Turkey’s Long War on Its Own LGBTQ+ Citizens

Note: The official name of Turkey is Türkiye.

Turkish police moved before dawn on the weekend of September 13, 2026, breaking into the offices of LGBTQ+ associations across twelve provinces, detaining at least 47 people, and seizing drugs, phones, alcohol, and a firearm along the way. By the following Monday, the country’s justice minister confirmed the operation had widened into judicial proceedings against 162 suspects, nine associations, and thirteen businesses spanning fifteen provinces, with a parallel investigation targeting the veteran rights group Kaos GL resulting in 21 more detentions in Ankara alone. Dozens of websites and social media accounts belonging to LGBTQ+ organizations were blocked in the same sweep. When activists gathered outside Istanbul’s Caglayan courthouse two days later to protest, police detained dozens of them too.

The operation carries an official name — “My Family Is Safe” — and an official justification, framed by Justice Minister Akin Gurlek as necessary to protect children, family, and public order. Turkey’s Human Rights Association offered a blunter description on social media, calling it state-organized discrimination and the dismantling of civil society dressed up in a family-friendly name. The Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner, Michael O’Flaherty, weighed in directly, noting that invoking family values does not give a government legal cover to restrict human rights.

What makes the September raids notable isn’t that they’re unprecedented. It’s that they’re the latest entry in a campaign that has been running, openly and with growing intensity, for more than a decade — one that says a great deal about where Turkey has been and where its government wants it to go next.

A country that decriminalized homosexuality before most of Europe

The strangest fact in this story is also the oldest one. The Ottoman Empire removed homosexuality from its criminal code in 1858, as part of the sweeping Tanzimat reforms that also imported large parts of the Napoleonic legal system. That makes today’s Turkey one of the earliest jurisdictions on earth to decriminalize same-sex relations — a fact that predates Britain’s partial decriminalization by more than a century, and one that Ottoman art and literature reflected fairly openly at the time, in a culture where European visitors were simultaneously scandalized and fascinated by it. When the modern Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923, its new penal code carried the same silence forward: no law was ever written to criminalize gay sex, and transgender Turks have been able to legally change their gender since 1988.

None of that legal tolerance translated into social safety, and by the late twentieth century Turkey’s queer community had begun organizing anyway. An early attempt to hold an Istanbul pride event in 1993, timed to Christopher Street Day, was banned outright by the city’s governor — a rejection that directly prompted the founding of LambdaIstanbul that same year. Kaos GL followed in Ankara in 1994, starting as a small newspaper before growing into one of the country’s most enduring rights organizations; it became the first Turkish LGBT group to achieve legal registration as an association, in 2005, after initially having that application appealed by Ankara’s deputy governor.

The years it looked like things might open up

Istanbul held its first Pride march in 2003, making Turkey the first Muslim-majority country to host one. For over a decade, it grew rather than shrank: Ankara added its own march in 2008, and by 2013 — the same year Gezi Park protesters joined the parade — Istanbul Pride drew a reported 100,000 people. The 2014 march matched or exceeded that number. For a brief window, Turkey looked like an outlier success story in a region where almost nowhere else permitted this kind of public queer visibility.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s own rhetoric tracked that opening, and then reversed it just as visibly. Before his first election as prime minister in 2003, he stated publicly that homosexuals deserved legal protection of their rights and freedoms. By 2013, he was describing homosexuality as a preference incompatible with Islamic culture. The shift wasn’t cosmetic — it tracked, almost exactly, onto policy.

2015 and after: the closing

In June 2015, the Istanbul governorate banned Pride at the last minute, citing security concerns during Ramadan, and police dispersed the crowd with tear gas and water cannon. It has stayed banned every year since. Ankara went further in 2017, issuing an indefinite ban on all LGBTI events in the capital — a prohibition Human Rights Watch called for the government to lift as early as 2019, documenting in the same report how Middle East Technical University disciplined 28 students for marching on campus grounds, detained a student LGBTI group’s representative, and opened a confidential investigation against him.

The human cost of that closing climate became impossible to ignore in August 2016, when Hande Kader — a transgender activist and sex worker who had become a recognizable face of the movement after sitting down in front of riot police and water cannon at the banned 2015 Pride — was found raped and murdered, her body burned, in a forest outside Istanbul. Her death, coming weeks after the similarly brutal killing of Syrian refugee Muhammed Wisam Sankari, drew hundreds of mourners into the streets and became a rallying point that outlived the news cycle; a support and rights organization in the Turkish capital carries her name today. Turkish LGBTI groups had already documented 41 trans and gender-diverse people killed between 2008 and 2015 — the second-highest total recorded in Europe over that period, behind only Italy.

The 2019 Middle East Technical University Pride march — where students marched despite the ban — led to nineteen activists being charged with unlawful assembly; they weren’t acquitted until 2021, after a repeatedly delayed trial. By 2023, campaigning for re-election, Erdoğan’s ruling coalition had formally allied itself with the New Welfare Party and HÜDAPAR, both of which had made closing down LGBTI associations an explicit demand as part of the coalition agreement, according to monitoring by ILGA-Europe.

Family, birth rates, and a new vocabulary of attack

Around 2025, the government’s language shifted again, this time folding LGBTQ+ hostility into a demographic argument. Turkey’s fertility rate had fallen to 1.48 children per woman in 2025 — down further to 1.42 by the time the next year’s statistics were released, and below the replacement threshold of 2.1 for nine consecutive years. Erdoğan declared 2025 the “Year of the Family” and, at the International Family Forum in Istanbul in May of that year, announced that 2026 through 2035 would be a “Decade of Family and Population,” a national mobilization aimed at reversing the decline. In the same speech, he described the LGBTQ+ movement as a form of fascism and oppression and warned that so-called “degendering projects” threatened national security, framing opposition to the movement as a matter of human dignity.

That framing gave the government’s subsequent actions a ready-made justification: restricting LGBTQ+ people wasn’t discrimination, in the official telling, it was defending the family against a hostile ideology. In December 2025, a Turkish court ordered an LGBT organization closed entirely, citing social media posts it judged obscene and capable of encouraging what it called LGBT behaviors — one of the abusive uses of obscenity law that Human Rights Watch has tracked as a recurring tool against both organizations and individuals; in May 2026 a well-known singer stood trial, and was ultimately acquitted, over a song widely read as being about same-sex desire. HRW’s June 2026 report also flagged a resurfacing legislative proposal that could go further still, criminalizing LGBT people directly and restricting access to gender-affirming healthcare — a law that, if passed, would be a first: explicit criminalization has never existed in the century-plus history of the Turkish Republic, only a widening set of morality and obscenity statutes bent to the same purpose.

Where things stand

None of this is footnoted history — it’s the direct backdrop to the raids that opened this piece. “My Family Is Safe” isn’t a rupture from the pattern; it’s the pattern’s most recent and most coordinated expression, arriving nine years into a Pride ban and running in parallel with a pro-natalist campaign that treats visible queer life as a symptom of the same demographic crisis it wants families to solve. Homosexuality itself remains, technically, exactly as legal in Turkey today as it was the day the Ottoman penal code stopped criminalizing it in 1858. What has narrowed, steadily and by design, is everything around that bare legal fact: the right to assemble, to register an organization, to run a nightclub, to sing a love song without a prosecutor deciding who it was written about.

A rough timeline

Year	Event
1858	Ottoman Empire decriminalizes homosexuality under the Tanzimat reforms
1923	Republic of Turkey founded; new penal code carries no law against homosexuality
1988	Legal gender change becomes possible for transgender citizens
1993–94	Istanbul Pride attempt banned; LambdaIstanbul and Kaos GL founded in response
2003	First Istanbul Pride held — the first in a Muslim-majority country
2013–14	Istanbul Pride peaks at roughly 100,000 participants
2015	Istanbul Pride banned for the first time; tear gas used to disperse marchers; ban has continued every year since
2016	Hande Kader murdered; mass protests follow
2017	Ankara issues an indefinite ban on all LGBTI events
2019–21	Nineteen METU students prosecuted for an unauthorized Pride march; acquitted after a two-year trial
2023	Erdoğan’s coalition formally allies with parties demanding LGBTI association closures
2025	“Year of the Family” declared; Erdoğan calls the LGBTQ+ movement a form of fascism at the International Family Forum
Dec. 2025	Court orders an LGBT organization closed over social media posts
2026–35	“Decade of Family and Population” launched
Sept. 2026	“My Family Is Safe” raids: 162 people in judicial proceedings, nine associations and thirteen businesses targeted across fifteen provinces