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Paper short abstract

Based on archival sources and ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines transfeminine resistance in Turkey, focusing on the core demands that underpin it and how it is continually shaped by the precarity experienced by transfeminine (sex worker) communities.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines transfeminine resistance in Turkey, focusing on the core demands that underpin it and how it is continually shaped by the precarity experienced by transfeminine (sex worker) communities. Combining archival sources with ethnographic fieldwork, the article approaches resistance as a dynamic, socially and historically emergent process. The archival research draws on oral history and media sources to trace transfeminine resistance from the 1970s to the present, situating it within broader political, economic, and legal contexts. Complementing this, the ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Izmir intermittently between 2017 and 2019 with a transfeminine sex worker community offers an in-depth analysis of how resistance unfolds in everyday life and is both informed by and negotiated through material realities. Together, these sections demonstrate that transfeminine struggle has been rooted primarily in the access to basic material conditions, namely safety, home, and subsistence. While shared vulnerability, produced by the intersecting forces of violence, spatial exclusion, policing, and economic marginalization, provides grounds for collective action, resistance also exposes individuals to risks of bodily harm, detention, and the loss of livelihood or home. This makes resistance a fragile and risky terrain for those pushed to the furthest margins of social, political, and economic life. Compared to much of the global public or media debates on trans lives, these observations highlight a class dimension that critically shapes the daily circumstances and forms of organizing within transfeminine (sex worker) communities in urban Turkey.