Living as a Dönme: On Transmisogyny and Transfeminist Becoming in Türkiye

In this article, I draw on storytelling as a decolonial methodology to offer a situated intervention into the concept of transmisogyny from a poor, racialised, transfemme positionality in Türkiye. Using madness as a subversive transfeminist method, I critically examine a transmisogynist attack from my childhood in which dönme, a racialised slur historically rooted in Ottoman histories of religious conversion and betrayal, was used against me. Situating the attack within Türkiye’s specific histories of gender regulation and heteropatriarchal normativity I sit with the paradox of how such violence could be simultaneously devastating and identity-affirming. Here, I contend that transmisogynist violence cannot be understood without attending to the subjective complexities it produces for all involved, including the perpetrators. Finally, I argue that my story is not illustrative of existing theory but generative of new possibilities that only become visible from my specific situated position and propose coalition-building towards transfeminism as a framework capable of dismantling the structures that produce it, structures that, once dismantled, will liberate all of us.