From Every Crack
On Trans History, Censorship, Urgency
It took days to find out the location. Walking up and down the steep hills of Istanbul, I relentlessly DM’d various accounts, asking — practically begging — for somebody to send me the details. No one responded, which wasn’t a huge surprise given that I was a stranger messaging in English, asking to be let into a secret exhibition of trans history. A film producer friend back in the UK finally connected me to a Turkish documentarian who, several days and emails later, was able to send me a drop pin for the gallery. It turned out to be not a ten minute walk from where I’ve spent the past few weeks staying in Istanbul.
DÖN DÜN BAK: Revisiting Trans Revolutions in Turkiye occupied the top floor of a tobacco factory turned gallery. I slid out of the thick heat and into the industrial art space, wondering if I might be subject to security procedures as at most other galleries and museums and churches and mosques I had visited so far in Istanbul, only to find myself alone. Completely alone. I looked around for someone to pay for a ticket, but there was no one, and so I floated through the air conditioned ground floor — another exhibit my eyes briefly passed over — before heading up the stairs. The first floor was showing a black and white photo portrait series of Armenian craftspeople, which I decided I would take in on my way out and continued past. I followed the growing voices and pulsing music up to the second floor, expecting to finally find myself surrounded by people. It sounded like quite the party, and I hoped maybe some kind of event might be happening within the space.
But there was no one still. The voices and music were from a variety of video projections running through a space filled with layer upon shifting layer of archival material.
Pride is illegal in Istanbul. Days before I arrived in the country, police rounded up, beat, and arrested fifteen Pride marchers — an expected, annual occurrence since the first government crackdowns by Erdogan’s AKP government on Pride in 2015. Despite this, people turn out in solid numbers every years, refusing to be pushed into the shadows, knowing that they may very well be detained or worse. This authoritarian political repression affects many groups in Turkiye — feminists, the Kurdish ethnic minority, even animal rights activists (who this month were beaten and arrested for protesting government plans to mass slaughter the famous stray cats and dogs of the country, despite the cats at least being easily one of the top attractions for foreign tourists). But there is a particular disgust levelled at LGBTI community events, which have been branded both terrorist organisations and affronts to public morality.
According to Fait Muedini’s 2018 book LGBTI Rights In Turkey, the original stated reasoning behind the ban on Pride was that it occurred during the month of Ramadan. However, when organisers later moved the event outside of the Holy Month, police and government refused to budge.
The Rainbow Map produced by ILGA Europe places Turkiye at 4%, below even Russia in terms of LGBTI rights and freedoms. There are officially no human rights protections for LGBTI people in Turkiye, though the government — in its continued overtures to the European Union and signing of various international treaties — positions itself as defending the rights of all Turkish citizens. Violence does not just come from police and government officials, Turkiye has the highest rates of trans and queer murders in all of Europe, including familial violence positioned as “honour killings.” “Trans panic” and “gay panic” defences are written into law and have been successfully used to lower or even avoid punishment for the murders of trans and queer people. Over the years, threats from organised groups of homophobes have also been used as justification for government to stamp down on Pride, alleging that they don’t have the resources to keep LGBTI protesters safe.
In the West, we have collectively spent the past thirty years in a circular debate about whether Pride is a political protest or just a party sponsored by Absolut Vodka and a host of drone bomb manufacturers. While the issues affecting our lives continue to be life-threatening, many would argue that Pride itself has been subsumed into rainbow capitalism, the perfect vehicle for corporations to launder their image once a year. Many of us long to return to the urgency of Pride’s origins, the proverbial ‘brick’ thrown at Stonewall1, to use it as a platform to fight against the rise of the far right forces that are hard at work repealing everything we have managed to win.
Here in Istanbul that ferocious spirit claws on and many are willing to put their lives on the line for it.
The England I took a break from just went through an election that could, charitably, be described as a race to the absolute bottom of human decency. The supposed centre-left candidate won the election mere days after telling reporters that trans woman should have no right to use public toilets, while his freshly installed Health Secretary went on a one man mission to win the heart (questionable) and mind (questionable) of everybody’s least favourite billionaire author by opting for a full ban on healthcare for trans youth. We were, I think, mere hours away from the losing Tory party offering licenses to hunt trans kids for sport when finally the election came to an end and Labour won, to the mild excitement of several people.
In the midst of this, a group of trans young people heroically scaled the exterior of the Ministry of Health and occupied it for four days. This historic event generated zero mainstream press coverage, though it seems to have inspired trans people across the English-speaking world, flooding Instagram and the app formerly known as Twitter on both sides of the Atlantic. Pride might be a bust, but the kids know the good word about direct action, at least!
With murders, stabbings, assaults, harassment, and suicides of LGB and especially trans people rising sharply year on year in the UK, alongside a significant repeal of basic inclusive policies from prisons to hospital wards, the UK has little moral high ground over Turkiye. It is a matter of degrees, and the gap feels to many of us like it is slowly closing.
The morning after I visited the secret trans exhibition, I got a message from the filmmaker who had hooked me up: the exhibition had been discovered by the government and banned. There was a slow, quiet sort of jolt that ran beneath my mind at this news — I had taken for granted something fundamental about the world that I now realized did not exist.
I may well have been the last person to see the exhibit.
DÖN DÜN BAK consisted of three rooms. At the top of the stairs, a four page Trans Manifesto greets you. To the right, a small room containing a variety of posters, photographs, and videos told the story of Ali ‘Aligul’ Arikan, the founder of Voltrans, Turkiye’s first trans men’s organisation, who passed away in 2013. Ali died as a result of transphobic medical neglect — like many trans people across the globe, he had had too many negative experiences with healthcare workers and so by the time his cancer was detected, it was too late. I realized in this room that I would need to move slowly, working with Google Translate’s camera function to understand the written materials.
From here I exited into the main room, a large gallery space divided into several sections. Placed delicately on a podium draped in a trans flag, a single black platform shoe soaked in its own spotlight. It took me a few minutess to realize that as you looked at this shoe, the walls behind and beside it explained it’s legendary origin. An uncolour-corrected video projected onto one of the walls of two young, beautiful trans women strutting down Istiklal Street (the Oxford Street of Istanbul, site of the annual illegal Pride demonstrations) in short repeating loops. The first loop I saw: her friend picking her up and spinning her in the air before they strutted away through the Pride March. The next: that same trans woman moving through a sea of people. Then another loop: a fight breaks out between the trans women and the crowd — the trans woman takes off her black platform shoe and attacks one of the shouting homophobes. On the other wall, a still image of this moment in photojournalist style. This then is that very shoe. This shoe fights fascists. And it stood sentinel at the very entrance to this exhibition, right at the top of the stairs, protection for those who need it and a warning to those who might threaten us.
The middle of the room is bisected by protest banners, with large slogans Google Translate can’t quite work out. Perhaps they are in lubunca, the trans sex worker slang derived from a mixture of Romani, Greek, Arabic, Armenian, and French — a truly Istanbul cant if ever there were one.
I followed along the wall to my right, barely an inch not covered by photos and posters. This exhibition is in celebration of the tenth year of Istanbul Trans Pride, and most of the photos tell its story. A couple of video monitors on the walls feature activists explaining the genesis of trans liberation in Turkiye, and disagreements they had had with the ‘old guard’ of the 1990s, like Demet Demir (a video of whom I had watched in the Istanbul Modern the day before).
The photos of marches give way to a series of news clippings. These turn out to be the juiciest piece of the exhibition, at least for this historian. Obviously culled from one of what Sandy Stone once referred to as an OTF. In the Empire Strikes Back: a Post-Transsexual Manifesto, Stone explains:
[…] many transsexuals keep something they call by the argot term "O.T.F.": The Obligatory Transsexual File. This usually contains newspaper articles and bits of forbidden diary entries about "inappropriate" gender behavior.
Every older transsexual I know has or has had one of these, and this archiving impulse could reasonably be described as a distinct part of our cultural heritage.
The clippings on the wall, blown up for easier reading, tell a variety of stories across time. Bülent Ersoy’s ban from public performance for nearly a decade following the 1980 coup, at the height of her fame. Two trans women, aged 22 and 24, who fought their way out of jail with knives (but sadly were recaptured shortly thereafter). A gorgeous girl who looks the spitting image of Venus Xtravaganza threatening to out all of the celebrities she’s slept with. And nestled in the middle of all of this, some clippings, photos, and a video recount the history of the Homosexuals on Hunger Strike.
On April 29th, 1987, after a series of increasing attacks by police, thirty trans people went on hunger strike in Gezi Park, Taksim. This was a momentous event in the collective history of LGBTI rights in Turkiye, garnering support from feminists, artists, intellectuals, and radical organizers. Even people on the street seemed broadly in support, telling the press at the time “We support them because we’re against repression, whether it’s against them or normal people.”
The news clippings continued down the wall, and then, behind the banners that split the room, a video monitor was revealed on the floor with some pillows. I sat down and watched some of the short films included here. In one produced by Voltrans in 2012-13, a series of trans men discuss masculinity and identity.
On the wall behind, photos of Pride marches continue, but projected across them is footage of speeches from the marches. More monitors captures speeches given at memorials for murdered trans women and Trans Day of Remembrance. Among the photos being projected upon, two strike me: one, a young activist with blonde hair is arrested by police; the other, a photo I already recognize of Hande Kader crying while a wall of police close in on her. Kader, only 23, was later murdered and set on fire by a client. Her death instigated a massive protest movement calling attention to the dire situation of trans sex workers in Istanbul, but despite international pressure, the case was never solved.
The final room screens another series of interviews with local activists. Much of this was in Turkish and moving too quickly for my silly little Google Translate to follow, so I let it simply wash over me for a while. Soon I would have to go back out into the heat and hills of Istanbul, so I let myself linger and think through all that I have seen.
Knowing that this exhibition had to keep its location secret, and sitting there entirely alone in the building, gave a certain weight and poignancy to the images and stories contained within it. For now, though they incur protests and many of us worry out loud2 about potential bomb threats, trans events remain open in the UK. We don’t generally fear arrest, though thanks to the constant government threats in the press I certainly did worry about it while marching in solidarity with Palestine at Armistice Day last November. But here in Istanbul, it is a given. The baby blues and pinks of the trans flag, which I so often find juvenile, here transform into a symbol of state resistance.
It’s impossible not to be moved.
The news that the exhibition has been banned comes the same day that a young trans woman, Iris, is arrested in Istanbul for making a tweet. Activists do not have time to mourn the loss of the exhibit, because already they must organise for her release. Then news comes that a Syrian trans woman’s HIV status is leaked to the press by hospital staff and she is deported. Pride organisers in other parts of the country are beaten and arrested. And finally a trans woman is stabbed more than fifty times and remains in hospital.
Meanwhile, the English portion of my Instagram fills up with the beady eyes of a certain politician who has announced he wants to make the ban on puberty blockers permanent in the UK.
I chug fresh juices from street vendors, take a ferry out to the Prince’s Islands, continue trudging through museums and Byzantine churches and mosques, petting hundreds of street cats along the way. A few friends message to ask if I am safe in Istanbul. As a tourist and, especially, as a trans woman who passes, I am mostly inured to the danger here. Privilege in motion. With all that is going on in the news, it’s almost shameful to say that I am having a beautiful time. But there is something dysregulating happening in the back of my mind. The exhibition and its sudden shut down haunt me more than the attacks at home on our healthcare. It feels almost like a premonition, a shiver running through the universe that has passed over my body.
“The position is, if Pride walks are illegal, then we’ll make every walk a Pride walk,” E explains. A local trans activist, E, and her friend, D, agreed to meet me in a chic coffeehouse in posh Nisantasi. Over iced drinks, we trade information about our respective countries: repression, politics, dating. Both of them are razor-sharp, funny, and gorgeous. And they both want to leave.
But I’m surprised to hear that it is not so much the human rights situation that makes them want to go. “It’s the economy,” D tells me. It’s hard to make a living for most people in Istanbul, the government seems to encourage people to take second jobs to make up for the rising tide of inflation, but the situation is especially acute for trans women who continue to face significant barriers in employment, education, and housing.
“If the economy was better here, I’d probably just stay,” D goes on.
“I want more nature,” E adds. She explains that, in a city of fifteen million people, the largest metropolis in Europe and one of the biggest in the world, you cannot find a moment to yourself in any of the few green spaces the city has to offer. Day or night, it’s hard to find anywhere private to just sit and gaze out at the Bosphorus Strait. This is a complaint I have often made about England — even when hiking, you can barely go more than a few minutes without encountering somebody, a shock to the system of this Canadian whose idea of nature means being kilometres away from other human beings.
But leaving is not so easy. Turkish passports are not ranked highly, even tourist visas can be hard to obtain. I say “if you’re ever in London..!” but we all know this offer is difficult to follow through on. E tells me I should come back in the spring, when the linden trees blossom — the scent from their flowers filling the streets.
“Inciting the public to hatred” and “provocation” are the reasons given by police for shutting down the exhibition. A statement released by Trans Pride Istanbul says that police confiscated things from the exhibition, and mentioned — defiantly — that even giving press releases had been prohibited.
To say that trans history has, nearly the world over, been suppressed is usually an understatement, but here in Istanbul this suppression is at its most literal. I go over my photos and videos of the exhibition, wondering where exactly the incitement to hatred and provocation lie. Instead I find two photos. In one, a pair of trans women kissing at the seafront, the wind and rain no match for them. In the other, a trans woman leans down to kiss a trans masc while a banner-holding front of queer activists marches on.
“You cannot erase us,” the Trans Pride Istanbul statement goes on, “Our past, our traces, with these prohibitions. We know how to leak from every crack. We learned this from our history in this exhibition.”
Whether on terf island or here in Turkiye, trans people keep finding each other, keep reaching together for the lives we deserve. They may ban our healthcare, eject us from public toilets, suppress our histories, and even kill us, but they can never stop us.
We will become liquid, we will take new shapes, new forms, and we will seep through.
xx
M
No bricks were thrown at Stonewall... The original claim was that it was “the shot glass heard round the world,” and that a hail of pennies and cosmetics were thrown down upon the hapless NYPD.
And in print, see for example Alison Rumfitt’s Tell Me I’m Worthless.