Kızılay Shopping Mall: We Do Not Allow People of Your Kind to Enter!

Source: Ömer Akpınar, “Kızılay AVM: Sizin Türdeki İnsanları Almıyoruz!” (“Kızılay Shopping Mall: We Do Not Allow People of Your Kind to Enter!”) kaosGL.org, 20 February 2014, http://kaosgl.org/sayfa.php?id=15865

Trans women were not allowed in the central shopping mall in Ankara, Kızılay Shopping Mall, due to an arbitrary decision by the administration.

“President’s Directive Does Not Allow You In”

Yesterday evening two trans women, Asena and Hazal, who went to meet their friend Yasmin at Ankara’s “Kızılay Shopping Mall” shopping mall were stopped by private security at the entrance. The security chief justified the situation by saying that “President Gül has a directive that prevents people of your kind getting in.” Asena and Hazal left the scene without making any complaint about the violation.

Bihter who called her friend Hazal without knowing what happened found Hazal feeling quite down. After learning the reason, Bihter went to Kızılay Shopping Mall with her friends today. She talked to the security chief and reminded him of his claim about President’s directive, which he denied today. He kept on claiming that the administration of the mall decided in a meeting not to allow anyone who has feminine ways of acting, looking like a transvestite with a wig on and with marginal looks.”

The decision document was not shown to the women and Bihter wanted to learn the name of the man to make a complaint. That is when she and her friend İlyas were forcefully taken out of the mall.

Police: Go Make Your Complaint to Whoever You Want

After being taken out, Bihter called the police with the hope of getting help: “They wanted us to cover up the incident. They did not really care.”

The women said that the Çankaya Central Police Station were not interested in helping them because of their gender identity.

Bihter: Should I get stabbed to be taken seriously?

“They offend us in the society” says Hazal, who kept facing discrimination at the police station with her friends Bihter and Yasmin. The women were kept at the station from 7 PM to 9 PM when their statements were finally taken.

One comment

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.