ΗΜΕΡΑ ΤΗΣ ΓΥΝΑΙΚΑΣ ΓΙΑ ΤΙΣ ΛΟΑΔ ΣΤΗΝ ΤΟΥΡΚΙΑ.

Ένα ενδιαφέρον άρθρο από την τουρκική εφημερίδα Hürriyet Daily News, για την ημέρα της γυναίκας από την οπτική των λεσβιών, αμφί και διαφυλικών γυναικών. Μιλούν, η Esmeray τρανσέξουαλ φεμινίστρια, η Ecem Dalga εκπροσωπόντας την λοαδ οργάνωση Kaog GL, και η Nevin Öztop μέλος πάλι της Kaog GL από μέρους του λεσβιακού κινήματος της χώρας. Αντιγράφω.

Women's Day not easier for those on margins of society.
SEVİM SONGÜN
ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News
It is International Women’s Day on Monday, March 8, and many women’s organizations and activists will be celebrating the date with activities throughout the week.
Some groups will meet to protest inequalities resulting from age-old patriarchal understandings between men and women. Others will distribute flowers to women on the street like on Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day. Still other women and men will come together to discuss problems of being a woman in Turkey and the rest of the world.
To contribute to the events, the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review has spoken to women on the margins of society, such as lesbian, bisexual and transsexual women, about their views of Women’s Day.
Discrimination
Esmeray, a transsexual feminist who acts in standup shows and plays, said Women’s Day is significant because it enables women to ask for their demands. Atop the agenda for feminist women lately is the conflict in Southeast Turkey, which Esmeray said is an “ongoing war” and that it affects women the most.
As a feminist, Esmeray has joined every Women’s Day march for the past seven years. She said women’s organizations and activists have always been supportive of her participation in these celebrations.
Esmeray believes she faces discrimination in two ways: first, since she disclosed herself as a woman, she faces all problems females suffer from patriarchal society, and second, she has separate issues resulting from her transsexual identity.
“Since I started to wear a skirt and disclose my identity, my close male friends started telling me, “Don’t carry this table, you could injure your back,’” said Esmeray. “Also, my boyfriend’s friends started calling me ‘yenge’ (a word used for the wife of a relative),” said Esmeray. Men’s politeness and sensitivity disturbed her, she said. “This is women’s problem in society. Men treat women as is they are incapable of doing things in life. Unfortunately, some women also internalize this belief.”
As a transsexual, the difficulties Esmeray faces are not harder than other women’s problems, but they have different aspects. “As a transsexual, if I walk in Beyoğlu at night, a man can easily come and ask me, ‘How much?’ because all transsexuals are prostitutes in the eyes of wider society,” she said. “But that does not mean this is only our problem. Unfortunately, men’s understanding is that only loose women come to Beyoğlu after midnight,” she said.
“We experience difficulties at different levels, but in the end they are all related to the gender issue,” Esmeray said.
Gender Identity
Ecem Dalga, from Lambdaİstanbul, a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual, or LGBT, association, said March 8 is important for her because women are exposed to every type of discrimination on the street and in schools, businesses and homes. “Because of our gender identities, when the issue is homosexuals, nobody recalls lesbians, as if there are only male homosexuals in Turkey,” she said. She complained that lesbian gender identity and sexual orientation, which she said is not a choice but an orientation, are invisible in society.
“This is why it is important for us to be on the streets during the March 8 celebrations and protests in order to break this invisibility,” Dalga said. The women’s movement and the LGBT movement can contribute to each other as they have many common agendas, she added.
“It was a sentimental moment for me when a few words about our problems were read from the chair on Women’s Day last year, and all the women in the street chanted “no silence, shout, there are lesbians,” she said.
Dalga said women are always described as belonging to someone or somewhere rather than as individuals. “I see posters saying, ‘We celebrate March 8 for our women,’ and I say I am nobody else’s women. We are always ‘belonging’ to someone and identified as such by others, like husbands, children, family or the state,” she said.
“As women, we are all expected to give birth to a child, wash the clothes and know our limits,” she said.
Lesbian movement
Nevin Öztop, from Kaog GL, an Ankara-based lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual, or LGBT, association, said during her first years of participation in March 8 celebrations, she was there “mixing in as if she was a straight woman,” but later as she disclosed her bisexual identity, she decided to be part of the leabian movement.
“I started feeling that women’s movements were only considering women who love men, and their demands of changes in the marital law were only trying to make female and male relations equal in the law,” she said. The movement had gained ground in legal reforms in favor of women, but there should be an amendment in the Constitution considering discrimination against lesbians and bisexual women, only saying equality between men and women does not provide that, she added. “It only perpetuates the re-creation of womanhood- and manhood-terms, which must always be subject to questioning.”
Öztop said, as a bisexual woman the main problem she faced is blindness of society toward people who love their same kind and transgender.
“If you have ‘outed’ your sexual orientation to your family, you know you can never bring your girlfriend home, as your partner and your life would be full of lies,” said Öztop. In school, family and in the streets, a lesbian must pretend to be friends with her partner, she said.
We believe whatever is private is also political and we make an effort to voice our identity and demands at any opportunity. “Just as domestic violence should not stay in the home and should be uncovered in order to be stopped, our love should be in the open on the streets, too,” she said.