Blood Isn't the Only Bond: How Turkish Trans Americans Are Building Family From Scratch

There's a word in Turkish — hısım — that technically means kin, the people you're bound to by blood or marriage. But for a lot of Turkish trans and queer people living in the US, hısım stopped feeling like the right word a long time ago. What they've built instead doesn't have a clean translation. It's messier, more intentional, and honestly? Often a lot more loving.

Across cities like Chicago, Houston, New York, and Los Angeles, Turkish LGBTQ+ Americans are quietly constructing kinship systems that didn't exist in any template they were handed. These aren't just friend groups. They're networks with structure, ritual, and real stakes — the kind of family you call at 2 a.m. when the immigration lawyer drops your case, or the one that shows up with food when you're recovering from surgery and your mom doesn't know you had it.

The Table That Held Them When Others Wouldn't

For Selin, a 34-year-old trans woman who moved from Ankara to Atlanta seven years ago, the turning point was Şeker Bayramı — the holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, when Turkish families traditionally gather, visit relatives, and exchange sweets. Her first year in the States, she spent it alone in her apartment with a box of Turkish delight she'd ordered online and a phone that didn't ring.

"The second year, I wasn't going to do that again," she says. "I texted four people I knew from the community group I'd found online. I said, come over, bring something sweet, we're doing Bayram."

That gathering has since grown into an annual tradition that rotates between homes, now pulling in 20 or more people — some Turkish, some not, some trans, some queer allies, some just people who needed somewhere to be. They do the things Selin grew up doing: the kissing of elders' hands, the offering of lokum and baklava, the long meals that stretch into the evening. But they also do new things. They go around the table and say what they're grateful for. They name people they've lost. They make space for grief alongside celebration.

"It's not a copy of what I had growing up," Selin says. "It's something that fits who I actually am."

When Care Is the Currency

Chosen family in the Turkish trans community often goes well beyond the emotional. Financial interdependence — the kind that biological families take for granted — is something these networks have had to build deliberately.

In Houston, a loose collective of about a dozen Turkish and Turkish-adjacent LGBTQ+ people has developed what they call a "care pool" — a shared fund that members contribute to monthly and draw from in emergencies. Medical costs, legal fees, a security deposit when someone needs to leave a bad situation fast. It's not formal, there's no nonprofit paperwork, but it functions with remarkable consistency.

"In Turkey, if you're in trouble, you call your uncle, your cousin, someone," says Tarık, a 29-year-old nonbinary person who helped organize the pool after a friend in the group faced a sudden health crisis with no insurance. "We don't have those people here. Or if we do, we can't always call them. So we became that for each other."

This kind of material solidarity isn't unique to Turkish queer communities — mutual aid has deep roots in LGBTQ+ organizing broadly — but the cultural layer adds something specific. The expectation of family reciprocity that's baked into Turkish social life gets redirected rather than abandoned. The obligation isn't erased; it's reattached to people who actually show up.

Rituals They Invented Themselves

Not everything these chosen families do is adapted from Turkish tradition. Some of it is entirely new — rituals invented to mark moments that mainstream culture doesn't have ceremonies for.

In Brooklyn, a group of Turkish trans women started holding what they call geçiş gecesi — "transition night" — whenever one of their members marks a significant milestone in their gender journey: a legal name change, a first medical appointment, a year on hormones. They gather, they cook together (usually something from whoever's regional home in Turkey), they share stories, and the person being celebrated gets to say whatever they want about who they're becoming.

"There's no ceremony for this in Turkish culture. There's no ceremony for this in American culture either, really," says Naz, one of the organizers, who moved from İzmir to New York four years ago. "So we made one. Because these moments deserve to be witnessed."

The cooking element matters more than it might seem. Food is deeply tied to identity and memory for diaspora communities, and the act of preparing a specific dish from a hometown — a particular style of börek, a regional soup — carries the weight of connection across distance. It says: you are from somewhere, and that somewhere is welcome here, at this table, with these people.

Caregiving Across Distance

One of the harder realities of chosen family life is that it has to do work that geography complicates. Biological families often live in close proximity; chosen families are frequently scattered across time zones.

Several people interviewed for this piece described elaborate systems for long-distance care — group chats that function as daily check-ins, scheduled video calls that nobody is allowed to skip without a good reason, and agreements about what to do if someone goes quiet for too long. One group has a rotating "wellness check" system where a different member is responsible each week for confirming everyone else is okay.

"It sounds intense," admits Defne, a 31-year-old trans woman in Seattle whose closest chosen family members are in New York and Chicago. "But it's not, really. It's just what family does. You pay attention. You notice when someone's missing."

For Turkish LGBTQ+ people who are also navigating the particular anxieties of diaspora life — immigration status, the constant news cycle from Turkey, the weight of being far from a country that's simultaneously home and hostile — that kind of active witnessing carries enormous emotional weight.

Belonging That Doesn't Ask You to Choose

What's striking about the chosen family structures Turkish trans Americans are building is that they don't, for the most part, require anyone to reject their cultural identity in order to participate. The Bayram table still has baklava. The caregiving still looks like Turkish caregiving — generous, slightly overwhelming, expressed through food and presence. The rituals are in Turkish, or mixed, or whatever language the room speaks that night.

The innovation isn't abandonment. It's expansion. These communities are taking the architecture of Turkish family life — the reciprocity, the ritual, the table that's always big enough for one more — and extending it to people who were told they didn't qualify.

They qualified. They always did. They just had to find each other first.