Ajda Ender did not come to journalism through a newsroom, a university course or a carefully planned career move.
She came to it because, for years, she had been trying to make people listen.
Ajda Ender poses in undated photo. She did not come to journalism through a newsroom, a university course, or a carefully planned career move, but through years of trying to make people listen. Note: Licensed photo. (Newsflash/NX)
In 2005, Ajda moved into an apartment in the Şişli district of Istanbul, in north-western Turkey, after being given the keys by her mother. She had already been forced to leave the family home because her father did not accept that she wanted to live as a woman, and the apartment was supposed to offer her a fresh start: a place of safety, stability and dignity in a city where she was trying to build a life as a tailor and clothes designer.
Instead, she says, the flat became the centre of an 18-year campaign to drive her out.
The hostility began almost as soon as she moved in. Ajda says neighbours cut off her electricity and internet, banged on her door, insulted her, accused her of offering sexual services and posted photographs of her with friends, falsely claiming they were customers. The abuse, she said, was not only verbal. It became physical, and at one point she says she was chased from the building by a knife-wielding mob.
For years, Ajda tried to complain to the authorities. But instead of feeling protected, she said she was ignored. Her complaints were repeatedly rejected, while her neighbours were able to use restraining orders against her, leaving her unable to enter the apartment that belonged to her mother.
The dispute did not simply take away her home. It damaged her ability to work, harmed her reputation and left her fighting for the most basic right of all: the right to live safely in a place where she was entitled to be.
By 2020, her case had become so stark that it was cited in a United States government human rights report on Turkey, which used Ajda’s treatment as an example of the wider hostility faced by LGBTQ+ people in the country. The report said Ajda had been forced to flee her residence because of death threats and physical assaults from neighbours, and that police had refused to accept her complaint when she asked for help.
That official recognition gave the story international significance, and Central European News picked it up as a case that showed something far larger than one neighbourhood dispute. Here was a woman from Istanbul’s fashion world who said she had been driven from her own home because people in the building refused to accept her.
Ajda Ender poses in undated photo. She did not come to journalism through a newsroom, a university course, or a carefully planned career move, but through years of trying to make people listen. Note: Licensed photo. (Newsflash/NX)
At that stage, CEN had not been able to reach Ajda directly. The story was distributed internationally, but her own voice was still missing from it.
Then Ajda saw the report, shared it on social media, and in doing so opened the door to direct contact.
That changed everything.
The follow-up story was no longer just about Ajda. It was with Ajda. She was able to describe the years of harassment, the failed attempts to get help, the way her work had suffered and the sense of being pushed out of ordinary life while the people she accused of abusing her seemed able to act with impunity.
Her lawyer, Eren Keskin, eventually managed to file a case against the neighbours on counts including wrongful acts, threats and gender-based discrimination, and sought damages of 20,000 TRY. Keskin said Ajda had been subjected to discrimination, insults and physical attacks by people living in the building where her mother’s apartment was located.
For Ajda, the lawsuit was about far more than bricks, doors and legal papers. It was about whether she counted.
She said: “This trial is very important for me. Because my right to life was taken away from me and my reputation was impaired. I was disregarded while I was alive, all of my rights were usurped.”
There was a small moment of practical hope when the local council in Şişli gave her a place in the Şişli Bazaar, where she could sell her design clothes. After years in which her business had been damaged and her confidence shaken, the chance to work again mattered.
Ajda said: “I will sell my design clothes in bazaars. I am really very happy. I extend my thanks to the journalists who helped my voice to be heard.”
That line became the bridge between two parts of her life.
Until then, Ajda had been someone journalists wrote about. But once CEN had direct contact with her, the conversation naturally widened. She spoke not only about her own case, but about the difficulty of finding work, the vulnerability of people who are pushed to the edge of society, the way authorities can fail those most in need of protection, and the stories from Turkey that rarely reach the outside world unless somebody makes the effort to find them.
So CEN offered her the chance to try journalism herself.
Ajda Ender poses in undated photo. She did not come to journalism through a newsroom, a university course, or a carefully planned career move, but through years of trying to make people listen. Note: Licensed photo. (Newsflash/NX)
It was not charity. It was recognition. Ajda knew Turkey, understood the language, followed local media and social networks, and had the instinct that comes from lived experience. She knew what it meant when a person said they had been ignored. She knew how easily a victim could be blamed, dismissed or turned into the problem. She knew that stories about rights, safety, poverty, abuse, women, animals and vulnerable communities were not abstract subjects. They were the texture of real life.
Ajda Ender poses in undated photo. She did not come to journalism through a newsroom, a university course, or a carefully planned career move, but through years of trying to make people listen. Note: Licensed photo. (Newsflash/NX)
She began finding stories in Turkey that could be shared with the international media, and over time became a regular contributor. Her work has ranged from human-rights cases and discrimination to women’s safety, social injustice, animal welfare and strong human-interest stories with the power to travel beyond Turkey’s borders.
Her own legal battle, however, continued to shadow her.
After prosecutors rejected her complaint against her neighbours, Ajda herself faced prosecution following a complaint that she had insulted the neighbours’ lawyer, Murat Bozkurt, after describing the treatment she had suffered as transphobic hatred. The reversal was brutal: the woman who said she had been driven from her home, threatened, assaulted and ignored by the authorities was now being turned into a defendant because she had complained.
Ajda said: “I was repeatedly subjected to transphobia and hatred at every step of the process as I tried to exercise my right to live in my own home. The right to housing is one of the basic fundamental rights and they took it from me.
“Trans people are not treated as equals in society. I am a journalist, I want to live in my home like everyone else. However, they don’t want to see me as an equal. They wish transgenders and LGBTI+ individuals would be invisible, disappear, and to have us homeless on the streets. This hatred is too much.”
The case was later raised in the Turkish Parliament by Zuleyha Gulum, an Istanbul MP for the Peoples’ Democratic Party, who submitted a question to Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag. Gulum said Ajda had been threatened by neighbours and exposed to attacks for years, but that when she filed a lawsuit over the attacks, prosecutors found there was no case to answer. The MP warned that making Ajda a defendant would only increase the danger she faced and encourage those who wanted to act with impunity.
By then, though, Ajda had already found a new way to answer back.
The woman who had once needed journalists to help make her voice heard had become one herself. She was no longer only the person at the centre of a story about discrimination, housing and the failure of institutions. She was now reporting other people’s stories too, using the same international news system that had first carried her own case to help make others visible.
That is why Ajda’s work matters to us.
She is not a distant correspondent parachuted into a country she does not understand. She is not writing about injustice as an abstract theme or a convenient editorial category. She has lived through the machinery of being dismissed, disbelieved and pushed aside, and that experience gives her reporting a human urgency that cannot be faked.
Ajda Ender poses in undated photo. She did not come to journalism through a newsroom, a university course, or a carefully planned career move, but through years of trying to make people listen. Note: Licensed photo. (Newsflash/NX)
Her journey began with a flat in Istanbul that she says she was not allowed to live in peacefully. It passed through police stations, court papers, parliamentary questions and an international human rights report. It reached the global media through CEN, came back to her through social media, and then turned into something neither side could have planned: a working relationship built on trust, persistence and the belief that stories only matter if they help people be seen.
Ajda Ender is now part of our network because journalism gave her a voice at a moment when she badly needed one.
Now she uses that voice for others.
By supporting Ajda’s work, readers are not just supporting one journalist in Turkey. They are helping keep open a channel for stories that might otherwise never leave the country, from people who are too often ignored until somebody like Ajda takes them seriously enough to listen.
(Mike Leidig / newsX)
