I left the office with the pleasure of making the two people who violated my rights listen to me, dreaming that we can build a better world for intersex people in the future.

Intersex activists gathered in Ayvalık on September 9-12, 2021 to create a roadmap for the intersex movement in Turkey. Organized by 17 May Association and Inter Solidarity, intersex activists wrote their stories together with Yıldız Tar. As part of our campaign combining October 26 Intersex Awareness Day and November 8 Intersex Solidarity Day, we share those stories with you.

The second story comes from Yasemin Bahar:

As I was climbing up the stairs of the red double-decker bus, I was trying to see if there was an empty seat at the front. Looking out of the big window at the front was a good opportunity to get to know England. In this country, which is still a mystery to me, I used to go upstairs and look at those seats every time I got on the bus. But that day I needed that view in a special way. Focusing on the outside would help dispel the dark clouds in my head. And indeed it did.

My mom and I sat in the front row, put our feet up and showed each other the historical buildings we saw. It was a moment of peace, albeit brief, but ours was not a tourist trip. This unwanted trip to England had started years ago when my mother had made an unwanted decision.

When we got off the bus and arrived at the doctor’s office, the envelopes at the entrance caught my eye. The envelopes, framed with blue and red lines, were very familiar to me. How could I forget how my life was turned upside down four years ago when I found these envelopes in my mother’s drawer? Inside those envelopes, the intervention on my 2-year-old body was documented. Inside those envelopes, it was written that I was not actually born a girl, but for the comfort of the society, I was “normalized” by being put under the scalpel when I was very young, and that my mother approved of this. I spent every day of the past four years thinking about that envelope.

No one had ever told me that genders – like most things – could not be divided into two. No one had told me that being different was not a “freak” (at least not unless we wanted to be freaks). No one told me that mothers and doctors can always keep learning. From the moment I saw that striped envelope, it was impossible for society to hide this from me.

After pacing around the waiting room for a while, the doctor who held my scalpel 16 years ago appeared before us. I told both him and my mother what I had learned from that envelope, and I told them that interventions that were not necessary and urgent had to stop, that people had to be given back their right to bodily integrity and self-determination. I walked out of the office with the pleasure of making two people who had violated my rights listen to me, and with the dream that we could build a better world for intersex people in the future. I looked up and saw the sun breaking through the clouds.