Our call to women and trans people:
The wave of actions that began on October 3 in Poland with women’s one-day #SiyahProtesto, defending their bodies and choices against the abortion ban, reached Argentina and grew stronger as opposition to femicides mounted. In Argentina, Poland, Italy, Iceland and America, women poured into the streets saying #BirKişiDahaEksilmeyeceğiz. Women’s rebellions sweeping the world, their determination to claim their lives and their firm stand against discrimination and inequality are spreading in waves. The women of Argentina are right: “This March 8, the earth will shake!”
For us, since March 8, 2016, when we filled Taksim with 10,000 people, the earth has been shaking in many different ways: We rebel because we do not forget!
We do not forget that while patriarchy grows by intensifying its violence, we are expected to shrink, to be erased from the streets and from life, to become cowed and isolated!
Male violence continues in the streets, on public transport, at home, at work, in parliament and at school. While women are most often murdered when trying to divorce or separate, or because they do not want to reconcile, we do not forget that through the strength of our solidarity we blocked the Turkish parliament’s Divorce Commission’s attempts to prevent divorce and stigmatize relationships outside marriage!
We do not forget the closure by decree laws of women’s associations and centers to which women seeking escape from male violence turn, the attempt to lock up women’s solidarity!
We do not forget that in 2016 in Turkey they tried to whitewash sexual abuse through marriage, and that we stopped this through our organizing!
We do not forget that women public-sector workers, academics and journalists who signed a text for peace, went on strike within their legal rights, or worked at press and publishing institutions that gave space to oppositional voices were dismissed overnight through arbitrary lists!
This year we have seen what war means for us, how it recognizes no borders, how it infiltrates everywhere by circulating its own imagery too. We try to carry on our lives under the threat of bombs and the shadow of guns. We also know war through the experiences of Syrian women and all migrant women in this country; we do not forget!
We are living through a period in which Turkey is becoming more conservative and there is no tolerance left for lives outside what those in power deem appropriate. We experience increasing hatred and discrimination against LGBTI+ people. We know our liberation lies in our own struggle, not in men who “presume to teach” us how to live, what to wear, where to be at what time, whom to love and whom to have sex with; not in those building their politics on this; not in those seeing us not as subjects but as symbols of their own battle!
That is why we say no to fathers, husbands, lovers, bosses and state “elders” who believe men should make the decisions about our lives, steal our hope for peace by threatening us with civil war, tell us to surrender our lives unquestioningly into the hands of a single man, and mix lies with threats to force us to consent and depend on them! Against those trying to dominate us at home, at work and in the streets, to say our lives and our choices are ours and we will never give them up, we will be at the Feminist Night March in Taksim on March 8 at 19.30!