Demet Demir (born March 12, 1961) is a Turkish LGBT activist. She was awarded the Felipa de Souza Award in 1997 for her activism. Biography Demir was born in Yalova on March 12, 1961. After her parents divorced, she and her sister moved to Istanbul when Demir was five. Demir was assigned male at birth, but discovered her trans identity around the age of 17, on reading about Bülent Ersoy. Her subsequent meetings with similar people at Taksim Gezi Park and nearby nightclubs, which were attended LGBT people, reinforced her preferences. In 1979, she became involved with Turkey's leftist movement and was arrested on 1 May 1980 during a demonstration for Labour Day. All throughout, she used to hide her trans-sexuality to gain acceptance within the political movement. Post her arrest, she was allegedly tortured by police, before being sent to hospitals dealing with sexual diseases in a bid to cure her of homosexuality. After the 1980 coup in Turkey, Demir was sentenced to 15 months in prison for her political work, beginning 1982, but was released after 8 months. During her imprisonment, fellow prisoners came to know of her non-hetero-normative identity and she was subject to isolation. After coming out of prison, she began to assert her sexual identity but did not immediately engage in LGBT activism. According to Demir, the spans were oppressive for queer people; they were often subject to illegal detentions, physical abuse, active discrimination, forced displacement and sexual assault. She was allegedly tortured in illegal government custody, three times in 1983 and witnessing raids by military police in nightclubs of Beyoğlu and ghettos of Cihangir, to rape homosexuals. She received little support from the leftist parties during these spans who considered trans-sexuality as a bourgeois disease and gradually grew disillusioned. Thereafter, she joined the Radikal Demokratik Birlik, which was responsible for initiating the first movement in Turkey to eliminate discrimination and violence against LGBT people and other minorities. She grew more aware of the perpetuation of systemic violence by the state against minorities and learned about the concepts of feminism, environmentalism and militarism. In 1989, Demir joined the Human Rights Association (HRA), where she contributed in the setting up of the Sexual Minorities Commission and other similar platforms with fellow feminists Ayşe Düzkan, Filiz Karakuş et al. and eventually became HRA's first transgender delegate. Her efforts were mostly unsuccessful due to exclusion by the socialist