Remembering Hande Kader

Remembering Hande Kadar, a candle in the wind , August 2016

Hande Kadar – only a word to most of us. A transsexual woman in Istanbul who got murdered. Only one of so very many unnoticed, unreported killings. LGBT people are murdered throughout the Middle East, and all over the world every day. Is this one any different?

It is different: in Istanbul, LGBT people, and people who are just ordinary people in the most repressively anti-LGBT region of the world, have had the courage to rise up in protest. We need to support them.

Hande Kadar was a sex worker – the only source of employment open to someone who challenged the status quo in such a fundamental way in her heavily trammelled society. Hande Kadar used her status as someone completely outside of society to challenge society. She used her craziness, her outrageousness, her gift of getting noticed, to draw attention to repression. She figured large in the LGBT marches, and she did that imaginatively, loudly, even outrageously in Turkey – where repression closes ever more brutally on any form of diversity.

We need to support, not only the LGBT community in Turkey, but in particular an astonishingly brave woman who challenged the most ferocious form of despotism in the world today.

So let us say that Hande Kadar shall be our Stonewall. For Hande Kadar, we shall say NO!

Dale Millard, Gosport Talkbook