If it were up to the President of Turkey, Talia Aydin would probably not exist. The 26-year-old is a candidate for the Turkish Workers’ Party (TİP) and has openly stated that she is transgender. Aydin is one of those whom the Turkish President addresses almost every day before the elections. In his campaign speech, Mr. Tayyip Erdogan he said that “in this country there is no LGBT community”, threatening to teach a “lesson” to his supporters.

LGBT (eng. LGBT) is an acronym derived from the words “lesbian”, “homosexual”, “bisexual” and “trans”, which is a hostile term for the President of Turkey. He can be sure that this will be taken into account by religious conservative voters. However, statements of this kind about queer people are not new. For years, Tayyip Erdogan and Interior Minister Suleiman Soylu have fueled hostility towards queer people, publicly calling them “perverts” and equating them with terrorist organizations. Soylu recently stated that the LGBT community is in favor of marrying animals.

What may seem absurd to some, reaches some voters. In the summer of 2022, as a result of a provocation by the government, people took to the streets in many cities of the country, demanding, among other things, a ban on “gay propaganda”. When transgender woman Celine Gigurji wanted to open a beauty salon in the city of Iconium, a crowd gathered in front of her house and insistently demanded that she leave the city.

Turkish Workers’ Party (TİP) candidate Aydın wants to address this very issue. “I can’t get over the fact that I feel less secure now than when I was 14 and people thought I was a boy,” she says. She is not afraid to appear in public as a transgender. “I’m not the one who should be afraid of them, they should be afraid of a righteous judge in the future.”

But a few months ago, she herself would not have believed that she could run the country under Erdogan. The fact that he does this in spite of everything positively surprised her. The self-proclaimed socialist focuses on equality – regardless of social class, economic resources and gender. She is sure that Turkey is on the verge of great changes, as well as Oyku Didem Aydın. Oikou has represented many homosexuals in court. The country’s judiciary is corrupt, and the government is politicizing homophobia to rally voters. “There is an atmosphere of pogroms in Turkey, people are being persecuted,” says Oyku Aydin.

According to the organization “Transrespect”, Turkey leads in the statistics of European countries, having the highest rate of murders of transgender people. Women are also underrepresented in politics. Under Erdogan’s government, the country withdrew from the 2011 Istanbul Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women.

Islamist parties against feminism

Now Erdogan hopes to win the elections with the support of all Islamist parties that include anti-feminist programs in their campaigns. Kurdish Islamist Khuda Par, for example, wants to protect the “traditional” family from “deviant” ideologies, educate boys and girls separately, and offer women working conditions that are in keeping with their “nature.” The Islamist New Prosperity Party, as part of its campaign, uses a bus in which male candidates appear with a photo, while only the shadow of a female candidate is visible.

Women and queers fear that if Erdogan is re-elected, their position will worsen again. Deniz Altuntash of the Center for Women and Family Studies at Kadir Has University notes that it is clear that the threats will not only remain at the verbal level, but may also take the form of violence. “Imagine that every day a politician threatens you during his speech, stating that you do not exist and calling you a threat to society.” If the current government continues in the same spirit, further curtailment of rights and freedoms is inevitable.

Source: Deutsche Welle.