LGBT Murders in Turkey

For this week’s blog entry I would like to say a word or two about gender inequality in Turkey. Before I do that, however, please take a look at this news article on a Turkish-language portal: http://www.bianet.org/bianet/lgbtt/148371-kusadasi-nda-trans-cinayeti. In case you cannot read Turkish, it is about a transgender woman, by the name of Dora, who has recently been killed in Kuşadası, a popular summer town in Aegean Turkey, and it includes the dates and venues of the protests to be carried out against hate murders. Yet, although the story has been covered by most Turkish media outlets, I cannot help but notice that in a country that has just hosted the LGBT pride week for the twenty-first time, the mainstream media continue to treat LGBT murders as if they are "ordinary" crime stories and to avoid touching upon reasons that lie behind them. It seems to me that the role of news media cannot be considered complete when it merely reports us news; it needs to initiate effective debates to interpret them. Unless this function is fulfilled, the following inevitably takes place: I have been living with my aunt and her two teenage sons for some time now. The day of Dora’s murder, when we were watching evening news at the dinner table, I realized that my ten-year-old cousin thought that a transgender woman was necessarily a sex worker. Given that even most adults tend to think this way in Turkey, it did not exactly come as a surprise. I immediately corrected him and told him and his twelve-year-old brother that being a transgender individual is merely a sexual orientation. Fortunately, this is quite a liberal household, at least in Turkish standards, so I did not have to start from scratch and go through the trouble of explaining them what a sexual orientation is. On the other hand, it was still a bit of a surprise because I was hoping that since their mother and I had already talked to them about LGBT individuals, they would be more resistant to embracing the social bias that surrounds them. As I have already said, however, I cannot blame my lovely cousins when this is the way many adults seem to think about LGBTs, and especially about transgender individuals. Few people care to understand that they are forced into sex work since most other job areas are closed to them. It is possible to discuss the dynamics underlying this, but I will suffice it to say that those who deny the existence of gender inequality and biases in Turkey need to face the crude fact that our society is still embarrassingly ignorant about gender identity. It continues to equate being a queer individual with being a sex worker and it reproduces its biases so recklessly that individual attempts to remove them remain futile. Social policies such as more strict hate crime laws, affirmative action and job quotas are urgently needed!