Sex worker Nina relies on an apartment in the Turkish city of Istanbul as a relatively safe space to meet clients, but the 29-year-old is worried about making enough to cover the rent after the landlord doubled the price.
As a surge in inflation fuels a housing crisis in Turkey, LGBTQ+ sex workers like Nina say landlords are forcing them to accept huge rent hikes for fear of being evicted.
Nina, who uses the pronouns they and them, worries about how they will pay the increased monthly rent of 8,000 Turkish lira (US$425.11) on top of rising bills.
Photo: AP
“There are gas, electricity, water, Internet, phone bills,” Nina, who asked to be identified by their first name only, said as they sipped a coffee at a cafe in the gay quarter of Taksim.
“I have to work all the time without taking a break, just to pay these,” they said. “What about the harm it will do to my body, my mental health?”
Turkey’s inflation was 64 percent in December last year, drifting downward from a 24-year high of 85 percent in October, in a cost-of-living crisis that has left many struggling to afford basics.
In June last year, the government imposed a 25 percent cap on annual rent rises until July.
However, average rents rose by 69 percent on average across Turkey and 85 percent in Istanbul last year, showed research by the Bahcesehir University Center for Economic and Social Research, based on data from online advertising portal sahibinden.com.
LGBTQ+ sex workers said they have little choice but to pay, as it is unsafe to live outside of areas known as gay and transgender-friendly districts.
A ban on prostitution outside of government-certified brothels also means sex workers who operate out of their homes have little recourse to report illegal rent rises.
Only unmarried Turkish women can work in brothels, excluding many sex workers.
Nina, who is barred as they are not legally female, said that in any case they would want to avoid the “harsh” conditions in government brothels.
Landlords multiply the rents of trans sex workers as they see them as “easy money,” said Leyla, a 24-year-old LGBTQ+ sex worker who asked to be identified by a pseudonym.
“Historically, it has always been an issue for LGBT people to rent a place. With the current housing crisis, they have become more vulnerable,” said Leyla, who also uses they and them pronouns.
At least 62 trans people have been murdered in Turkey since 2008, the highest figure of any country in Europe, according to data collected by Transgender Europe, a network of organizations that advocate for rights.
Advocacy groups say LGBTQ+ people face increasingly open discrimination, fueled by crackdowns against pride parades by officials and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other senior government figures.
Leyla, who lives In Izmir, the third-largest city in Turkey, said that the authorities are trying to force trans sex workers out of the center by increasing police pressure, sealing their houses and launching gentrification projects.
The Ministry of the Interior did not reply to a request for comment.
Trans sex workers already operate under dangerous conditions, said Leyla, recounting the story of one friend who was recently found beaten unconscious.
Working outside their neighborhoods exposes them to more risk, Leyla added.
Melis Arslan, 26, a member of Red Umbrella, which campaigns for sex workers’ rights, said the group had seen a considerable spike in reports of sex workers struggling with housing during the economic crisis.
“Sex workers, who are already paying more than regular tenants, are under risk of eviction, or asked to leave their apartments and are looking for new ones,” Arslan said.
Nina said they fear landlords are seeing the economic crisis as an opportunity to wring yet more cash from an already disadvantaged community.
“The current system is breaking already fragile LGBT people and sex workers, making us more vulnerable,” they said.
NXP Semiconductors NV expects its first automotive-grade 5-nanometer chip built by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) to become available for automakers within one-and-a-half years at the earliest, following demand for better computing performance and energy efficiency for connected vehicles, a company executive said yesterday. That would mean a significant upgrade from the 16-nanometer technology NXP adopted in its existing series of microprocessors. NXP chief technology executive Lars Reger made the remarks during a media briefing yesterday in Taipei. The latest updates came after NXP unveiled its plan to source 5-nanometer capacity from TSMC in 2021. This is Reger’s first trip to
AI TREND: TSMC has been rapidly expanding capacity to meet a spike in demand for advanced packaging services, but still expects supplies to be tight for 18 months Arizona is in talks with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) about advanced chip packaging, state Governor Katie Hobbs said yesterday, which is crucial for the manufacturing of artificial intelligence (AI) chips. TSMC, which is building a US$40 billion chip factory in the US state, has not announced plans to build facilities for advanced chip packaging in the US. Advanced packaging processes stitch multiple chips together into a single device, lowering the added cost of more powerful computing. “Part of our efforts at building the semiconductor ecosystem is focusing on advanced packaging, so we have several things in the works around that
The European Commission’s digital chief yesterday said that murky Chinese laws were fueling concerns among foreign firms in the country, following discussions with Beijing officials about critical areas such as artificial intelligence (AI) and data governance. Vera Jourova, who is also the commission’s vice president, made the comments after meeting on Monday with Chinese counterparts including Vice Premier Zhang Guoqing (張國清) in the second “High-level Digital Dialogue” between the two sides. Among the concerns Jourova said she had heard about from European businesses in China was the “unpredictability of the decisions and interpretation of the laws by the regulators.” Beijing has recently implemented
EVADING US CONTROLS? ‘These surveillance chips are relatively easy to manufacture compared to smartphone processors,’ a source said about HiSilicon’s components A Huawei Technologies Co (華為) unit is shipping new Chinese-made chips for surveillance cameras in a fresh sign that the Chinese tech giant is finding ways around four years of US export controls, two sources briefed on the unit’s efforts said. The shipments to surveillance camera manufacturers from the company’s chip design unit, HiSilicon Technologies Co (海思半導體), started this year, said one of the sources and a third source familiar with the industry supply chain. One of the sources briefed on the unit said that at least some of the customers were Chinese. Huawei unveiled new smartphones in the past few weeks that
RSS