In Erdogan’s Turkey, trans people are portrayed as a threat to the traditional family

Alek Demir (19) already felt that he was different as a child. When he read online about being trans at the age of thirteen, the penny dropped. “At first I thought I was gender fluid or lesbian. I knew little about gender and identity. Only later did I really start to understand: I don’t feel like a girl, I’m a boy,” he says on the couch in his apartment in Ankara. Demir, a Language and Literature student at Ankara University, moved to a new home three weeks ago and now lives with a friend and their two cats. The night before, they dyed his curly hair blue together. There are still remnants of blue paint stuck to his painted nails.

Recently, the rules in Turkey for hormone treatments have become much stricter and the age to receive them has been increased from 18 to 21 years. That decision is related to the ‘Year of the Family’, as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan named 2025. Erdogan has been lashing out at the LGBTI+ community for years, regularly portraying them as perverse and a threat to traditional values. “LGBTI+ is a poison injected into the institution of the family,” Erdogan said.

When Turkey withdrew from the Istanbul Convention, the international treaty against violence against women, in 2021, it was difficult to separate it from Erdogan’s rhetoric around trans people. According to the government, the treaty would promote the “normalization of homosexuality”. Since then, pressure on the LGBTI+ community has continued to increase. The pride was already banned in 2015. More and more queer artists are under fire in pro-government media and are sometimes prosecuted for “obscenity.” In January, the state broadcaster TRT a documentary with the title ‘Rainbow fascism‘.

Because it has become so much more difficult to obtain hormone treatment in a short time, interest group Hormon Hakkim Kollektifi was founded in March. Literally: the ‘I have the right to hormones’ collective. “When the age limit of 21 years was introduced, we, together with other activists and organizations, started drawing attention to hormonal care and physical autonomy of trans people,” says founder and trans activist Ecmel Deniz (27) on a terrace in Ankara. “Due to political pressure, we had to respond quickly to new bills and attacks from the government. We are not only trying to fight against that age limit, but to draw broader attention to the health problems that trans people face.”

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Consent from doctors and committees

For Demir, the consequences of a higher minimum age are major. In 2024, when he was seventeen, he started taking testosterone to develop physical male characteristics. Although a prescription was officially required for testosterone, the drug could still be obtained relatively easily in some Turkish pharmacies at the time. Later that year, enforcement became stricter and he still had to go through an extensive medical process to receive a prescription.

“First you have to see a psychiatrist. Then you are sent to various departments in the hospital to collect signatures. For hormone therapy you need permission from several doctors and committees. In some hospitals this takes years, or they require that your parents be involved. I was lucky with the Hacettepe University in Ankara. There it went relatively quickly: within five months I received permission for hormones.”

With that official document he was able to pick up testosterone again at the pharmacy last year. Until the Turkish government introduced stricter rules again. In June, Demir received his first dose of testosterone. Twelve days later, the minimum age was raised to 21 and he was once again unable to obtain it. Holding the official prescription from that time in his hand, he sighs: “If I had known it would be so complicated, I would have stocked up on testosterone when I first moved here and there were no restrictions yet.”

Since then, Demir has been trying to obtain testosterone through alternative routes. So far it’s still working out quite well. With the help of his roommate, he has just injected his last dose. He has now found a new dose through the grapevine. While he was working in a cafe, someone approached him and asked if he still needed testosterone. “In this way we try to help each other. We do not have an official network, because we are afraid that we will be persecuted, but informally we keep in touch about how we can obtain hormones.”

Stopping hormones is not an option: “My voice has changed, my Adam’s apple has become visible, my face has changed… These are things I have been waiting for for a long time. This is not just something temporary for me: this is who I am.”

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Due to testosterone use, Demir grows a beard, which he occasionally shaves (left). Alek’s roommate helps him with a new dose of testosterone at home in Ankara (right).

Photos Efekan Akyuz

Criminalizing public expressions

In addition to raising the age limit, a draft of a new judicial reform package was also leaked last year. The idea was that certain public expressions of queer identity could be criminalized, with prison sentences of up to three years. After fierce criticism from society and human rights organizations, these proposals ultimately disappeared from the table. Yet, according to activists, the leak clearly shows the direction the government wants to take.

Deniz indicates that with Hormon Hakkim Kollektifi they try to talk directly to politicians and ministers, but that this has become virtually impossible. “Even to our official petitions, we often do not receive an answer. When we recently wanted to submit a petition to the Ministry of Health, we were surrounded by the police and threatened with arrest. We are still in contact through individual parliamentarians from opposition parties, but this is limited to symbolic support. Open LGBTI+ activism in parliament has become virtually impossible in the last ten years.”

Doctors and psychiatrists who offer gender-affirming care – to help transgender and non-binary people feel more at home in their own bodies – or who speak out publicly about this are also increasingly confronted with intimidation campaigns. For example, in 2021 a psychiatrist was attacked in pro-government media for his work on transgender care and later also physically abused. One of Turkey’s first openly trans doctors lost her job at a state hospital after colleagues complained that her presence would be “against morals.” Although a judge later reversed that dismissal, she was removed from her position again this year. A legal investigation is now also underway against her.

Proposals are now circulating to increase the minimum age for hormone treatments and legal gender transition to 25 years. In addition, the plan states that trans people must be permanently infertile in order to legally change their gender. It is also the intention that both doctors who offer hormone treatments and trans people themselves can be criminalized, human rights organization Amnesty International writes in a fact sheet.

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‘This is about bodily autonomy’

The government presents the stricter rules as a way to protect individuals, the traditional family and society. But according to both Demir and Deniz, the policy is mainly about discouragement and control. They argue that the government does not base its decision on science or medical expertise, but on ideological views on gender and family. “We are being pushed into a system in which the state determines who can and cannot use these medicines,” says Deniz. “This is not just about access to a medicine, but about bodily autonomy and who gets to decide that.”

Due to the increasingly conservative climate in Turkey, Demir feels pressure to quickly arrange gender confirmation surgery. “They said to the psychiatrist: apply for permission now, before there are restrictions for that too. First there were rules regarding hormones, and later perhaps also for operations. If there is a ban later, with such a permit you might still have a chance of having an operation.”

Demir’s parents initially reacted with sadness and disapproval coming out. They were afraid he would throw away his future. They have now become milder. He received immediate support, especially from his sister. “In any case, my mother does her best to use my new name, and I honestly didn’t expect that. My father sometimes still calls me by my old name or says ‘my daughter’, but as long as he doesn’t out me in public, it doesn’t bother me as much. What’s more important to me is that he has said that he will be there for me if I ever have an operation.”

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