turkey detained 150 more people for trying to hold a press conference. the ones already charged are mostly trans women.

via the Washington Blade, PinkNews, the Guardian and the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The plan was to stand outside a courthouse and talk to reporters. That was the entire plan.

More than 150 people were detained outside Istanbul's Çağlayan courthouse on Tuesday, the Washington Blade reports, after gathering to protest the weekend raids on Turkey's LGBTI+ organizations. They had meant to speak to the press; the Blade, citing CNN, says authorities stopped them before they could.

We wrote on Saturday about the operation the government chose to call Ailem Güvende, My Family is Safe. Here is what it has produced since.

A statement from a group of Turkish advocacy organizations, which the Blade received on Tuesday, counts "at least 112 people have been detained in connection with the operations," 43 of them "LGBTI+ rights defenders." At least 62 have been formally arrested with proceedings continuing in Istanbul, and at least 16 of those are activists or people attached to the associations themselves, "including founders and members of association bodies."

Then the sentence that reorders the whole story. "The majority of those arrested are trans women who are charged with prostitution-related offences."

The raids were announced in the language of obscenity and child protection. Justice Minister Akın Gürlek said the point was to "protect children, the institution of the family, and public order." What the courts are actually processing is trans women on sex-work charges, which is the oldest tool a state has for moving people it does not want off a street and into a file. It requires no new law and no new argument, and it never makes the front page anywhere.

The organizations are next. Per the same statement, prosecutors have said publicly that dissolution cases will be brought against the associations. Kaos GL, the country's longest-running LGBTI+ group, was among those raided.

The Congressional Equality Caucus has condemned the operation, as have Representative Carlos Giménez, a Florida Republican, and the Council for Global Equality. There is a rally at the Turkish Embassy in Washington on Friday. Outside the courthouse on Tuesday the banners said "Being LGBTQ is not a crime," which is true, and which is not the question anybody in that building is being asked.

now it has reached the press

Since we staged this, the sweep has taken a journalist. The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that Tuğba Tekerek was taken into custody late on September 13 and arrested by a court on September 15 on suspicion of obscenity, over a freelance piece she wrote for Kaos GL about elections in Georgia roughly two years ago. Seven Kaos GL board members were arrested on the same suspicion; seven substitute board members were released under judicial control. "It's unacceptable that journalist Tuğba Tekerek was imprisoned for doing some freelance work for an LGBTQ+ publication years ago," said Fiona O'Brien, CPJ's Europe and Central Asia regional director.

Read that sequence again. A reporter is in a cell over a two-year-old article about a different country's election. Obscenity is turning out to be whatever the file needs it to be.

what the family is being protected from

The Guardian's Ruth Michaelson, reporting from Istanbul, says riot police teargassed hundreds of protesters in İzmir. Emma Sinclair-Webb of Human Rights Watch called it "the widest crackdown on LGBTQ+ people in recent years," and answered the government's framing better than we could: "Obviously, protecting children and the family is important, no one is debating that, but in a country with a large and concerning record of domestic violence, many cases of child abuse and murders of women, the protection of the family cannot be focused on LGBT people."