Full legal context
Turkey has never criminalised sex between men, and it has never protected anyone either. Both halves of that go back to the Ottoman penal code of 1858, and the distance between them is the whole story: 4.75 % on the Rainbow Map, 47th of 49 countries, with a flat zero for equality, family, hate crime and asylum. The only category that scores at all is legal gender recognition, at 19 %, and it does so for a procedure that requires a court and surgery.
What has changed in the last decade is not the criminal code but what the state permits in public. Istanbul Pride drew roughly a hundred thousand people in 2013. It has been banned every year since 2015.
Here is the historical overview of the legalisation of homosexuality and gay rights in Turkey.
Phase I: Legal Without Ever Being Recognised (1858 to 2002)
1858: The Ottoman penal code drops the provisions punishing same-sex acts, more than a century before most of Europe. Nothing is put in their place, and nothing has been since. There is no anti-discrimination law naming sexual orientation or gender identity, and no hate crime provision.
1988: Legal gender recognition becomes possible under Article 40 of the Civil Code. It needs a court decision, a medical examination and surgery, and in practice it runs through state hospitals in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and Antalya. Hormone treatment is not covered by the state health system.
Phase II: A Public Movement, and Then the Ban (2003 to 2017)
2003: The first Istanbul Pride march is held with about thirty people, the first such march in a Muslim-majority country.
2013: The march reaches roughly a hundred thousand, swelled by the Gezi Park protests happening in the same streets.
2015: Police disperse the march with water cannon. The governor's office has refused permission every year since, on grounds of security and public order.
2017: The governor of Ankara bans all LGBTI events in the province indefinitely under the state of emergency. The state of emergency ended in July 2018. The ban did not, and film screenings and exhibitions are still refused under it.
Phase III: Prosecution by Other Means (2018 to 2025)
No law names LGBTI people, so the charges come from elsewhere: obscenity, public morality, insulting religious values, resisting police orders.
2018: About a thousand people defy the Istanbul ban and are met with tear gas and rubber bullets. Eleven are arrested.
2021: Turkey withdraws from the Istanbul Convention, the Council of Europe treaty on violence against women that was signed in Istanbul and named after the city. Its reference to non-discrimination was named in the debate as a reason for leaving.
2022: More than 360 people are detained around Pride week.
Phase IV: The Bill That Keeps Coming Back (2025 to 2026)
2025: A draft law leaks in October. It would make attitudes and behaviour contrary to a person's sex at birth a criminal offence and rewrite the rules on gender-affirming care. It never reaches parliament.
2026: The same provisions are attached to a judicial reform package in February and dropped again before the vote. In June the Justice Ministry circulates a brief to governing-party members of parliament containing them once more: up to three years in prison for praising or promoting such behaviour, a minimum age of twenty-five for gender reassignment, a sterilisation requirement, exclusion for anyone who has children, four separate health board evaluations, and up to seven years for doctors who do not comply. Human Rights Watch published the contents in June.
None of that is law. It has been drafted, withdrawn and reintroduced three times in eight months, which is itself information about where this is going.
