Lesson 4.1: Anti-Gender Politics and Displacement

2. Push Factors: Persecution, Surveillance, Public Hostility

As discussed in previous topics in this course, ‘anti-gender’ politics manifest through legislative change, public hostility, media discourses, and state repression. For queer, trans, and feminist activists in certain regions, these pressures create an environment where safety, dignity, and participation in public life become increasingly constrained and often endangered.

Across RESIST findings, participants consistently described how legal restrictions, police harassment, public hostility, and authoritarian governance pushed them to seek protection abroad. ‘Anti-gender’ mobilisations frequently coexist with nationalism, populism, or authoritarianism, creating layered exposures to harm.

Turkey / Northern Kurdistan Displacement as safety, strategy, and emotional rupture

For many Kurdish, feminist, queer, and trans activists, leaving Turkey / Northern Kurdistan was simultaneously an escape and a long-term strategy for survival and political continuity. In RESIST, exile describes a state of in-betweenness: safe, but not yet free; distant, yet still politically attached. Participants described an increasingly repressive environment post-2015, marked by bans on Pride marches, intensified online hostility, and targeted policing of gender- and minority-related activism. As Bawer explained:

[Since] 2015 the government started to directly attack the LGBTQIA+ movement […]it is difficult today, but it was always difficult. Homophobic violence [...] it has many forms. (Exile Report, p. 7)

Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, the collapse of the Kurdish peace process, and post-2016 emergency rule reinforced a climate where violence escalated and impunity prevailed. Hate crimes and femicides increased, and perpetrators were emboldened. Arat, a trans woman and and activst put it bluntly:

I would have died if I stayed in Turkey. (Exile Report, p. 7)

In the RESIST data, participants described an increasingly repressive environment post-2015, marked by bans on Pride marches, intensified online hostility, and targeted policing of gender- and minority-related activism.

Leaving was therefore not only a flight from violence but an act of political persistence.

• Egemen, an academic who signed a petition against state violence (an "Academics for Peace" petition, titled "We Will Not Be a Party to This Crime") fled to continue his scholarship. 
• Yazan, a gay left-wing politician, left after sustained media harassment and escalating threats.

‘Anti-gender’ politics in Turkey thus acted as:

• a push factor, producing direct persecution; and
• a framing device, branding queer, feminist, and Kurdish dissidents as “perverts”, “terrorists”, or threats to the nation.

Exile therefore can be seen as both personal rupture and a strategy for survival. In RESIST, exile describes a state of in-betweenness: safe, but not yet free; distant, yet still politically attached.

Kurdish-Turkish conflict: It is important to note that the Kurdish–Turkish conflict cannot be understood in isolation from Turkey’s longer history of authoritarian governance and repression of ethnic, religious, and political minorities. Policies of forced assimilation, denial of cultural rights, and state violence have affected a wide range of groups, including Armenians, Assyrians, Alevis, non-Muslims, leftists, and dissidents more broadly. However, within contemporary political, social, and cultural life in Turkey, the Kurdish question has become the most structurally defining axis of conflict. Due to its scale, duration, geographic scope, and centrality to state security policies, the Kurdish issue has profoundly shaped Turkey’s legal framework, militarisation, governance practices, and limits on democratic participation. As such, while repression in Turkey is neither new nor exclusive to Kurds, the Kurdish question remains the most decisive and enduring site through which authoritarian power has been organised and contested.

Belarus Repression, anonimity, and the loss of collective space

In Belarus, ‘anti-gender’ hostility is deeply woven into state governance. Participants linked repression of feminist and queer activism to an authoritarian strategy that portrays gender equality as a foreign threat to national stability and moral order.

After the 2020 protests, repression intensified. If prior to 2020 people had spaces to think together and heal, afterwards,only individual therapy was available, which could not replace community. People described feeling isolated. (Belarus Report, p. 10)

Another organiser described the atmosphere of constant alert, that they were constantly calculating risks, knowing that telling people the truth (about the severity of surveillance) would increase anxiety. The pressure never stops, as Belarus participants described (Belarus Report, p. 11)

Here, exile often followed deep isolation: a need not only for physical safety but for emotional survival.

Precariousness vs. Precarity? Precariousness in Judith Butler’s understanding is the shared human condition of vulnerability that binds us all in our susceptibility to harm. It demands that all lives are mourned equally and presumes an ethical commitment to sustaining a liveable life for all. Precariousness is different from precarity which Butler uses to define the varying levels of socially-induced disenfranchisements, with some groups of people being deprived from their right to a liveable life more than others, thus becoming rendered into disposable, non-grievable objects.