Western phrase. Other terms with longer roots—ibne (derived from an Arabic term for the “habitual bottom” in sex between men), dönme (“reversed”), top (“ball”)—are used for men, generally imply being a passive partner, and have come to be taken as intensely abusive.¹⁷

Homosexual conduct has existed everywhere, and throughout history; the term and identity are recent. In Turkey, the development both of the identity, and of the peculiar form of the prejudice against it, is arguably connected to the country’s difficult experience of modernization. What is certain that the “gay” or “homosexual” identity shared by many men and women in Istanbul or Ankara is not shared, and should not be attributed to, many men who have sex with men or women who have sex with women in the country. What is also evident, from story after story, is that the pressure to define an “identity” as either “gay” or “straight” among the latter group of men, in the context of modern-day Turkey, can generate a self-loathing that may lead to violence.

Transgender people are usually included in the term “eşcinsel”—but also have a different realm of identities. The term “transgender” (embracing anyone whose gender identity differs from his or her birth sex) has no exact equivalent in Turkish. Most people use the terms travesti or transseksüel; the former usually means people who have not had “sex-reassignment surgery,” the latter people who have—but the terms are often used loosely. One transgender activist estimated that there are more than 3000 transgender people in Istanbul alone, only 1000 of whom are “transseksüel.”¹⁸

While some transgender people speak of a widespread desire in their communities for the supposed security that surgery and the “pink card”—an identity paper legally classing them as women——can bring, others disparage that security, and affirm they are happy without it.¹⁹ Another told Human Rights Watch the reason why she has not sought the surgical procedures and the legal change—pointing again to the complicated constructions of masculinity in Turkey. “We all do sex work,” she said, “and 90 percent of our clients want a penis. You understand? They want to be fucked by a penis in a dress.”²⁰

For a long time, many transgender people shared an almost stereotypical life-course. There was often an upbringing in a rural community; rejection by the family as they began to reveal their gender identity in adolescence; and flight to a major city, where they met other transgender people who integrated them into sex work. As a young transgender woman, Seyhan recalls, “You sometimes became a domez, [the name given to young transgender people who want to transition into women], helping the transsexuals and working. To be a transvestite, you have to start that way.”²¹ People often spoke to Human Rights Watch about the family-like atmosphere of transgender people living together in mutual support. Over decades, transgender people in Turkey even developed their own argot, called kelavca: a mixture of terms from Roma and other minority languages, as well as popular culture. Demet Demir told us,

The language kept police and heteros from understanding. Once I made a dictionary of 210 words; now there are new words emerging. And the language is always changing, moving from old transvestites to new ones. Old ones say paparon for police; new ones say “baby.”²²

In the wake of the massive police crackdowns on Ülker Street and other transgender communities, that sense of solidarity is now, older transgender people said, “shattered and scattered.”²³