Transgender and gay identities have gone through three stages in Turkish history.

By Kaya Genç @ NY Review of Books, June 28 issue, article available free online now

[....] In a country where men and women are often relegated to strict gender roles, those who have a gender identity that is the opposite of their assigned sex or who are transitioning from one gender to another can find that their lives are in great peril.

Turkey, according to the organization Transgender Europe, has the highest rate of murders of transgender people in Europe. Since 2008 forty-four have been reported. There is also widespread discrimination [....] Many Turks became aware of the plight of trans people after seeing posts on Twitter and Facebook; some held protests in solidarity.

A certain ambiguity has defined Turkish attitudes toward gays, cross-dressers, and people who have a fluctuating gender identity since long before the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. The Ottomans tolerated homosexuality in public spaces, despite the Koran’s commandment [....]

The Turkish language doesn’t have gender pronouns. When the luminaries of Ottoman poetry wrote verses about beautiful boys, readers were left in the dark about the genders of their poems’ subjects, and so deciphering references to male beloveds itself became a feature of Ottoman poetry. In the sixteenth century, poems called şehrengiz (city thrillers) chronicled handsome boys in different towns [....]