Trans woman inmate Ida is on hunger strike

Trans activist Diren Coşkun has announced that İda Koçak, a trans woman inmate, has started a hunger strike after she was denied vegan meals in prison. Today is the eighth day of her strike. Koçak has repeatedly demanded vegan meals which was denied by the prison administration.  Pink Life Association has contacted the psychosocial support unit of the prison and requested information about the current situation. Trans, inmate and human rights advocates have launched a hashtag campaign to raise İda’s voice, with the hashtag #idayasesver .

ERNb9HkXkAAKlFv.jpg
Trans women inmates have been facing many discriminatory practices under incarceration. Diren Coşkun herself was on a death fast in 2018, demanding her right to gender confirmation surgery and an end to her confinement in solitary confinement.  In September 2019, Miray, a trans woman inmate from Alanya L Type Prison, started a hunger strike as the prison administration kept LGBTI+ inmates in solitary confinement based on their gender identity. On August 2019, trans woman inmate Buse mutilated herself after being kept in a solitary confinement in a men’s ward and denied gender confirmation surgery. Similarly, trans woman inmate Esra Arıkan has repeatedly started hunger strikes due to the inhumane conditions of her imprisonment, such as being confined to a solitary cell, physical abuse and torture as well as harassment. After a ten year long battle, Arıkan finally got her gender confirmation surgery and was transferred to a woman’s prison. However, last year on August, Arıkan was once more on strike, seeking proper medical attention.

 

UPDATE: İda’s demands were met the next day (21.02.2020) and she ended her hunger strike after receiving a vegan meal.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.