Cultural artifect #1

[Tianhui Qiu]

Last week, we watched a video about the story of a Turkish man, who has seen himself as a woman since he was little and loved making up and wearing feminine clothes. He lived in a relatively under-developed village and people living in the village are pretty conservative. So for a very long time, every one tried to stay away from him as far as possible and he lived alone, because people considered him as a big weirdo or even a psycho and his parents died when he was around 26. However, he never gave up himself and began to let people accept him by helping all the village people no matter when no matter how as long as he can be helpful. From that time. People began to talk to him and find out he is a really outstanding person, because he is very ebullient and kind person with a soft and sensible heart. Then, many people, including old grandpas, considered him as an important part of the village, or even a member of their family. They invited him to have breakfast every day and they found he is such a perfect person. Afterwards, he got the chance to do a surgery which can turn him into a “real woman” physically, but he refused to do so because he believed it is not necessary anymore and everyone has already accepted him as a woman. He believed those who did not like him before would still not like him even after he did the surgery, which I agreed a lot because some people just would not change their minds in lots of reasons. I was pretty shocked at the beginning when I saw this video, because I’ve been in an environment for a long time that every individual is respected and accepted no matter how different you might be from other people. The public would even stand out and speak for those people who did not earn enough respect because of the difference. I never imagined the situations in some places can be that worse. However, I began to understand the circumstance after further thinking, because in China, LGBT group still cannot be accepted by most of people in China especially people in my parent’s age or older. When browsing some online social medias, you can still see some people would say bad words to this group of people. But with the society making progress, lots of people began to accept and respect the individual difference, because we can see that Chinese people in our age has a really open mind toward LGBT group and we even argue with our parents about whether we should respect the difference. Lots of people, like those village people in the video, were growing up in an environment that they were taught to behave similarly and were not allowed to do things that seemed “abnormal”, so they cannot easily change their perspective or values since they has lived in this environment for half of their lives and they felt “safe” in it. Also, they did not have chances to know a person well since they refused to get any tough with people who look different from the very beginning. However, if they got to know these people, they would find that they did not have any difference at all and they could be really great people. And the glad thing is more and more people in this world began to have respect to this group of people and central cities in Turkey actually really respect the transgender people. The situation in the video only happened in small villages or remote places.

[Global Studio]

Interesting post, Bonnie. Be sure to ask Hazal about Zeki Müren.