[NextGenderation]
Dear all,
Thank you for your messages. I have forwarded your emails to the
lambda listserv and shared it with the whole community. I am glad
people have spreaded the word, these things shouldn't go silent, we
should hear and feel rage and get together and stand stronger and
resist. We all know that Ebru Dilan is not the only transgender
person who was killed in our recent transgender history; as a matter
of fact, during the past transgender day of remembrance we mourned so
many, too many, losses that happened over a single year. Even the
conversations in TGEU listserv pointed out that we need to join
forces and come up with strategies to change the order. We need to
find ways to confront our societies with their hypocrisy and ask how
and why is it ok to marginalize a group of people and then treat them
with lower standards of ethics and care? How and why is it ok to pick
and choose whom we will treat with the level of compassion and
justice that we think we, our own selves, deserve? And what happens
when we are assigned on the opposite side of that equation?
This is not just about instigating laws against hate crimes, there
are many contexts in which these laws are in place but either they
are not enforced effectively or somehow are not enough to make us
feel safe. Same is true for anti-discriminatory laws. Surely, it is
urgent and very important that we make sure that these laws are in
place, if for nothing else to create a stable basis to build upon,
but we shouldn't confine ourselves to only those strategies. That is
a space where we can help each other. When I talk about joining
forces say at the next TGEU, I am not envisioning a group of us
saving some other or showing the way to salvation. I am also not
talking about making assumptions about whose situation is better and
blindly focusing on what needs to be done to help those others get to
where we are at. As transgender communities from around the world, we
have our own struggles and strengths, some of these are common across
borders and some of these specific to our own contexts; that
precisely gives every single one of us the potential to benefit from
each other's experience. The fact that we may have varying perspectives
and experiences should ignite our creativity in resisting against
things that require so much strength and courage and persistence like
transphobia. That is our power. When I talk about joining forces, I
am talking about getting together for the common goal of structural
change, sharing experiences, listening to each other and allowing
various modes of resistance to emerge.
Transgender community in Istanbul and Ankara are radically strong. I
feel that strength when we all march and dance together down the
streets during istanbul pride, you should come and join us in 2009! I
felt the empowerment during the tranny meetings against police raids
and house shut-downs in early 2007. The police was raiding people's "
rest" homes (the homes that they don't work at), shutting them down
and locking people out of their living spaces. For many months, the
meetings held at LGBT cultural center was filled with members of the
trans community. It was so crowded that many of us had to stand by
the door. People brought over food and some even brought laced
curtains to make it more home like. Lambdaistanbul indeed felt like
home and those friends like a closely-knit family, Ebru Dilan was a
part of it. We have our struggles but we organize and there is
progress as well as backlash. We inspire each other and get inspired
by the stories we hear from South America, Lebanon, Spain, Asia,
Europe, wherever they may come from. We also have stories to inspire.
Trans friends in Ankara recently established the first official sex
worker's union in Turkey.
Violence against transgender community and transphobia are wide-
spread all around the world and I haven't yet heard of any country/
context that is immune to it. Transphobia has many different faces
and can take many different forms, justified violence is one of it.
In struggling against something so wide and vast and shape-shifting,
we should get together and join forces. However, in doing so, we
should make sure that we don't act out of assumptions and put words
into each other's mouth or stay tuned to hear only those things that
we expect. If that is what it takes, then we should restructure our
dialogues so that our many different perspectives, experiences and
varying strategies come out and proliferate and in getting together
we should give each other hope, support, inspiration and motivation
to move forward with what we learned through our mutual exchange.
Solidarity and love,
Sinan
Tgeu-info_lists.
tmkis.eu mailing list tgeu-info@???
https://ml01.
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