I am writing as a victim of rape.

As a victim of theft, threats, and insults.

As a transgender individual and a sex worker.

As a rights advocate.

As somebody who gets scared when she goes out on the street.

I start sweating, I get tense. I cannot move without somebody accompanying me. I feel as if I have been in house arrest for the last 12 days. Just yesterday I saw one of the perpetrators while I was out together with my friends; I ran home. It’s like they are everywhere. They are wandering around freely when I am trying to stay away from the eyes of people. They call this justice.

Özgecan (1) comes to my mind – the girl for whom everybody held long speeches, cried, mourned… They snatched Özgecan from us – just like all the other women they snatched from us. Having been totally silent up until then, Turkey was swept with outrage; it poured onto the streets. It felt pain, it shivered. We shivered.

With Özgecan’s murder we lived another story which is not alien to us … We remembered all sex workers and transgender people who have been raped and murdered for so many years.

It was just yesterday when the whole country was terrified with the murder of Münevver Karabulut (2) whose head was severed from her body. All those who raised their voices against Münevver’s murder suddenly became nobody when a transgender female sex worker was found in a trash container with her head severed from her body just one week after this incident. Transgender women and sex workers were left on their own once again in the country of beheading murders.

The stories of all sex workers, all transgender people who were kidnapped and raped ended with loneliness in this country. They still do. Don’t be misled by the strength of the voices that were raised upon the violence I was subjected to. They most probably wouldn’t have been if I had not been a renowned rights advocate.

Living lives tested with violence, rape, and murder, transgender people, sex wokers, “other women”, nameless women are raped once again by a certain silence. Rapes take place every day and night in the backstreets, in those streets we stay away from, in those lives that are “deserved”. It is because none of these lives are as “valuable” as Özgecan’s. It is because they live the lives they “deserve”. It is because “water pot breaks on the way to the fountain.” It is because they deserve rape, it is their fate to die.

We have a Ministry of Family and Social Policies whose voice, albeit rather faint, is heard when a case of rape or murder occurs and outrages the whole country. We have a ministry that gets lost all of a sudden, keeps silent, does not care when these cases involve transgender women and sex workers – a ministry that is complicit with the silence that rapes us…

I have a question to Minister İslam:

Esteemed Minister, I am a transgender individual and a sex worker, and I got raped. I was extorted, threatened, and subjected to insults. I was confronted with maltreatment when I consulted the police so as to protect myself from the violence that was inflicted on me. One of your police could even say to me, “But you were not raped.” Another was aggrieved because the “people of Lut were not extinct”.

Fortunately I am still alive – well, if you can call it “alive”, but still. My friends tell me that I should see the positive side of it, and that I should be grateful that I am still alive.

Esteemed Minister, you are everybody’s minister, aren’t you? Transgender people and sex workers are included in this “everybody”, aren’t they? If your answer is “yes”, then I ask you, why are you still keeping silent about what I have gone through? The prosecution process is still going on, and you are still silent. Will you stand by me should a lawsuit be filed? Will you get involved in it? Will you be by her side when a transgender individual, a sex worker, a rights advocate is being raped and subjected to violence?

Or am I going to be alone, are we going to be alone, to be those who “deserve” what they go through? When one of us gets murdered tomorrow, are we going to bid our last farewells to our murdered one on our own, on the shoulders of two or three of us, as has been the case so far with our murdered friends? Are we, or the “people of Lut” as some people who are close to you have called us, still going to be “disciplined” through violence, rapes, and murders?

Esteemed Minister, is this silence proper? Alright, we might not be women in your eyes after all; we might be “immoral” people, too. But then aren’t we humans, either? Are all those values that you keep mentioning -“conservatism”, “religious and humane values”- also silent to the violence that we are being subjected to?

I, a citizen of yours, a transgender individual, a sex worker, a rights advocate, a victim… When have I and all other victims been so lonely, so left alone?

Esteemed Minister, I am inviting you, your ministry, your government to stand by me. Mine is a hope; I hope so that maybe it comes true. Maybe you take a step, and your step constitutes an answer to the rapists.

Before we are murdered more and more… (KÖ/ÇT)

(*) “Water pot breaks on the way to the fountain (Su testisi su yolunda kırılır)” is a Turkish proverb, meaning that a thing/person will suffer an accident on the way to a certain goal that person/thing is trying to achieve; that they will do so precisely because they are seeking this goal. In this context, this proverb can be interpreted as such: those who are after achieving negative things (being transgender, being a sex worker) deserve the negative consequences of these things (rape, death). It can be said that, by referring to this proverb, Ördek is actually referring to the hypocritical, conservative stance of the Turkish authorities and society regarding the way they view and assess transgender people and sex workers.

(1) Özgecan Aslan’s (1995-2015) murder became one of the most widely followed case of femicide in Turkey, sparkling massive reactions and debates all around the country.

(2) Münevver Karabulut’s (1991-2009) murder was closely followed by the press; numerous protests took place in the meantime, also regarding the fact that Karabulut’s murderer Cem Garipoğlu could not be found by the police and was on the loose. Garipoğlu surrendered around six months later and was put into prison where he allegedly committed suicide in 2014.

Click here to read the article in Turkish.

(Translated by Müge Atala)