Turkey: trials in connection with the murders of two trans women now under way

In April, I wrote (link here) about Melek K, a trans rights activist, who was stabbed to death in her own home in Ankara, Turkey.

And in May, I wrote (link here) about Çağla, who was also stabbed to death in her own home in Ankara, Turkey.

I’ve been unable to find much information about either of these murders, although I see from the Kaos GL website (link here; Google translation here) that murder trials are now under way in both cases.

The trial of Çağla’s murderer was scheduled for yesterday (July 8), and the trial of Melek’s murderer is due to take place today (July 9).

I’m trying to find further details of both cases, and hope to post an update later.

(Curtsey to Stefani for the heads up)

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Previous related posts:

• Unsafe haven: LGBT asylum seekers and refugees in Turkey (July 8, 2009)
• Turkey – new Chief of Police for Istanbul. Will this bring an end to the “undeclared war” against trans women? (June 15, 2009)
• Turkish policemen on trial for attack on trans woman (May 29, 2009)
• Turkey: another trans woman stabbed to death – UPDATE (May 29, 2009)
• Turkey: another trans woman stabbed to death (May 25, 2009)
• Turkish parliament questioned on trans safety (May 12, 2009)
• Lambda Istanbul granted permission to continue operating (May 7, 2009)
• Suspected murderer of trans rights activist arrested in Turkey (April 21, 2009)
• Every 15 days, another trans person is murdered in Turkey (April 14, 2009)
• The undeclared war against LGBTT people in Turkey continues (March 29, 2009)
• Another trans woman murdered in Turkey (March 14, 2009)
• Trans woman stabbed to death in Istanbul (March 12, 2009)
• Lambda Istanbul wins appeal against closure (January 28, 2009)
• Trans rights abuses in Turkey (November 29, 2008)

Coverage of Lateisha Green trial next week

In advance of the trial next week of Dwight R. DeLee for the murder of Lateisha Green, the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (TLDEF) has produced an online Resource Kit. Although intended primarily for use by the media, it makes interesting reading for anyone with an interest in the case.

Due to this landmark case’s complexities and its significance for LGBT people, it is of utmost importance that media coverage of Lateisha’s tragic death be inclusive, accurate, and respectful of a community that is too often targeted for harassment and violence.

(Via)

The Resource Kit is in a total of four sections:

• The Lateisha Green Murder: Violence Against Transgender People Resource Kit (link here)
• The Lateisha Green Story (link here)
• Media Resources for Covering Hate Crimes (link here)
• Appendix: Hate Crime Laws (link here)

As regards the trial itself, TLDEF says it will be posting daily updates on its website (link to TLDEF website), as well as live Tweeting from the courtroom (link to TLDEF on Twitter). Finally, the Justice for Teish Green Facebook page will also be updated regularly (link here).

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Cross-posted at Questioning Transphobia

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Previous related posts:

• Lateisha Green: hate crime trial starts on Monday, July 13 (July 3, 2009)
• Teisha Cannon murder: case to proceed as a hate crime prosecution (June 5, 2009)
• So that makes four trans people dead so far this month (November 18, 2008)

Unsafe haven: LGBT asylum seekers and refugees in Turkey

ORAM, the Organization for Refuge, Asylum & Migration (link here) has published its report, Unsafe Haven: The Security Challenges Facing Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Turkey (direct link to PDF). The report is based on in-depth interviews with 46 LGBT asylum seekers and refugees
living in Turkey, most of whom are Iranian.

Many of those interviewed described a lack of sufficient police protection in response to their complaints of violence, including admonitions that they stay at home or dress “like a man” to avoid being targeted. Others reported being evicted from their homes on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity. The few able to work described being violently forced off the job when their LGBT status became known.

The report is a detailed and depressing read which seems unable to suggest any immediately effective ways of reducing the abuses against asylum seekers and refugees based on their sexual orientation and gender identity. The “introduction of education and training”, while a worthy aim, does not help the trans woman who, having escaped persecution in her home country, must live in a small town while she waits anything up to three years to be recognised as a refugee by the UNHCR before she can be
resettled in a third country. In that time, she is likely to be afraid to leave her home in case of violence from the local communities, as well as having very limited access to medical care, social support or employment.

In my opinion, the immediate problem is a society in which rampant transphobia is the norm, and where even the authorities are complicit in a war against trans women regardless of their nationality. Yes, education and training are essential parts of the longer-term process of dragging Turkey into the 21st century – but in the meantime, it’s estimated that my trans sisters are being subjected to an attack every three days and a murder every 15 days, and I see no sign of any direct, short-term action being taken to address that.

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Previous related posts:

• Turkey – new Chief of Police for Istanbul. Will this bring an end to the “undeclared war” against trans women? (June 15, 2009)
• Turkish policemen on trial for attack on trans woman (May 29, 2009)
• Turkey: another trans woman stabbed to death – UPDATE (May 29, 2009)
• Turkey: another trans woman stabbed to death (May 25, 2009)
• Turkish parliament questioned on trans safety (May 12, 2009)
• Lambda Istanbul granted permission to continue operating (May 7, 2009)
• Suspected murderer of trans rights activist arrested in Turkey (April 21, 2009)
• Every 15 days, another trans person is murdered in Turkey (April 14, 2009)
• The undeclared war against LGBTT people in Turkey continues (March 29, 2009)
• Another trans woman murdered in Turkey (March 14, 2009)
• Trans woman stabbed to death in Istanbul (March 12, 2009)
• Lambda Istanbul wins appeal against closure (January 28, 2009)
• Trans rights abuses in Turkey (November 29, 2008)

Lu’s: a pharmacy for cis women?

Vancouver Women’s Health Collective has just opened a new pharmacy called Lu’s: A Pharmacy for Women which claims to offer a “full-service pharmacy” as well as “advice on your medication and your healthcare”. (Via VWHC website – Lu’s Services)

The website continues:

By opening a women’s pharmacy, the VWHC is once again providing health care services to women along with health information and our continued advocacy work, from a model that is informed by a feminist perspective. We know that women are still underserved by the current health care model, and we know that certain women face considerable barriers to accessing quality health care, which include poverty, addiction, racism, and sexism, among others. We see Lu’s: A Pharmacy for Women as a unique opportunity to organize in a new way, by bringing together health care professionals both traditional and holistic (in the form of pharmacists, doctors, and holistic practitioners), volunteers, community activists, and community members in one space.

(Via VWHC website – A Brief History of Lu’s: A Pharmacy for Women)

Which all sounds great. A much-needed resource offering access to “quality health care, which include poverty, addiction, racism, and sexism, among others”. A laudable aim, unquestionably.

However, according to The Vancouver Courier (link here):

Starting Tuesday, any woman who was born a woman can visit the pharmacy to have prescriptions filled.

It’s unclear where the phrase “any woman who was born a woman” has come from – The Vancouver Courier is the only source I have seen which uses the term explicitly; note that the VWHC website (link here) refers simply to “women”. Not “womyn born womyn”, and not “self identified women”; just “women”. The contact page of the VWHC website (link here) states that “our Centre is a space for women only”.

However, history has shown us many times that the default meaning of “women” is, in reality, “cis women”, so the use of “women” is a cause for concern if trans women are likely to be excluded.

And the fact that this pharmacy has opened in Vancouver is further cause for concern. The appalling treatment of Kimberly Nixon by Vancouver Rape Relief in 1995 resulted in a huge and destructive legal battle which still has implications today.

Ms Nixon had previously worked as a rape counsellor elsewhere, and the main reason she applied to VRR was because the shelter that she visited didn’t allow survivors they’d served to volunteer until 12 months had passed. She was initially accepted, but when it became known that she was a transsexual woman, she was forced to leave.

Ms Nixon took her grievance to a Human Rights tribunal – and won – but the decision was overturned by the British Columbia Court of Appeal in 2003. And in 2007, the Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear an appeal from the decision of the British Columbia Court of Appeal.

Effectively, the decision legitimised VRR’s “women only space” policy, which translates to meaning that only those who were born and raised female are allowed access. In my view, this is tantamount to holding trans women’s history against us – that something we have no control over is an ineradicable original sin which stains our lives forever.

It is this terrible history of cis women’s mistreatment of trans women in Vancouver that makes me wish that the VWHC would issue a formal clarification of their position on access by trans women to the resources offered by Lu’s Pharmacy.

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ETA: Thanks to Carto in comments (link here) for pointing out the paragraph in VWHC’s Our Political Agreements statement (direct link to PDF) which says:

Therefore, we feel that it is essential that a woman be born a woman and have the physiology of a woman and the psychological experiences of living as a girl and a woman in order to embrace the work of the Vancouver Women’s Health Collective. For us, membership and services are open to women who were born women.

So there y’go, that’s as clear as crystal.

And presumably, then, by that same essentialist definition, trans men will be welcomed with open arms…

7/7: Four years on

Today, 7th July 2009, is the fourth anniversary of the London bombings and for me, each year it has been a long day; a day of quiet contemplation.

Below is an excerpt from my private Journal of 7th July last year.

7 July 2008

Three years ago today at about 10 minutes to eight, I got off the Piccadilly line Tube at Russell Square and went into work as usual. An hour later, four terrorists detonated their bombs, murdering 52 people, injuring hundreds and turning upside down the lives of thousands of relatives and friends.

I was lucky; I wasn’t directly affected at all.

It was my second near miss with a terrorist atrocity: in 1996, on the day before it was detonated, I walked past the Manchester bomb on my way home from work. I could have reached out and touched the bonnet of the van containing the 3,300lb bomb.

I was lucky; I wasn’t directly affected at all.

The London bombings made me aware of the randomness of that sort of violence. The population of London was around 7 million – and almost any one of us could have been victims of the murderers. And I began to wonder how it would feel to reach the end of your life, only to realise that you’d completely wasted it; that there was nothing you could look back on with a sense of achievement, of happiness, of peace.

Over the course of the following year, that sense of a wasted life returned to me time and again, and always I would refuse to face up to the fact that I was denying my true identity, my sense of being gendered female. And each time I pushed those feelings down inside me was another act of self-harm. Until, eventually, I couldn’t take it any more.

And one sunny afternoon in August 2006, I found myself in the headspace where I knew I needed outside help to begin to heal the damage I had done to myself – and was ready to ask for that help. But I had to find that place by myself, and I wouldn’t have started that process without the events of July 2005.

Good things can come from bad. And even though they may not be the things we expected, we should cherish them and be happy for them, because life is too fragile, too precious and too short to waste.

We must live the lives that are ours.

Starting today.

trans privilege

It’s been asserted (link here) that trans people benefit from “trans privilege”. The implication I draw from that statement – assuming that “trans privilege” exists, of course – is that we are somehow using this privilege to attack cissexual people because they’re not trans.

However, “trans privilege” doesn’t seem to have been defined anywhere, so I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what it does mean. I wondered if I could find a definition by means of a reversal/substition of the term “cissexual privilege”, which has been given a now well-established definition by Julia Serano:

cissexual privilege
The privilege that cissexuals experience as a result of having their femaleness or maleness deemed authentic, natural, and unquestionable by society at large. Cissexual privilege allows cissexuals to take their sex embodiment for granted in ways that transsexuals cannot.

(Via Julia Serano – Whipping Girl: a glossary of sorts…)

I think that’s clear enough, so let’s go through the looking glass and see how that works with the appropriate reversals:

The privilege that transsexual people experience as a result of having their trans identities deemed authentic, natural, and unquestionable by society at large. Transsexual privilege allows trans people to take their sex embodiment for granted in ways that cissexual people cannot.

Frankly, I just can’t see that at all. It seems to me that if society at large really did accept our identities, then we’d have no need for the descriptors trans and cis in the first place. We are defined by cis people’s society; their privilege of having their subconscious sexes and their physical sexes in alignment gives them the power to position us as the Other. We are consequently at an immediate and significant disadvantage as we are the people who forever have to justify our identities, our selves, to them. At least, that’s my direct experience: all else follows.

As for the second part of the reverse definition, all I know is that my gender dissonance has had, and continues to have, such an immense and immeasurable impact on my life in so many ways, for so many years, that taking my sex embodiment for granted is simply not even an option, full stop.

“Trans privilege”? It’ll take a lot more to convince me that such a thing exists – and certainly not as a weapon with which to attack cis people. But I do wonder if there may be, amongst some cis people, a misapprehension of what it means to be a member of the marginalised and oppressed minority that is the trans community.

GIRES Award 2009 announced

The Gender Identity Research and Education Society has announced its Award for 2009:

The Award recognises the excellent work of eight eminent clinicians, who developed “Guidelines on the Endocrine Treatment of Transsexual Persons”

The Guidelines include a clear recommendation that suppression of pubertal hormones should start when girls and boys first exhibit physical changes of puberty, but no earlier than Tanner stages 2-3.

[...]

The Award is made in recognition of influential published work that will improve the lives of gender variant people.

The 2009 Award recognises the importance and excellence of the Endocrine Society “Guidelines on the Endocrine Treatment of Transsexual Persons”.

[...]

The Guidelines include a clear recommendation that suppression of pubertal hormones should start when girls and boys first exhibit physical changes of puberty, but no earlier than Tanner stages 2-3. That treatment is already available in highly reputable centres in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Norway, the Netherlands and the USA. The guidelines should now provide a substantial impetus to improving treatment in other countries, such as the UK, which require these young people to endure inappropriate full pubertal development before any physical intervention is offered.

Via http://www.gires.org.uk/awards.php

A Man Called Adam – Barefoot in the head

Loving you has made me strong
now I’m ready to go on
and my mind’s wide open, baby
I won’t let this feeling go
can’t believe this love is wrong

We are children of the light
and our kingdom is the night
I never dared to ask the questions
now I’ve found a thousand more
it can’t be wrong, it feels so right

We’re going to walk barefoot in the head
we’re going to run barefoot in the head
we’re going to dance barefoot in the head
we’re going to run til love has gone

I’m the queen of every hive
I’m the blaze on every hill
I think we’ve built a mountain, baby
and this is our ascension day
we are only in a pre-life
and my mind’s wide open, baby
I won’t let this feeling go

We’re going to walk barefoot in the head…

I put a seashell to my ear and it all comes back
the yellow sun
the mediterranean blue of the sky
the children running on the beach that day
the kildean birds marching in formation down to the sea and back
down to the sea and back

when my memory wanders, as it does when bad things happen,
I put a seashell to my ear and it all comes back…
that day…
you…

Lateisha Green: hate crime trial starts on Monday, July 13

Monday (July 13) sees the start of the trial of Dwight R. DeLee, who is charged with second-degree murder in connection with the shooting last November 14, 2008, of Latiesha “Teish” Green.

Ms Green and her brother, Mark Cannon, were shot with a rifle as they sat in a parked car. The bullet grazed the left arm of Mark Cannon, who was in the driver’s seat, and hit Ms Green in the chest.

From the start, Ms Green’s family pressed for her death to be treated as a hate crime, and the court case – which will be held in Syracuse, NY – will be tried as such, although the prosecution contends the victim was targeted because of sexual orientation. Ms Green’s sister, Shaconia Williams, said Ms Green called herself a transsexual woman.

Speaking in Cnylink Local News (link here), Roxanne Green, Teish’s mother, acknowledged that the spotlight has been hard for her at times.

“It’s bad enough to live with families that don’t approve,” said Roxanne Green. “I never expected a gay son and I have two. It needs to stop. They hurt and I hurt. I have a boy living with me now because he can’t go home. For these kids to fear school! Teish had to go to school late and leave school early. That was the school’s idea of helping! It made Teish angry. She wanted to go when everyone else did.”

[...]

“I relive a lot of things,” she said. “[She] really took something precious. I lost a mother when I was nine and that hurt. Losing a child is a whole different hurt.”

But Mary Alice Smothers [of the Wyoming St. P.E.A.C.E. office] doesn’t see this as different from other fights over the years.

“It’s always about the youth,” she said. “It’s always about empowering them to be able to speak and have their voice. We let adultism get in the way. They know where they want to go. As parents, we know we raised them on the right track and we have to let them.”

Gina Morvay has created a Facebook page to act as both a memorial for Ms Green and a clearing house for information about the trial. Here’s the link.

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Cross-posted at Questioning Transphobia

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Previous, related posts:

• Teisha Cannon murder: case to proceed as a hate crime prosecution (June 5, 2009)
• So that makes four trans people dead so far this month (November 18, 2008)

ID cards trial scheme to be voluntary

A few weeks ago I wrote (link here) about the proposed launch of a trial of the ID cards scheme in Manchester. Today the Press Association carried the news (link here) that the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, has announced that the trial scheme “which would have required some airport staff and pilots to carry the controversial cards” has been abandoned.

Mr Johnson said: “Holding an identity card should be a personal choice for British citizens – just as it is now to obtain a passport. Accordingly I want the introduction of identity cards for all British citizens to be voluntary and I have therefore decided that identity cards issued to airside workers, planned initially at Manchester and London City airports later this year, should also be voluntary.”

Asked if the cards would ever be made compulsory he said: “No”. “If a future Government wanted to make them compulsory it would require primary legislation,” he added.

In addition:

He also ruled out ever requiring the public to own a card. Previously, ministers said ID cards could become compulsory once 80% of the population was covered.

Which, superficially at least, is good news, especially from the point of view of those trans people who are in the difficult position of having “no-match” documentation. As the Daily Mail reported it last November:

People who are undergoing a sex change will be allowed two cards – one in each gender. But they will also be forced to pay twice – landing them with a £60 bill.

It has decided they will have to hold a card in their current sex, which can be used for travel in the EU.

But they will also be able to apply for a card – with corresponding picture – in the name and sex they are undergoing treatment to become.

In other words, they will dress and appear as they will once the sex change is complete.

For anyone falling into that category, a more offensive and frankly ludicrous proposal would have been hard to concoct. I hope that it will now be consigned to the history books.

But-there’s-a-but: “the cards will still be compulsory for foreign workers”, according to Mr Johnson. That’s bad enough in terms of the inherent racism, but there’s another reason to object to it, which is that it can only mean that the centralised database remains intact. The whole concept of the ‘database state’ has been described in detail, and campaigned against solidly, by NO2ID, and I’d once again recommend any interested party spends some time browsing their excellent website – here’s the link.

I don’t believe we’ve heard the last of this foolishness, not by a long way, but I’ll reserve further comment until I’ve tracked down the full details of Mr Jackson’s announcement.

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Previous related posts on this blog:

• Manchester ‘launch’ for ID cards (May 6, 2009)
• ID Theft? (April 8, 2009)
• National ID Card Petition (February 7, 2009)
• ID Cards update (November 24, 2008)

Links to external websites:

• Gender Spectrum UK – ID Cards Discussion (Public Forum)
• Identity and Passport Service – Identity cards and the National Identity Service
• Identity Cards Act 2006
• NO2ID