On the night between September 12th and 13th, Turkish police entered the homes of activists, searched the offices of LGBTQIAP+ associations, seized phones and computers, and raided their premises. The operation spanned fifteen provinces, involving 162 people, nine associations, and thirteen businesses. At the same time, a significant portion of the movement's digital space was blocked: association websites, media outlets, and accounts of activists, lawyers, and university groups.
The raid brings together very different entities: long-standing and internationally recognized organizations like Kaos GL, associations working on HIV, but also clubs and venues for queer social interaction and sexuality. The investigations focus on sex work, drugs, "obscenities," and other alleged crimes. Turkish activists we are in contact with interpret this overlap as a deliberate strategy to legitimize repression in public opinion: associating the LGBTQIAP+ movement with drugs, prostitution, and crime allows the raid to be presented not as a political attack on its organized structures, but as an operation to defend society, children, and the family. This interpretation is echoed in the authorities' own language: the Prosecutor's Office speaks of the need to prevent the "normalization" of these practices in the eyes of society, while the Ministry of Justice invokes the combined protection of minors, family, and "common moral values." The government calls the operation Ailem Güvende, meaning "My family is safe."The name isn't a propaganda detail. It speaks volumes about what's happening in Turkey and, at the same time, about a reactionary offensive we're familiar with even in this part of Europe. The family must be defended, children must be saved, the declining birth rate, "nature," "morality," gender, and queer and trans people transformed into a threat: these are words that have been circulating for years across borders, right-wing parties, governments, and anti-gender movements. In Turkey, this political grammar has gradually become state policy.
The repression of the movement has been a longstanding tradition. In Istanbul, Pride has been banned annually since 2015, yet each year the movement still tries to reclaim the streets. Similar bans affect Pride and LGBTQIAP+ initiatives in other cities, and the response has become almost ritual: police cordons, dispersed marches, violence, and arrests. Last June, the 24th Istanbul Pride was held in Kadiköy despite the ban: 65 people were arrested. During Pride Month itself, there were other arrests in Izmir, Ankara, and during the Istanbul Trans Pride. So, it's not that the LGBTQIAP+ presence in public spaces has disappeared: the price paid to make it visible has become increasingly high.
The current phase's shift toward family-centeredness, however, reached a crucial point in 2021, when Erdogan withdrew Turkey from the Istanbul Convention against Violence against Women. The government openly linked this decision to homosexuality, arguing that the Convention had been used to "normalize" it, detrimental to social and family values. It is no coincidence that the attack on women's rights and that on LGBTQIAP+ people converge precisely here. The family is constructed as a body under siege, to be protected simultaneously from feminism, women's self-determination, queer and trans subjectivities, and anything that undermines the naturalization of gender roles.
It is a construction that becomes increasingly organic in the following years. Campaigns against so-called "LGBT propaganda" intertwine with proposals to constitutionalize heterosexual marriage, pronatalist policies, and the attack on gender affirmation programs. A decisive step forward comes in 2024: with the Family Protection and Strengthening Vision Document and Action Plan 2024-2028, the protection and strengthening of the family becomes a multi-year state program, structured into five strategic objectives, fifteen targets, and one hundred actions, and entrusted to national and provincial bodies. This is followed by the "Year of the Family" in 2025 and, this year, the launch of the "Decade of Family and Population 2026-2035."
We don't have to make the connection with what's happening today: Justice Minister Akin Gürlek himself placed Operation "Ailem Güvende" within this policy. The family thus becomes not only the object to be protected, but the criterion by which to establish which bodies, relationships, and forms of life are legitimate and which can be surveilled, censored, and criminalized.
Nor is it a Turkish exception. Over the past fifteen years, transnational anti-gender networks like the World Congress of Families have brought together the American Christian Right, Russian conservatism, and European right-wing movements. Putin's Russia has been a laboratory for the criminalization of so-called "homosexual propaganda"; Orbán has built a central part of his political project around family and birth rates; in Italy, the World Congress of Families itself met in Verona with the participation of the League. We have no evidence to support a direct organizational relationship between this network and Turkish family organizations. There's no need to invent it: the circulation of the same political grammar is already evident.
And in fact, the September crackdown doesn't stop at individuals. It affects the very possibility of organizing. According to the Istanbul Bar Association, 11 LGBTQI+ association websites and 419 social media accounts or addresses have been blocked, while another 107 have been requested to be blocked. Legal international funding, advocacy activities, publications, and fundraising efforts are being questioned. Associations that have been working for decades for LGBTQIAP+ rights and against HIV are being treated as potential criminal organizations.
And when the movement responded, the repression continued. In the days following the raids, people took to the streets in Izmir, Ankara, and Istanbul. The police also intervened against these demonstrations: 125 people were arrested and later released. In front of the Çaglayan courthouse in Istanbul, more than a hundred people were taken away and even the reading of the statement was prevented. It's important to distinguish these arrests from the arrests of the initial operation: those who took to the streets to demand the release of their comrade returned; many of those they were demonstrating for did not.
As of September 23, at least 83 people remain in pre-trial detention. And they aren't just people randomly rounded up in a raid. The crackdown is directly impacting the movement's memory, expertise, and organizational structures. Seven members of the governing and supervisory bodies of Kaos GL, founded in 1994 and a key part of Turkey's LGBTQIAP+ history, are in prison. Journalist Tugba Tekerek is also detained; among the evidence used against her is a 2024 article on the LGBTQIAP+ movement in Georgia published by Kaos GL.
Umut Derin Eroglan, Janset Kalan, and Nedime Erdogan are currently in prison. Nedime is a mother who has been working for years to ensure families understand and support their LGBTQIAP+ children: being incarcerated under the "My Family is Safe" operation almost brutally highlights the paradox of this policy. Janset Kalan, a longtime trans activist, from Sincan prison has instead asked that attention not remain focused solely on the people best known and most supported by the movement. She receives visitors, has lawyers, friends, journalists, and international networks who know where she is. Many other trans people in prison do not. Her appeal is simple: "Remember the trans people detained in Sincan and in all other prisons; make sure they are not left alone."
This is not an abstract appeal. Kaos GL reports forced strip searches, homophobic insults and threats, isolation, poor access to medication, and other ill-treatment from prisons. Approximately half of its detained members are reportedly held in solitary confinement. The reports were subsequently taken up by Amnesty International.
The response to the crackdown quickly spread beyond Turkey's borders. On September 21, more than 450 organizations from over 65 countries signed a joint appeal calling for the release of prisoners and against the criminalization of the LGBTQIAP+ movement. The signatories include queer, feminist, anti-violence, and human rights networks. The appeal explicitly denounces a broader anti-gender policy based on the patriarchal control of bodies, identities, and relationships, and the attempt to transform legal activities-association work, advocacy, publications, fundraising, and international funding-into elements of a criminal investigation. ( International Appeal "Stop the Criminalization of the LGBTI+ Movement in Turkey" )
On September 21 in Ankara, the movement reversed the government's name for the raids: "My family is not safe. My family is in prison, my family is in custody."
This is perhaps the most accurate way to describe what's happening. Because the family evoked by the government doesn't include the families who support queer and trans children, the chosen families, the networks of care and solidarity built by the movement. The repression seeks to break down precisely those relationships: by blocking the places where people meet, arresting organizers, isolating those who end up in prison.
But this also raises a question that concerns us. This roundup has received very little coverage in the Italian press so far, despite marking a turning point in the criminalization and repression of LGBTQIAP+ people in Turkey. Why does a repression of this scale struggle to make headlines? Our lives matter, but some Italian media outlets don't seem to give them the same weight. And silence also creates a narrative: it determines which lives deserve attention, which acts of violence become newsworthy, and which can remain invisible. This deafening silence, too, is propaganda.
Babs Mazzotti
Editor's note: In this article, I chose to use the acronym LGBTQIAP+ because it speaks to different subjectivities and mobilizations. In recent days, the Turkish movement's press releases and appeals have mostly used the more concise acronyms LGBTI+ and LGBT, which I've retained when I directly reference their formulations.
https://umanitanova.org/la-mia-famiglia-e-in-carcere-turchia-repressione-e-resistenza-dei-movimenti-lgbtqiap/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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