Source: Gani Met,  “Bu Yazı İnsanlığa Suç Duyurusudur”, (“This Piece is a Denunciation for Humanity”), 5harfliler.com, 5 January 2015, http://www.5harfliler.com/bu-yazi-insanliga-suc-duyurusudur/

Here I am releasing a denunciation to all of humanity, over and over again: You are destroying us each day. You are massacring us systematically and politically. See this! Hear this!

I don’t understand how I was able to manage this situation in the past. Not a day goes by without someone dying, someone being kicked out of their house, someone in need of care at some hospital…These pieces of news make me so sad now. My resistance decreases. I don’t know how I would be able to survive if it weren’t for the well-intentioned people around me. What kind of an arena is this where if you fall, you are shattered? What is the struggle behind this hopelessness? Why? I don’t know…

The psychology of war that we are made to experience is always with me. There are dead bodies everywhere. I used to know that one. I used to love that one. That other one was a nice girl. The latter was my friend. There are dead bodies everywhere or bad memories. I don’t know who the enemy is anymore.

My anarchist spirit could resist the police, the military and the system. But now the war is within us. We are fighting ourselves, people we love, people who are like us. The gangs that we have formed are not different from those of heterosexuals or the system. We are now producing the same kind of filth. There are girls who have made names for themselves with knives and stones. The lines of work we are able to find are being overseen, just like the state acts. We pay our taxes to monsters who look like women but have the spirit of the state. We are in a situation where we are accountable to gangs or to girls who have formed gangs. What is more is that I am scared! This situation brings with it many deaths. Either we kill or we leave no space to live. That’s right. We don’t kill. We make them commit suicide. I don’t understand what kind of a destiny this is. Either we find the man we have left behind in some other person and make them God, we call them husbands or lovers or we become killers. What is going on with us? Is this why we go through the change? How can we turn into monsters who look like women with plastic surgery?

Most of us have similar points of initiation. We had a different childhood. I know. But all of us, when we were children, we dreamed that we would have a house that would protect us from the hatred there was outside. We played with dolls when we first arrived in this world. None of us had knives or stones. We didn’t like war toys; we were soft children. We were scared of everything. Isn’t it due to these fears that we were able to find each other? Now, trans people are just like the system, the state, the police, the military and the fascists. This means that they are making us normal. I mean, we are becoming merciless killers just like normal psychopaths. I think that this is how we perceive being normal. This normalization appalls me and scares me so much. There is no space for new trans people! We consider our workplaces, our lovers, houses and cars our private property. We protect them just like normal people. The sad part is that we are normal. If we so badly wanted to be normal, why did we go through all this trouble? I don’t know.

We make new trans people experience exactly what our families, the outside environment and the system made us go through. In the past, we used to cut ourselves not to be taken into custody. Three or five of us could bring down a police station. I remember the things we used to do at police stations or in detention. All the cops used to be afraid of us. They wouldn’t know where to put us. The gendarmerie would not take us in. They knew it would be problematic. We would bring down street gangs together. Yes, we all did drugs and drank. We would pass on “roche” [rohypnol] to encourage girls who could not mess with the police or the state. It was obvious who the enemy of our army was. We were able to exist one for all and we all went to detention together. We would be hosed down together. We would be beaten together. But then we would also have fun together and laugh together. When Hülya from Mersin produced roche from inside her pussy, it would prove to us that a whole new world could come out of a pussy. And we would share it equally. The new girls would get less and we would make do. We would attend to our scars, our cuts and bruises together. But we all knew each other: the Roma, the Kurds, the Turks, the Alevis, the Armenians. There would be no difference. We had been able to form a different kind of sisterhood. Our other identities were only nicknames. We were an odd army back then. We had Amazonian victories. We could stop traffic by undressing. We could expose injustice like that; wherever you saw an undressed transvestite cutting herself, you knew there was injustice there. The state and the media called this “transvestite terror” but everyone knew this was not the case.

We would live by having sex, by stealing, by ripping people off and by being ripped off. We didn’t know anything like “man, trans woman, trans lesbian, gay, bisexual,” etc. There were no such things. There were those who were discarded. All of us discarded were together and we had come up with practices of living together. We had devised methods of making love. Everyone could make love to anyone. There were no labels and there was no cruelty. First, they divided us: Gay, lesbian, transvestite, transsexual, whatever, this and that… Each letter began to stand for a gender identity or an orientation or whatever. Each letter began to turn into an effort to become normal. And it took its toll on us. First gays who looked like men became normal. They began to get married. They adopt children. They get married in church now and stuff. Then the lesbians. And now it’s our turn. God willing, we too will become normal. How can we not see that the system is responsible for this normalization? How can this effort to empty something out and make it normal not impact us? Now, we too can walk around outside. We can ask for help from security forces. We can ask, but that’s it, or we can complain and that’s it. We can consider ourselves lucky if they don’t find us guilty based on our complaints.

I was so saddened by the young woman yesterday. There can be no such deaths. So young. I cry each time I look at her. I don’t know her but I cry every time I look at her. I don’t know what to tell anyone or who to be angry with. So young! Death does not become her. Trans people always die so young, so very young. Our dead bodies are shattered just like we are when we are alive. See it! Hear it! Look at it! Dead trans bodies in morgues display a whole other level of cruelty: They are either strangled or stabbed. And it’s not enough to stab them once! They stab us until our dead bodies are crumbled or you find trans bodies over which a few cars drove on the TEM highway. I remember more things as I write this. I’m going to go crazy. I am scared. Whose turn is it? We will never be able to fit within any category or place like the school, the family, the state, religion, ethnic identity or the street.

I’ve gone crazy again in an effort to talk about bits and fragments of something. I hereby proclaim a denunciation on all of humanity over and over again: You are destroying us each day. You are massacring us systematically and politically. See this! Hear this! Firstwe are cornered and then they get us to kill off each other like captured mice. Don’t you see it?

I don’t know anymore right from wrong…

 

---

https://lgbtinewsturkey.com/2015/03/04/suicide-resources/