Count Us In: How Turkish Trans Americans Are Turning Raw Data Into Real Power

There's a moment Defne Yıldız remembers clearly. She was sitting in a city council meeting in Chicago, watching a housing advocate present a slide deck full of bar charts and demographic breakdowns. The room shifted. Funding decisions were made. Priorities were reshuffled. And she thought: we need to be in those slides.

Defne, a 34-year-old Turkish trans woman who came to the US on a student visa and never quite left, has spent the last four years building what she half-jokingly calls "the most niche spreadsheet in America" — a running log of health outcomes, housing instability events, and employment gaps affecting Turkish trans people in the Chicago metro area. It's unglamorous work. It is also, she'll tell you without hesitation, the most radical thing she's ever done.

"In Turkey, our existence was something people argued about in the abstract," she says. "Here, I wanted to make it impossible to argue about us in the abstract. I wanted receipts."

Why Counting Matters When You've Always Been Uncounted

For Turkish LGBTQ+ Americans, invisibility has historically operated on two levels. Within mainstream American discourse, they're frequently collapsed into a generic "immigrant" or "Muslim" category that erases their queerness. Within LGBTQ+ spaces, their Turkish identity — its specific cultural weight, its political complexity — often gets flattened or ignored entirely.

The result is a community that falls through the cracks of almost every dataset that matters: federal health surveys, nonprofit needs assessments, immigration advocacy reports, mental health research. If you don't show up in the data, you don't show up in the budget.

That's starting to change, and the people driving the shift are using every tool available — from Instagram analytics to formal census participation campaigns to peer-reviewed public health partnerships.

In New York, a collective called Gökkuşağı Sayımı (Rainbow Count) spent the last two census cycles running targeted outreach to Turkish-speaking LGBTQ+ residents in Queens and Brooklyn, specifically encouraging accurate identification across both ethnicity and gender identity fields. Organizer Mert Arslan, who uses they/them pronouns, says the effort was met with skepticism at first.

"People were scared. They'd say, 'Why would I put that on a government form?' And that fear is completely valid," Mert explains. "But we had to help people understand that aggregated data protects you. It's the individual data that feels dangerous. When we become a number in a category, we become a community that can receive services."

Social Media as a Research Tool

Not everyone is working with census bureaus. Some Turkish trans creators are mining their own platforms for evidence — and finding it.

Serap Demirci, a beauty and lifestyle creator based in Los Angeles, started tracking her engagement metrics with unusual intentionality about two years ago. She noticed that posts where she discussed her Turkish background alongside her trans identity consistently outperformed content that addressed either identity in isolation. The numbers told a story: audiences were hungry for the intersection, not the silo.

She started sharing those findings — not just with brand partners, but with LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations looking to understand underrepresented demographics. "I became my own focus group," she laughs. "My DMs are basically qualitative data at this point."

Serap's informal research has since informed at least two nonprofit grant applications and one university study on Turkish diaspora identity formation. She didn't set out to be a data source. She set out to be herself online — and discovered that visibility, rigorously documented, becomes evidence.

Health Data and the Fight for Funding

Perhaps nowhere is the stakes higher than in healthcare. Turkish trans people in America navigate a particularly layered set of barriers: language access issues, cultural stigma around both transness and mental health, immigration status complications, and the persistent challenge of finding providers who understand any of it.

A small but growing coalition of Turkish LGBTQ+ health advocates has been working with sympathetic researchers at urban university health systems to embed culturally specific questions into existing patient intake processes. The goal is simple and enormous: create a paper trail that proves Turkish trans patients exist, that they have specific needs, and that meeting those needs requires targeted resources.

Dr. Ayla Korkmaz, a public health researcher who works with one such coalition in Boston, is direct about the political dimension of this work. "Every time a hospital system says they don't have data on a population, what they're really saying is they never looked," she says. "We're forcing them to look."

Storytelling as the Other Half

But data without narrative is just a table. The Turkish trans Americans doing this work understand that numbers need a human face to move people — and move policy.

That's why many of the same organizers running data collection efforts are also investing heavily in storytelling: oral history projects, documentary web series, community zines, and public testimony campaigns. The two practices feed each other. A story makes someone care. A statistic makes them act.

Defne's Chicago spreadsheet, for instance, now lives alongside a companion podcast series where the people behind the numbers tell their own stories in their own words — in Turkish, in English, sometimes in both at once.

"The data says one in three Turkish trans women in our sample experienced housing instability in a two-year period," she says. "But it's the voices that make people understand what that actually means. What it feels like to call your cousin at 2 a.m. because you have nowhere to go. The numbers give us credibility. The stories give us humanity. You need both."

What Comes Next

The movement is still young, still patchy, still running largely on volunteer energy and community trust. But the infrastructure is building. More Turkish LGBTQ+ Americans are learning to treat their own lives as data worth collecting, their own platforms as research tools, their own stories as political instruments.

For Mert in New York, the long game is clear: "We want to be in every dataset that matters. Health. Housing. Education. Immigration. Because when we're in the data, they have to respond to us. They can't pretend we're not here."

They pause, then smile. "And honestly? We've always been here. We're just finally making ourselves impossible to ignore."