I was wondering how I am gonna explain my aunt in Turkey that I am non-binary, since it is time that I finally came out to her officially.

The problem is that she and her son, my beloved cousin, only speak Turkish, and, well, yes, you might have guessed it: Turkish doesn't have the concept of "binary".

So I looked up what the official Turkish term for "binary" is: ikili.

And non-binary? "ikili olmayan"

Here is where my brain crashed: "ikili" is the base word "iki" ("two") with the "possessive" suffix "li" ("with"), meaning literally "with two", if used as adjective on a person it would literally mean "person with two".

And "olmayan" means "non-existent"/"doesn't exist"/"doesn't have"/"doesn't", so "non-binary person" ("ikili olmayan insan")literally translates back from Turkish as "human who doesn't have two").

So, I would tell my aunt that I am a person without two or "I don't have two".

Which, of course (warning, tangent here!!) reminds me of everything else where "-li" is used as a suffix where European languages use something specific.

Let's look at "imdat celeste is married": in Turkish, it is "imdat celeste evli". Here again we can find the suffix "-li", but what does "ev" mean? Funny that you ask..

"Ev" means "house" and thus the Turkish sentence "imdat celeste evli" translates back (literally) as "imdat celeste has house" - note: it doesn't mean "imdat celeste has a house", the missing "a" here is important, because "house" here doesn't mean the physical building*, but "house" as in "House of Usher", so "imdat celeste evli" means that I have a "House of Imdat Celeste (+ partner[s])".

note on *: in that case you would add the number of houses in front of "ev" and not use "-li" suffix, instead use the "-i" suffix and add "var" at the end of the sentence, but to make it correct you would need to add an "'nin" at the end pf my name: "imdat celeste'nin bir evi var"/"imdat celeste'nin üç evi var" (üç = three).

--- back from the tangent

So, there is no concept of binary in Turkish and all those constructs would completely confuse my aunt (and my cousin), so what I will say is "I am neither a man nor a woman inside, I never felt like a man but also never felt like a woman, thus something else, something different" - and funny enough this explanation will be way more comprehensible for them than "non-binary" and probably end up with a response like "ah, like a köçek..." (a somewhat third "gender" on Turkish culture).

#Turkish #Language

Mutual Aid Fascist Relief

In the 20 years since Hurricane Katrina, rhizomatic tendrils of @mutualaiddisasterrelief have spread across the United States, from the “common ground” of an experiment in supplying anarchistic material+immaterial mutual aid in the wake of human-made climate catastrophe. Yet I recently heard that some of the folks who directly engaged in the autonomous clinic and other forms of “we take care of each other” in NOLA right after Katrina feel like their efforts were a failure. After all, much of what we do as anarchists rises beautifully in such disasters and yet seemingly falls precipitously soon after, in the return to “normalcy.”

Not to paint a pretty picture of the christofascist catastrophe we face now, but I think we fail when we fail to widen our lens beyond specific moments and see our own bigger picture, our own anarchist achievements, especially in continuously propagating possibilities beyond our small anarchic crews and circles (much as we need those too).

Mutual aid has taken root and flourished because of our small starters, like the Common Ground Clinic twenty years ago in NOLA. But we need only expand our perspective to the last five years to notice the fruits of our labors of love—the enormous mutual aid that blossomed seemingly overnight at COVID-19’s onset, then during the George Floyd Uprising, and onward to abortion and book bans, then Hurricane Helene and the LA fires. Yes, all our mutual aid gets co-opted and tamed. Still, with each new reemergence, we’ve sprung into bigger, more intricate, more impactful, more horizontally dispersed and yet interwoven networks of solidarity that can substantially aid each other across the continent. And almost instantaneously, with a flexibility, creativity, and love that astounds.

That “muscle memory,” rather than dissipating, is growing stronger with each new iteration. How it feels to practice mutual aid together lingers, making people of all walks of life yearn for “safety in solidarity not states,” even if they haven’t fully taken the anarchist leap—yet.

That’s one of our anarchist superpowers now: seeding an antifascism of mutual aid that can spread wildly and freely.

(photo: a drawing in black ink of three anarchist cats, all masked up, with one sporting a circle A on its chest, as seen sketched on a pink wall in Exarchia in Athens, late January 2025)