Esmeray Özadikti

Esmeray Özadikti — Biography

Esmeray Zeynep Özatik was born in 1973 in the Digor district of Kars and moved to Istanbul with her family at the age of 15. She began her stage career after taking theatre, Turkish, and Kurdish lessons at the Mesopotamia Cultural Center, and went on to become known as a theatre actress, newspaper columnist, and LGBT rights activist.

In 2009 she appeared in two different adaptations of a Dario Fo play, and was also part of the cast and production team of Yazmadan Dökülenler, staged at Amargi Theatre, which told the story of women who had migrated to a big city. Drawing on her own life, she wrote and performed the one-woman show Cadının Bohçası, about a transgender woman who moves from Kars to Istanbul, bringing visibility to the transgender experience in Turkey; its sequel, Yırtık Bohça, addressed discrimination faced by people of different sexual identities, while a later play, Kestirmeden Hikayeler, drew on her own gender-affirmation process.

At the founding congress of the Peoples' Democratic Party in October 2013, she was elected to the party assembly. In the 2023 general election she ran as a parliamentary candidate for Istanbul's 2nd district for the Workers' Party of Turkey, becoming one of the country's first transgender candidates after Demet Demir.