When state power begins to dictate gender and sexual identity, that power may then be classified as a “violent intimacy,” argued Dr. Asli Zengin, the Allen-Berenson postdoctoral fellow in the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies program in a lecture on Friday.

Zengin, who came to the University in 2015, has conducted years of research on sex and gender in Istanbul, and presented on how transgender individuals are treated in Turkey and how the government interacts with them.

In her lecture, she argued that the state exercises its power in an “intimate” way, becoming involved with individuals’ gender identity and sexuality to a degree that then becomes violent. These so-called “violent intimacies,” she elaborated, are especially evident in two aspects of trans life: the gender reassignment process and the death and burial process.

Zengin began her lecture by explaining that Turkey issues two different colored identification cards to its citizens: pink for women and blue for men. She spoke about her experiences interviewing and interacting with transgender women in Istanbul, and how, in one particular case, a postoperative trans woman described how a doctor told her to exercise her reconstructed vagina with a cylindrical tool, as the state examination she needed in order to get her pink card relied on whether her new vagina was more than 4 inches deep, or roughly the length needed to accommodate a penis. “‘The state rapes us to make sure we’re female enough,’” Zengin remembered the woman telling her. Such a practice is a “violent intimacy of the state,” Zengin argued.

Zengin also cited the famous case of Bülent Ersoy, one of the first well known trans women in Turkey. Ersoy, who got her start as a singer and performer in the 1970s, was shunned from the music scene after coming out as trans. Though she returned to Turkey as a postoperative woman, it took her years of lobbying to be legally recognized as a woman, Zengin recalled.

She added that the policy for legal gender transitions in Turkey was altered in 2002, when the new conservative government added hurdles to the process and made the requirements for obtaining a government ID card more difficult. Now, she explained, trans individuals must appear in court to obtain the new identification, and they must be unmarried, sterile and possessing a medical report stating that gender reassignment is medically necessary. After surgery, she reiterated, trans individuals must demonstrate to government officials that they possess a “proper” penis or vagina. This whole process — including the mandatory psychological evaluations needed to obtain a medical referral — can take well over two years, she added.

Zengin then discussed how Turkey’s treatment of transgender individuals fits into the government’s conservative approach to reproductive justice rights and women’s rights overall. The government, she said, can often limit how women obtain jobs and care for their families, and can also impact how LGBT individuals function in society. Gender reassignment surgery regulations, she added, base themselves on “what the trajectory for intimate life should be” according to their set of gender binary ideals.

Though gender can often be ambiguous in reality, the Turkish government’s efforts to make gender unambiguous is finalized by physical intrusions into trans people’s bodies, which are then “made sexually legible and less ambiguous by the state,” Zengin argued.

In discussing the second half of her thesis — death and burial in trans circles — she then cited one instance where a trans woman suffered from a brain hemorrhage and ended up dying after a brief hospital stay. Zengin explained that her trans friends were the only ones to visit her in the hospital — save for one brief visit from her brother and sister — and that when it came time to wash and prepare the body for burial, her family refused to take part in the rituals.

This type of situation is not uncommon, Zengin noted, adding that in deaths where no will was left behind, biological families that had previously disowned their trans kin can then bury them in unmarked plots, even misidentifying their gender identity throughout the burial process. These incidences, she argued, are an example of how a “biological family can be a model of violent intimacy.”

Zengin ended her speech by arguing that the world at large needs to check Turkey’s exercise of power over sexual and gender identity, concluding, “We need to pay more attention to the role of the state as the mediator and authorizer of … forms of intimacies between trans people, their native communities and other social actors.”

The lecture, titled, “Violent Intimacies: Trans Embodiment, Medico-Legal World, and the State in Contemporary Turkey,” was held as part of a departmental colloquium for the Anthropology program and was also sponsored by Brandeis Anthropology Research Seminar.