MARCH 8: Centipede's Struggle and Women’s Coalition
written by Işıl Kurnaz
Aksu Bora and Güven Güzeldere was having a conversation via Açık Radyo on 8th March. Güzeldere was asking the women's movement the following question: "So where has the women's movement been?" This is a long term question, because it asks the struggle not only as a legal struggle, but also with its dynamism and world. The emotions within it, the destructions, the advances, sometimes the declines, sometimes the gains turning into losses. Let me call it a kind of sewing, a kind of knitting. Sometimes, when the ball gets tangled, to go back to the beginning, to be able to follow the end of the thread. It is what Ursula K. Le Guin taught us:
"There's no trace down here
Neither a goal, nor a path, nor ways [...]
In that haze
A movement, a glimmer, maybe"
I guess it reminds me the question of where the women's movement has come from and where it is going to. The fact that radical right-wing movements all over the world circulate a global narrative as if it were biological truth, and that women's and LGBTI+ movements all over the world are engaged in similar but geographically specific struggles for their rights reminds me of a glimmer that helps to clear such a hazy atmosphere. Trump declares that he sees the world as consisting of men and women, and women in certain roles; in Georgia, all regulations containing the word “gender” are replaced with the word “biological sex”; Poland opens the Istanbul Convention to discussion; Hungary both wants to leave the Convention and tries to replace the term "parenthood" in international texts with the term "motherhood". In other words, the curiosity to close the world on women and LGBTI+s does not really limit itself with geography. On the other hand, Turkey's women's struggle, continues to resist.
The political agenda seems determined to imprison women from Turkey in the Year of the Family. 2025 was declared the Year of the Family and the Vision Document on the Protection and Strengthening the family was prepared. Immediately afterwards, the Presidential Decree on Population Policies and the Presidential Decree on the Establishment of the Family Institute were issued. These decrees both reconstruct the responsibility for care work as women's, and instead of expanding employment opportunities for women, they include regulations that will withdraw women from work life under the guise of “family oriented-work models”; and they shape birth policies by stating that the fertility rate is decreasing. When talking about the family year, the fact that families are living under financial hardship and in deep poverty is not focus on. Rather, we are talking about a climate where biological sex is tried to be enacted into law instead of gender, where women are rebuilt by imprisoning them in caring roles in a family and their "nature", and where hate and hostility laws are discussed for LGBTI+s.
So much so that the latest reflected in the media draft law wants both to usurp civil gains and to clamp down on women and LGBTI+s together with rights organizations through criminal law mechanisms. By calling it indecent acts, it is intended to make it a crime to “act against the behaviors required by the natural biological sex and to encourage it”. This not only automatically criminalizes LGBTI+ persons, but also confines women to a certain model of femininity. The law, which completely blockades public appearance, carries risks such as making gender reassignment surgery virtually impossible, defining and fixing gender as a legal category, and exposing rights-defending organizations to legal prosecution. Moreover, it does this by resurrecting norms that were previously canceled by the Turkish Constitutional Court.
On the other hand, the women's movement is surrounded not only by the regulations that are being brought before us, but also by the regulations that are wanted to be brought before us. The Women's Coalition has been part of both a reactive and proactive struggle for a very long time. This includes both the reflexive of reacting quickly to the changes that are being proposed and being part of a pro-active struggle while those changes are still at the level of political discourse. Moreover, this is such a multidimensional structure that it builds an expanding part of a series of networks ranging from constitutional amendments and legal regulations to monitoring municipalities and local life. Therefore, a women's struggle that cannot be confined to the dichotomy of reaction and counter-reaction is being woven.
When describing how this struggle is trying to reach everywhere like centipede, İlknur Üstün, the coordinator of Women’s Coaliation said:
"The personal and strong relationship of our stories, the small issues that are not taken to serious, with gender equality, freedom and justice has also determined the areas we have been dealing with and the areas we have been oriented towards."
What she describes when describing the Women's Coalition actually describes the women's movement's wide-ranging mobility. Because with the Women's Coalition, we see that the Coalition is able to fight against tiny, invisible articles of law, the unnamed inequalities that we encounter in life, how a municipality's relationship with local life should be established, and the struggle for daycare centers in municipalities against policies that try to impose caring roles on women. The struggle includes being able to collect calls from dozens of women's organizations against the Istanbul Convention withdrawal case in a courtroom, being able to say "we are here, we are not leaving" against a law that has not yet come before us in any way. Women’s Coaliation, as an umbrella organization, is a systematic organization that did not allow the struggle to remain as a just reflex. Moreover, it did this as part of a process that moved from small policies to big law-making processes. In 2022, they were the ones who said "a constitution cannot be made under these conditions" against the political power that tried to build the constitutional amendment on women, and they were the ones who said "you have to make women, who are part of the problems, part of the solution". Therefore, a much wider struggle was being woven, dealing not only with the content of the issue, but also with its form and appearance.
For a very long time, women in Turkey have been struggling against an anti-gender narrative that resonates around the world. It is such a powerful political narrative that it is a systematic attack, ranging from withdrawing from the Istanbul Convention, to cutting funding to women's organizations fighting for gender equality, to introducing fate clauses in laws referring to biological sex. Moreover, it does not always only in the name of women's rights, but in some cases through the use of abstract categories such as “influence agent” and “incitement to hatred and enmity” in a way that usurps freedom of association manifest itself. But on the other hand, this is a forty-legged struggle like centipede.
To date, the women's and LGBTI+ movement has worked to remove "honor killing" discounts from the Penal Code, to call on the Constitutional Court to challenge provisions that reduce penalties for sexual assault committed against a woman who is unchaste, to pursue the annulment of a provision that requires the husband's permission for a woman to work, to file lawsuits against the withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, and to intervene in existing lawsuits, raising their voices when the right to kindergarten is being usurped, following women candidates in local and general elections, exposing the fact that access to abortion, sexual and reproductive health rights is virtually impossible, only equal fighting not for representation but also for equal participation.
What we are facing now is that the measures in Law No. 6284 after the Istanbul Convention are not being implemented, and that this Convention is wanted to be replaced with a new law that can more easily leave it to fate, and that rights arising from civil law, such as alimony rights, are wanted to be abolished, The introduction of mediation in family disputes, which is prohibited by the Istanbul Convention, under pretexts such as reducing divorces, which LGBTI+ persons and their organizations are reconstructed as “unjust subjects” with almost no rights, and women and LGBTI+ persons are carefully erased from public life. It Is the atmosphere now but is it possible to stop breathing just because the atmosphere is like this?
I answer this with Aksu Bora's conversation I mentioned at the beginning. The women's and LGBTI+ movement has been tested by bans until today. Always. On the other hand, when asked how hope can flourish in such a pessimistic climate, Aksu Bora reminded us that hope is not something that flourishes but something that is built, something that requires care and labor. Because she said this: Hope never returns to its starting point. Like that sparkle, that stirring that Ursula K. Le Guin reminded us of. The end of that poem goes like this:
"A movement, a glimmer, maybe: Waves,
Towers or hills?
Far, far.
The language of the rocks has changed."
In such a climate, the Women's Coalition sees how the language of the rocks changes. It is making waves and sparkles from towers and hills. While trying to influence the constitutional amendment agenda, they are preparing a local equality action plan for municipalities, saying that exiting the Istanbul Convention is not null and void, reminding the jurisprudence by following the cases where the Convention is applied one by one, showing how women's needs will be taken into account according to their different characteristics in a budgeting based on gender equality, how young women, old women, LGBTI+ persons will be made part of the policy.
You cannot stop breathing because the air is dirty, because hope never forgets the paths it has travelled and never returns to its starting point. It is always much further ahead than where it started.
About Işıl Kurnaz, PhD Ricercatore Diritti Umani e Diritto Costituzionale @ScuolaSant'Anna , Pisa/ Italy - visiting @University of Copenhagen/Denmark
https://www.santannapisa.it/it/isil-nur-kurnaz
https://jura.ku.dk/icourts/news/2025/new-visiting-researcher-at-icourts---isil-kurnaz/
