At 1 a.m. on September 13, 2026, Turkish police broke into the offices of LGBT rights and HIV groups in five cities. Nine days later, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told the UN General Assembly that “global gender-neutralization policies … have turned into a siege targeting innocent children, alongside the family institution.” His remedy: protecting the family of a man and a woman.
He did not mention the raids. For LGBT people in Turkey, the danger is no longer rhetorical. A government that has turned Islamic doctrine into state policy is enforcing it through police and prosecutors—dismantling LGBT civil society, criminalizing homosexuality and LGBT identity through pretextual charges, and consolidating power. This threatens the rule of law for LGBT people and fundamental rights of all Turkish citizens striking against activists and groups that represent and support LGBT people. Those jailed threaten no family; their rights, like everyone’s, do not end at Turkey’s border.
On September 12, a court blocked LGBT groups’ websites and social media accounts, and within hours police moved in.
It began by silencing witnesses. On September 12, a court blocked LGBT groups’ websites and social media accounts, and within hours police moved in. They hit seven LGBT rights groups, two HIV organizations, and bars and nightclubs. Targets included LİSTAG, an association of LGBT people’s families and friends. Justice Minister Akın Gürlek named the operation “My Family Is Safe,” tied it to Erdoğan’s 2026–2035 “Decade of Family and Population,” and said it targeted associations that “promote LGBT and immorality.”
At least 116 people have been arrested across 15 provinces, at least 83 remain in pretrial detention, and more than 160 are under investigation. LGBT groups report intrusive strip searches, humiliation, and isolation in custody. Most of those arrested are trans women, charged with prostitution, or drug, obscenity, and association-law offenses. Turkey’s Human Rights Association said charges such as “forming a criminal organization” were added to incriminate an entire community. Prosecutors accused Kaos GL, Turkey’s leading LGBT organization, of posting obscene content that could be publicly accessible, including by children.
Among the Kaos GL members jailed is Nedime Erdoğan, the mother of an LGBT person, who says she joined to keep LGBT people and their families together. Journalist Tuğba Tekerek was jailed because of a freelance Kaos GL article from two years ago. An operation called “My Family Is Safe” has imprisoned a mother for keeping her family whole.
Authorities blocked or restricted at least 419 social media accounts. Police arrested more than 100 protesters outside Istanbul’s Çağlayan courthouse, and Gürlek set financial-crimes investigators on the groups’ foreign funding, which is legal. Prosecutors moved to dissolve two associations in Mersin.
In 2025, the Diyanet sent every mosque a sermon calling “desexualization” one of humanity’s gravest threats.
In 2020, the Diyanet, Turkey’s state religious authority, declared in a Ramadan sermon that Islam condemns homosexuality. When the Ankara Bar objected, prosecutors investigated the lawyers, and Erdoğan called criticism of the cleric an attack on the state and on Islam and the sermon binding on all self-described Muslims. In 2021, Erdoğan quit the Istanbul Convention on violence against women, which his Communications Directorate said had been hijacked by people “attempting to normalize homosexuality.” In 2025, the Diyanet sent every mosque a sermon calling “desexualization” one of humanity’s gravest threats.
A leaked 2025 draft law would have imposed up to three years in prison for behavior “contrary to biological sex and general morality.” Civil society forced it out of successive judicial packages. So, Ankara changed tools. Turkey remains constitutionally secular, and same-sex relations legal. Yet a verdict from a state pulpit has become a presidential talking point, then a prosecutor’s “obscenity” theory, and then an early-morning raid. Islamic doctrine is being enforced as if it were law. The result: LGBT people may legally exist but cannot organize, publish, fund, or protest.
Erdoğan’s AKP has sharpened anti-LGBT attacks to rally its conservative base before elections. The government blames falling birth rates, though the real threats to Turkish families are actually poverty, insecurity, and violence against women. Scapegoating minorities for national decline is an old authoritarian tool.
At the United Nations, Erdoğan took the project global. When the UN Human Rights Council created an expert on anti-LGBT violence in 2016, members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, except Muslim-majority Albania, fought to block it. At its far end, state-enforced Islamic doctrine is lethal. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom counts ten countries that make same-sex relations a capital crime, all citing official interpretations of sharia. Turkey is not there, but the direction is unmistakable. The danger is when Islamic doctrine is wielded as state power.
Six European governments called Ankara’s actions “deeply troubling,” and the European Parliament’s rapporteur warned Turkey is headed “down a dark path.”
LGBT rights are human rights, and Turkey’s allies have begun to say so. The Council of Europe’s rights commissioner said family values and child protection cannot alone justify restricting rights. Six European governments called Ankara’s actions “deeply troubling,” and the European Parliament’s rapporteur warned Turkey is headed “down a dark path.” Brussels, which has reminded Ankara that candidates must respect human dignity regardless of sexual orientation, should make freeing jailed activists a condition of accession progress.
Washington should go further. Condemnation there is bipartisan. Rep. Carlos Giménez (R-Fla.) and the Congressional Equality Caucus have spoken out, and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) is urging passage of the Global Respect Act, co-led with Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, to sanction foreign officials who abuse LGBT people. Congress should pass it, and the Trump administration should press Ankara directly. A NATO ally and European Union candidate that jails a minority and silences Amnesty has no standing to accuse Israel of a “genocidal mindset,” as Erdoğan did at the UN, drawing an Israeli walkout.
As a Kaos GL campaigner said of an earlier draft: “This bill is not about protecting families—it is about criminalizing existence.”
Erdoğan told the UN that children and families are under siege. In Turkey, they are. The siege comes from the presidential palace.
