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epa10606230 Turkey's Workers Party (TIP) parliamentary candidate Zeynep Esmeray Ozadikti (C) attends the solidarity meeting of the UniKuir (college LGBT communities) association at the Nazim Hikmet Culture and Art House in Istanbul, Turkey, 13 April 2023. .Born in 1972, Zeynep Esmeray Ozadikti left her home in Kars in northeastern Turkey for Istanbul at the age of 15 after being ostracized by her family because of her gender identity. As a member of the Kurdish community, she suffered at the hands of Turkey's military regime that came to power after a coup d'etat in the early 1980s, a period defined by a rise in Turkish nationalism. Facing discrimination for both her ethnicity and especially her trans identity, she was forced to scrape a living on the streets, with sex work being one of the only ways for her to make money. In the 1990s, she says she was repeatedly detained and tortured for her activism with LGBTQ+ rights groups. Later, she studied theater, staging her first play in 2007, before producing two more in 2010 and 2014. In 2013, her political career began as she joined the left-wing Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), before becoming a member of the Workers' Party of Turkey (TIP) in 2019, the party she is representing in the upcoming elections in Istanbul on May 14. Her opponent in that race, interior minister Süleyman Soylu of president Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP), has been a vocal critic of LGBTQ+ rights. “The rulers of the country are using homophobia as an ideology,” Esmeray says. “I've been fighting these types since my years as a sex worker. I will fight them in the National Assembly. We will have immunity and they will not be able to silence us. Once I have that authority, they will no longer be able to ignore us. I am not alone, there are millions of people like me. This is a way of life. Just as heterosexuality always exists, other sexual identities also exist.” EPA/SEDAT SUNA ATTENTION: This Ima