There Is No Turning Back from Our Feminist Struggle! No to Interference in Our Lives!
This year, for the 15th time, as women and trans people at the Feminist Night March, here we are again, side by side in the streets, in the square, on İstiklal Caddesi, in the midst of life. Together we stand against the state that instills fear in us and tries to drive us women out of the streets, squares, nights, universities, public life, our workplaces and politics, and against men who attack our bodies every day. Even under the destructive conditions of the state of emergency, we do not hold back from doing what we know best; we are not going anywhere, we resist, because there is no turning back in either our lives or our struggle! We know every kind of conservatism and male domination best; we know best how they attack women. They want us to get scared and return home when we hear news of a kick aimed at a woman wearing shorts, an attack on a pregnant woman in a park, the rape of a woman returning home at night. We hear this news because, as we know, they are legitimizing existing male domination more and more each day. Not only do men go unpunished, they are rewarded; the law continues to work for them. Yet far from being afraid or retreating, we strengthen one another through women’s solidarity and do not retreat from the streets. While the AKP government imposes the heterosexist, Turkish and Sunni family on all of us, trans people targeted by these policies are murdered by men in their homes and in the streets; their killers are protected and encouraged by the state itself. As the number of women and trans people taken from us by male violence increases every day, male justice lets women’s killers benefit from every kind of sentence reduction granted to men and hands them sentences like rewards, while raining harsh punishments on women who defend their lives. With the nationalist security policies it has rallied behind it, the AKP increasingly narrows our living spaces. Bombs are falling on our lives. While leaving no incentive untried to make us start families, they want to shut us women inside the family, isolate us and weaken us. They want us to give birth, look after children, work flexibly, and, through laws on agency labor and childcare allowances for maternal grandmothers at home, be condemned to a lifetime of unskilled, insecure work. Marriage incentives and the divorce commission both lead to the same place: the family. We have been saying it for years; let us say it again: We owe children neither to the state nor to men. On the contrary, men are indebted to us! We have had our fill of marriage incentives, too. Do you know what the increase in divorces despite so many incentives says? Women have now taken to the streets, women are claiming their lives, and there is no turning back! Through the opportunism of the state of emergency, added to the destruction of war and the bombs falling on our lives, they close oppositional women’s institutions while establishing women’s institutions close to themselves, so they can say, “Look, we work with women’s organizations too.” Women mayors and local administrators, and the women’s counseling and solidarity centers created through their efforts, are being usurped by appointed trustees. The incoming trustees’ first act is to close women’s centers, even to say that women cannot be bus drivers. Women MPs who are our voice in parliament, who try to put equal representation into practice, who are our companions in feminist struggle, are arrested and attempts are made to silence them. They try to shove us out of parliament and social life. But if we are not in parliament, we are in the streets; if not in the municipality, we are in the squares, and under every condition, everywhere, we shout that another kind of world is possible through women’s solidarity. With laws they pass through parliament at midnight without our knowledge, they try to pave the way for a child to marry her abuser and to usurp, one by one, the gains women have won through the civil code and international conventions. We won our rights; of course we will defend them. We laugh off those who think we will wait silently and bow to our “fate.” Better still, we send them our joyful laughter. This March 8 we are much stronger than ever. Because in different parts of the world, women are on strike, in the streets, in rebellion against similar conservative, racist, militarist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic state policies. This year March 8 is a March 8 when women everywhere in the world come together, object and say no to war, male domination and violence, heterosexism and every kind of discrimination. Women’s solidarity crosses borders! We escape the loneliness and fear into which harsh times push us by once again drawing strength and courage from one another. Our night march is both an expression and a renewed declaration of this togetherness and determination. Today we are here together as women in a thousand and one forms, with a thousand and one methods of struggle. We grow stronger through our differences and struggle side by side, hand in hand, against the threats directed at our lives. We will continue until we have put an end to the breed of those who think they have the right to interfere with what we wear, whom we have sex with, our pleasure, when we go out, our abortions when we become pregnant, when, how much and in what tone we speak, and our laughter. We will build life anew, ourselves. From here we declare once again to men and the male state: No to anything less than one hundred percent equality! No to a life bounded by the family! No to equal labor for unequal pay and insecure work! No to war and cross-border operations! No to our rights and freedoms being trimmed and ground to dust! No to male justice and the male state! No to the head of the family and the head of the state alike! We abandon neither the nights nor the streets nor the squares! There is no turning back from our feminist struggle! Next year, too, we will meet in this space to raise the voice of feminist struggle. Long live our Feminist Struggle! Long live March 8!
Feminists
March 8, 2017